Page 6 of What Have You Done?

At that, Cameron looks up from the table at the detective. ‘What?’

‘The house was empty. Diana’s mother was at work. No one else lives there.’

Edward watches his son flush, his eyes directed again to the table. Cameron mumbles, ‘Diana didn’t like to do it in the house. She thought it was disrespectful to her mother.’

Stone nods, as if he understands perfectly, but Edward is annoyed at the detective. He’s being rude and insensitive. His son has just lost someone he cares deeply about. Now he’s being embarrassed unnecessarily in front of his parents.

‘What was she wearing?’ Stone asks next.

‘Um, blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and her beige corduroy jacket.’

‘What about her underwear?’

Cameron flushes again. ‘She had a bra and panties on, but I don’t know what colour. It was dark. Socks and sneakers. Why are you asking me this?’

Stone ignores him. ‘What time did you bring her home?’

‘I’m not sure exactly, but around eleven. And then I went home.’

‘Did you accompany her inside, or drop her at the door?’

‘I stopped the truck in front of her house and watched her go in. She waved and closed the door behind her, then I left.’

‘Did she unlock the door when she went in?’

Cameron pauses. ‘I didn’t notice.’ He adds, ‘But I don’t think she locked it behind her when we left.’

‘Okay,’ Stone says. ‘Did Diana ever mention that she was worried about someone? Had anyone been bothering her?’

‘No. Everybody loved her,’ Cameron says.

CHAPTER FIVE

SHELBY WATCHES HER son break down after he says, ‘Everybody loved her.’ She feels her own lower lip wobble, and she reaches for him, seated close beside her, drawing him into a hug, stroking his soft brown hair. She feels his body convulsing in sobs against her. It’s true, everybody loved Diana. She was almost too good to be true. They’d been so delighted when their son started dating her. They’d fallen in love with her, too, a little bit. This is all very hard, and she hopes her shattered son can survive it.

She can hardly bear to think of Diana’s mother, Brenda. She’ll be all alone now, and Diana was everything to her. How bleak her life will be, just like that. Cameron is also an only child; Shelby can’t bear to think of what her life would be like if she were to lose him. How fragile life is, she thinks, holding her sobbing son; we should never take it for granted. She still thinks of her son as just a boy – he still seems so young to her. She doesn’t like to think of him having sex with Diana in their truck.

Who could have done such an awful thing? She assumes, because she’s not naïve and because of the pointed questions the detective just asked, that Diana was sexually assaulted as well as murdered. It all makes her stomach heave.

How could it have happened? Cameron brought her safely home. This is a small town, where everybody knows everybody else – no one gets murdered here. That question about the door – do the police think someone might have already been waiting inside the house for her last night? She supposes it’s possible, if Diana hadn’t locked the door. People often don’t around here. It makes her sick to think of it, to think that her son might have unknowingly delivered Diana to her killer. How else might it have happened? She wouldn’t have gone out again at that hour. Maybe someone came to the door later? Or broke in afterward? She was all alone in that house last night.

Shelby fervently hopes they catch the bastard. The death penalty would be too good for him. How desperately awful for her son to lose his first serious girlfriend this way.

And yet Cameron has told the detectives one small lie.

She tries not to worry about it. But after the interview – which seemed to go on and on – as she drives home alone in her own car, Cameron in the truck with his father, Shelby does worry. She knows something that her husband doesn’t. Should she tell him? Confront her son? Because she got up last night, when Edward was snoring heavily beside her. She had to pee. On her way down the hall to the bathroom she peeked into Cameron’s room, because his door was slightly open. Usually, it was closed. His bed was empty. He wasn’t there. She finished in the bathroom and went back to her room, checking the time on the digital clock on her bedside table. It was almost one a.m. She would have to talk to Cameron in the morning, she thought. He was supposed to be home by 11:30 on weeknights. She and Edward were usually asleep before then, so they didn’t know when he came in. They didn’t police him. They just assumed he was coming in on time.

As she lay there, worried, her earplugs left out, she heard him creep in. She noted the time: 1:11 a.m. She thought about going out and confronting him on the stairs, but she decided it could wait until morning. Reassured to have him safe at home, she fell back asleep.

But now, driving home in her car, she knows he lied to the police. He did not come home shortly after eleven – it was much later than that. She just doesn’t know why he lied. Did he leave Diana safely at home at eleven and go do something else and lie because of his curfew? Or did he leave Diana at home much later than he said?

Brenda Brewer is at the police station, in one of the two interview rooms. She’s sitting with a female officer who brings her coffee and tissues and speaks in a soft voice. She doesn’t know where the police chief has gone. They wanted to get her out of the house while they looked it over as a possible crime scene. She’s been told that they think Diana’s body was taken to the field, that she was killed – strangled with some kind of ligature – somewhere else. The house is one possibility. It stuns her: the idea that Diana might have been killed inside their house, while she was at work.

A man in a dark suit quietly enters the room, accompanied by a woman, also in plain clothes, and the uniformed officer exits. He introduces himself as Detective Stone and the woman as Detective Godfrey, from Vermont State Police, Major Crimes Unit. They, too, speak softly. Brenda’s ex-husband is on his way, but he lives more than a two-hour drive away now. He is the only one who will feel the loss anywhere near as much as she does, she thinks, but he has another family. He has other children. She has no one.

‘I know this is unbelievably hard,’ Detective Stone says gently, ‘but we want to get who did this. Do you think you can answer some questions?’

She nods. She will do her best. But she just wants someone to drug her into sleep and never to wake up.

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