head leaned back against the wall and his eyes closed.
“Back then I thought it was you,” Susanna said, to me. “Who took the key.”
Smoke went down my nose. “Me?”
She shrugged. “It went missing at Leon’s birthday party. I’d forgotten, but I’ve been thinking back, and I’m positive. It was there that afternoon—remember, Hugo was digging stuff up to put in the rock garden, and we were taking rubbish out to the laneway? But the next day, when I went to let Faye in, it wasn’t there. And you and Dominic were the only people who had gone down to the bottom of the garden during the party. The ground down there was a mess, someone fell in a hole and got all muddy, so after that the rest of us stayed up this end.”
“Yeah”—I had just about finished coughing—“I know that. Why would Dominic and I have been down there?”
“You were doing coke—oh, come on, Toby, I know I was naïve but you weren’t exactly subtle about it. You snuck off down there together, and then you came back snickering and rubbing your noses and putting each other in headlocks and talking a mile a minute. Remember?”
The thing was, I did. C’mon, Henno, I need a word; hurrying down the garden, Dominic swearing as his foot went deep in mud, me laughing at him, lines chopped out on an old garden table by the light of my phone. “Why the hell would I want the key?”
Susanna shrugged, sitting up to take the joint off me. “How would I know? I figured maybe since you’d gone off Faye—duh, of course I knew you were hooking up with her—I thought maybe you didn’t want me to let her in any more.”
“I didn’t give a damn whether you had Faye in and out every night of the week. And I didn’t go off her. It’s not like we were going out. We just— You know what, never mind. Forget it.” I didn’t feel like having this conversation in front of Melissa.
“Or else I thought maybe Dominic had tried to rob the key, for a laugh, and you’d taken it off him and lost it— I don’t know, Toby, I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time analyzing the possibilities. I just sort of figured you had it.”
“Well, I didn’t. Jesus.”
Susanna shot me an oblique look. “You don’t even remember doing the coke. How do you know for sure you didn’t take the key?”
“Because there’s no bloody reason why I would.”
“Huh,” Susanna said, on a long thoughtful stream of smoke. “Then I guess it must have been Dominic.”
“Did you say that to the detectives? That you thought it was me? Tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course I didn’t. I said, ‘Dominic Ganly’s ballsack.’” Leon started to giggle again.
“Su, seriously. Did you—”
“No, I didn’t. I said I hadn’t got a clue. Relax.”
The thing I’d almost missed, in the middle of being annoyed with Susanna: she was right. If I hadn’t taken the key, and no one else had been down to the bottom of the garden, then Dominic had to have. “Why would Dominic want a key to our place?” I asked.
Susanna shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he was just robbing random stuff because he thought it was funny.”
The joint was kicking in properly; my G and T tasted novel and starry, I could feel every individual bubble popping on my tongue. “One time Dec robbed Mr. Galvin’s shopping list for the laugh,” I said. “Right off his desk, when we were bringing up our homework. It was like, ‘Ketchup, Heineken, shaving foam, condoms.’ So Dec took a photo and made it the screensaver for the entire computer room.”
“That was Dec?” Leon said, impressed. “Everyone said it was Eoghan McArdle.”
“Shh. Nobody has to know.”
“I wish I’d known you all back then,” Melissa said; dreamily, gazing out over the darkening garden, but she had caught the opening I was throwing to her; I felt the shift in her, her body drawing itself together, ready steady go. I gave her a tiny encouraging squeeze.
“You don’t,” Susanna said. “Believe me.”
“Why not?”
“No one’s at their finest at eighteen. You probably wouldn’t have liked us.”
“Don’t listen to her,” I said, dropping my head to nuzzle Melissa’s hair. “You would’ve loved me.” Leon made a faint sound that was just far enough from a snort for plausible deniability. “And I would have loved you.”
“I imagine you being lovely,” Melissa said. Leon offered her the joint; she shook her head and passed it to