"Ewww," Cassie said. "I didn't even know you could
"I think she may have been illegitimate-Jamie, not her mother. Her father wasn't in the picture. A few kids used to pick on her about it, till she beat one of them up. I asked my mother where Jamie's dad was, after that, and she told me not to be nosy." I had asked Jamie, too. She had shrugged and said, "Who cares?"
"And Peter?"
"Peter was the leader," I said. "Always, even when we were tiny kids. He could talk to anyone, he was always talking us out of trouble-not that he was a smart arse, I don't think he was, but he was confident and he liked people. And he was kind."
There was a kid on our road, Willy Little. The name would have caused him enough trouble all by itself-I wonder what on earth his parents were thinking-but on top of that he had Coke-bottle glasses, and he had to wear thick hand-knit sweaters with bunnies across the front all year round because there was something wrong with his chest, and he started most of his sentences with "My mother says…" We had cheerfully tortured him all our lives-drawing the obvious pictures on his school copybooks, spitting on his head out of trees, saving up droppings from Jamie's rabbit and telling him they were chocolate raisins, that kind of thing-but the summer we were twelve Peter made us stop. "It's not fair," he said. "He can't help it."
Jamie and I sort of saw his point, although we did argue that Willy could perfectly well have called himself Bill and quit telling people what his mother thought about things. I felt guilty enough to offer him half a Mars bar the next time I saw him, but understandably he gave me a suspicious look and scuttled away. I wondered, absently, what Willy was doing these days. In the movies he would have been a Nobel-prize-winning genius with a supermodel wife; this being real life, he was probably making a living as a medical-research guinea pig and still wearing bunny sweaters.
"That's rare," Cassie said. "Most kids that age are vicious. I'm sure I was."
"I think Peter was an unusual kid," I said.
She stopped to pick up a bright orange cockleshell and examine it. "There's still a chance they could be alive, isn't there?" She dusted sand off the shell against her sleeve, blew on it. "Somewhere."
"I suppose there is," I said. Peter and Jamie, out there somewhere, specks of faces blurring into some vast moving throng. When I was twelve this was in some ways the worst possibility of all: that they had simply kept running that day, left me behind and never once looked back. I still have a reflexive habit of scanning for them in crowds-airports, gigs, train stations; it's faded a lot now, but when I was younger it would build to something like panic and I would end up whipping my head back and forth like a cartoon character, terrified that the one face I missed might be one of them. "I doubt it, though. There was a lot of blood."
Cassie was putting the shell in her pocket; she glanced up at me for a second. "I don't know the details."
"I'll leave you the file," I said. Annoyingly, it took an effort to say it, as if I were handing over my diary or something. "See what you think."
The tide was starting to come in. Sandymount beach slopes so gradually that at low tide the sea is almost invisible, a tiny gray edge far off on the horizon; it swoops in dizzyingly fast, from all directions at once, and sometimes people get stranded. In a few minutes it would be up to our feet. "We'd better head back," Cassie said. "Sam's coming over for dinner, remember?"
"Oh, that's right," I said, without much enthusiasm. I do like Sam-everyone likes Sam, except Cooper-but I wasn't sure I was in the mood for other people. "Why did you invite him?"
"The case?" she said sweetly. "Work? Dead person?" I made a face at her; she grinned back.
The two sticky toddlers in the stroller were whacking at each other with luridly colored toys. "Britney! Justin!" the mother screamed over their yells. "Shurrup or I'll kill the fucking pair of yous!" I got an arm around Cassie's neck and managed to pull her a safe distance away before we both burst out laughing.
I did eventually settle in to boarding school, by the way. When my parents dropped me off for the beginning of second year (me weeping, begging, clutching the car door handle as the disgusted housemaster plucked me up by the waist and prized my fingers away one by one) I recognized that, no matter what I did or how I pleaded, they were never going to let me come home. After that I stopped being homesick.
