“What do you mean by ‘friendly’?”
I stare at him. “I mean, we said hello to each other every day. I gave her a ride home once when she needed it. Occasionally we ate lunch together. But that’s about it.”
“Okay, I get it.” He nods. “And was there ever a situation where you fought with Dawn?”
“No,” I say firmly. “Never.”
“Did you ever make fun of her?”
“Make fun of her?” I repeat. “What am I—in grade school?”
“Well,” he says thoughtfully, “from what I hear, Dawn was kind of odd. When people are different, it might be natural to poke fun at them.”
“Well, I never did.”
“Never?”
“No!”
“So you never told anyone that you thought Dawn lost her virginity to a turtle?”
My jaw drops. “I… it… who told you that?”
He lifts one of his dark eyebrows. “A few people, actually.”
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath. “Okay, look… I mean, yes, I might have said that. As a joke. I didn’t say it to Dawn. I just… I was making a joke. You know, because she liked turtles so much. I didn’t do it to hurt her feelings.” I dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand. “It doesn’t make me a terrible person because I made one joke.”
“Of course not.” But there’s something in his voice that makes me think he believes otherwise. “So are there other jokes you made about Dawn?”
“No. I mean, I don’t remember any.”
“Did you invite her to office parties?”
I blink at him. “Yes, of course I did.”
“Because several people said you deliberately kept her from going to workday parties…”
“I did no such thing!” I burst out. “I always sent out an email to the entire office. I wouldn’t exclude Dawn on purpose.”
“Did she come to the parties?”
“No, but that’s not my fault, is it?” I plant my hands on my hips. “Was I supposed to give her an engraved invitation?” I glare at him. “What are you accusing me of, exactly?”
He cocks his head to the side. “Several of your coworkers felt you were bullying Dawn Schiff.”
This time my jaw feels like it’s about to become unhinged. “Bullying Dawn? Are you serious? Who said that?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. But it wasn’t just one person.”
“They’re lying.” I can feel a fleck of saliva fly out of my mouth as I spit out the words. “I never bullied Dawn. We’re not in school. What does that even mean?”
He frowns. “It means that there was a pattern of cruelty to her perpetrated by you.”
“A pattern of cruelty?” I can’t believe my ears. “Because I made a joke about her?”
“Because you excluded her from company events. You kept her out of meetings. You damaged her personal property…”
“I… what?” My head is spinning. “I never did anything like that. I was nice to her. Nicer than she deserved.”
“Nicer than she deserved? What does that mean?”
I immediately regret my choice of words. “I just mean Dawn was strange. People didn’t like her. But I tried to be nice to her, okay? Maybe I made a couple of jokes about her behind her back, but so did everyone else. I never bullied her.”
Santoro gives me a look that makes me think he doesn’t believe one word I’m saying. I wonder who told him these terrible things about me. Probably somebody who’s jealous of my sales record.
“Just because Dawn was different,” he says, “you didn’t have to be cruel to her.”
“I wasn’t!” Tears spring to my eyes, and I struggle to keep them from rising to the surface. “Ask my boss. Seth Hoffman. He’ll tell you I was nice to her.”
Santoro’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Seth Hoffman? You mean your married boss who you were sleeping with?”
Okay, now I feel like I’m about to keel over from a heart attack. How does he know about that? I get that he’s a detective, but it seems out of the scope of the investigation into the disappearance of a completely unrelated person. “Did Seth tell you that?”
“No. He only said nice things about you.”
“So who told you I was sleeping with him?”
He hesitates a split second. “Dawn wrote about it to a friend in emails we found in her computer.”
Oh God.
Yes, Dawn knew about me and Seth. It wasn’t like I confided in her. She happened to witness Seth’s wife leaving me a threatening note. But she was nice about it. She promised not to tell anyone. God knows who this “friend” is that she told about my exploits. I didn’t even realize she had any friends to blab to.
And it makes me wonder what else she wrote about me.
But what’s the difference? So what if Dawn wrote a few things about me in a couple of stupid emails? She certainly had a unique view of the world, and it doesn’t mean anything she said was true. None of this is real evidence of anything.
“This is harassment, Detective.” I grit my teeth. “I’ve got to get to work. And we don’t even know anything bad really happened to Dawn. She probably just took off on a trip without telling anyone.”
A deep crease forms between his eyebrows. “No. She didn’t.”
“Well, how do you know?”
“Because,” he says, “we found Dawn’s body early this morning.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
My legs almost give out from under me. I reach for the banister of my stairwell, but it’s not enough. I sink onto the first step. My head is spinning, and for a moment, I have to put it between my legs.
We found Dawn’s body early this morning.
No. It couldn’t be.
“She…” I gulp. “She’s dead?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t realize until this moment that I had believed Dawn was still alive. Even though I saw that blood on the floor in her house, I still truly thought she had to be okay.
But she’s not okay. She’ll never be okay again. Now she will spend the rest of eternity buried in the ground. There will be a funeral, where we will talk about how much we miss Dawn. About what a great person she was, about how she was taken from us far, far too early.
“What happened to her?” I manage.
He hesitates for a moment, as if he’s not sure he wants to tell me. “She was beaten to death with a blunt object. She died of head trauma.”
I let out an anguished cry. That sounds like an absolutely horrible way to die. Beaten to death. Poor Dawn. Even though she was strange, there was an innocence about her that made her seem almost like a child sometimes. Who would do something like that to her?
I lift my eyes again to look up at the detective. He thinks I am the one who did this to her. He thinks I somehow beat her to death with a blunt object. As if I could do such a thing.
I mean, physically I suppose I could. Dawn was such a small person. She could not have weighed more than 100 pounds dripping wet. And I am admittedly in pretty good physical condition. He just caught me going for a run. So I suppose it isn’t out of the question that I theoretically could have done it to her.