Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [59]
“Did she tell you she was sneaking out?”
“No.”
“But she told you about Drew.”
“Just that she had a boyfriend…that was all; she wouldn’t tell me his name. It was like some big secret or something.”
“So the last time you saw her was—”
“In our room. She was there when I went to bed, and next thing I knew, there was all this pounding on the door, and here I am.”
“Your baseball cap was near her body.”
“What?” Shaylee’s head snapped up, and she clamped two hands atop her head as if to locate the hat in question. “No, it wasn’t.” She was shaking her head again, as if in so doing she could change every thing that was happening.
Trent nodded. “In a pile with her clothes.”
“She…she wasn’t wearing her clothes?” Shay whispered, and bit her lip. “Why not?”
“Why was your hat there?”
“I don’t know! The last time I saw it, it was on the hook by the door in our room. That’s where I put it. How it got…wherever she was.” She looked at Trent. “Where was she? In Drew’s room?”
“In the stable.”
“That’s enough,” Lynch said. “We’d better wait for Sheriff O’Donnell before we question her further. He promised to come out personally, with the detectives.”
“The sheriff? Detectives? This was an accident, right? They got themselves trampled or fell or…” Shay’s eyes were huge, dark with fear.
Trent felt for her. “They always look into accidents.” He didn’t want to panic the girl, but it seemed too late.
“Police officers, yeah. Accident-reconstruction people…but that’s not what he’s saying.” Shaylee sank down in the chair.
Trent said, “Detectives are called when someone dies.”
But Shaylee would not be reassured. “Wait a minute, you don’t think that someone…” She swallowed hard, blinking back tears. “Wait a friggin’ second. Do you think that I…?” She looked from Lynch to Trent, and some of the color returned to her face. “The talk about my hat—you think I’m responsible for whatever happened to Nona and Drew? Do I need a lawyer or something?” She was more than scared now. Terrified. “What the hell happened to Nona?”
“A lawyer?” Burdette repeated, her eyebrows rising as if she were truly surprised. “Shaylee, you’ve been watching too much TV.”
“This is over,” Trent said. “When the sheriff gets here, he’s going to want to talk to a lot of us, so for now, let’s just wait.”
But Shaylee lowered her head into her hands, a gesture of surrender. “Don’t you have cameras everywhere around campus? In the dorm rooms? In the hallways? Even in the stable?” She turned accusing eyes at Reverend Lynch, who blanched visibly. “Then everything’s on tape, right? So why the hell am I here being treated like some kind of criminal? Look at your sicko—probably illegal—tapes and let me go.” Finding Trent as her only ally in the room, she turned big, pleading eyes up at him. “And I don’t mean back to the dorm. I want out of here. Someone call my mother. Tell her what happened, that kids are dying, okay? I want to go home. And I want to go now!”
Jules was hungry and tired, and her butt was starting to ache like crazy from hours of sitting behind the wheel of the car.
Still, she drove, eyeing the road ahead. This part of I-5 was a treacherous gray snake that curved and twisted through the steep, forested mountains of southern Oregon. Having been behind the wheel for over seven hours through most of Washington and Oregon, she stepped on the accelerator, her Volvo’s tires singing as she passed semis that crept up the hills, then barreled down steep inclines.
Her stomach was rumbling, her mood decidedly souring. Sleep had eluded her this week, the recurring nightmare of her father’s death creeping through her subconscious, images of Cooper Trent interspersed with the horror of blood seeping over the hardwood floor.
After popping a couple of headache pills with two cups of black coffee this morning, she’d only stopped for a burger and a Diet Coke from a drive-through outside Portland. No wonder her stomach was roiling.
She’d drunk most