Page 20 of Twelve
I took a moment to connect the dots. Before Kelley’s death, two of her classmates had killed themselves. One was a boy.
The Summers boy?
“Kelley knew the boy who jumped?” I asked.
“This is Cape Roane,” her father said dismissively. “Everyone knows everyone.”
And everyone loves Kelley,I echoed his earlier lie silently back at him.
“What about the other victim?” I asked. “The girl? Did she and Kelley know each other?”
There was a long pause.
“Have you been talking to the school?” Alice Peterson couldn’t have bristled more if she were actually feline. I took that to mean that someone at the school might have had something less than flattering to say about her perfect daughter.
“Was Kelley ever bullied?” I asked. That was an easier question for a parent to be asked thanWas your daughter ever accused of bullying someone else?
“There were tiffs, of course.” Kelley’s mother relaxed slightly. “But nothing major. Kelley knew who she was. She wasn’t the type who needed anyone’s approval.”
Kelley’s father squeezed his wife’s hand. “I will say,” he told me carefully, “that the last few weeks were very hard on our daughter.”
The last few weeks. Since the Summers boy jumped off a cliff? Since another of Kelley’s classmates did the same?
My gut said that if I pushed either of them on that point, they would end this interview, so I sidestepped. “The police file on Kelley’s death indicated that she had no defensive wounds.” That, along with the other suicides and Kelley’s history of self-inflicted injuries, was what had biased the police in favor of the suicide interpretation. “That suggests,” I explained, “that whoever pushed Kelley didn’t physically engage her beforehand. She wasn’t dragged up to the steeple.” I kept my tone gentle, to counteract the words. “Unless her attacker had a gun, the most likely explanation is that she went willingly.”
Maybe someone coerced you into going up there. Blackmailed you. Guilted you.I sorted through the possibilities, one by one.Or maybe the person who pushed you was someone you trusted. Maybe you went willingly, because you wanted to be alone with that person.
Or maybe you went on your own, and your killer followed.
“Would Kelley have gone up there on a dare?” I asked. “Or for privacy—or to meet someone?”
“I…” Alice bowed her head slightly, the motion more graceful than it should have been. “I don’t know.”
“Is there anyone she might have trusted enough to go—”
“We don’t know.” Isaac Peterson repeated his wife’s sentiment, and I had the distinct sense that of everything that had passed their lips during this interview, these words hurt the most.
You thought you knew your daughter, but you’ve realized since she died how much you don’t—and didn’t—know.
“Is there anyone else we should talk to?” I asked. “Anyone Kelley might have confided in? Anyone she was close to?”
That line of inquiry seemed to center Kelley’s parents. Alice folded her free hand neatly in her lap, the other still woven through her husband’s.
“Kelley had a lot of friends,” she declared.Kelley was popular. Kelley was perfect. Kelley was loved.“In fact,” Alice Peterson continued, her voice shaking slightly, “the pastor called to let us know that a group of students from the high school are planning a vigil for her tonight. At the church.”
YOU
There’s something about heights. Something pure and true. There’s clarity in those final moments.
You’ll feel it again soon.
As I stepped out of the Petersons’ house, the humidity was a visceral reminder that this wasn’t an ordinary case.It’s going to rain.We weren’t on an ordinary timeline, and the insight I’d been able to glean about our victim from her parents—it wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t let myself spare more than a passing thought for Mackenzie or the lighthouse or the angry wind whipping my hair against my face as Lia and I made our way back to the car.
I had to focus.
I pulled myself into the passenger seat, shut the door, and let my mind linger on a single word.You.Not Mackenzie this time. And not the killer—not yet.Kelley.Knowing her—how she would have reacted, the limited circumstances in which she would have climbed to the top of the steeple of her own free will, who she might have done that with—that was a piece of the puzzle I needed.Behavior. Personality. Environment.Victim’s and killer’s BPEs were intertwined.
