Page 17 of The Better Sister

“There’s clean sheets on the bed,” I said. He was halfway up the stairs when I checked with him one more time. “And you’re sure that’s the only thing the detective asked you about? Nicky?”

“Yes.”

Had they asked him about me? That is what I wanted to know. “Nothing else?”

“No!” he said, clearly aggravated by my cross-examination.

He was trying to be calm, I could tell, but I heard him start to cry almost immediately once he reached the bed.

If only he had done that back in the Dunhams’ kitchen, I thought. Because I had seen the way Guidry looked at him. Whatever test she had in mind for how a kid should act when he hears his father’s been murdered, Ethan had failed it, and now the police were going to put our family under a microscope.

10

Detective Jennifer Guidry plucked another gelatinous piece of candy from the tear in the upholstery of the passenger seat of her department-issued Impala. If her count was right, it was the seventeenth one so far—not counting the one Chloe Taylor had found. She wondered how long Bowen had been stuffing them in there. If she had to guess, it probably started around the time she called him out for that weird thing he kept doing, rolling up little strips of Scotch tape and dropping them into a coffee cup. If only he were as obsessive and compulsive about police work.

She closed the car door and made her way back to the Dunham house across the street, which she had left only forty minutes earlier. Andrea Dunham was still in her robe when she answered the front door.

Andrea kept clutching at the collar to cover her chest, even though she was wearing some kind of tank top beneath it. Guidry thought about telling her to go upstairs and do whatever she needed to do to be less fidgety, but she was working on fumes and needed to get home to catch a few hours of shuteye.

Andrea gave a small laugh when Guidry asked whether she and Chloe Taylor were close.

“Sorry,” Andrea said, “but you saw their house, right? And you see the one you’re sitting in now. No, we don’t exactly hang out. The boys have been friends for years, though. They met in sports camp when they were ten years old. But we only know Chloe and Adam to say hi to them, coordinate play dates when the kids were little, that kind of thing. I can’t even believe it about Adam. She must be beside herself.”

Guidry had assumed the two women weren’t friends. Chloe hadn’t even hugged Andrea when she left the house, just a thank-you for the coffee and for letting Ethan spend the night.

“Do you know who they’re close to out here?”

Andrea was looking up at the kitchen ceiling, searching for answers, but then a worried expression crossed her face. “Chloe’s not a suspect or anything, is she?”

“This is standard for an investigation,” Guidry assured her. “We focus on the victim and work our way outward. Try to find sources of conflict, potential motives.”

Andrea nodded. “They’re summer people, you know? They hang around with the friends they know from the city. I can’t really help you.”

“Perhaps your son would have some names?”

“Maybe. He spends time over there.”

“That would be great,” Guidry said, as if Andrea had volunteered to wake her son. Andrea was about to leave the kitchen when Guidry stopped her. “It’s lucky the boys were here last night instead of at Ethan’s. Were they here all night, by the way?”

Andrea waved a hand as if the suggestion were silly. “Don’t judge me, but I have no idea. Kevin’s room is in the basement, and there’s a walkout door from there, so he’s always coming and going. As long as he makes curfew, I consider myself lucky.”

“And what time was last night’s curfew?”

“One on weekends.”

“And how do you know he made it?”

She shrugged. “He’s a good kid. You’ll see.”

She’d spent the requisite amount of small talk with Kevin—did he know Ethan’s family, could he name their friends—before turning to the time line for the previous night. “Before I go, can I just confirm that Ethan was with you until this morning?”

“Yeah. We were out all night, just like driving and stuff. Got back here around 12:30, played some Fortnite. He was gone when I woke up.”

“Where’d you drive?”

“Cruising is all. Went as far west as Watermill. East as far as Montauk.”

Guidry remembered cruising the main drag in Boston. At sixteen years old, she wouldn’t have been able to describe the details any better.

---