Last Seen Leaving (19 page)

“California?”

“We both wanted to move to the West Coast after graduation, and so sometimes we'd tell each other stories about what it'd be like, hanging out in LA together and stuff.”

“You went from talking about your future together to breaking up, but there was no fight?”

“Well…” I was hoping a bunch of brilliant words would come flying out of my mouth at the end of that self-conscious ellipsis, but instead I just looked at Garcia in silence with a growing sense of desolation.

My dad, God bless him, stepped in just then to save me. “Detective, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to get to the point. What does my son's breakup with January have to do with her clothes being found in a field behind her house?”

Garcia and Becker looked at him, and then at me, and then at each other, and seemed to come to some unspoken agreement. The ball appeared to have been passed to Becker, because the slender detective eyed me very seriously and then asked the question that changed everything. “Flynn … were you aware that your girlfriend was pregnant?”

 

SIXTEEN

FOR A MOMENT,
the room lost focus and my ears filled with feedback, the couch swaying like a catamaran as I tried to make sense of what I'd just been told. My parents were staring at me, white-faced, and I was staring at Becker. Finally, I laughed, a little wildly. “No she wasn't!”

He continued to stare at me, his face serious, his mouth clamped into a taut little line. Uncompromising, he asked again, “Did you know?”

“Know what? Of
course
I didn't know! There was nothing
to
know!” I turned to my parents for support, but they were looking at me like they'd never seen me before. The sweat at my temples started to roll. Did they not
believe
me? “She was a virgin!”

“We're very careful,” Garcia explained smugly, as though he rather enjoyed my escalating agitation. “We have to be. As soon as we realized it was blood we were dealing with, we had it analyzed and compared against a DNA sample taken from January's bedroom, crossing our Ts and making sure the facts were the facts. The specimens matched, Flynn; there's no question about it. Your girlfriend lost a ton of blood, and somebody tried to wipe it all up with her sweatshirt.” His eyes bored into me like an oil drill. “And I mean it was a
lot
of blood. Enough that we just don't see how she could have survived without medical attention—which we know she didn't get, at least not at any licensed emergency room in this part of the state. That's why we're here. We're from Homicide. This is officially no longer a missing persons case, Flynn.”

Homicide—official now.
Everybody knows she's not just missing anymore
. But I couldn't even process that part, couldn't find any spare room in the mosh pit of crazy thoughts squirming and crashing about in my head.
Pregnant?
They were wrong!

“Confirming that it was January's blood and that she's most likely dead wasn't all we learned when we had the samples tested, though.” Becker took over seamlessly, their interplay a well-choreographed routine. “The analysis also showed the presence of hCG—human chorionic gonadotropin—a hormone excreted during pregnancy. It surprised us, too, but it's one hundred percent accurate: Your girlfriend was pregnant.”

“
She was a virgin!
” I insisted, instantly aware of how unhinged I sounded. I knew from TV that sometimes cops lied to suspects to get a confession—
your partner's in the next room right now, spilling his guts out—
but I could see no reason they would lie about this. No reason to fabricate the detection of “human chorionic gonadotropin” in January's blood. I could practically feel all the color drain out of my face, and the room slid and throbbed around me. When I spoke again, my voice sounded tinny and small. “I don't … there has to be … I don't understand.”

“Is that what the two of you fought about?” Becker asked gently. My mother wouldn't look at me anymore, her hand over her mouth, but my father continued to stare. “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“She wasn't,” I maintained irrationally. Then, “We never even had sex!”

“Flynn,” my dad began in a strangled voice, “we're not going to be upset—”

“There's nothing to be upset about! We didn't have sex!”

“Maybe you tried to talk her out of having it, but you couldn't,” Garcia suggested next, almost cajoling. “We understand January was pretty headstrong. Maybe she told you she was having the baby, and she expected you to step up to the plate.”

“That's a lot to have hanging over your head,” Becker chimed in sympathetically. “Being a father at fifteen? No one would blame you for being angry—even a little desperate. You'd have to tell your parents, her parents … and her stepfather isn't the kind of guy—”

“
No
,” I gasped, my eyes huge. “No! That's all wrong!”

“It could be someone else's,” my mother finally managed to suggest, but her tone was so dubious it both enraged me and broke my heart at the same time. Coupled with that, the austere, skeptical looks on the detectives' faces felt like a kick directly to my solar plexus.

“None of this makes any fucking sense!” I exclaimed manically. “I'm telling you the truth—
we didn't have sex
. She was still a virgin, she said so!”

Garcia moved closer, interest piqued. “When did she say that, Flynn?”

“Friday!” My entire body felt raw and hot, and I was answering the questions without thinking about where they were going, the need to clear my name suddenly urgent. “The night we broke up. She said she wanted me to be her … you know, her
first
.”

“And afterward, you realized she had been lying to you?”

“What? No! There was no afterward! I'm telling you that we didn't do it!” I was emphatic, everything coming out with exclamation points. “She wanted to, and I wouldn't, and she got mad, and then … and then she said it was over.”

“She broke up with you because you wouldn't sleep with her.” Garcia seemed disappointed in me for thinking he might be stupid enough to buy such an absurd story.

“
She
wanted to have sex and
you
didn't?” Becker asked, sounding even less credulous than his partner, if that were possible.

“Yes! We—we'd agreed to wait, and then she didn't want to wait, and I told her I still wanted to wait.…” My voice petered out pathetically. I felt like I had floodlights pouring into my eyes, and my chest was constricted, the air too thick and hot to breathe.

They stared at me. Just stared. I thought I was going to lose my mind, my body burning all over, my parents rigid on either side of me, and these two cops sizing me up for an orange jumpsuit while I tried not to speak the words that were crawling up my throat like stomach acid. Becker shifted. “Son, we know you claim you have an alibi for the night she disappeared, but you need to be honest with us—”

“I'm gay!”

The words burst out of me like they were spring-loaded, and I'm not certain, but I think my soul left my body for a moment. It was like I was looking down at myself, damp and stricken at the center of that ridiculous tableau, everyone blinking at me with saucered eyes. The room was dead silent, and it was far too late to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and my entire life had just changed—completely, totally, irrevocably, and so fast it wasn't fair,
I still needed more time
—and then more words poured out like a river of barf, because I couldn't stop them anymore. “She wanted to have sex, and I said no, and I guess she'd figured out the reason why I never wanted to …
do
anything with her, because she tried to make me admit that I … that I don't like girls, and I got mad, and we started fighting, and she said … she told me I needed to ‘admit the truth,' because she was done. And then she stormed out, and it was the last time I ever saw her. It was the last time.”

I couldn't look at my parents, and I couldn't look at the detectives, so I stared at the coffee table. A hiccup jerked at my esophagus and I tasted bile, but I bit down against the impulse to vomit. I was struggling to breathe, waiting for my mom to start crying or something, but the room was so quiet it was like I'd been struck deaf. Finally, after an interminable length of time, Becker cleared his throat. “So, it's safe to say she was pretty upset that night.”

I actually laughed. “Yeah. Yes. It's
safe to say
that she was upset.”

“I don't understand,” my dad said, his voice steady but unnatural, and I still couldn't look at him. “If she was pregnant, it obviously wasn't Flynn's—and you yourself just pointed out he has an alibi—so what's the point of all these questions? What difference does it make?”

“Kind of convenient, you suddenly realizing you don't like girls anymore, right after finding out a piece of news like this,” Becker remarked, almost casually, and I gave him a poisonous glare in response. Did anything about the situation actually seem “convenient” to him? Tossing a look at his notes, he continued, “And about that alibi … you say you were doing homework the night January disappeared. Can anyone else confirm that?”

“He watched TV before dinner, right in this room, and then sat at that table and worked on his history paper until he went to bed,” my mother reported, her tone as cold and stiff as a corpse. The question didn't make any sense to me; did they really think I could have hopped on my bike, gone off to
kill January
, and then dumped her clothes in a field behind her own house before cycling back home? It was insane. The whole thing was completely insane.

“And you're sure that we're not going to find out about a secret girlfriend—or boyfriend—when we ask around about this?” Garcia pressed. “Someone who might have gotten jealous?”

My heart tripped and fell over.
When we ask around about this
. Naturally, they couldn't just take my word for it, and soon—the next day? The day after?—they would start talking to my friends. Micah, Ti, Mason, the guys on the track team … one by one, they'd all get asked if I might have been cheating on January. If I might really be gay. My stomach dropped like an anchor as I pictured it, all their faces flashing through my mind in high speed as they reacted to the question. I couldn't speak, my tongue felt like it was coasted in paste, so I just shook my head in response.

“We understand that the field where her clothes were found had some particular significance to her,” Becker noted, directing the comment to me.

“She watched the stars there.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

“Do you think that's where she was … Do you think … it happened in the same place?” my father asked, still struggling with the unnamable act, as if saying it out loud might upset someone. As if the night could possibly become more upsetting.

The detectives ignored him, scribbling down some notes, and then Becker inquired, “Flynn, if you weren't the father, then do you have any idea who was? Any guesses as to who else your girlfriend might have been seeing on the side?”

“No,” I replied rigidly. “I really don't know.”

It was the truth, but it was also somewhat misleading. I didn't
know
, but I was starting to have a suspicion, and it was one that made the taste of bile flood the back of my throat once again. It was sick and twisted and wrong, but I couldn't stop thinking about Anson sneering at me in January's bedroom, a lacy G-string in his hands.
Your girlfriend was a dirty fucking whore who tried to Lolita my dad.

It was bullshit. It had to be. January would never ever have had sex with Jonathan Walker—
ever
. Like I'd said to myself the day Anson made the preposterous allegation, it was nothing but a perverse fantasy, invented by the most fantastic pervert of all time. January loathed her pompous martinet of a stepfather and, until that night in the barn, had agreed with me that sex was a Big Deal and shouldn't be rushed. Beyond all of that, there was simply no way I could picture her trying to seduce her mom's husband. It was as insane as everything else that was happening.

And yet. I couldn't rid myself of the image of ice cream with maple syrup and potato chips, of January complaining about sexual objectification while gesticulating provocatively with a banana. The details were too
real
to be wholly false.

And what if, somewhere at the bottom of it all, there was a grain of truth in Anson's claims?
It's finally the right time, and I want … I want you to be the first
. What if January had known she was pregnant that night in the barn, and the reason she'd been so desperate to sleep with me was because she was hoping to convince me that the baby was
mine
? If, somehow, she really had been carrying her perfect, politically ambitious, image-obsessed stepdad's baby, the man couldn't possibly afford to let anyone find out. Jonathan Walker would have had an excellent motive for wanting her to disappear—and that desolate field behind the mansion would have been a really convenient place to dump the evidence.

In a flash, I heard Eddie's voice in my head:
That little bitch was your candidacy's Achilles' heel, a scandal waiting to happen.
Had he known something? Had they both? Could it be true? And did I dare mention any of it to the police?

I was overwhelmed, my thoughts cacophonous and out of control; I wasn't even sure that I was completely
compos mentis
, and I didn't want to make an enemy of Jonathan Walker by slinging accusations when I barely had my head on straight. Not when the cops were already making veiled observations to the effect that my coming out was possibly just a lie to divert suspicion. Besides, at the end of the day, all I really had to show for myself was the dubious word of pathological shit-starter Anson Walker—who would no doubt deny everything if he were asked. No; I had to keep my own counsel for now, and trust that the cops were already considering Mr. Walker a possible suspect.