“Sorry. It’s still hard for me to see her face. Brings it all back.” Ricky flipped the frame over and opened the back. She unfolded the photograph and showed it to Andrea. “She was pretty, right?”
Andrea nodded, trying to pretend like she had never seen the picture before. She randomly pointed to Nardo. “Who is this?”
“My asshole ex,” Ricky muttered, but she didn’t sound bitter. She pointed to Clay in the photo. “That’s Clayton Morrow. You’re a cop, so you probably know more about him than I do. That’s me, of course, back before my tits dropped and my hair turned gray. And that’s my brother Eric. We called him Blake.”
Andrea saw an opening. “Called?”
Ricky carefully refolded the picture. “He died two weeks after Emily did.”
Andrea watched Ricky put the frame back together. There were more photographs on the table, a kind of shrine to Ricky’s youth. Clay and Nardo smoking in the front seat of a convertible. Blake and Nardo dressed up as Al Capone-era gangsters. Blake and Ricky in matching tuxes. If you didn’t know Emily Vaughn was part of the group, you would never miss her.
Ricky said, “About a week after Emily was attacked, Clay told us he had enough credits to graduate early. He was going to head out to New Mexico to find a job before college started.”
Andrea looked down at the oversized books stacked under the two wide drawers. Yearbooks. Dozier Elementary. Milton Junior High. Longbill Beach Senior High.
“Blake offered to help Clay with the drive. Two thousand miles was a lot different back then. No cell phones if you broke down. Long-distance calls were astronomical. We didn’t even own our phone. We rented it from C&P.”
Ricky carefully placed the framed group photo back beside the others. She touched her finger to her brother’s chest.
“I can’t blame him for wanting to get away,” Ricky said. “Things were so tense between all of us. Even me and Blake. He was my twin, you know?”
Andrea shook her head, though she knew. “Did Emily ever tell you who the father of her baby was?”
“No.” Ricky’s voice had filled with regret. “Emily wasn’t talking to me at all by the end. I had no idea.”
Andrea considered what Wexler had told her in the truck. Emily had been raped at a party. Andrea had to assume Ricky had been in attendance. And Eric. And Nardo. And Clay. And maybe Jack Stilton and Dean Wexler. There was a psychiatric syndrome called folie à plusieurs—a shared psychosis where a group of people together commit bad acts that they wouldn’t otherwise commit on their own. Andrea had no problem buying that her father had taken this otherwise disparate group of people and given them permission to let the worst of themselves come out. Then he had left town and Dean Wexler had stepped in to fill the role.
She tried another avenue. “Did you have a theory about who could’ve killed Emily?”
Ricky shrugged, but said, “From the beginning, the cops were laser-focused on Clay. That’s why he wanted to get out of town so badly. And Blake—well, he wanted to leave for his own reasons. Things weren’t good with my grandfather. There was a blow-up about money. It was a really bad time for both of us. We weren’t really talking.”
Andrea cleared her throat. She knew that she had to be careful. Ricky didn’t keep a shrine to her friend circle because she thought they were terrible people. “Why were the police focusing on Clay?”
“Stilton despised him,” Ricky said. “Both Stiltons, actually. Clay was different. He was brilliant. Sarcastic. Good-looking. He was too much for their little brains to understand, and they hated him for it.”
Andrea didn’t remind her that Clayton Morrow was also a psychopath and a convicted criminal.
“I shouldn’t say this, but we were all a little in love with Clay. Emily adored him. Nardo wanted to be him. Blake thought he hung the moon. We were such a special little clique.” Ricky looked down at the photograph of Clay and her brother. “They were hiking in the Sandia Mountains just outside of Albuquerque. They went for a swim near Tijeras. Blake ducked under the falls, but he didn’t come back up. He was never a strong swimmer. They found his body two days later.”
At least that explained why Eric Blakely’s death certificate wasn’t registered in Sussex County. He had died in another state.
Ricky turned away from the photo. Her arms were crossed. “Clay must’ve been the one who killed her, right? I mean, that’s what makes sense.”
Andrea thought it had made more sense before she’d witnessed for herself the cruelty that Nardo Fontaine and Dean Wexler were capable of.
“I was so horrible to Emily when she told me she was pregnant.” Ricky’s gaze went to the couch under the window. “We were both right here in this room, and I said so many nasty things to her. I don’t know why I was so angry. I guess I knew that it was over, you know? Our little clique. Nothing would be the same ever again.”
Andrea had let Ricky get comfortable enough. She tried to gently take back control. “The way you talk about her is so different from the picture Dean Wexler painted.”
“Dean?” Ricky looked surprised. “Why would he be talking about Emily?”
Andrea shrugged. “He told me she had some problems with drugs and alcohol.”
“That’s not true. Emily didn’t even smoke.” Ricky was suddenly agitated. “If you talked to Dean, then you talked to Nardo. What did he have to say about Emily?”
“He didn’t mention her,” Andrea said. “Marshal Bible and I were at the farm because of the body in the field. But you knew that already, right? You’re the one who told Bible about the girl.”
Ricky tucked her chin into her chest. “It’s what I said before, Cheese is a worthless drunk. Sometimes I wonder if Dean has something on him. All that craziness going on at the farm for years—decades. And Cheese sticks his thumb up his ass and looks the other way.”
“What kind of craziness?”
“The volunteers?” Ricky’s agitation was ramping up. “You want to know the history on that, you should look up the court case from twenty years ago. They’re exploiting the hell out of those girls.”
“I’ve read the court case.” Andrea kept her voice calm because Ricky’s was not. “An anonymous caller tipped off the feds. She made the call from a public payphone on Beach Road.”
Guilt flashed across Ricky’s face. She took her phone out of her back pocket. She checked her timer, which showed another four minutes. “My dryer’s about to go off.”
Andrea wasn’t going to let her go. “The girl in the field probably killed herself.”
“I heard.”
“She was gaunt, almost starved to death.” Andrea watched Ricky check the timer again. “All of the women on the farm are starving themselves. They look like they’re living in a concentration camp.”
“I pray for them.” Ricky used the tail of her shirt to wipe the screen. “I pray for their parents. Dean has a battalion of lawyers on standby. They’re not going to get anything out of him. He always wins.”
Andrea could tell she was losing Ricky. “Do you know any girls who aren’t there anymore? Maybe they’d be willing to talk.”