an old, tired sigh. “Well, Edie and I were alone in the main room—I was in the kitchen doing dishes, she was on the couch drinking whiskey and typing away into that diary she kept on her computer—and her phone rings. She talks into it for a little bit, sounding angry and I’m trying not to listen, especially since I’m still annoyed with her. Then she hangs up and says, ‘What the f-word?’ Like, loud enough and then with a waiting air, so I turned around and said, ‘What?’ She made a face and said, ‘My mom is here.’ ” Sarah played with a lock of hair. “I remember looking around and noticing the bong and cigarette butts and empty beer bottles and stuff everywhere, so I was like, ‘She’s coming in here?!’ And she said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just go meet her,’ all annoyed like I’d told her her mom wasn’t allowed in. So she grabbed her purse and walked out. That was the last time I saw her. I mean, alive.”
The diary—Mrs. Iredale had mentioned it, too. I made a mental note to double-check that I hadn’t missed it in the case files.
“Alex, where were you during this?” I asked.
“Earlier that night? I was hanging out with Kevin and his bandmates. We went to the taco truck.” He was tearing the cardboard coaster into shreds. “Her mom was pretty intense, right?”
“Super intense. Always made me uncomfortable,” Sarah concurred.
“You think her mom did it?” I said, looking back and forth at them. I knew even as I said it that it was a crazy leap.
But Sarah took it seriously. “Probably not. I dunno. Edie didn’t really seem to like her parents, but…I mean, her mom was obsessed with her. I dunno why she’d kill her.” Her soup appeared and she sprinkled it with oyster crackers.
“But it’s chilling she was there that night, right?” I pressed. “What if she hung around after they talked and then snuck up to the apartment?”
Alex crossed his arms. “That’s a lot of luck, to get all the way in and out without anybody seeing you. It was a Friday night—there were people everywhere.”
“Well, no one saw Edie going back to her own apartment,” I said. “Or—if there was someone else, if we’re correct that she didn’t kill herself—nobody saw the other person coming in or out. Calhoun was a labyrinth.” It was its own dimension. Maybe portals lurked below the staircases and between the floors, wormholes for sudden inexplicable entrances and vanishings.
Sarah shrugged. “I told the cops about her stopping by, but they never even made a note about it. Actually, how’d you figure it out?”
“I went and saw her last week. Her mom.”
“Whoa. What’d she say?” Sarah asked.
I flicked a glance at Alex, then leaned forward. “She told me she left Edie with the guy she was secretly seeing. Lloyd.”
She frowned. “He had the bouffy blond hair, right?”
“Wait, you knew about him?” Alex said.
Her eyes bulged, then dove to the bowl in front of her.
I started laughing. “This is so ridiculous.” I was surprised that this revelation still stung—that I now cared more about Edie sharing the secret with Sarah than having the secret at all. The sudden singe of feeling Left Out. “This is like a fucking soap opera. I forgot what a drama magnet Edie was.”
A tense silence.
“That’s why we broke up,” Alex offered finally. “I found out about Lloyd when we were still dating. So if you were…Lindsay said you guys always wondered what happened.”
Sarah’s cheeks were scarlet.
“I had a huge crush on Lloyd, which Edie knew about and encouraged, so that’s not humiliating or anything,” I said. The teensiest part of me wanted Alex to feel jealous. When had I slept with Lloyd? It was before he and Edie had begun hooking up, right?
Sarah tilted her bowl to collect the last of the broth. “I talked to him, back in the day. Just ’cause I knew they’d been seeing each other, but then I figured out he was the last one to see her. But his alibi held up, and he didn’t really have anything to add. He’d been in the neighborhood and Edie had texted him begging him to come, like, rescue her from her mom. They talked by the front door a minute, he had to leave to shoot a concert, and then—I mean, we know he was onstage when it happened.”
I frowned, working through the timeline. “He told you they were at the