Page 77 of Little Stolen Memories

We walked to the living room, and I sat down.

“You want some water or a soda or something?” he asked.

“No, I'm good.”

“All right. I’ll be right back.”

The thought of Xander leaving the room without telling me why raised suspicion. He was at the top of my list of suspects. Still, getting him alone was a good thing. I hoped it would give me the opportunity to get him to say something he hadn’t before, an admission or maybe even a confession.

While I waited for him to return, I kept one hand in my lap and the other beneath my shirt, palming my gun in the event I needed to use it.

Xander returned to the living room with a soda in hand. He plopped down on a chair, cracked the can open, and began gulping it down until it was gone. He set the empty can on the side table and looked at me. “Well, let’s get to it. What are these followup questions of yours?”

“I've been thinking a lot about how you were treated when you were in high school,” I said.

“What about it?”

“I’m sure you wanted what every teenager wanted at that age … to be accepted. It’s too bad Jackson and his friends messed with you the way they did.”

“They didn’t all mess with me. Owen was nice. So was Cora … most of the time.”

“What do you mean by most of the time?” I asked.

“Not that it matters, but I had a crush on her for a while.”

“Did she know?”

“I think so. I said as much to her once.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me she wasn’t looking for a relationship, but then I started to notice the way she looked at Owen. It wasn’t the way a person looked at a friend. It was the way a person looked at someone they liked.”

“So she lied to you,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say she lied. I’d say she didn’t feel the same about me as I felt about her, and she let me down easy.”

Owen and Cora seemed different than the rest of the group. They hadn’t teased or taunted Xander like the others had. But if he had a crush on Cora, it made me wonder if jealousy had played a part in his feelings toward her.

“Do you remember some of the football players wearing gold chains back then?” I asked.

Xander tapped a finger on the arm of the chair, thinking. “Don’t think so. Why?”

“The football coach gave them to the star players, which would have included Owen, Aidan, and Jackson.”

“What about them?”

“I was looking at a piece of evidence today that had been collected at the crime scene. I don’t think the detectives knew what it was when they found it, but I believe it was a couple of links from one of the gold chains the boys were given.”

“Okayyy. Why tell me about it?”

I looked him in the eye. “I’m telling you because I think at least one of the boys was wearing the chain they’d been given on the day they died. Strange thing is, in the crime scene photos, the boys weren’t wearing them.”

“So …?”

I’d brought up the gold chains to gauge his reaction, which seemed apathetic. Maybe he was telling me the truth. Maybe Owen had been wearing the necklace on the day he died, and when he was assaulted, it had fallen off or broken. Maybe my theory was just that—a theory.

“I’d like to know more about your home life back then,” I said. “Would you say it was normal?”

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