I told her, as gently as possible, about the origin of the gift. I was ready to support my story with an affidavit from Samantha, the clerk in the hotel shop, if I needed to, but Rosie didn’t seem to need confirmation.

“Could it have been Barry who was sending you those gifts all along?”

“I suppose so. I know you and the girls on crafts night tried to tell me that something was not right. I just couldn’t listen at the time. But why would Barry send them using David’s initials?”

“You talked about, quote, a date gone bad. Are you willing to tell me more about it?”

Rosie bristled. She’d seemed to have matured in her outlook since Friday afternoon. Nothing like a murder to give one perspective. I hoped I hadn’t lost her with this question. She’d referred to the date several times, but it seemed the details of its failure were still hard to talk about.

“That was a long time ago,” she said.

“That’s what reunions are about. A long time ago.”

“Do you want some ice tea?” she asked me.

“I’d love some,” I said and followed her to her kitchen.

It took longer than it should have to brew two glasses of ice tea, during which time we chatted about decaf versus regular, whether the upcoming week would be as hot as last week, and a special shipment of book club choices Rosie expected on Wednesday. She’d closed Rosie’s Books early on Friday and, as far as I knew, hadn’t opened it since.

“In some ways, I’m dreading going to the shop tomorrow,” she said, once we were finally settled in the living room again.

“It will probably take you all of twenty minutes to get back in the swing of things. Once you see the boxes of books waiting to be opened and start to work on the details of the fall children’s program, you’ll be fine.”

“Fortunately, not too many of my classmates are customers. I guess we weren’t your best readers.”

“Except for you.”

Rosie’s smile was thin, but more than I’d seen for a few days. I felt a breakthrough coming.

“It was a Thursday, before the big Valentine’s Day dance. David came up to me in the hallway, where the lockers were.”

I knew that. My whole crafts group, including Maddie, knew that. I let Rosie take her time.

“Uh-huh. And then?”

“He kissed me and whispered in my ear that he wanted to go to the dance with me the next night.”

“It was pretty short notice, wasn’t it?”

Rosie uttered a bitter-sounding laugh. “So? It wasn’t as if I had other plans. I nearly fainted, I was so shocked and, of course, deliriously happy. On Friday I skipped classes and went shopping for a dress. I had to beg my father to help me pay for it, and money was very tight at the time. Business was slow and there were so many other expenses senior year.”

Rosie was talking so slowly I had time to speculate in between phrases. This time I jumped ahead and figured David stood Rosie up.

“I’m guessing something kept David from showing up.”

“It’s worse than that,” Rosie said. “He asked me to meet him in Joshua Speed Woods, where, you know, kids went to make out.”

More interesting. “Uh-huh.”

Rosie took several sips of tea, with deep breaths in between. I knew I could end her misery by calling off the question, but I kept my eye on the goal-to have as much information as possible.

“He said he’d meet me in the clearing. I knew where he meant.”

“Is that where…?”

“Yes, it’s where he was killed,” she said, without much emotion.

I expected that David’s murder had put an end to romantic assignations in the clearing for the near future. “Did you go to the clearing that night?” Not the night of the murder, I said to myself. That can’t be where this is heading.

Another nasty-sounding laugh. “I went all right, in my new red dress with these little sequin hearts all over it. I got my red heels, which were right out of the box, all dirty, walking down the path, but I didn’t care. I was going to meet David.”

A long pause. I became impatient. “And he didn’t show?”

“Worse than that,” Rosie said again. “Do you remember Mathis Berg? He was the school’s biggest nerd.”

I nodded. “Math Bird.”

“Well, when I got to the clearing, guess who was there?”

It started to fall into place. A prank perpetrated by the cool kids on the unwitting wallflowers of the class. “They’d set Mathis up, too? So instead of David, you met Mathis there?”

“Worse than that.”

One more time. Rosie knew how to spin a yarn. Too bad she was the victim in this one.

“They were all there to see it. It was dark, just the moonlight illuminating the clearing. Then, suddenly all these lights went on. They’d rigged them somehow to hang from the trees. I picked out the football team and the cheerleading squad, mostly, but it seemed like the whole senior class was there in the woods. Mathis and I were standing there, all lit up. He had on a tux and I remember the collar was so big for his skinny neck. We were both so mortified.”

To think I’d taught those students who made up the jeering crowd, probably the same day and the days before and after. I might even have given a couple of them As. Would I have graded them differently if I’d known what shallow lives they led? That was a moral discussion for another time.

I took a cue from Abraham Lincoln: “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” Rosie and Mathis should have waltzed out of the woods and gone to the Valentine’s Day dance together and had the best time of anyone there.

But that was hindsight, and an adult response, not a high schooler’s.

“How cruel, Rosie. You must have felt awful,” I said. I moved to a seat next to her on the couch and put my arm around her.

“I wanted to die right there.”

“Did you talk to Mathis about it?”

“Never, never. Looking back, I guess he was in his own private agony. I learned that Sheila Philips, who was voted the prettiest girl in the class-do they even do that anymore? I hope not-was the one who invited Mathis to the clearing. It’s so dumb, Gerry, what seems important when you’re seventeen.”

“And you never talked to David about it?”

She shook her head. “Never. But he was nice to me after that. He didn’t ask me out or anything, but he would smile and once he picked up something I dropped in class. That made me think the whole setup in the clearing wasn’t his idea, that his boorish friends put him up to it. And then this summer, when I started getting presents from him-I thought it was him-I figured he was finally going to make it up to me.”

“I’d have been so angry with him.”

“My father was the one who was ready to kill him.” Rosie stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that.”

“It’s just an expression, Rosie. We don’t realize what a terrible thing it is to say, until something like this really happens.”

“My father wanted to have it out with him in the school-yard. Imagine that. He’d have been arrested immediately.” Rosie laughed. “Me, I had this fantasy of pouring tacky glue all over David’s lying lips.”

I withdrew my arm from the back of the couch and sat up. “What did you say?”

“I was into miniatures then, too, remember? So, naturally, that’s what I thought of.”

“Naturally.”

I left Rosie’s to go to Linda’s where Maddie was hanging out. I was ready for grief as only an eleven-year-old can give it. On the way to her house, I called Linda, using my headset. I wondered if Bluetooth was now a verb-I Blue-toothed Linda. I’d read that the technology was invented in Denmark and named after one of their peacemaking tenth-century kings, Harald Bluetooth. At first hearing, the story seemed like something made up in an eighth-grade creative writing class, but I’d read it enough times from trusted sources to believe it.

I needed to ask Linda a question out of range of Maddie’s ears.