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  “Do I have to remove my watch?” she asked the guard.

  Audrey shook her head. “No. You can go right through. Just sign in.” She shoved a long clipboard toward Mrs. Page.

  She scribbled her name on the sign-in sheet. Audrey studied the signature. “Oh. Are you Gretchen’s mother? She’s the cheerleader, right? Very nice girl. Always says good morning.”

  “I’m kind of in a hurry,” Mrs. Page, shoving her stuff back into her pocketbook. “I’ve never been here. Which way is the principal’s office?”

  Audrey pointed. “Make a left, then a right.”

  Mrs. Page turned and started to hurry away.

  “Your top is buttoned crooked,” Audrey called after her.

  “Huh?” She lowered her gaze to the front of her pale green blouse. She saw immediately that the two sides didn’t meet. She had the buttons in the wrong button holes. No time to fix it.

  A few seconds later, she burst into the principal’s office. The secretary behind the front desk looked up from a folder she had been reading. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to see Mr. Hernandez right away.” Mrs. Page saw the door to the inner office and strode toward it without waiting for the woman’s reply.

  “He has someone in there—”

  She lurched into the doorway. Hernandez, behind the desk, was tall and broad, nearly bursting out of a gray suit, shirt unbuttoned, dark-framed glasses over his eyes.

  He looks more like a gym teacher than a principal, she thought.

  Two students, both blond, a boy and a girl, sat in chairs facing the desk.

  All three of them looked up in surprise as Mrs. Page stepped in.

  “I need to talk to you right away.” She couldn’t keep her voice from trembling. One hand went to her throat as if to be as dramatic as possible.

  He squinted at her. “Are you Gretchen’s mother?”

  She nodded.

  He turned to the two kids. “Let’s continue our talk after lunch. Can you come back sixth period?”

  They both nodded and scurried out without a word.

  Hernandez motioned to a seat, but Mrs. Page remained standing. “You look upset. Is there a problem?”

  She nodded. “I-I don’t know where to start,” she stammered. She changed her mind and slid into one of the chairs.”

  “It’s about Gretchen?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “I thought she was doing well. I thought she was okay.…” Her voice trailed off.

  Hernandez removed his glasses. Pinched the brim of his nose. Replaced the glasses. Waited for her to continue, not taking his eyes off hers.

  “She got on the bus for the retreat,” Mrs. Page finally continued. “I went up to her room and I saw that she left her phone behind. I … I couldn’t resist. I looked through it.”

  Hernandez leaned forward over the desktop. “You looked at her emails? Her Facebook?”

  “Her phone calls,” Gretchen mother replied. “I looked through her call log. I haven’t done it for a long while. I … thought she was okay. But…”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “But … I found all these calls. Gretchen was making calls almost every day … to a girl named Polly Brown.”

  Behind his glasses, Hernandez’ eyes narrowed in concentration. “What’s wrong with that, Mrs. Page?”

  “Polly Brown has been dead for two years. Gretchen … Gretchen killed her.”

  PART THREE

  42.

  Hernandez uttered a sharp gasp. “Killed her?”

  Mrs. Page grabbed her throat again. “I … shouldn’t have said that. Gretchen was responsible for Polly’s death. I mean, she didn’t kill her deliberately. Polly was her best friend. They were inseparable. Closer than sisters. I—I—”

  Gretchen’s mother started to choke. Shaking her head, she held her throat and coughed.

  “Miss Rangell,” Hernandez shouted. “Please bring Mrs. Page a bottle of water.”

  Gretchen’s mother heard scurrying in the outer office. She forced herself to swallow. Her throat suddenly felt dry as cotton. The secretary appeared with the bottle of water. Mrs. Page took several long sips.

  “Better. Thank you.” She smiled at the secretary, who disappeared back to the outer office.

  Her smile faded as she turned back to the principal. “Gretchen and Polly were on their way to a basketball game. This was back in Savanna Mills. Gretchen was driving. She’d only had her license a few weeks, but she was a good driver, I think. Confident. Not nervous … like me.”

  She took another sip of water. “They were just a few blocks from the high school. I guess Gretchen was distracted. She was thinking about her cheerleading routines. She was the star … the best cheerleader at Savanna Mills. But…”

  She stifled a sob. “Gretchen didn’t see the van. She should have swerved or stopped or something. But she didn’t see it. It … it…”

  “Take your time,” Hernandez said softly, his big hands spread over the desktop.

  “It was a horrible head-on collision. Polly was reaching for something on the floor. She had her seatbelt open. She … she flew right through the windshield. She died before she landed. She didn’t have a chance.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Hernandez murmured, shaking his head. He lowered his eyes. “How horrible.”

  “Yes. Horrible,” Mrs. Page repeated in a whisper.

  Silence for a long moment.

  Mrs. Page was the first to break the silence. “Gretchen was lost after that. I mean really lost. We … we couldn’t get through to her.… Her father and I … we tried everything. We took her to all the best doctors. But…”

  Another long pause.

  “But we couldn’t reach her. Couldn’t get through to her. She was lost. Just lost. In her own world. No touch with reality.” She raised her eyes to Hernandez. “She wouldn’t talk to anyone. For weeks, she wouldn’t get out of bed. She wouldn’t eat. She … just tried to vanish from the world.”

  Hernandez swallowed. “Take your time, Mrs. Page. Tell me what happened next.”

  “The doctors brought her around,” Gretchen’s mother replied. “They found the right meds. They found the right approach. They brought her back. My marriage had broken up by then. The stress was just too much for her father and me. We couldn’t handle it, and we divorced.”

  Hernandez shook his head. He lowered his gaze to the desktop.

  “But when Gretchen started coming around, her father and I were overjoyed. We had our daughter back. And she … she seemed like her old self in every way.”

  Mrs. Rangell poked her head into the office. “Mr. Mulrooney from the State Education Board is on line one?”

  Hernandez waved a hand. “Tell Anthony I’ll have to call him back.” He turned back to Mrs. Page. “And now you’re worried—?”

  “When Gretchen starts to call Polly, it means she’s losing it again. Backing away from the real world. Something starts to bother her … something starts to eat at her … and she starts to sink back.…”

  “What do you think caused the problem?” Hernandez asked.

  “I … I think maybe the cheerleading. I tried to discourage her. I tried to convince her to wait. To take it slow. It meant so much to her. But I shouldn’t have let her join. I should have stopped her. I’m afraid she may be going back to her old pattern … to what she did back in Savanna Mills.”

  Hernandez leaned forward over the desk. “Her old pattern?”

  “Back home, she picked out one girl. One girl on the cheerleading squad. And then Gretchen made herself look like a victim.”

  Hernandez squinted hard. “I don’t understand.”

  “She made it look as if the girl was persecuting her. Harassing her. Doing terrible things to embarrass her. Gretchen tried to turn everyone against that girl, even though the girl wasn’t doing anything to her. Gretchen did it all to herself.”

  “Oh no,” Hernandez muttered. “Gretchen may be doing that again. Devra Dalby, one o
f the cheerleaders…”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Mrs. Page said. “When I saw she was making calls to her dead friend, I thought maybe she could be starting the pattern all over again.”

  Hernandez swept a hand back through his dark hair. “You should have told the school about your daughter’s history,” he said. “We don’t have any of this in our records, and we really should know about it all.”

  Mrs. Page lowered her eyes but didn’t reply. “I haven’t told you the worst of it. I haven’t told you about the knife.”

  Hernandez blinked. His mouth opened slightly. He waited for her to continue.

  “When Gretchen was acting most paranoid … when she was accusing this girl at school of trying to harm her … we found a knife. Hidden at the bottom of her backpack. A hunting knife. Very long and very sharp.”

  She shuddered. “That was the low point. That was when I was most frightened. Of course, we took the knife away. And she never used it.… But we couldn’t get Gretchen to talk about it. I tried. The doctors tried. She never said a word.”

  “Oh my God,” Hernandez muttered. “So…” He took a breath. “So you think your daughter might be dangerous right now?”

  Mrs. Page bit her lip. “I … I…”

  Hernandez was breathing hard. “We’ve had one girl badly burned and another girl murdered in a most hideous and shocking way. A lot of tragedy for this school. A lot of sadness. Too much sadness for one school.” His eyes were suddenly watery. They locked on hers. “You don’t think Gretchen—?”

  The unfinished question hung in the air.

  Then, Mrs. Page spoke in a voice just above a whisper. “I think we have to get Gretchen away from those other cheerleaders as fast as we can.”

  43.

  Gretchen never thought it would come to this.

  Sure, there was tension on the bus that brought them to this campgrounds in the woods. More than tension. A long argument between Devra and Sid that soon became a screaming fight.

  Coach Walker had to go to the back of the bus and break it up. She demanded to know what the problem was. But, of course, neither of them would speak up. Devra just stared back at Coach Walker, her face tight with disgust.

  Sid sat beside Devra, his cheeks bright red and glistening with sweat. He kept his eyes lowered and wouldn’t say a word.

  Shaking her head, hands clenched into tight fists, Coach Walker returned to her seat at the front of the bus.

  The tension between Sid and Devra simmered, but the shouting had stopped.

  Gretchen kept twisting in her seat, taking peeks at them. What did Devra do to get Sid steamed like that? She wondered. He looks ready to explode.

  Sid had slid across the seat, away from Devra. He had his arms crossed tightly in front of him, his face still red. He stared out the window at the passing farm fields.

  Devra pushed her earphones into her ears and fiddled with her phone. She blew a strand of red hair off her face and settled back in the seat. She appeared a lot calmer than Sid. And now they both ignored one another as if nothing had happened.

  Shannon leaned across the bus aisle and said something to Gretchen. But Gretchen didn’t hear her. She was thinking hard about the argument—the fight—in the back of the bus, struggling to guess what could have sparked it.

  Was it about me?

  And then the bus had come to a stop outside the rustic camp mess hall that looked like a big log cabin. Their bags were being unloaded, and Coach Walker, clipboard in hand, was assigning them to their cabins. One for Walker. One for Sid. Three girls each in the two small cabins on the other side of the mess hall.

  Gretchen was put in a cabin with Shannon and Becka.

  Did Coach Walker deliberately separate me from Devra?

  Not enough time to unpack. They had to rush to their first squad meeting in the mess hall. Coach Walker always insisted on promptness.

  The girls wore black tights or jeans and sweatshirts and still hugged themselves for warmth. There was no heat in the big hall, and no one had started a fire yet in the enormous fireplace against the back wall.

  And then the trouble ignited again. The screams and accusations.

  And this time it got really bad.

  Really bad.

  Gretchen covered her ears and ran screaming from the mess hall. The afternoon sun sent shifting patterns on the grass, filtering through the tall trees. Shadows moved at her feet as she ran.

  Ran breathlessly to her cabin. Her bag still propped on her bed, only half-unpacked.

  Gretchen knew what she had to do.

  Yes, her mind was spinning, flying, pictures danced and disappeared, the cabin now a dark swirl of grays and blacks.

  But she knew what she had to do.

  She had to put an end to it.

  She could hear the cries from the mess hall.

  She had to hurry.

  With a choked cry, Gretchen dug her hand deep into her travel bag … slid it under the clothes … under her cosmetics bag.

  She wrapped her fingers around the knife she had hidden there, lifted it out, the long blade dull in the dim cabin light.

  I’m ready.

  44.

  Mrs. Page struggled to tighten her seatbelt as Mr. Hernandez swerved, guiding his Subaru SUV through traffic in the Old Village. “These streets are too narrow,” he said, groaning. “They were too narrow when the town was built. And now they’re ridiculous.”

  He roared the SUV onto the sidewalk to edge it around a slow-moving garbage truck. Mrs. Page bounced against the passenger seat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “So sorry I didn’t let the school know about Gretchen’s problems. But she was doing so well. Her therapist felt that getting away to a new place was the right thing to do.”

  Hernandez nodded, peering through his sunglasses at the line of traffic in front of them. “I don’t know if we’d have done anything differently,” he said. “Maybe kept a closer eye on her. Listened to her complaints about Devra Dalby a little more seriously…”

  “How far are we from the camp?” she asked.

  “Only about forty-five minutes. If traffic starts moving. We should be okay once we get past town.”

  They rode in silence for a while. The sun slid over the windshield, forcing Mrs. Page to shield her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, but I need to ask,” Hernandez said, frowning. “And there’s no gentle way to ask it. Do you think Gretchen could have killed Madison Grossman? Wasn’t Madison her friend?”

  Mrs. Page pressed her hands together, fingers tightly entwined, almost as if praying. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I … I don’t think my daughter is a murderer. She is a troubled girl. I mean … I can’t picture her … I just can’t imagine—” Her words broke off with a sob.

  “Can you think of any reason at all she would have for murdering Madison Grossman?”

  Mrs. Page shook her head. “No. No reason. Madison was her only new friend since moving here. At least, I think she was. You have to understand, Mr. Hernandez, Gretchen is very private. She doesn’t confide in me.” And then she added, as if an afterthought: “Oh. I think there was a boy, too.”

  Hernandez’ eyes widened. “A boy?”

  “Yes. I met him. Nice looking. Gretchen seemed to like him. I just got a vibe, a feeling. She didn’t say they were going together or anything. He came to help her clean out the garage last Saturday.”

  “You don’t remember his name?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t. I was so shocked that she seemed to have a boyfriend.…” Her voice trailed off again.

  Hernandez hit the brake, nearly hitting the SUV in front of them. “Can you describe him?”

  Mrs. Page thought for a while. “Well, he had one of those very trendy haircuts. Awful. You know. Buzzed very short on the sides and long on the top. Brown hair. And … I remember he had very big ears. He was nice looking, except for the big ears.”

  “Sounds like Sid Viviano,” Hernandez said. �
�He’s the equipment manager for the cheerleader squad.”

  “Yeah. Maybe,” she said. “That would make sense, I guess.”

  “But everyone in school knows that Sid and Stacy Grande are a couple. Have been for a long time.”

  Mrs. Page didn’t answer. She took a shuddering breath. “I thought I was paying close attention to Gretchen. She accused me of paying too much attention. But … I guess I didn’t do my job. I should have been more responsible. I should have watched her even more closely.”

  They drove in silence for a while. The traffic eased as they left Shadyside. The afternoon sun began to dip, lowering itself over the flat gray and brown farms that ringed the town.

  Mrs. Page kept her eyes shut. Hernandez knew she wasn’t asleep. Was she praying?

  He wondered if she had told him everything about Gretchen. He imagined there were big chunks of the story she had left out. He kept thinking about the knife they found in Gretchen’s backpack. Thinking about it caused a hard rock to form in the pit of his stomach.

  Dread made his entire body feel heavy as he swung the SUV into the dirt driveway to the campgrounds. Tall trees reached their limbs over the narrow drive, sending shadows over them, deepening as they followed the drive to the camp.

  Mrs. Page’s eyes snapped open. Her face locked in a wide-eyed expression of fear and anxiety. Spotty sunlight dappled the roofs of the line of small wooden cabins, abandoned this time of year.

  The car sank into a deep hole in the dirt, then bounced back up, causing Mrs. Page to cry out.

  Hernandez slowed the car as they passed two cabins with lights on, the pale light seeping from the small dirt-smeared windows. And then they could see at the end of the row of cabins a large two-story building that must be the mess hall.

  A sudden movement along the path caught Mrs. Page’s eye. She saw a girl running toward the mess hall entrance. And she gasped. “Is that Gretchen?”