The Secret Place (70 page)

She said it clear and warm, the way she’d have said it to a friend, a best friend, to her closest sister. She was holding out a hand and beckoning Julia to cross that river. Go from the lifelong-familiar side where grown-ups were faceless mentallers trying to wreck everything, no point trying to understand them, over to this new strange place where we could talk face to face.

Julia looking at Conway. Things moving across her face said she knew the crossing was one-way. That you can never tell who’ll still be beside you, on the other side, and who’ll be left behind.

I kept quiet. This was theirs. I was outside.

Julia took a long breath. She said, ‘You’re sure. It wasn’t her.’

‘We don’t suspect her. You’ve got my word.’

‘Lenie’s not just naturally crazy, though. You don’t know her; I do. She wasn’t like this before Chris got killed.’

Conway nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. But what’s wrecking her head isn’t that she killed him. It’s that she knows something she can’t handle. She’s spacing out so she doesn’t have to deal with it.’

It was getting colder. Julia pulled her jumper tight at her neck. She said, ‘Like what?’

‘If we knew, we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation. I’ve got ideas, no proof. All I can tell you for sure is: you’re not gonna get Selena in hassle by telling me the truth. I swear. OK?’

Julia tugged her sleeves down, the pale smudges of her hands vanishing into the red. She said quietly, ‘OK. I texted you about the key.’

Conway said, ‘How’d you know where Joanne and them kept it?’

‘I’m the one who gave her the idea about the book.’

I said, ‘And the one who gave her the key.’

‘You make it sound like it was her birthday present. Actually, they saw us heading out one night, and Joanne said she’d tell McKenna what bad girls we’d been if we didn’t make her a copy of the key. So I did.’

‘And gave her advice on where to keep it?’ Conway raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re very helpful altogether.’

Julia matched the eyebrow. ‘When someone could get me expelled, yeah, I am. She wanted to know where we kept ours, which I wasn’t going to tell her because fuck the bitch—’

‘Which was where? While we’re at it.’

‘Down the inside of my phone case. Simple, and it was always on me. Like I said, though, I wasn’t about to give the Heifer Heffernan any more than I had to. So I told her the only way to be safe was to keep it in the common room, so if it got found no one could connect it to her, right? I was like, “Pick a book no one ever reads. Who’d you do your saint essay on?” – the common rooms are all full of saint biogs, no one ever looks at them except once a year for essays, and we’d just handed ours in. She went, “Thérèse of Lisieux. The Little Flower” – she actually got this
holy
face on, like that somehow made her into Joanne of Lisieux.’ Conway was grinning. ‘So I went, “Perfect. No one’s going to look at the book again till at least next year. Stick the key in there, you’re sorted.”’

‘And you figured she’d taken your word for it?’

‘Joanne has zero imagination, except about herself. No way could she have come up with a place. Anyway, I checked. I thought it might come in useful.’

‘And it did,’ Conway said. ‘How come you decided to tell us?’

Julia hesitated. The small noises all around were moving deeper into night: flurries in leaves said hunting, the laughter from the lawn was long gone. I wondered how little time we had. Didn’t look at my watch.

I said, ‘The interviews, earlier on. Did Selena come out of hers upset?’

After a moment: ‘I mean, she wouldn’t have looked upset to most people. Just spacy; well, spacier than usual. But that is upset, for Selena. That’s how she gets.’

I said, ‘You were afraid we’d shaken her up enough that she might let something slip, maybe even confess. You needed us looking in another direction, at least till you could get her settled down again. So you threw us Joanne’s key, to keep us occupied. And it worked. You’ve got a gift for this, you know that?’

‘Gee, thanks.’

Conway said, ‘And if you’re the one who texted us, that means you’ve got Chris Harper’s secret phone.’

Julia went still. Her face was a new kind of wary.

‘Ah, come on. Records say that text came from that phone. There’s not a lot of point in mucking about.’

A tilt of the head, acknowledging. Julia leaned back and wriggled a phone out of her jeans pocket, slim little thing in a snappy orange case. ‘Not his phone. Just his SIM card.’

She pulled the case away from the back of the phone and tapped a SIM card into her palm. Handed it to Conway.

Conway said, ‘We’re going to need to hear the story.’

‘There’s no story.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘Don’t I have the right to an attorney, or something? Before I start telling you where I got a dead guy’s SIM?’

I knew. I said, ‘You got his phone off Selena, after he died. She gave it to you, or you found it in her stuff. That’s why you think she killed Chris.’

Julia’s eyes flicked away from me. Conway said, ‘We still don’t. And it’s pretty obvious you didn’t do the job, or you wouldn’t be climbing the walls thinking she did.’ That got a faint one-sided grin. ‘So dial down the paranoia and talk to me.’

The night was turning that red jumper the colour of a banked fire, compressed and waiting. Julia said, ‘I was actually trying to get rid of Selena’s phone, the one we’d both used to text Chris. Imagine my surprise when this showed up.’

Conway said, ‘When was this?’

‘The day after Chris got killed.’

‘What time?’

An unconscious grimace, as she remembered. ‘Jesus. I started trying before
noon
– they had this big high-drama assembly to tell us about The Tragedy, we had to say a prayer or something
.
.
. All I could think was I had to get Selena’s phone out of our room. Before you guys decided to search the place.’

‘What were you going to do with it?’

Julia shook her head. ‘I hadn’t even thought that far. I just wanted it out. But I could not get a fucking
second
alone in there. I guess McKenna had given orders that none of us were allowed to be alone in case a maniac was roaming the corridors, I don’t know. I said I’d forgotten my French homework in my room, and they sent a prefect up with me – I had to pretend the shock had turned me into an airhead, ooo it was in my bag all along! Then I said I’d got my period, but they wouldn’t let me go to my room, they sent me to the nurse instead. And then when school ended, McKenna made this announcement – “All students will please report immediately to their activity groups, while remaining calm and blah blah blah stiff upper lip school spirit
.
.
.”’

She did a good McKenna, even if the wank mime was out of character. ‘I do drama group, so we had to go to the hall and pretend we were rehearsing. It was a
mess
, no one knew where they were supposed to be and all the teachers were trying to take like four groups at once and people were still crying – well, you were there.’

That was to Conway, who nodded. ‘Loony bin,’ she said, to me.

‘Exactly. So I thought maybe I could just slide out and sneak up to my room, seeing as I had the key on me, right? But nooo, the corridors were riddled with nuns and I got sent back to the hall. I tried again during study, said I needed some book, and Sister Patricia came
with
me. And then it was practically lights-out, you guys were still doing whatever down in the grounds, and I still hadn’t got that
fucking
phone out of the way.’

Julia’s voice was tightening towards something. ‘So Holly and Becca go to brush their teeth, and I’m messing around hoping Selena goes too. But she’s sitting on her bed, just sitting there staring into space. She’s not going anywhere, and Holly and Becs are gonna be back any minute. So I say, “Lenie, I need that phone.” She looks at me like I just landed in a UFO. I go, “The phone Chris gave you. We don’t have time to dick around. Come on.”

‘She’s still staring, so I’m just like,
OK, forget this
. I shove past her and I stick my hand down the side of her bed, where she kept the phone – it was this little foofoo pink thing, just like Alison’s; I guess that’s what Chris thought was appropriate for girls. I’m hoping to Jesus she hasn’t moved it, ’cause I don’t have time to try and figure out where, so I’m a happy girlie when I feel it there, right? Only then I pull it out, and it’s red.’

The memory made Julia take a hard in-breath through her nose, bite down on her lip. She wasn’t someone you could pat on the head with the old
You’re doing great
. Conway gave her a second before she said, ‘Chris’s.’

‘Yeah. I’d seen it on him; it fell out of his pocket once, when we were
.
.
. I go, “Lenie, what the
fuck
?” She looks at me and she’s like, “Huh?” I swear I nearly shoved the phone up her arse. I went, “Where did you get this? And where’s your one?” She looks at the phone and after a second she says – this is it, this is all she says – “Oh.”’

Julia shook her head. ‘Just like that. “Oh.” I still feel sick thinking about it.’

Conway said, ‘You figured she’d killed Chris.’

‘
Duh,
yeah, I did. I just— What was I supposed to think? I thought she’d been out meeting him and he told her about me, and she— And then when she was legging it back inside, she grabbed the wrong phone somehow. If they’d, I don’t know, if they’d taken off their clothes and their phones had ended up—’

I said, ‘Or she might have taken it so we couldn’t link her to Chris.’

‘Yeah, no. Selena? Wouldn’t even occur to her. What freaked me out was where was
her
phone, like had she left it wherever Chris was? But I figured I couldn’t worry about that. I just grabbed the phone and I was out of there.’

It jibed with Holly’s story, or partway. Holly had thought faster: like her dad, always on top of the just-in-case, never let the off-chance sneak up on her. She had swiped Selena’s phone early in the morning, before the full story got through to McKenna and the school went into lockdown. Between then and study time, someone else had found a way into that room.

Conway said, ‘Where’d you put it?’

‘Locked myself in a toilet cubicle, deleted the shit out of the message folders, took out the SIM and stuck the phone in a cistern. I figured even if you found it, you couldn’t link it to us, and without the SIM you probably couldn’t link it to Chris either. That weekend when I went home, I left the phone on the bus. If no one stole it, it’s probably in the Dublin Bus lost and found.’

She had guts, Julia. Guts and enough loyalty for a dozen. She was good stuff. I wished I knew how badly we were going to break her heart.

‘Why keep the SIM card?’ I asked.

‘I thought it could come in useful. I was pretty sure Selena was about to get arrested – even if by some miracle she hadn’t left evidence all over the place, I figured she’d go to pieces and confess. Do you even remember what a wreck she was?’

‘So was everyone else,’ Conway said. The sharp point on her voice said
Should’ve known
. ‘She wasn’t bawling or fainting: she looked to be in better nick than most.’

Julia’s eyebrow flicked. ‘Yeah, if only you’d told me that back then. I was there expecting you guys to come for her any minute. I thought if there was at least a way to show you that she was the one who’d dumped Chris, and that he was a total dickhead to girls, Lenie might get – I don’t know, a lighter sentence or whatever. Otherwise everyone would just think he dumped her and she went psycho, lock the evil bitch up and throw away the key. I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly; I just figured keeping it couldn’t hurt, at least for now, and it might help.’

If Julia had talked to any of the others, she would have known that the story had tangles, that not everything pointed straight to Selena. No way to guess what they would have done next, but they would have done it together.

It had been months too late for that to happen. Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

I said, ‘Can you remember if anyone did manage to go up to the boarders’ wing before study period that day? We’ll check the logbook, but while we have you here: anything come to mind?’

I had Julia’s attention. She was watching me hard. ‘What? You think someone else put that phone down behind Selena’s bed?’

‘If Selena didn’t take that phone off Chris, someone else did. And then somehow it got to where you found it.’

‘Like, someone tried to
frame
her?’

Behind her shoulder, Conway’s eyes said
Careful
. I shrugged. ‘We can’t say that yet. I’d just like to know if anyone had the opportunity.’