Page 61 of Evil All Along

There were so many things I wanted to say to this boy who was trying to defend the woman who had abandoned him. They all got caught in my throat, though, so I only nodded.

“I went to talk to JT about it. But he said she’d never paid, and I said she had, and he said if she didn’t have a receipt, then she hadn’t paid, and—and I lost my temper.” He picked at the vinyl banding on the table with his thumb. “I was already mad.”

He didn’t have to say,From seeing Millie and Louis, for me to know what he meant.

“My guess is Channelle was stealing rent money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to prove because she and JT are both dead, and I don’t know if JT was in on it.”

“He wasn’t,” Keme said. “He was fine until she came along.”

That was interesting, and I wanted to follow up on it, but there was something else to address first. “I don’t want to make you mad, but Foster might have stolen your mom’s money. I found a stash in the camper. Of course, he might have gotten it from Channelle—did you know they picked him up for the murders?”

Keme snorted. “He didn’t kill anybody.”

And he sounded so intensely self-satisfied that a sneaking suspicion raised its head.

“Keme,” I said.

He looked up from his ice cream.

“Did you beat Foster up?”

Keme’s got a great poker face, but you could practically see the testosterone radiating off him.

“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to know.” A hint of bitterness slipped out in spite of my best efforts as I added, “It would have been nice to get one solid lead on this murder, though.”

Neither of us seemed to know what to say to that.

I was the one who broke the silence, of course. Keme could have sat there all day and not said a single word. Literally.

“Do you want to talk about Millie?”

He glared at me over a peanut butter cup.

“I’m proud of you for telling her how you feel,” I said.

He made an unspeakably rude gesture that you definitely aren’t supposed to do in a Cold Stone.

“I know it’s not going to make you feel any better right now,” I said, “but I think you should be proud of yourself too. It takes a lot of courage to do what you did.”

That made him screw up his face into an even angrier look. He dug around with the spoon for a while before he finally burst out, “What does that mean?”

“What?”

“Why’d you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

He kicked me under the table.

“Oh my God, Keme!”

All I got, though, was a scowl.

“I was just thinking, though,” I said, “that the downside to acting like an adult, and to being brave, is that once you do it, well, you kind of are supposed to keep doing it.”

He ate some more ice cream before grudgingly asking, “What doesthatmean?”

“It means Millie wants to talk to you. And I know it’s going to be hard, but I think you might want to hear her out.”

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