You Are Not Alone(18)
I’d noticed one other thing: The chain was broken.
Maybe that’s why it had fallen off Amanda’s neck in the subway. But other possibilities had occurred to me on the walk to the police station: Someone could have ripped it off her neck. Or she could have yanked it away herself.
“Shay?” I look up and see Detective Williams striding through the security door. She’s got unlined dark skin and a close-cropped Afro. She’s wearing a crisp blue pantsuit—similar to the gray one she had on when I first met her—and the same impassive expression she wore when she questioned me on the subway platform after Amanda’s suicide.
“Come with me, please,” she says in her soft voice.
My brow furrows. What else can she need from me?
I follow her down a hallway lined with a few small, spare rooms—probably places where suspects are questioned—and into an open area filled with desks and chairs. It smells like french fries, and I spot a McDonald’s bag on the desk of an officer who’s simultaneously eating dinner and filling out paperwork.
“Have a seat.” She gestures to a chair. Her words could make it an invitation, but her tone straddles the edge of an order.
She walks around to the other side of the desk and sits down. She pulls her chair in closer, her movements slow and deliberate.
When she reaches for a notebook and pen in her top drawer, then fixes me with her inscrutable dark brown eyes, my mouth turns dry.
I can’t shake the sense that I’m in trouble.
The detective can’t suspect I had something to do with Amanda’s death. Can she?
She turns to the first blank page of the notebook. “Tell me again how you came to realize the necklace belonged to Amanda Evinger.”
“I saw this picture at her memorial ser—” The realization hits me: Detective Williams must be wondering why I went to a memorial for a woman I never met.
I haven’t done anything illegal, I think frantically. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But I’m holding a broken necklace that was on Amanda, and I was beside her when she leaped to her death. When I reached out to try to grab her, could someone have thought I was pushing her?
My breathing is so ragged I worry it’ll seem like evidence of my guilt. Detective Williams is waiting. Not saying a word.
“I know it sounds strange,” I blurt. “I just felt this—this connection to her because I was there right before she…” I can barely choke out the words. “That’s all it was. I went to pay my respects.”
The detective writes something down in her notebook. I’m desperate to see it, but I can’t read her tiny, squiggly letters—especially upside down. It seems to take her forever.
She lifts her head again. I can’t tell if she believes a word I’ve said. “How did you know about the memorial service?”
Inwardly I cringe. I’m digging myself into a deeper hole. My upper lip and brow are sweaty. My heart is pounding so hard I feel as if Detective Williams must be able to see it pulsing through my shirt—as if it’s another piece of evidence in the case she might be compiling. I doubt innocent people panic like this.
“Do I need a lawyer?” My voice is shaking.
She frowns. “Why would you think that?”
I push my glasses up higher on my nose and swallow hard. “Look, I just—I found her address after you gave me her name. I was wondering about her, and she lived near me. So I took a flower and left it on her doorstep. That’s where I saw the notice about the memorial service.”
I wonder if the detective already knows about the yellow zinnia I left, and the way I lied at the service about how I knew Amanda.
Detective Williams looks at me for a long, steady moment. “Anything else you want to tell me? Are you still hanging around her apartment?”
I shake my head. “No, just that one time.” I’m near tears. “That’s the whole story, I swear.”
She closes her notebook and stretches out her hand. For a moment I think she’s reaching for mine, but she just wants the envelope. I give it to her, noticing it’s now crumpled and damp from my sweaty palms.
“That’s all I need for now.” She stands up.
I do the same, my legs weak with relief.
As we retrace our steps down the hallway, Detective Williams asks me one final question: “You still seem really shaken up by all this. Is there someone you can talk to?”
No, there isn’t anyone, I think an hour later, as I sit across from an empty chair at a table for two at my favorite Greek restaurant a few blocks from my apartment.
After I’d left the police station, I’d stopped at a deli to pick up a six-pack of Blue Moon—Sean’s favorite beer, and one I like, too. I thought I’d remembered him saying something about Jody being away, and I’d hoped to catch him alone.
My fingertips had skipped past Cassandra Moore’s card as I’d reached for my Visa tucked in the slot behind it.
“Oh, I forgot an orange,” I’d said to the cashier, running back to scoop one up. We always drank Blue Moon with a slice of the fruit down the neck of the bottle for extra flavor, ever since a bartender served it to us that way.
I was curious about the origin of that garnish, so I looked it up a while back: The cofounder of the company came up with the idea after he observed some bartenders serving beer with lemon wedges. Although Americans don’t drink as much beer as they used to, in recent years consumption of Blue Moon has nearly doubled. By changing up the fruit, the cofounder added a distinctive association to Blue Moon.