Nikki was silent as they stood in the hall at the front door and she listened to Kovac run through his thoughts on Kyle’s chronology of events, what he wanted to clarify, who they needed to talk to. He wanted to go back over all the video from the Rock & Bowl, from the Holiday station. He wanted to speak again to Christina Warner, but he knew Michael Warner wouldn’t allow it. He wanted to know what Penny Gray had said that had flipped Christina’s switch.
It was all just noise in the background. She felt as if she were hearing him from far away. A weird numbness ran through her like some kind of IV lidocaine.
Kovac finally hooked a knuckle under her chin and picked her head up. She expected to see irritation, but that wasn’t it at all. She saw concern and caring.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I’m sorry this is hitting where you live, Tinks.”
Pain shivered through the numbness. “It’s hard,” she whispered.
“I know,” he said. “Let me give you that hug you asked for.”
And she put her head against his chest and let him hold her for a long, quiet time.
• • •
AFTER SAM HAD GONE, Nikki went back up the stairs to knock once more on Kyle’s door.
He tucked his phone under his pillow as she let herself into his room. He sat on his bed, backed up against the headboard, looking forlorn. Nikki sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I’m so sorry about your friend,” she said softly.
“We weren’t really friends,” he said. “Gray didn’t really have friends like other people. She was kind of . . . alone . . . inside herself.”
Like you, Nikki thought. Locked up inside himself, careful not to let anybody in too far.
“I knew her,” he said. “We hung out sometimes. She was cool in a lot of ways.”
“Yeah? Like how?”
“With her poetry, and wanting people to just be who they are and let other people do their own thing.”
That would appeal to Kyle, she thought. He had always marched to his own drummer, even when he was small. He had always been sensitive to the feelings of other kids, had always spent much time in thought and contemplation.
He reached under his pillow and pulled out his phone. He tapped on the screen and navigated his way to what he wanted.
“She was always making videos with her phone,” he said. “She shot this one during the writer’s workshop and sent it to me.”
He touched Play and showed Nikki the screen. “We had to interview each other about what made us want to be writers.”
The camera focused first on Gray as she introduced herself and explained the purpose of the interview. Then she turned the camera on Kyle while he answered the question. He fidgeted and looked away and scowled, never liking to have his picture taken or to have the moment captured on a video. Gray came back on the screen while she answered. She spoke about how it made her feel to write a poem—like she was opening a window to her soul and letting the feelings escape. Sometimes they were good feelings, and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes it felt as if she opened a vein and bled the words out.
Nikki watched with a sad heart, wishing she could have known this girl, wishing some adult in Penny Gray’s life would have cared enough to help her, to listen to her troubles and try to understand. She remembered herself at that age, feeling lost and misunderstood. It was hard to be sixteen, when every little thing seemed a matter of life and death, and the future was too far away to believe none of the immediate crises would mean much at all. She hadn’t gotten that kind of understanding from her own mother, and neither had Penny Gray.
She handed the phone back to Kyle as the video ended. “You know, I’m proud of you for sticking up for her the way you did that night at the Rock and Bowl.”
He shrugged one shoulder, looking down. “It’s not right to hit a girl. None of that was right.”
“The other girl, Brittany, do you know her very well?”
“I thought I did.” He sighed. “People are disappointing.”
“They can be. It’s not always easy to do the right thing. Sometimes it’s not so easy to know what the right thing is. Sometimes we just do the best that we can.”
He shook his head a little. “Sometimes people just do what’s easy or what other people want them to. For all the wrong reasons.”
She couldn’t argue.
“I wish I could have stopped Gray that night,” he said, his eyes filling with tears. “If I could have caught her before she drove out, maybe she’d still be alive.”
Nikki put a hand on his forearm and squeezed. “You can’t think that way, Kyle. A lot of things happened that night. That was just the last one that you know of.
“It’s like in a football game when the kicker misses that last-second field goal and everybody wants to blame him for losing the game. But there were a thousand things that happened before that moment that could have changed everything. Nobody thinks about those moments. A missed catch, a bad tackle, a penalty that shouldn’t have happened. All of those things were equally crucial. They just weren’t the last thing that happened.
“So maybe, yes, if you had caught Gray before she left, if you had gotten in the car with her, maybe she’d be alive today—or maybe you’d both be gone. But there are a lot of other maybes. Maybe if the girls hadn’t gotten into a fight. Maybe if your friend Brittany had made a better choice. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“There are so many maybes,” she said. “Maybe if we could have solved this killer’s first murder or second. Maybe if he had turned left instead of right at an intersection he never would have met your friend. It’s not just about what you did or didn’t do, or what I did or didn’t do, or even what Gray did or didn’t do.
“We try to make sense of things that can’t be made sense of. All we can do is the best that we can. The rest is out of our hands. And if our best wasn’t good enough, we try harder the next time.”
“Gray doesn’t get a next time,” he said quietly.
“No. But all we can do now is try our best to catch her killer.”
“When you said you texted Gray and tried to call her. Was that the night she went missing or after that too?” Nikki asked.
“After too,” he said. He dug his phone out and checked the text messages he had sent to the girl. “I tried to text her this morning. I kept thinking she just went off somewhere to be alone. I thought maybe if I kept bugging her, she would answer.”
Nikki absorbed that and put it away in her head, too tired to think it might be significant. All she could think was that she was raising one hell of a good human being and that it was a pure damn miracle considering how little time she spent doing it.
“I love you so much,” she said, hugging him.
Kyle hugged her back. “I love you too, Mom. I’m really sorry about this morning.”
“Me too,” she said, squeezing him tighter. “We’ll both do better tomorrow, right?”
That was the thought she carried with her to bed. That they would all do better tomorrow. And hopefully that would mean finding Penny Gray’s killer.
34
How f’d up was that 2day? Cops! :O
Brittany sat on her bed, tucked up against the headboard, her legs curled beneath her, unconsciously making herself small. She looked at the text from Christina, not wanting to answer. She’d had a stomachache ever since the afternoon, ever since she had to talk again with the police.
She couldn’t believe any of this was really happening. How could someone she knew get murdered? How could she be involved in something so sick and twisted and crazy? All she’d done was try to be friends with a girl she felt sorry for. She was a good person. She tried to do the right thing. Usually. It was just that sometimes that was so much harder than it should have been.