"That will take too long. It has been almost ten years."
"Then we better start now. Before someone else disappears—someone like you."
His words reminded me of how close I'd come to drowning, to vanishing in the dark of the night, with no one around to know what had happened to me.
If James or Carter had pushed me into the water, how could I say for sure that one or both of them hadn't hurt Kelsey, hadn't hurt Melanie? I'd already discovered two secrets. How many more were there?
The idea of digging deep into the past terrified me. I was afraid of the pain, of what I couldn't remember, but I couldn't keep running away. Kelsey's life was at stake, and maybe so was mine.
"Well?" Drake asked.
Chapter Sixteen
"All right," I said. "I'm in. I'll help you."
Relief flooded his gaze. "Good." Drake got up and walked over to the closet. He grabbed a big box, brought it over, and set it on the coffee table. "This is everything I know about Melanie. I've read it all a million times, but I need your eye for detail. I need you to look at everything and tell me what I'm missing."
He lifted the lid, and I saw about ten file folders stuffed with paper. "Are those the police files?"
He pulled out one folder. "This is the police report." He set it on the table and grabbed another file. "This is from a private investigator I hired. The rest are my notes on the case."
"You have all this, and you need me?" I asked in bewilderment.
"Yes, because there are more questions here than answers. And you are on the inside. You know at least a certain subset of players better than I do."
"I'm not an investigator. Ben will be a better ally for you."
"Well, Ben is otherwise engaged. And I told you that he backed off even before Kelsey disappeared."
"What about Ben's father? Have you tried to sit down and talk to him since you got back this week?"
"No. The sheriff made his thoughts clear on many other occasions. He'd given me the file, and he was done discussing the case. I think he regrets now that he gave me any information at all, because small inconsistencies and comments are what led me to two lies, the one told by Ben, and the other by James."
"Do you think the sheriff was just incompetent, or that he didn't want to solve the case?"
"Could be either or a combination of both. The rich summer tourists donated to the sheriff's benevolent fund and contributed to some of his other charities. Sheriff Ryan was in tight with your parents and their circle of friends."
"I can't believe he would let donations get in the way of justice, especially for a local girl."
"Something got in the way."
"Maybe he was just incompetent. Ben always said his dad didn't like to work that much. That's why he was happy to stay on the island and be a small-town sheriff."
"Like I said, the sheriff could have been bad at his job, but he also could have been protecting someone, maybe even his son. If the sheriff thought Ben might be involved in Melanie's disappearance, it would explain why the investigation sputtered out so quickly. He wanted the case to be over. He wanted people to forget. And for the most part, that's exactly what happened."
I frowned, thinking back to my conversation with Ben's dad at the station. "Sheriff Ryan said something to me earlier today. He was annoyed that Ben was keeping him waiting in the hall. He told me he'd always looked out for his son, and that Ben had never appreciated everything he had done to protect him. After what you just said, it makes me wonder. But am I reading something into an innocent comment? A lot of parents don't think their kids are grateful for what they've done for them."
"Did he say anything else?"
"He said I must have had a guardian angel the night I blacked out. That someone must have been trying to protect me. The way he looked at me was weird, almost like he was implying that he'd been the one to do that, but that's impossible. He never protected me from anything. And after Melanie died, I had to sit in his office and answer questions for a long time. Did you read my statement?"
"I did. It was one paragraph long."
"What? I talked to Sheriff Ryan for at least an hour."
"Well, when he wrote it up, it boiled down to a paragraph."
"I guess that's because I didn't remember anything. There was nothing to put in the report except I didn't know where I was the night before or what happened to Melanie."
"That sums it up. Maybe Sheriff Ryan was protecting you by not bringing you back for questioning."
"He would have had no reason to protect me. I was a…nobody."
"You're a Kent. You're hardly a nobody," he said dryly.
"I may have the last name, but I never fit in my family."
"Did you try? Melanie told me you liked to be in the shadows. You were uncomfortable with the spotlight."
"She said that to me, too, that I needed to stop being invisible, stop being the one taking pictures and watching life through my lens. She wanted me to be living, not spectating. I wanted the same." I bit down on my lip as memories swamped me. "Melanie and I had plans to go to Italy after she got out of high school. She wanted to eat pizza in Rome, and I wanted to photograph everything: the monuments, the food, the people, and the landscape. She got a book on basic Italian words, and we'd practice them when we were at the beach. We had a couple of phrases we were sure we would need."
"Like what?"
"Where's the restroom? How much does this cost? And the most important one—where do we meet the cute boys?" I smiled at the memory. "Of course, we weren't really going to say that." I shook my head again. "We probably wouldn't have even gone. Your parents wouldn't have permitted it."
"Probably not."
"But it was a nice dream. Life can be so cruel."
"Did you go to Italy without her?"
"No. I haven’t gone anywhere. We talked about so many places, but I thought it would be too lonely to go on my own. It would feel wrong. If Melanie couldn't go, I shouldn't go."
"Is that your penance for not remembering the night?"
I hadn't really looked at it that way, but he was right. "Yes, I think it is." I met his gaze. "What's your penance, Drake?"
"I can't move on with my life until I know what happened to her, and I get justice."
"What if neither of those things happen?"
"I don't know, but I'm not ready to stop trying." He tipped his head toward the files. "Somewhere in there is a clue. I just have to find it. I've looked at everything so many times, I'm probably missing something."
"I will help you, but it's after midnight, and I'm exhausted. I'll come back tomorrow. I'm going to join one of the search parties in the morning, but I can stop by after that." I got to my feet. "I'm going to dress and then I'll need you to give me a ride home."
"No problem," he said as he rose. "I just hope you don't change your mind between now and tomorrow."