T.J. is quiet for a minute. Then he glances over at me. “Only… only that means everybody will know about the money he paid to Rita. They’ll say things about Coach and Rita, whether they’re true or not, Hope.”
“Do you think I care if the world discovers Rita and Coach were having an affair, or worse? The only thing I care about is getting my brother out of jail.”
T.J. still hasn’t turned on the headlights. He quits talking and keeps taking peeks in the rearview mirror. I turn around and stare out the back window. Far behind us, about the length of a football field, I see two headlights, white eyes watching us through the darkness.
“T.J.!” Panic rises like bile in my throat.
“I know.” He touches my knee, then puts his hand back on the steering wheel. I don’t understand how he’s staying on this road without headlights. He must really be familiar with this part of Grain. The road winds one way, then the other, with no warning. He takes a turn, and for an instant there are no lights behind us. Then they pop up again. “Who’d be following us this time of night? If Mrs. Johnson called the police, they’d just arrest us and get it over with.”
“It’s the white pickup truck,” I mutter. When he frowns at me, I explain as fast as I can.
“Why didn’t you tell me somebody was following you?”
Because I told Chase. “I should have. What can we do now?”
He rolls down his window. A rush of humid air floods the car, bringing in clover and dust and a faint scent of skunk. “I’m pretty sure there’s a path up on the left,” he shouts above the wind. “I think we can lose him if I can find-There it is!”
He brakes, and we swerve left. Weeds slap the sides of the car. There’s a blur of fence, barbed wire. The car skids at a ditch and stops.
I look behind us in time to see a pickup speed by our turnoff. “He’s gone. You did it! You lost him.”
T.J. leans his forehead on the steering wheel. “I think I’m turning in my license.” He looks over at me. “Was it the pickup?”
“You didn’t see it?” My heart is clawing to get out of my chest. “It was definitely a pickup. I couldn’t tell the color, but it had to be the same one. Why would anybody do that?”
In almost a whisper, he says what I’ve already figured out. “Because somebody doesn’t want us investigating Coach’s murder.”
Rita’s car is gone when T.J. pulls up in front of my house. He insists on walking me to the door and checking inside before he leaves. We’re both so tired we can barely stand up. “See you in court,” he says, glancing at his watch. “In a couple of hours.” He starts down the sidewalk but turns back, hands in his pockets. “My dad needs the car again today. I asked Chase to give us a ride to court.”
“Okay.” I try to pretend like it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Then I race inside, and the first thing I do is text Chase. I can’t text everything I want to, but I get in the general outline of the night, knowing he won’t get the message for a couple of hours anyway.
Two minutes later, my cell rings. “Chase?”
“Hope, what did you do? Tell me I didn’t read your text right.”
I tell him about the loans, the checks, seeing Coach’s wife standing up, and about the white pickup truck. When I stop, he doesn’t say anything. “Chase? Don’t be mad. I had to do it. I needed to see the crime scene for myself.”
The silence is too long. Finally, he says, “I thought… I was going to tell you I couldn’t help you, that we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”
Something burns a hole in my chest. I don’t want it to matter. I don’t want him to matter.
“But I can’t,” he says.
“Can’t see me anymore?” I ask.
“Can’t stop seeing you.”
Neither of us says anything, and I picture our breaths traveling from cell tower to cell tower and back.
“Start over, Hope. At the beginning. Tell me everything.”
I do. I go into more detail this time.
When I’m done, he says, “Those checks? Hope, what do you think they mean?”
That’s what it comes back to-the checks made out to Rita. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “But as soon as Rita steps in the door, you can bet I’m going to find out.”
23
An hour later, Rita still hasn’t come home. I pace the living room, trying to come up with an explanation for those thousand-dollar checks. If Rita did have an affair with Coach, who’s she seeing now? I never ask. I never want to know.
I have to do something, so I search Jeremy’s room for his batting gloves. Then I check Rita’s room for her old high school yearbooks.
Zilch. Nothing.
After another restless hour, I stretch out on the couch to see if I can catch a few minutes’ sleep. But when I shut my eyes, I see Caroline Johnson standing at the window, watching. Or I see Coach Johnson curled up on the barn floor.
A few minutes before six, I can’t wait a second longer. I have to call Raymond and tell him about the new evidence.
The phone rings and rings until the answering machine picks up. While I’m waiting for the beep, I try to figure out how to word what I want to say.
But before I can leave my message, Raymond answers. “Hello?”
“Raymond?” The machine finishes telling me to leave a message, then squawks out a beep. “Raymond, I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah. Listen, I have to tell you some stuff, but I don’t want to tell you how I got the information.”
“Just a minute.” He sounds like he’s underwater. I hear the receiver clunk. A minute later Raymond is back. “This better be good, Hope.”
I fill him in as much as I can without telling him about breaking and entering the crime scene and Coach’s office.
“Wait now,” he says. “How did you…? No. Never mind.” His sigh carries over the phone wires. “What does your mother say about the checks?”
“I haven’t asked her yet.” I don’t add that I haven’t had a chance to ask because she’s stayed out all night.
“Well, it might not matter.”
“Are you kidding?” I shout. “Raymond, how could that not matter? Don’t tell me I broke into Coach’s office for nothing!”
“I didn’t hear that,” Raymond says, not shocked or surprised, like he’s already figured out that much. “I don’t know about the checks, Hope. But the other things, the loan apps and the bills, nobody’s said anything about Coach’s finances. Where there’s debt, there’s motive. How many loan refusals were there?”
“I’m not sure. Three or four, at least. T.J. could tell you.”
“T.J.?”
Rats! I shouldn’t have brought him into it. Such a long silence follows that I’m not sure if Raymond is still on the line. “Raymond?”
“Hmmm? Sorry. I’m thinking…” More silence. “Okay. I’ll level with you, Hope. Your testimony didn’t help our insanity plea any.”
“I’m sorry, Raymond.” I get a flashback of that second in court when I realized I’d walked right into the prosecution’s trap. Keller looked at me like I’d single-handedly won him his ticket to Washington, D.C., and bigger fish to fry. I can see his nose hair in his left nostril, the bead of sweat on his curled upper lip.
“It’s not just your testimony,” Raymond continues. “My expert witness didn’t do much for us either. Insanity is a hard sell around here. People are too practical.”
“Too insane, if you ask me.”
“Could be,” he admits.
“So what do we do?”
“I think I’m starting to agree with you, to tell the truth,” Raymond says.
“Really?” I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe that this was going to be a much harder sell to Raymond. “That’s great!”
Raymond keeps going, and I think he’s talking to himself more than to me. But I don’t mind. “We need to begin creating doubt, give the jury a few reasons to find Jeremy not guilty.” He sighs. “Thank God for the double plea-not guilty by reason of insanity, and not guilty.”