Trev knocks, and a few minutes pass before the door opens. Matt looks like an older, worn-down version of Adam. His skin doesn’t have Adam’s healthy glow, his cheeks are sunken, and there are fading red marks on his jaw. But he’s got some weight on him and his eyes are clear.
It’s possible he’s clean.
“Trev, my man.” He and Trev do that one-armed hug thing that guys do, and he smiles at me. “Who’s this?”
“This is Sophie.”
“Hi.” I hold out my hand, and Matt takes it.
“Do I know you?” he asks.
“I’m friends with your brother. And Kyle Miller.”
“Oh yeah.” Matt’s smile widens. “Come on in.”
Matt’s place is neat and clean. Two brindle pit bulls jump and wiggle up to me, trying to lick my face as we walk through the doorway. He calls them off and opens the back door for them. I search as subtly as I can for any sign that Matt has relapsed. The house smells like smoke and there’s a china bowl with burn marks almost overflowing with cigarette butts, but when I look down, I don’t see any roaches, just yellow filters. There are no beer bottles or caps, no mysterious baggies in plain sight, no pipes—not even a bottle of Visine or NyQuil.
All of it could be hidden somewhere. When getting high is the only thing you can think about, you get pretty smart about keeping it a secret.
“How’s your mom doing?” Matt asks Trev.
“You know.” Trev shrugs. “It’s better for her, being with my aunt, I think.”
“That’s good. What about you?”
Trev shrugs again. Matt reaches out, claps Trev on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, man.” He looks at me. “Hey, you guys want something to drink? I’ve got soda and water.”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“So what’s up?” Matt asks after we’ve settled on the peeling vinyl couch. He sits down across from us in an armchair.
“Well, it’s kinda weird,” Trev says. “I’m going through Mina’s stuff; I want to have it packed up when my mom comes home. I found this list of names in her desk, and yours was on it. I was wondering what the list was about. I didn’t know you guys were friendly.”
“We weren’t,” Matt says. “Not really. She didn’t tell you about the story she was doing on Jackie?”
“No,” Trev says.
“It was for the Beacon. She said she was doing a profile for Jackie’s birthday and asked me for an interview. I said okay and talked to her. When I never saw anything come out in the paper, I just figured she hadn’t finished it before…” Matt trails off uncomfortably.
“What did she want to know?” Trev asks.
“Normal stuff. How Jackie and I had started dating, what our plans had been.”
“Did she ask you about the case?” I ask.
“Nah,” Matt says. “Mina knew I had nothing to do with it. Detective James is an asshole on a power trip.”
I keep my expression neutral, thinking about how Mina had Matt as Suspect Number One on her list.
“What else did you guys talk about?” I ask.
“Um, she asked how long we’d been together. We talked about soccer, how Jackie ran for student body president junior year. She must have bought a case of glitter glue for all those signs we put up.”
Trev grins. “I forgot about that. She freaked out when she ran out of pink.”
Caught in the memory, Matt laughs, then sobers suddenly, running a hand through his black hair. “Sometimes it’s like she was here just yesterday,” he says. “She always made me laugh, even when everything else sucked.” Absently, he digs something out of his pocket, flipping it over in his fingers, and I see it’s a six-month sobriety chip.
“Six months is awesome.” I gesture at the chip.
His fingers tighten around it. “You in the program?”
“I’ve got a little over ten months.”
“Good for you,” he says. “The meetings are a big help, but it’s still hard sometimes.”
“Yeah, it’s tough. But you know, it’s just one—”
“‘One day at a time.’” He finishes the slogan and looks up at me with a rueful smile. “That’s all we’ve got, right?”
“Something like that.” I smile back, letting it be my excuse to stare into his eyes. Had it been him that night? It’s so hard to clearly remember the killer’s voice, to remember exactly the shape of his eyes through that mask. Three little words punctuated by gunfire, and I…I can’t be sure.
But I can be sure of one thing: addicts lie.
Matt rubs his fingers over the edge of the chip, like he’s drawing strength.
“Did you happen to mention to anyone that Mina was doing a story on Jackie?” Trev asks.
“I think I told my mom,” Matt says. “She thought it was nice that the Beacon was doing a feature on Jackie. Mom loved Jackie.” His green eyes go bright, and he grips the chip tightly, swallowing hard. “It’s just tough,” he says, “thinking about her. Not knowing what happened.”
“Do you think she ran away?” I ask him.
Matt shakes his head, his eyes still moist. “Nah, Jackie loved her family—she’d never leave them, especially Amy. Jackie was excited about college. We even talked about us getting an apartment near Stanford, me going to community college. She wouldn’t have run—no reason to. Someone took her.” He breathes deep, his chip clutched tightly in his hand. “And all I can do is pray she’s out there somewhere, that she’ll get away if someone’s got her, that she’ll come back home.”
“You think she’s still alive?” The second it’s out of my mouth, I know it’s a mistake. He looks like he’s about to burst into tears; pushing this way won’t do any good.
“I hope so,” Matt says. “More than anything.”
There’s an uncomfortable stretch of silence when I don’t know what to say. He could be lying, laying it on thick to mislead us. He could be telling the truth—he could really believe that she’s alive after all these years, because he can’t stand to imagine the alternative.
“We should go,” I say. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”
“You cool, Matt?” Trev asks. “I can hang out.”
“No, no, it’s fine.” He waves us off. “Just…bad memories.”
“Thanks for talking to us.”
Matt nods and walks us to the door. “See you around.” He smiles, but his eyes aren’t in it. The door shuts behind us, and I hear the sound of the bolt sliding into place as we head to the stairs.
“Well, what do you think?” Trev asks when we get to the truck.
“He’s tall enough to be the killer,” I say, stepping up into the cab. I fasten my seat belt and turn the key in the ignition. “I know he has guns. Adam goes hunting with him all the time.”
“Just about every guy has a gun around here,” Trev points out as I back out into the street. “I have a gun.”
“You have your dad’s old pistol. Have you ever even shot it?”
“Sure. It’d be stupid to have a gun I didn’t know how to use. I taught Mina, too.”
“When was this?” I don’t remember Mina ever mentioning it.
“When you were in Portland. She asked me to. She…” Trev frowns. “She asked me right around Christmas.”
“When she was getting the threats.”
“So why didn’t she take it with her that night?” Trev asks, and there’s this angry note in his voice that makes me flinch. “She knew where it was, how to use it. She could’ve protected herself.”
“She didn’t bring the gun because she didn’t suspect whoever she was meeting,” I say.
We slow to a halt at the stoplight at the end of the street, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see a muscle in Trev’s jaw twitching. It’s eating at him, that Mina knew she was in enough danger to want to learn how to shoot but had kept her secrets too long.