“You okay, kid? You look kinda pale.”
I gulped down a sudden wave of nausea and nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re not gonna throw up, are you?”
I shook my head. “Nuh-uhn.”
“You sure?” Raley squinted down at me, clearly not convinced.
I did another dry gulp, dragging in a big breath of air with it.
“I think so.”
“Good.” Raley nodded. “You think you could answer a few questions for me, then?”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
“How did you come upon Sydney?”
I did a repeat of the deep-breath thing, then told Raley that I’d been “strolling” along the bike trail on my way home from school when I’d seen Sydney in the pool, freaked, ran, and called 911.
“Wait-” Raley said, putting up a hand, “you were on your way home from school?”
I nodded.
“But you live that way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction from the trail.
“It was a nice day. I thought I’d take a little detour.”
Raley stared down at me, leaning in so close I could see right up his nose. I tried not to stare, lest that nausea come back.
“A detour?”
“Yep. I’m… a nature lover.”
Yeah, I know. That sounded lame even to my own ears. But I wasn’t sure just yet how much I wanted to share with Raley. He had a habit of interpreting situations his own way, and I figured that me planning to meet a dead girl and spying on her from a tree was not a situation he would interpret in a positive way.
“How did you see Sydney?” Raley asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the back fence is six feet high. How did you manage to see in the yard?”
“Through a crack in the fence?”
“Is that a question?”
I cleared my throat. “No.”
Raley gave me a stare down again, but, thankfully, let it go.
“How well did you know Sydney?” he asked instead.
I shrugged. “Not that well. We go to the same school.”
“Was she there today?”
I shook my head. “No. She’s suspended. She cheated on a test.”
Raley raised an eyebrow. “Suspended. I guess she was pretty upset about that?”
“I guess. Like I said, we weren’t really that close.” I paused. “Why?”
Raley avoided my eyes. “No reason. Just asking.”
Huh.
“How had Sydney seemed before she was suspended?”
I narrowed my eyes. “‘Seemed?’”
He shrugged. “Was she generally a happy person, or did she keep to herself?”
“She was in the running for homecoming queen until two days ago.”
He leaned in. “She lost?”
“She was kicked off the court when she got caught cheating.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Suspended and kicked off the homecoming court. So, I’d guess she was upset.”
I narrowed my eyes at him again, trying to follow his train of thought. “Why does it matter if Sydney was upset? This was an accident.”
Raley looked at me, his face a blank, unreadable cop thing.
“It was an accident, right?” I repeated.
He sighed. “It’s too soon to tell. At this point we need to explore all possibilities.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning most teenage deaths that we investigate end up being self-inflicted.”
I blinked at him. “Suicide?”
Raley nodded.
“Oh no. You’ve got this all wrong.” I shook my head violently from side to side. “No, that doesn’t make any sense. Sydney wasn’t suicidal.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know her well,” Raley countered.
“Not that well, but trust me, Sydney did not commit suicide.”
“You just said she was suspended for cheating. Maybe the guilt overwhelmed her?”
I let out a laugh, then quickly stifled it as Raley shot me a look.
“Look, Sydney wasn’t the guilty type,” I explained. “For example, Erin Carter was the front-runner for homecoming queen. Until Sydney started a rumor that Erin had lice. Suddenly no one would come within five feet of Erin, and the school nurse even came in to check her head right in the middle of PE. Trust me, guilt was not in Sydney’s repertoire.”
Raley did the deep-sigh thing again, and I looked away to avoid seeing his nose hairs vibrate with the effort. “Look, it’s too early to tell much of anything at this point. All I can say is that it doesn’t look like an accident.”
“What do you mean? She drowned, right? That can happen, can’t it?”
“We have to wait for the ME’s report, but it doesn’t look like she drowned. We found something in the pool with her.”
“Something?”
“Her laptop.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to process the information.
“It was plugged into an outdoor wall outlet. Our best guess is that Sydney jumped into the pool with her laptop and electrocuted herself.”
I blinked at him, letting this sink in. He had a point. That hardly seemed like an accident. Even if Sydney had been online poolside, what were the chances she’d decide to take a dip with her computer? No one was that stupid, not even Sydney Sanders.
On the other hand, I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of Sydney ending her life. Sure, she’d been tweeting some pretty unhappy stuff lately, but there was a huge gulf between saying your life sucked and actually ending it. And if you were going to end it, wouldn’t you want to wait until after you had unburdened yourself to the reporter you were supposed to meet?
“That just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would she kill herself before she-”
I stopped myself just in time.
Raley leaned in, his bushy eyebrows moving north. “Before she what?”
I shut my mouth with a click.
“Before… the homecoming dance,” I finished lamely.
That seemed to satisfy Raley as he just shrugged. “It’s hard to say what goes through a suicidal person’s mind.”
I bit my lip. I was pretty sure this person wasn’t suicidal. Which left only one alternative.
Sydney Sanders’s death was a homicide.
“It was a homicide,” I told Sam two hours later as I sat cross-legged on my bed.
“No fluffin’ way!”
I paused. “Wait-‘fluffin’’?”
Sam shrugged. “I was getting tired of ‘effing.’ It was too obvious, you know? I’m experimenting with some alternatives.”
“Well, fluffin’ is… creative.” I shook my head. “But, more important, yes way, Sydney was totally murdered.”
As soon as I’d arrived home in a police cruiser, Mom had jumped into total SMother mode, wigging out that I was with the police (again), hugging me to within an inch of my life when she heard the cop say one of my classmates had been killed (which, honestly, was a little comforting), then totally freaking that I’d been the one to find a dead body. (Again. Which, I had to admit, was totally freaky.) She’d immediately gone into the kitchen and made her version of comfort food, while I’d immediately called Sam and told her she had to come over ASAP. Both Sam and the rice cakes with flaxseed butter had arrived at the same time, and I’d used the comfort fuel to spill the whole story.
“So,” Sam said, grabbing a rice cake. She held it up to her nose, sniffed, then thought better of it, and placed it back on the plate. “Raley told you Sydney was murdered?”
“Well, not exactly,” I hedged. “He thinks she committed suicide.”
While I’d expected Sam to have the same shocked reaction I’d had at the idea, she just slowly nodded. “I can see that.”
I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, we’re talking about a girl who incorporated cheats into her nail-polish design. She was scheming. Underhanded. Remorseless. Not the type to give it all up.”
“But she was depressed,” Sam pointed out. “She tweeted four times this afternoon alone talking about how miserable she was.”
“You follow Sydney on Twitter?” I asked.