to the far side of the parking lot, a sort of grim march. I rolled down my window. There was no way to do this that didn’t feel like a page out of a murder mystery. The boy called to her from his car. She approached; she knew he was suspected by the police, but he’d always seemed kind….
“Rachel!” I called.
Rachel’s eyes were wide and it took a long time for her to arrange her face into something more pleasant. She stopped about ten feet from my driver’s side window, her feet clapped together and her hands holding both of her backpack straps.
“Hi,” she said. She looked wary, or sad.
“Can I talk to you a minute?”
Rachel glanced back toward the school, then to me. “Sure,” she said. She didn’t come any closer. That distance stung. It also meant that everything I said to her would be shouted across ten feet of parking lot.
“Do you mind if we’re, um, a little closer?” I asked.
Rachel shrugged, but didn’t come any closer.
I left the car running and got out, shutting the door behind me. Rachel didn’t move as I approached her, but her eyebrows moved slightly closer to her eyes.
“How are you doing?” I asked gently.
Rachel looked at me, her lower lip firmly caught in her teeth. She was so incredibly sad looking that it was hard to think that Grace’s decision to come here was wrong.
“I’m so sorry about Olivia,” I said.
“Me, too,” Rachel said. She said it in this brave way. “John is doing bad.”
It took me a moment to remember that John was Olivia’s brother. “Rachel, I’m here about Grace.”
“What about Grace?” Her voice was guarded. I wished that she trusted me, but I guessed she had no reason to.
I grimaced and looked at the students filing onto the buses. It looked like an advertisement for a school: perfect blue sky, brilliant green leaves, eye-buggingly yellow school buses. Rachel only added to the image; those stripes looked like you had to order them out of a catalog. Rachel was Grace’s friend. Grace believed that she could keep a secret. Not just a secret, but our secret. Even trusting Grace’s judgment, it was surprisingly difficult to relinquish the truth. “I need to know you can keep a secret first, Rachel.”
Rachel said, “They’re saying some pretty bad things about you, Sam.”
I sighed. “I know. I’ve heard them. I hope you know that I wouldn’t hurt Grace, but … you don’t have to trust me for this, Rachel. I just want to know that, if it was something important, something really important, you could keep a secret. Be honest.”
I could see that she wanted to let down her guard.
“I can keep a secret,” she said.
I bit my lip and closed my eyes for just a second.
“I don’t think you killed her,” she said, very matter-of-fact, like she was saying that she didn’t think it would rain tonight, because there were no clouds. “If that helps.”
I opened my eyes. It did help. “Okay. Here’s the thing, and it’s going to sound crazy, but … Grace is alive, she’s still here in Mercy Falls, and she’s okay.”
Rachel leaned toward me. “Are you keeping her tied up in your basement?”
The bad thing about that was that I sort of was. “Funny, Rachel. I’m not keeping her tied up against her will. She’s hiding and she doesn’t want to have to come out yet. It’s sort of a hard situation to —”
“Oh my God, you got her pregnant,” Rachel said. She threw her hands up in the air. “I knew it. I knew it.”
“Rachel,” I said. “Rach. Rachel.”
She was still talking. “—like everything we used to talk about and still, no, did she use her brain? No. She —”
“Rachel,” I said. “She’s not pregnant.”
She eyed me. I thought both of us were growing a bit fatigued with the conversation. “Okay. So then, what?”
“Well, it’s going to be a bit difficult to believe. I don’t really know how to tell you. Maybe it would be better from Grace.”
“Sam,” Rachel said, “we all had to take sex ed.”
“Rachel, no. She told me I should say ‘Peter of the Plentiful Pecs’ to you. I have no idea what that means, but she said you’d know it was her then.”
I could see the words working through her as she processed the meaning and considered whether I could have gotten them through nefarious means. She asked, wary, “Why isn’t she telling me this herself, then?”
“Because you wouldn’t come over to the car!”