you, Mr. Carlson,” she began, but Carlson, already at the office door, shook his head.
“We’ll make whatever arrangements are necessary,” he growled. “I think you people have done more than enough already.”
Then he was gone, and Hildie was alone in her office.
None of it had gone as it should have.
Both of the Carlsons, Frank as well as Margaret, should have been so shattered by the news of what had happened that they couldn’t even think straight. They should have been nearly paralyzed by the shock, as indeed Margaret was.
But Frank had gotten angry.
She thought quickly, trying to decide what she should do next.
Then she knew there was nothing she had to do, for despite his words, there was little Frank Carlson could do.
In the end, it would be Steve Conners who would be blamed for Amy Carlson’s death, not the Academy. Which, she decided, made things simpler for her than her original plan would have.
Frank Carlson, after all, could have made a case against the school had they failed to prevent Amy’s suicide.
Her murder, though, was something he could never blame the school for, since, until this morning, Steven Conners’s character had been totally unblemished.
No, Hildie thought to herself, satisfied, there was nothing Frank Carlson could do.
Late that afternoon, Josh lay on his bed, trying to think. The day he had just lived through seemed nothing more than a blur. Indeed, from the time he had turned and scurried away from Hildie Kramer while she talked to the police officer, his mind already rejecting what he had just heard, everything had begun to seem as if it had been happening to someone else.
Steve killed Amy?
It wasn’t possible!
Steve was Amy’s friend. His own friend!
He had instantly rejected the idea, telling himself that there had been some mistake.
Maybe it wasn’t Steve’s car in the water at all! Or maybe someone had stolen Steve’s car.
They hadn’t even found Steve yet. He might not be dead at all.
His mind had raced, ideas tumbling over each other as he’d stumbled across the beach, threading his way through the crowd, ignoring the questions that seemed to come at him from every direction.
Maybe Steve had stopped to pick up a hitchhiker, and the hitchhiker had beaten him up and left him by the road, then taken his car.
Steve could be lying somewhere right now, unconscious.
Josh had run up the stairs and started along the road, approaching each curve with rising hopes, certain that just around the bend he would find Steve lying next to the pavement, just waking up.
By the time he got to the village, though, those hopes had faded away. He had started back to the Academy, trying to convince himself that when he arrived, Steve would be waiting for him.
But even if it happened—and it hadn’t—it wouldn’t bring Amy back.
Amy.
The image of her mutilated body was still vivid in his memory, the bones showing through where her flesh had been torn away.
But most vivid of all was the empty cavity where her brain had been.
For the rest of the day, as he tried to answer the questions that the rest of the students at the Academy and then the police had asked him, that image seemed to be burned into his eyes. Even as he repeated, over and over again, the story of the body washing up at his feet, all he could see was that enormous hole in the back of Amy’s skull, and the odd emptiness of the place where her brain should still have been.
Should have been, but wasn’t.
He remembered what the police had said, that some animal, maybe a sea otter or a seal, had scooped it out and eaten it.
But even through the confusion of the questions he tried to answer, he found himself always coming back to that one thing. At last, an hour before dinner, he had escaped to his room, insisting even to Jeff Aldrich that he wanted to be by himself.
Now, lying in his room, he wondered if he ought to call his mother. Would she hear about what had happened? And if she did, what would she do?
Come and get him, and take him back to Eden.
But he didn’t want to go back to Eden.
Not yet, anyway.
Not until he’d found out what had really happened to Amy, and to Steve Conners, too!
Because something in his brain, something he couldn’t quite get hold of, told him that none of what the police thought had happened was true.