The chubby police officer was younger. He took a seat on the chair next to Luce, then—noticing that no one else had moved to sit down—stood back up and re-crossed his arms.
The bald man stepped forward and offered Luce his hand. “I’m Mr. Schultz, Sword & Cross’s attorney.” Luce stiffly shook his hand. “These officers are just going to ask you a couple of questions. Nothing to be used in a court, only an effort to corroborate details from the accident—”
“And I insisted on being here during the questioning, Lucinda,” Miss Sophia added, coming forward to stroke Luce’s hair. “How are you, dear?” she whispered. “In a state of amnesiac shock?”
“I’m okay—”
Luce broke off as she caught sight of two more figures in the doorway. She almost burst into tears when she saw her mother’s dark, curly head and her father’s big tortoiseshell glasses.
“Mom,” she whispered, too low for anyone else to hear. “Dad.”
They rushed toward the bed, throwing their arms around her and squeezing her hands. She wanted to hug them so badly, but she felt too weak to do much more than stay still and take in the familiar comfort of their touch. Their eyes looked just as scared as she felt.
“Honey, what happened?” her mom asked.
She couldn’t say a word.
“I told them you were innocent,” Miss Sophia said, turning to remind the officers. “Eerie similarities be damned.”
Of course they had Trevor’s accident on record, and of course the cops would find it … remarkable in light of Todd’s death. Luce had enough practice with police officers to know that she was only going to leave them frustrated and annoyed.
The thin cop had long sideburns that were going gray. Her open file in his hand seemed to require his full attention, because not once did he look up at her.
“Ms. Price,” he said with a slow southern drawl. “Why were you and Mr. Hammond alone in the library at such a late hour when all the other students were at a party?”
Luce glanced at her parents. Her mom was chewing off her lipstick. Her father’s face was as white as the bed-sheet.
“I wasn’t with Todd,” she said, not understanding the line of questioning. “I was with Penn, my friend. And Miss Sophia was there. Todd was reading on his own and when the fire started, I lost Penn, and Todd was the only one I could find.”
“The only one you could find … to do what with?”
“Hold on a minute.” Mr. Schultz stepped forward to interrupt the cop. “This was an accident, may I remind you. You’re not interrogating a suspect.”
“No, I want to answer,” Luce said. There were so many people in this tiny room that she didn’t know where to look. She eyed the cop. “What do you mean?”
“Are you an angry person, Ms. Price?” He gripped the folder. “Would you call yourself a loner?”
“That’s enough,” her father interrupted.
“Yes, Lucinda is a serious student,” Miss Sophia added. “She had no ill will toward Todd Hammond. What happened was an accident, no more.”
The officer glanced toward the open doorway, as if wishing Miss Sophia would relocate herself outside it. “Yes, ma’am. Well, with these reform school cases, giving the benefit of the doubt is not always the most responsible—”
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” Luce said, balling up her sheet in her fist. “I don’t have anything to hide.”
She took them through it as best she could, speaking slowly and clearly so she would raise no new questions for her parents, so the cops could take notes. She didn’t let herself slide into emotion, which seemed like exactly what everyone was expecting. And—leaving out the appearance of the shadows—the story made a lot of sense.
They’d run for the back door. They’d found the exit at the end of a long corridor. The stairs dropped quickly, steeply off the ledge, and she and Todd had both been running with such force, they couldn’t stop themselves from tumbling down the stairs. She lost track of him, hit her head hard enough to wake up here twelve hours later. That was all she remembered.
She left them very little to argue over. There was only her true memory of the night for her to grapple with—on her own.
When it was over, Mr. Schultz gave the police officers an are-you-satisfied tilt of his head, and Miss Sophia beamed at Luce, as if together they’d succeeded at something impossible. Luce’s mother let out a long sigh.
“We’ll mull this over at the station,” the thin officer said, closing Luce’s file with such resignation, he seemed to want to be thanked for his services.
Then the four of them left the room and she was alone with her parents.
She gave them her very best take-me-home look. Her mom’s lip trembled, but her dad only swallowed.
“Randy’s going to take you back to Sword & Cross this afternoon,” he said. “Don’t look so shocked, honey. The doctor said you’re fine.”
“More than fine,” her mom added, but she sounded uncertain.
Her dad patted her arm. “We’ll see you on Saturday. Just a few more days.”
Saturday. She closed her eyes. Parents’ Day. She’d been looking forward to it from the moment she’d arrived at Sword & Cross, but now everything was tainted by Todd’s death. Her parents seemed almost eager to leave her. They had a way of not really wanting to deal with the realities of having a reform school daughter. They were so normal. She couldn’t really blame them.
“Get some rest now, Luce,” her dad said, bending down to kiss her forehead. “You’ve had a long, hard night.”
“But—”
She was exhausted. She briefly closed her eyes and when she opened them, her parents were already waving from the doorway.
She plucked a plump white flower from the vase and brought it slowly to her face, admiring the deeply lobed leaves and fragile petals, the still-moist drops of nectar inside its center. She breathed in the flower’s soft, spicy scent.
She tried to imagine the way they would have looked in Daniel’s hands. She tried to imagine where he’d gotten them, and what had been on his mind.
It was such a strange choice of flower. Wild peonies didn’t grow in Georgia wetlands. They wouldn’t even take to the soil in her father’s garden in Thunderbolt. What was more, these didn’t look like any peonies Luce had ever seen before. The blooms were as large as cupped palms, and the smell reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
I’m sorry, Daniel had said. Only Luce couldn’t figure out for what.
TWELVE
INTO DUST
In the hazy dusk over the cemetery, a vulture circled. Two days had passed since Todd’s death, and Luce hadn’t been able to eat or sleep. She was standing in a sleeveless black dress in the basin of the graveyard, where the whole of Sword & Cross had gathered to pay its respects to Todd. As if one unenthusiastic hourlong ceremony were enough. Especially since the campus’s only chapel had been turned into the natatorium, and the ceremony had to be held in the grim swampland of the cemetery.
Since the accident, the school had been on lockdown, and the faculty had been the definition of tight-lipped. Luce had spent the past two days avoiding the stares of the other students, who all eyed her with varying degrees of suspicion. The ones she didn’t know very well seemed to look at her with a faint hint of fear. Others, like Roland and Molly, ogled her in a different, much more shameless manner, as if there were something darkly fascinating about her survival. She endured the probing eyes as best she could during class, and was glad at night when Penn dropped by to bring her a steaming mug of ginger tea, or Arriane slipped a dirty Mad Libs under her door.