“Uncle Ben was going to UCLA?” Cole asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yes,” Gina said. “Didn’t you know that?” Cole shook his head. “Ah, well, your uncle had gotten a scholarship to play football there, but at the last minute the funding got pulled. Amber said the coach had overextended his budget, but Spence had another scholarship lined up and he’d still be going. It was a relief to us, because that out-of-state tuition was very expensive, even back then.”
Gina looked down at her hands again. “None of that matters now, though. The kids never made it there.”
We all fell sadly silent and that’s when the curtain parted and the girl with blue tint poked her head in. “Gina? Your two thirty is here.”
Gina got up from the table, and put a hand on her lower back, as if it ached a little, then she moved to the doorway. Pausing to turn back to us, she said, “Remember what I told you kids. I know you’re anxious to have the case reopened, but I wouldn’t push any further with this. Nothing good will come of it, and your grandmother, Lily, could turn on you. Don’t forget how powerful she is in this town. We all know that she’s already turned on her son. She can make your life, and your mother’s, very difficult if she wants to.”
With that, she was gone, and Cole and I were left to sit and think about what she’d said.
“What do we do?” I finally asked him.
“Do you want to stop?” he asked me in turn.
“No,” I admitted. “I mean it, Cole: if my grandmother had anything to do with Ben and Amber’s death, I won’t be able to live under her roof. And my mom won’t, either.”
“She got your mom that job at the hospital though, right?” Cole said carefully.
I sighed. “She did. But there have to be other hospitals Mom can do her residency at. If I told her that I thought Grandmother had something to do with Amber’s death, she’d pack us up and move. She would.”
“Okay, so let’s keep digging,” Cole said. “And let’s agree that if we get enough clues together to reopen the case, I’ll send an email to one of the special agents I met at FAIT and see if I can convince him to look into it.”
“You want to get the FBI involved?” I said uneasily. That was hard-core.
“It’s probably the only way to bring some justice to Ben and Amber, and avoid having your grandmother getting involved and shutting down an investigation. The feds might also be able to protect our moms from retaliation. I mean, I’ll bet your grandmother wouldn’t hesitate to get involved with a Fredericksburg PD case if she thought it might lead to trouble for her, but I doubt she’d be willing to gamble with an obstruction charge from the FBI.”
I sat with that for a minute. If Grandmother really had been involved in the murders of Ben and Amber, then I honestly wasn’t going to shed a tear if she was taken off to jail. I’d gotten to know Amber and Spence in the past twenty-four hours, and they felt more like friends than strangers. If she’d been responsible, then I knew she’d have to be brought to justice.
And yet…she was family. Her blood ran though my veins, and instinctively, I felt a little protective of that kinship.
“Lily?” Cole asked me. “You look like you want to back out.”
“No,” I said, finally arriving at a decision I thought I could live with. “No. I’m not. If she’s responsible, Cole, then my grandmother needs to be brought to justice.”
He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “Let’s keep digging and decide once we’ve put all the clues together. If everything points to Maureen Bennett, then I’ll let you decide if I make that call to the FBI. Fair?”
I pressed my palm against the back of his hand. “That’s only fair to me,” I whispered.
His flesh and blood had been murdered, and it might have been because of something my flesh and blood had done. I didn’t know if I could’ve made him the same offer if our situations were reversed.
“Yeah, but I’m okay with it,” he said. “My mom and I have to live in this town, Lily, and Gina’s right—your grandmother totally runs this place. This whole thing could backfire on us and my uncle has been dead for thirty years. Plus, I feel like I know Spence well enough to think that he wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to us because we were trying to solve his murder. I doubt he’d think it was worth it.”
I lifted my chin and looked at him. Really looked at him. He was such a wise person for someone so young.
“Let’s keep going,” I said. “We can both decide if and when we find anything that breaks the case open.”
“Deal,” he said. He let go of my shoulder to reach into his backpack and pull out his tablet. He typed something quickly and hit ENTER.
“I found Grady Weaver,” he said. “Maybe that’s the best friend Mrs. Greeley said he got in a fight with.”
“Do you think he’ll talk to us about Ben?”
“Only one way to find out,” Cole said, putting the yearbooks and his tablet back in his backpack and motioning me to follow him out. We waved to Gina on our way through the front door, hopped in his car, and took off.
Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in front of a nice, two-story, A-frame house with teak-colored shingles and a cabin-in-the-woods feel. There were no signs of life on the property, even though the windows were large enough to give a view of the living room.
I rubbed my palms on my shorts. I was nervous. “We’re really doing this?” I whispered.
Cole grinned at me. “You don’t like talking to strangers much, huh?”
I grinned back. “I talked to you that first day, didn’t I?”
“Thank God,” Cole said, patting his heart. “I never would’ve gotten over it if you hadn’t.”
I laughed, and just like that a lot of my nervousness vanished. “Okay, let’s do this.”
We got out of the car and walked along the front path. Leaning close to Cole, I said, “You can do the talking.”
He chuckled. “Can I? Gee, thanks.”
I nudged him with my shoulder, and he smiled. Just as we were about to walk up the three steps to the door, we heard from behind us, “Can I help you?”
We both froze. Cole turned around first. “Hi,” he said. “Mr. Weaver?”
A good-looking middle-aged man with a square jaw, olive skin, and dark hair graying at the temples, stood in the drive with a garden hose.
“You guys collecting for the school?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Cole said.
“Well, good, ’cause I don’t have anything to give you. So, what do you want?”
Cole cleared his throat. “My name is Cole Drepeau, sir. I think you knew my uncle, Ben Spencer?”
At the mention of the name, Mr. Weaver’s eyes widened. “Spence was your uncle?” he said. “You’re little Stacey’s kid?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Weaver came forward to us and stuck out his hand. “Man!” he said as he pumped Cole’s hand up and down. “You look just like him. And you’re as big as him.”
Cole seemed to stand up a little straighter under the man’s scrutiny, and I could tell he was pleased.
“So what brings you by?” Weaver asked, finally noticing me and offering me his hand, too.
“I’m doing a school paper on my uncle,” Cole said. “And I wanted to talk to some of his friends and see what he was like.”
Weaver considered Cole for a minute. I didn’t think he believed him. “A school paper?” he said. “Didn’t you guys just start classes?”
“Last week,” I said. “We were given an assignment in our English class to do a research paper on someone from our family tree who had an impact on the family in some significant way.”
Weaver pointed back and forth between us. “You two in the same class?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Who’d you pick?” he said to me.
“My grandfather.” Weaver studied me and there was doubt in his eyes so I added, “Dr. William James Bennett.”
Weaver’s brow shot up in surprise. ??
?You’re a Bennett?”
I held up my hand. “Guilty.”
“Huh.” Weaver’s expression became neutral. Turning back to Cole, he said, “Your uncle was a great guy. One of my best friends. He’d help anybody out of a bind, and give you the shirt off his back. Spence was one of the best people I ever knew.”
Cole beamed with pride. “Thanks,” he said. “There’s just this rumor going around that’s sort of bugging me, though.”
Weaver cocked his head. “The UCLA thing?”
Cole blinked. “Uh, yeah,” he said, pretending like he knew exactly what Weaver was talking about. “Can you clear that up for me?”
Mr. Weaver shrugged. “Spence loved Amber,” he said. “Like, loved her. She said she was going to UCLA, and he decided he was going with her. Problem was, he had a hard time with exams, especially when there was a lot of pressure to do well. He managed okay in school, I mean, his grades were pretty good, given his anxiety around finals, but he bombed his first two attempts at the SAT. He wouldn’t have been able to get in the door at UCLA.
“Then, one day, he takes the test and bam! He scores really high. Those were the scores he submitted, and all of a sudden he’s in and has a scholarship to boot. But a month or so later, we heard that the school was questioning the scores. Spence had to retake the test, and he actually did okay—good enough to get in at UCLA at least—but nothing like his earlier scores. UCLA suspected he’d cheated, but they couldn’t prove it, so they pulled his scholarship but still let him attend if he could pay for it. Trouble for him was, he didn’t have the money to go, but then all of a sudden I heard that he did. Somebody came up with the cash for him. At least that’s what I heard. I always wondered if it was Amber’s parents who came through, or maybe some other mysterious benefactor. Spence was loved by a lot of people, so it was possible.”
My heart was hammering in my chest. The photo of Ben sitting in the front row of the classroom, about to take his SATs with Mr. Bishop, flashed over and over in my mind.
A quick glance at Cole told me he was likely thinking of it, too. “Did my uncle have any problems with any of the teachers?” he asked.
Mr. Weaver scratched his head. “Problem? No way. Like I said, everybody loved him.”
“We heard that he had an issue with Mr. Bishop,” I said boldly, if only to possibly trigger Weaver’s memory.
“Bishop?” he said. “Who was that?”
“He taught freshmen algebra,” I said.
Weaver shrugged. “Never heard of him. But I was advanced math, and back when I went to Chamberlain, high school started in tenth grade. It changed to start in the ninth grade when I was a junior, so if Bishop taught only freshmen, I’d never have had him.”
“We also heard that Spence beat up one of his friends,” Cole said carefully. It was maybe one question too many about Ben’s character. Weaver’s eyes narrowed.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t know anything about that.” It was clear to me that now Weaver was lying. “Listen, I gotta get back to watering the plants. Good luck to you guys with the paper, okay?”
On our way back to the car, I said, “So, do we both think that Bishop somehow helped Ben score really high on the SATs?”
“Has to be,” Cole said as he opened the car door. “But why would that be worth killing him over?”
I thought about it as I walked around and slid into the passenger seat. “Maybe because Spence was going to come clean?”
Cole sat down behind the wheel and nodded. “Okay, so how was your grandmother involved?”
I laid my head back against the seat. “I have no idea. But we know that he took the SATs with Bishop. The photo in the yearbook proves it.” And then another thought occurred to me. “Ohmigod! Cole! We forgot to take the yearbooks back to your grandmother’s!”
Cole glanced at the clock on the dash. “Shit! If we hurry, we can get them back before she comes home from her shift.”
“I’m not going inside with you this time,” I said. “’No more trespassing for me.”
“Glad to know you’re going straight,” he said lightly.
I rolled my eyes. “Just drive.”
Cole eased down the street and stopped several houses away. “Dammit,” he muttered. His grandmother’s car was parked in the driveway.
“I thought you said her shift ended at four.” I sat hunched down, nervously clutching the yearbooks.
“Sometimes they rotate her onto an earlier shift,” he said, tapping the steering wheel with his fingers.
“What do we do?” I asked.
Cole picked up his phone and looked at the display. “If she was gonna notice, she would’ve already. They came from my uncle’s room, and I don’t think she goes in there much. She even keeps the door locked.”
“She keeps the door locked? How’d you get in to get the yearbooks?” I asked.
Cole shrugged like it was an easy thing and pulled out his wallet from his back pocket. Taking out his school ID, he said, “All you have to do is slide this between the door frame and the latch, and—presto—you’re past security.”
I let out a small laugh. “If it’s that easy to get past, I wonder why she bothers to lock the door.”
Cole glanced sideways at me. “She doesn’t know I can get in there,” he admitted. “Like I said, Grams is a little weird about Ben’s room. It’s her shrine. Ben was her favorite by far. Sometimes she still talks about him in the present tense—like he’s still here. She just couldn’t get over losing him. She tells me all the time that he was the only one that used to take care of her. I guess he stood up for her against my granddad and stuff. Spence would make sure she didn’t get hit.”
I sucked in a breath. “Your granddad beat up your grandmother?”
Cole nodded solemnly. “He was a real asshole.”
“Why didn’t she leave him?” I asked, looking back toward the house. I felt such sympathy for Mrs. Spencer.
Cole shrugged. “Don’t know. I asked Mom that same question, and she said that her dad bullied Gram for their entire marriage. She believed she wouldn’t make it on her own if she left him. Not with two kids in tow.”
“Wow,” I said. “That had to have been rough.”
“It’s why I cut her a lot of slack when she’s not really nice to us.”
I thought about my own grandmother, who had every indulgence and luxury. She’d come from money, married money, and had never wanted for anything. And she was equally bitter and mean, only she had no excuses.
“So, what do we do about the yearbooks?” I asked, putting them back on the floor by my feet.
“She works Sundays, too. We can come back here tomorrow and sneak them in.”
“We’re hanging out again tomorrow?” I asked.
Cole’s cheeks were tinted with red. “Uh…I kinda hoped so. Unless you’ve got other stuff to do.”
“No, I’m good for tomorrow, too,” I said, feeling heat in my own face.
“Cool,” Cole said.
“Cool,” I agreed.
“Okay, then,” Cole said.
“Right. Okay, then.”
There was an awkward silence before Cole pulled away from the curb and turned the car around. “Let’s figure out who we should talk to next.”
“What about that other friend of Ben’s?” I said.
I was kind of enjoying spending the day playing amateur sleuth with Cole. It was both nerve-racking and exhilarating, plus it didn’t hurt that he was freaking gorgeous.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” Cole asked, glancing over at me while he drove.
I realized I’d been grinning. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “I guess I’m just having a good time hanging out with you.”
He grinned, too. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said. “Maybe it’ll become a habit.”
Cole slid the car over into the lot at a grocery store and parked.
“We going shopping?” I asked curiously.
B
efore answering, he pulled out his tablet from his backpack. “Naw. I wanted to look up that other friend of Ben’s, like you said. Bill something…”
I waited patiently while Cole tapped at his tablet. “Dammit,” he muttered after a minute.
“What?”
“Bill Metcalf—the guy in the photo with Ben—moved to LA. He’s a TV producer at Warner Brothers.”
“Wow,” I said. That was pretty impressive.
“Yeah,” Cole replied, still tapping at the tablet.
“What if we tried calling him?”
Cole stopped tapping to eye me skeptically. “He’s got no contact info here. If he’s up in the food chain at Warner Brothers, I doubt we’d be able to get through.”
I frowned. “So where does that leave us?”
Cole motioned to the yearbooks at my feet. “We could try looking up some of the other football players on the team. Maybe one of them was close to Ben and knew what was going on.”
But I had a better idea. “Why don’t we try working this through Amber’s friends?” I said. “I know that I used to tell Sophie everything that was going on with Tanner and…” My voice trailed off as I considered that that might not have been a good idea in hindsight.
Cole’s expression turned sympathetic. “You should really think about calling her.”
“I know. I will,” I said sadly. “But let’s focus back on Amber. Maybe she told her two best friends about what was going on with Ben.” After reaching for the yearbooks, I turned to the page I’d marked and opened it up. “Sara Radcliff and Britta Cummings.”
Cole began tapping again at his tablet. A minute later he said, “Bingo. Sara Radcliff lives eighteen miles north of here.”
“Wow,” I said flatly. “You’re really good at looking people up on the internet.”
“Mad skills, remember?” Cole said with a wink.
I laughed. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let’s go see her.”