Page 86 of She Didn't See It Coming
“But no one’s going to come after you now.”
“Salter already thinks I might have killed Bryden. I don’t want her digging around.”
“Even if she finds out, what can she do? You were never charged—it was self-defense! And she can’t make this information public now if you were a minor at the time.”
She shrugs. “Who knows what she’ll do?”
“Alice, she’s not like us,” Derek says. “She follows the rules. You have nothing to worry about.”
But he can tell that she’s still keeping something back. He wants her to tell him everything, so he makes a confession of his own. “Alice, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” She looks at him, tensing. “Relax,” he says. He pauses a moment and then says, “I’ve developed a bit of a side hustle.”
“A side hustle,” she repeats.
“It’s not exactly legal.”
“I’m listening.”
“I have a very small number of clients, not on the books, who pay extremely well for my special computer skills.” He pauses. “Actually, the less detail you know the better.”
“Okay.”
She seems to accept that. She trusts him. “How would you like to be filthy rich?” he asks.
“You know I’d like to be filthy rich,” she says with a smile. She adds thoughtfully, “You don’t want anyone to find out about this.”
“Obviously.”
“Like Detective Fucking Salter.”
They lock eyes. “Especially her.”
•••
Alice can’t sleep.She glances over at Derek, who is out cold. He doesn’t overthink things. She wonders how much longer he would have held out on her about his cybercrime side gig if things hadn’t reached a crisis—all because of Bryden Frost.
She’d spent all afternoon online, trying to find Susan Cleeve, her former best friend from Connecticut. Because Susan might be a problem. Most people have a profile on social media somewhere. Alice doesn’t, but she’s not most people—she deliberately stays off social media. She thought she’d be able to find Susan, who is much more conventional, but hadn’t been able to track her down. She might have married and changed her name though.
Now, she’s hoping that Susan is dead. Maybe she’s moved abroad somewhere. Alice thinks Derek would be able to find her or find out what happened to her. But she doesn’t want to ask him.
She remembers that day in the ravine as if it were yesterday.
And things didn’t happen the way she said they had.
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The man in the ravine hadn’t been panting, slobbering, horrible. He’d been an older man that she’d been sleeping with for three months. And he didn’t drag her into the ravine, with his hand clapped over her mouth so that she couldn’t scream, but by now she’d told this story so often she almost believed it herself.
She was so convincing when she was talking to the detectives all those years ago. She played the part of the frightened, desperate victim perfectly. She was rather proud of herself. It made her realize that she could make people believe almost anything.
No, he didn’t drag her into the ravine. He was already there, waiting for her, because she’d asked him to meet her there. She was tired of him. He was too dull, too predictable.
At first, he’d seemed exciting, forbidden, because he was so much older. And he’d found her seductive. The boys her own age or a little older were terrified of her. He wasn’t intimidated, and she liked that. In retrospect, he was certainly a creep, sleeping with a sixteen-year-oldgirl. But he’d made sure she was sixteen, the age of consent in Connecticut, before he slept with her. He was married, and he was risking enough already, he told her.
It had all seemed so exciting in the beginning. The secret trysts. Hiding them from her parents. Having this other life that they knew nothing about. It was thrilling. They thought she was just a schoolgirl in tenth grade, a straight-A student. They had no idea. But it got old rather quickly. She liked the double life, but she began to find him too boring, too conventional. It took all the fun out of arranging secret meetings when the man you were doing it for turned out to be dull as dishwater. She’d had enough of him.
She broke it off, but he wouldn’t accept it. He began to call her at home on the landline when she stopped answering his calls on her cell phone. He told her that he loved her and that he couldn’t live without her. He wanted to leave his wife so that they could be together. He was delusional. She had to be blunt. “Rich,” she said coldly, the second-to-last time she saw him, “I don’t love you. You don’t love me, you just think you do. You love your wife. Go back to her and leave me the fuck alone.”
“You’re just saying that,” he protested. “You don’t mean it.” He continued to pester her. He was desperate, unhinged. So she arranged to meet him in the ravine.
