Jesse, still sitting on the boulder, his hands around the propped up knee, looked at the Angels. "I don't suppose any of you," he said, "would know something about this."
Mark looked disgusted. "How would any of us know about some geek's sister getting wasted at a party?" he demanded.
"Perhaps because one - or all - of you happened to be at the party at the time?" I suggested sweetly.
Father Dominic looked startled. "Is this true?" He blinked down at the Angels. "Do any of you know anything about this?"
"Of course not," Josh said - too quickly, I thought. Felicia's "As if" was not very convincing, either.
It was Carrie who gave it away, though.
"Even if we did," she demanded with unfeigned indignation, "what would it matter? Just because some stupid wannabe drank herself into a coma at one of our parties, how does that make us responsible?"
I stared at her. Felicia, I remembered, was the National Merit Scholar. Carrie Whitman had only been homecoming queen. Twice.
"How about, just for starters," I said, "making alcohol available to an eighth grader?"
"How were we supposed to know how old she was?" Felicia asked, not very nicely. "I mean, she had enough makeup slathered on, I could have sworn she was forty."
"Yeah," Carrie said. "And that particular party was by invitation only. I certainly never issued an invitation to any eighth grader."
"If you want to hold someone responsible," Felicia said, "how about the idiot who brought her in the first place?"
"Yeah," Carrie said angrily.
"I don't think Susannah is the one holding you responsible for what happened to Michael's sister." Jesse's voice, after the shrillness of the girls, sounded like distant thunder. It shut the others up quite effectively. "Michael, I believe, is the one who killed you for it."
Father Dominic made a soft noise as if Jesse's words had sunk, like a fist, into his stomach.
"Oh, no," he said. "No, surely you can't think - "
"It makes more sense," Jesse said, "than this one's argument" - he nodded briefly at Josh - "that Michael did it out of jealousy because he has no … what is it? Oh, yes. Dates on Saturday night."
Josh looked uncomfortable. "Well," he said, tugging on his evening jacket's lapels. "I didn't know the skank they fished out of Carrie's pool was Meducci's sister."
"This," Father Dominic said, "is too much. Simply too much. I am … I am appalled by all of this."
I glanced at him, surprised by what I heard in his voice. It was - if I wasn't mistaken - pain. Father Dominic was actually hurt by what he'd just heard.
"A young girl is in a coma," he said, his blue-eyed gaze very bright as it bored into Josh, "and you call her names?"
Josh had the grace to look ashamed of himself. "Well," he said, "it's just a figure of speech."
"And you two." Father Dominic pointed at Felicia and Carrie. "You break the law by serving alcohol to minors, and dare to suggest that it is the girl's own fault she was harmed by it?"
Carrie and Felicia exchanged glances.
"But," Felicia said, "nobody else got hurt, and they were all drinking, too."
"Yeah," Carrie said. "Everybody was doing it."
"That doesn't matter." Father Dominic's voice was shaking with emotion now. "If everyone else jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would that make it right?"
Whoa, I thought. Father D obviously needed a little refresher course in student discipline if he thought that old line still had any punch.
And then my eyes widened as I noticed that Father Dominic was now pointing at me. Me? What had I done?
I soon found out.
"And you," Father Dominic said. "You still insist that what happened to these young people was not an accident, but deliberate murder!"
My jaw sagged. "Father D," I managed to say when I'd levered it back into place. "Excuse me, but it's pretty obvious - "
"It isn't." Father Dominic dropped his arm. "It isn't obvious to me. So the boy had motive? That doesn't make him a killer."
I glanced at Jesse for help, but it was apparent from his startled expression that he was as baffled by Father Dominic's outburst as I was.
"But the guardrail," I tried. "The loosened bolts - "
"Yes, yes," Father Dominic said, quite testily for him. "But you're missing the most important point, Susannah. Supposing Michael did lie in wait for them. Perhaps he did intend, when they turned that corner, to ram them. How was he able to tell, in the dark, that he had the right car? Tell me that, Susannah. Anyone could have come around that corner. How could Michael have known he had the right car? How?"
He had me there. And he knew it. I stood there, the wind from the sea whipping hair into my face, and looked at Jesse. He looked back at me, and gave a little shrug. He was at as much of a loss as I was. Father Dom was right. It didn't make any sense.
At least until Josh said, "The Macarena."
We all looked at him.
"I beg your pardon?" Father Dominic said. Even in anger, he was unerringly polite.
"Of course!" Felicia scrambled to her feet, tripping over her evening gown's long skirt. "Of course!"
Jesse and I exchanged yet another confused look. "The what?" I asked Josh.
"The Macarena," Josh said. He was smiling. Smiling, he didn't look anything like the guy who'd tried to drown me earlier that day. Smiling, he looked like what he was - a smart, athletic eighteen-year-old in the prime of his life.
Except that his life was over.
"I was driving my brother's car," he explained, still grinning. "He's away at college. He said I could use it while he was gone. It's bigger than my car. The only thing is, he had this stupid thing put in so that when you honk the horn it plays the Macarena."
"It's so embarrassing," Carrie informed us.
"And the night we were killed," Josh went on, "I laid on the horn as we were turning that corner - the one Michael was waiting behind."
"You're supposed to honk when you go around those hairpin curves," Felicia said, excitedly.
"And it played the Macarena." Josh's smile vanished as if wiped away by the wind. "And that's when he hit us."
"No other car horn on the peninsula," Felicia said, her expression no longer excited, "plays the Macarena. Not anymore. The Macarena was only hot for about the first two weeks after it came out. Then it became totally lame. Now they only play it at weddings and stuff."
"That's how he knew." Josh's voice was no longer filled with indignation. Now he merely sounded sad. His gaze was locked on the sea - a sea that was too dark to be distinguishable from the cloudy night sky. "That's how he knew it was us."
Frantically, I thought back to what Michael had told me, a few hours earlier, in his mother's minivan. They came barreling around that corner. That's what he'd said. Didn't honk. Nothing.
Only now Josh was saying they had honked. That not only had they honked, but that they had honked in a particular way, a way that distinguished Josh's car horn from all others....
"Oh," Father Dominic said, sounding as if he weren't feeling well. "Dear."
I totally agreed with him. Except …
"It still doesn't prove anything," I said.
"Are you kidding?" Josh looked at me as if I were the crazy one - like he wasn't wearing a tuxedo on the beach. "Of course it does."
"No, she's right." Jesse pushed himself off the boulder and came to stand beside Josh. "He has been very clever, Michael has. There is no way to prove - in a court of law, anyway - that he has committed a crime here."