The Lost Night (Page 39)

Sarah shrugged. “I told the cops about her stopping by, but they never even made a note about it. Actually, how’d you figure it out?”

“I went and saw her last week. Her mom.”

“Whoa. What’d she say?” Sarah asked.

I flicked a glance at Alex, then leaned forward. “She told me she left Edie with the guy she was secretly seeing. Lloyd.”

She frowned. “He had the bouffy blond hair, right?”

“Wait, you knew about him?” Alex said.

Her eyes bulged, then dove to the bowl in front of her.

I started laughing. “This is so ridiculous.” I was surprised that this revelation still stung—that I now cared more about Edie sharing the secret with Sarah than having the secret at all. The sudden singe of feeling Left Out. “This is like a fucking soap opera. I forgot what a drama magnet Edie was.”

A tense silence.

“That’s why we broke up,” Alex offered finally. “I found out about Lloyd when we were still dating. So if you were…Lindsay said you guys always wondered what happened.”

Sarah’s cheeks were scarlet.

“I had a huge crush on Lloyd, which Edie knew about and encouraged, so that’s not humiliating or anything,” I said. The teensiest part of me wanted Alex to feel jealous. When had I slept with Lloyd? It was before he and Edie had begun hooking up, right?

Sarah tilted her bowl to collect the last of the broth. “I talked to him, back in the day. Just ’cause I knew they’d been seeing each other, but then I figured out he was the last one to see her. But his alibi held up, and he didn’t really have anything to add. He’d been in the neighborhood and Edie had texted him begging him to come, like, rescue her from her mom. They talked by the front door a minute, he had to leave to shoot a concert, and then—I mean, we know he was onstage when it happened.”

I frowned, working through the timeline. “He told you they were at the front door?”

“Uh-huh.”

I shook my head. “You said this was around when I came over. And I didn’t see them. Alex, you didn’t either, coming back from the taco truck.”

“I probably took the side entrance,” he said, cocking his head. “You reach it first if you’re heading east. You would, too, if you were coming from your apartment.”

“That’s true.” How different would my life be if I’d walked one hundred and fifty feet farther? I turned to Sarah. “When did you talk to Lloyd?”

“That fall, right in the middle of everything.”

Ten years ago. “Had you met him before?”

She shook her head. “Edie had pointed him out once, but they never really hung out at Calhoun. I guess where you could see them.” She nodded at Alex. “I only talked to him that one time.”

“Alex, you could have seen them at Calhoun that night, talking to her mom.”

He shrugged. “Guess you’re right. They were lucky I took the other door.”

“Sarah, do you still have his contact info?”

“Seriously?”

I nodded. The waitress tipped more coffee into my mug, brown liquid sloshing everywhere.

“Of course not.”

“Okay.”

Now Sarah leaned back. “I just wish I could figure out what she was doing,” she said, “for that last ninety minutes or so. She said goodbye to Lloyd—didn’t tell him anything about where she was going—and then she obviously didn’t come back to the apartment, because we were all still in there. There’s just this…gap.”

The lost hours.

“Maybe her mom called her down again,” I said. “After Lloyd left. They talked some more, they’re getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, so Edie brings her back inside to your apartment, which is newly empty.”

“The gun—the weapon was Kevin’s gun, though, something in the room,” Alex said. “Her mom wouldn’t have known it was there.”

“I’m not saying it was premeditated,” I pointed out. “Who the fuck knows what went on? Maybe her mom insisted on coming in to look for something, or to, I don’t know, tell Edie to pack up and go, and they were fighting and things got out of hand. Maybe it was an accident.”

Sarah shook her head. “We have the phone records. Lloyd was the last person she texted. Her mom couldn’t have called again.”

I bit my lip. “Okay, but maybe—”

“This is crazy,” Sarah announced, a little too loudly. “We’re talking like I did when I was twenty-three and grieving and trying to make everything a lot more complicated than it actually was. Right?” She slurped her ice water. “Like, no, life isn’t actually a soap opera and the simplest answer is probably the right one. There’s a reason nothing you’ve uncovered during your…your investigation proves anything different.”

The three of us watched one another across the booth, across the ten years.

“But if Lloyd left the concert early,” I said, “maybe he quickly got all the photos he needed and headed back to—”

“Lindsay, stop. Do you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how you sound?” Sarah pressed her palms flat on the table. “Look, with Edie…I loved the girl, but she had a lot of enemies. We could probably fill a stadium with people she had a beef with, right?” She let out a mirthless chortle. “She was smart, and funny, and incredibly charismatic and all that, but she could also be really horrible to people. I lived with her—I saw that firsthand. I mean, weren’t you guys fighting at the end? If I didn’t know you better…hey, you grew up shooting guns, right? You knew Kevin’s gun was there, you wandered away from the rest of us before the concert, you don’t remember a…a fucking thing from the night—”

Alex piped up: “Hey, you know—”

“And I know what you did.”

We locked eyes. Did Sarah know about the Warsaw Incident, the drunken disaster Edie had promised not to share? Had she betrayed me?

“To your mom. When you were a kid? Edie told me.”

Not the Warsaw Incident—something worse. We stared at one another and the entire room vibrated with my heartbeat, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum.

She pulled the napkin off her lap, folded it carefully. “I said if I didn’t know you better. Look, at the end of the day, I think she was really depressed, and she took some drugs that messed her up even further, and she was alone and everything sucked and she made a really bad decision.”

Sarah knew. The dark childhood secret I’d let slip just once, soused on my friendship with Edie, deep into a game of Truth or Truth. I looked down at my hands, limp and folded in my lap like sleeping kittens. What are you two capable of?

“But we’re still here. And, Lindsay, it’s been ten years. Ten years. If Edie were sitting here right now, she would look all of us in the eye and tell us we should move the heck on.”

I felt rage rising within me, a steamy red spiral, but I fought it, moved my gaze back to the window and the people crisscrossing on the sidewalk outside. All consumed by their own little dramas.

“You’re right,” I said softly. “You’re so right. I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m sorry to bring this up.”

“It’s okay. I understand it’s—it’s not something you can talk about with a lot of people,” she said. She slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table, an odd, cinematic move, and said she’d better go. Alex and I slid out of the booth and gave her clumsy hugs. She was heading for the door when I remembered a final question.

“Sarah, wait.” She turned and peered at me, and I cleared my throat. “We had a little tiff that night, you and I, right? Right after we came down from the roof. About my wanting to go home and not come with you to the show?”

She nodded slowly. “That sounds right. I hate having to walk into stuff like that by myself.”

“Then where was Alex?” We both turned his way.

He raised his eyebrows. “Guys, I did a lot of coke back then. And I know you girls weren’t into it. Pretty sure I stopped on another floor to do a line and then met you at the show. I mean, right?”

We all looked at one another. Frustration swelled and my instinct, suddenly, was to cry.

“That sounds right,” Sarah said finally. “I remember finding you at the show. Well, see you later.” She headed for the exit.

Alex was looking at me oddly. “ ‘What you did to your mom’?” he said.

I shook my head, tears breaking free again, and walked past him toward the door. He called my name a couple of times, but I turned just long enough to say, “Alex, please don’t.” It was one of those silver days, overcast and still too bright, and when the door swung closed behind me, the air swallowed me right up.

* * *

On the subway ride home, I let this new horror unfold: Sarah knew. I couldn’t believe that Edie had told her, that all this time, another person knew what I’d done back in middle school. At the diner, I’d been too stunned to ask Sarah when Edie had shared it and why. Maybe Edie had gleefully gossiped about me, the same way she complained to me about Sarah; maybe she’d worked hard to keep both of us privately convinced we were in the number-one-friend spot. I felt a blast of nausea and tipped my sweaty forehead toward my knees.