Page 29 of The Guilty One
I cut a glance over my shoulder, checking out the back window. “What are you talking about?”
“No. Not right now,” Dakota says. “At home. At the store. On my way home from work. It’s always the same black car. A Lexus, I think. I just keep seeing it. They’re following me. Watching me. What if they did the same thing to Bradley before—” He cuts his words off, nodding with wide eyes. “What if they’re coming after me next?”
“Well, you should’ve mentioned all of this before you agreed to drive me to Dublin, don’t you think?” I check over my shoulder again.
“I want answers as much as you do,” he says. “Besides, I haven’t seen it yet today. They usually follow me home after work.”
“Why didn’t you mention it before now?”
“Would you have believed me?” he snarls with disbelief. He’s not wrong. I don’t know if I believe him even now. “There’s more,” he adds after a few minutes.
Unbelievable. “Of course there is. What else could there be?”
“Last night, when I got home from work, there was a burned book lying on my welcome mat with a note that said, ‘Shhh.’”
“A burned book?” My brows draw down. “Seriously?”
He nods, twisting his lips. “Look, believe me, I know it sounds crazy, but it was there. How else do you explain that?”
“What book was it?”
He cuts a glance my way, and something in my gut flips. “That’s the worst part. It was The Catcher in the Rye. Which would mean absolutely nothing to me, except…” He doesn’t go on, doesn’t need to. The second he said the title, my entire body went rigid. We both know what that book means, and only someone who knows about that night would understand its significance. “Even if I could write everything else off—being followed, Bradley’s death—there’s absolutely no way that book being on my doorstep is anything but a sign that someone knows, especially with a note that all but tells me to keep my mouth shut. Or…” He scratches his head. “Maybe they meant shhh as more of, like, a tease. Because of the secret. Because we kept it quiet. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Whether it’s someone who wants us to stay quiet or someone who wants what we did back then to come out, I’m not sure. But I think they’re targeting us all. And I think I’m next.”
I turn to look out the window, trying to process everything he’s telling me. “I don’t know, man. It seems far-fetched.”
“More far-fetched than our friend being murdered?”
“We still don’t know that he was murdered. Just that he had a head injury. Maybe he fell.”
“Sure,” he says, sounding defeated. “Maybe.”
“Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that I hope you’re not right. It’s like I said earlier, I can’t make it make sense in my head. If they knew what we did back then—enough to know the detail about The Catcher in the Rye—why would they have waited this long to come after us?”
“Unless they just found out. Like if Bradley’s guilty conscience led to him telling a friend or a therapist, if not his fiancée.”
“Even if he did, how would they have known to track us down? Why would they be following you instead of just reporting it all to the police? And why not me? I’m the one who killed—” I cut myself off, refusing to replay that night ever again. “I’m the one they should target. The guilty one.”
He doesn’t agree, but I doubt he disagrees either. “What other possible solution is there, though? What else could that book mean? Give me one viable, plausible theory, and I will latch onto it like a life preserver.”
I rack my brain for one, a single idea that makes sense as to why that specific book, or any book for that matter would be burned and placed on his doorstep. But there are no explanations that make sense, so I say nothing.
We make the rest of the drive out to Dublin mostly in silence, both seemingly lost in our own thoughts. It’s strange. I once knew everything there was to know about this person sitting beside me. I knew his fears, his goals, the girls he liked, the music he was into, the movies he hated. Now he’s practically a stranger. I don’t even know where he works. We went through something so terrible and formative, and it forever changed us. We can’t go back to being the boys who were friends. The scar from that night is permanent and disfiguring, forever a stain on who we were. Try as we might, neither of us can escape it.
We stop at a grocery store a few miles from Bradley’s home address and grab a bouquet of flowers. Celine prefers tulips, though she’d rather have chocolates than flowers any day of the week, but I have no idea if this woman likes flowers or has a preference for which ones we pick up.
I’m sure her house is filled with flowers from the funeral at the moment. Still, it feels wrong to show up empty-handed.
With the flowers in hand, we arrive at the address Bradley had listed in the school’s alumni directory. It’s a quaint blue house with black shutters. One story with a large porch spanning the length of the house.
It fits somehow. I can picture him here. Safe. Building a life. If Bradley were a house, he would be this one. Ordinary but comfortable. Welcoming.
That makes losing him so much harder. I have no right to grieve for him. I had been out of his life for more than a decade. I don’t get to be sad or miss him when I made no effort to fix it when he was alive. I know that, and still…I do. I can’t help thinking of who he was. How different I wish things had been.
We approach the house in silence and knock on the door, and I have to wonder if Dakota is thinking the same things. He gets to grieve if he wants. He tried, maybe even more than I saw. He sent emails. He texted. He tried.
He’s the only one of us who did.
Within a few moments, a woman answers. She has long, black hair and green eyes, bloodshot from crying or lack of sleep—or both.