him. When we pull into the garage, though, I try.
“I wanted him to admit to hurting Lila,” I say, “to help you.”
“Oh,” he says dryly, “is that what you were doing with your mouth? Kissing him to get a confession?”
“I didn’t kiss him!” I have to keep myself from wiping my mouth to erase the stain of his lips on mine. “He kissed me. I didn’t want to move because he was about to confess.”
“Oh, Tess.” Harmon looks at me the way he looks at Rudy when he tracks mud into the house or misuses the word literally. “You’re smarter than that. Why would he confess to you? He was either using Lila as bait to seduce you again or—” He grimaces and covers his eyes with his hand.
“Or what?”
“Or you’re using Lila as an excuse to see him again.”
My stomach turns at the thought even as I feel a guilty pang at the way I’d momentarily preened under his praise.
“That’s a horrible thing to say! You’re suggesting I wanted him to seduce me when I was seventeen—”
“No,” he says, holding up one hand to silence me. “Of course you’re not to blame for what happened when you were seventeen; I’m the one who told you that earlier. But you’re not seventeen now. You’re a grown woman who went into a secluded spot with a serial child molester. You have to ask yourself why.”
“I told you—”
“I don’t need you to prove my innocence,” he cuts in. “And if that’s really what you wanted, you would tell the police who was wearing that sweatshirt earlier in the night.”
My mouth goes dry. “What?”
“Please, Tess. I figured it out. The sweatshirt smelled when I put it on. I thought you’d just forgotten to wash it. When Morris told me about the blood on the cuff I figured that Lila must have worn it sometime. But that’s not what happened, is it? Rudy was wearing that sweatshirt when you picked him up. You gave him the clean, dry one that was on the radiator because God forbid Rudy have a moment of discomfort. You put the sweatshirt Rudy had been wearing on the radiator to dry and then you let me wear it to jog. You let me wear it to the police station and when they found bloodstains on it you didn’t tell anyone—not me, not my lawyer, not Kevin Bantree—that Rudy was wearing that sweatshirt when he saw Lila. So let’s be clear about who you’re protecting here, Tess, because it’s not me. You went to that monster to protect Rudy—I don’t even blame you for that—but you let him kiss you because for some sick, twisted, messed-up reason you still want him.”
He turns and opens the car door. I start to stop him but what can I say? I can’t deny that I lied about the sweatshirt, and a person who would do that is a monster. And a monster might well be drawn to another monster.
WHEN I GO upstairs Harmon is in the guest room with the door closed so I go back downstairs, too agitated to even contemplate sleep even though I’m so tired the backs of my eyes ache. I go instead into the dining room, open up my laptop, and search Woody’s name on Twitter to see what people are saying. Some tweets suggest that he was unfairly hounded to death over unproven allegations but these are quickly shouted down by those sure of his guilt.
He got what he deserved.
If he wasn’t guilty why was he so upset by the accusations?
It’s about time there was justice for those lost girls.
This one was tweeted by LostGirl99, whose tweet I saw earlier in the day on Jill’s feed. When I click on her profile picture to get a closer look I find a photograph of Noreen Bagley against a backdrop of peeling wallpaper that I recognize from the Cora Rockwell museum. Her bio says that she is a “tea lover, history devotee, and searcher of lost girls,” and that she manages a website called “Lost Girls of the Maiden Stone.” I recall that the site was linked to a tweet I saw before. I click on the site now and find atmospheric shots of Maiden Island in the fog, pictures of the girls who went missing, excerpts from Cora Rockwell’s diary, and theories of what happened to the girls. Three weeks ago LostGirl99 posted a picture of Cora Rockwell’s diary with the caption: Do the secrets of the lost