“SHARON TOLD YOU ANYWAY?” LIEUTENANT Fisher asked.
“Yes,” Alice said. “But not until it was too late to stop Jane.”
Fisher glanced at his watch: two-twelve. They had been at it an hour. Once he had gotten her going, Alice had talked freely, requiring little prodding. Her memory for details was remarkable. She could recount whole portions of conversations. Listening, Fisher had begun to build up a picture of the personalities involved. Even the elusive Jane Retton had begun to take shape in his mind. Yet Alice herself remained a mystery, and she was only an arm’s length away. She could describe everyone’s feelings throughout the confusion except her own. On the other hand, she didn’t appear indifferent to the events. There was a pain in her voice that she couldn’t have faked.
His drowsiness had vanished. He had a feeling he would have trouble sleeping for the next week. He had taken a lot of notes.
“Before you tell me about Jane’s plan, I’d like to backtrack for a moment. I’m still confused about how the diary got into Patty’s hands?”
A note of wariness entered Alice’s voice. “What do you mean?”
“From all that you’ve said, Jane has struck me as a cautious young woman. Now, I understand fully how the rabbit getting attacked could momentarily make her forget about the diary. But to accidentally take the notebook to school—that’s something else.”
Alice shifted uncomfortably. “There was something I didn’t mention.”
“You read the diary while it was sitting on Jane’s desk?”
Her eyes widened. “How did you know?”
Fisher smiled. “Probably most of us pride ourselves on not being nosy, but you only have to look at the sales figures for the Enquirer and the Star to realize we are a society of gossips. Don’t feel bad, I peeped at my girlfriend’s diary once. Wish I hadn’t, though.”
“Why?”
“There was nothing about me in it,” he lied. His girlfriend didn’t even keep a diary, and if she had, he wouldn’t have dared invade her privacy. But Alice smiled, relaxing a bit, and he continued, “Tell me about it?”
“I didn’t mean to look at it. When I entered the room, it was just sitting there, right out in the open. I glanced at it—I read very quickly—and I think I was halfway down the page before I realized what I was doing.” She hesitated. “I felt awful about it afterward.”
“Did Sharon catch you in the act?”
“No.”
“Do you think Sharon read it also?”
“Yes. But Sharon didn’t touch it.”
“What do you mean, touch it? Did you pick it up or what?”
“Well, like I said, I felt guilty. And I felt embarrassed for Jane. I closed the diary and put it aside.” She winced. “I put it in a terrible place. I didn’t mean to.”
“Where did you put it?”
“On top of her schoolbooks.”
“Oh, I see. And that’s how Jane ended up accidentally taking it to school?”
She nodded, tugging nervously at her long black hair. “It was all my fault. I wish now I had told Jane the truth. Maybe none of this would have happened.”
The explanation was more logical than the original one; nevertheless, Fisher felt unsatisfied. Not for the first time, he wished they could locate Sharon. “Don’t blame yourself. No one could have predicted what would happen. But let’s go on. I’m curious about Kirk. I’m not clear why he helped ruin Jane’s reputation. She was, after all, his girl.”
Alice stared at him strangely. “Guys are always pulling stunts like that.”
He had touched a nerve. “Did Kirk ever pull a stunt like that on you?”
“No. I wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“Apparently you didn’t stand for something about Kirk. You did break up with him.”
“1 told you already, we didn’t get along.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“He wasn’t my type. He never thought about the future, getting ahead, stuff like that. He was lazy.”
“Why did you go out with him in the first place?”
“He asked me.”
Fisher considered a moment. “Alice, was Kirk the first boy to ever ask you out?”
“No. I mean, he was the first one who asked me after I was allowed to date. But I used to get asked out before then. I just never went.”
“When did your dad start letting you date?”
“On my seventeenth birthday.”
“Isn’t that sort of late?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there anything else you didn’t like about Kirk?”
She was slow in answering. “Not really.”
“Weren’t you even a little jealous that your old boyfriend was going out with your best friend?”
“No.” She sounded as if she meant it.
“All right. Tell me Jane’s plan.”
“It was crazy, brilliant—just like Jane. Maybe she stole part of it from a book she read—she was always reading books—but I don’t think so. I think she made it all up in her head.
“As I said, she wanted to make it look as if Kirk and Patty had accidentally killed her. If that happened, she figured they’d suffer from a lot of guilt and blame. Everyone would come down hard on them just as they were coming down on her.
“On our way to the islands, she planned to get Kirk and Patty together with her at the bow of the boat. Once there, she was going to start an argument with them, try to get both of them yelling at her. With Patty, she knew this would be easy, but Kirk was another matter. She realized she was really going to have to push him. You see, she needed one of them, preferably Kirk, to push her. I mean physically push her.”
“Why?” Fisher asked.
“So she could fall off the boat and disappear.”
“Come again?”
“Friday night, the night before the trip, Jane fastened scuba equipment to the rudder of the boat we were using. When she got pushed over the side, she was going to grab the equipment, start breathing the bottled air, and sink down to the bottom. Then she planned on changing into her full gear and swimming back to shore so that everyone would think she had drowned.”
Fisher sat for a full minute digesting what Alice had just said. “Could this plan have worked?” he asked finally.
Alice nodded. “I think it did work. I think it worked too well.”
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t seen Jane since she went over the side.”
“Of course you haven’t.” The revelation had thrown him off balance. That a girl still in high school would have the nerve to do such a thing seemed unbelievable.
Yet she did go into the water, and she never came out, he reminded himself, remembering his captain’s summary of the official report of events aboard the boat.
Fisher shook his head. “They’re too many flaws in this. Where did Jane get the scuba equipment?”
“She must have rented it. When she came on board, she had the equipment I had given her. I know that for a fact. She might have rented the other stuff out of town.”
Fisher made a note. “We’ll check on that. How was she able to sneak into the harbor at night, and how did she attach the equipment to the bottom of the boat? They have security at that marina.”
“Sharon told me she swam into the marina from the sea, part of the way underwater, dragging the equipment. Attaching it would have been easy. She could have used an ordinary screw clamp. You can buy them in sailing stores. I’ve used them before to dangle a camera from the bottom of our boat.”
“But to circle into the harbor from outside with all that equipment—I would imagine that would require tremendous endurance.”
“I could have done it, and Jane could outswim me any day.”
“Wouldn’t the scuba gear have upset the speed and direction of the boat once you were under way? Didn’t your dad notice anything?”
Alice considered. “My father did think the boat was handling poorly, but he had never sailed her before, and we were just getting going. Our speed was slow.”
“After Jane fell off the deck, how did she have time to get into all her equipment?”
“She didn’t plan on getting into it right away. All she needed to do was open the valve on her tank, get hold of the mouthpiece, and sink to the bottom. Down there she could have taken all the time she wanted to put on her full gear.”
“How deep is the water we’re talking about?”
“About forty feet.”
“Is that all? If this really happened, how come people on the boat weren’t able to see her?”
“The sun wasn’t all the way up yet. When the light’s poor, you can’t see someone ten feet under. Jane told Sharon she had the whole thing timed to the second, and I believe her. I couldn’t see her from the boat.”
“What about bubbles? Wouldn’t they have given her away?”
“Good-size swells were coming at us from the north. They were glassy, but we had foam forming around the boat. That could easily have hidden a few bubbles. Plus when she didn’t come up after a few seconds, we went looking for her. There were dozens of us splashing around. There was no way we would have spotted the air from her tank.”
Fisher didn’t scuba dive; he couldn’t be absolutely sure the facts she was feeding him were accurate. But she sure seemed to know what she was talking about.
He began to feel a touch of admiration for Jane. But reality cut it off at the start. People were dead.
And I still don’t know how or why.
“But Jane couldn’t play dead indefinitely,” he said.
“What was the purpose in all this?”
“Her parents were gone for the weekend. She could have pretended to be dead at least that long. That would have been long enough to bring Kirk and Patty down.”
“But didn’t she consider all the trouble she would get into once everyone discovered she’d set them up?”
“Jane was never going to admit to anything. She was simply going to show up at school on Monday and say she’d swum back to shore and that we must have missed her.”
“She was going to play dumb?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So she wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“No, I mean why do any of this?” he asked, finally letting his exasperation show. “Was what happened to her that awful?”
Alice gave him a rare look in the eyes. “When you’re our age, there’s nothing worse than being humiliated. Nothing.”
There was a knock at the door. Officer Rick stuck his head in again. Fisher jumped up before he could speak and stepped into the hallway, closing the door at his back.
“Is it the father?” Fisher asked.
“He won’t sit still much longer,” Officer Rick said. “But the captain’s doing a good job in that department, talking with him about the Bible and the meaning of life. You know Cap used to be in the ministry? I guess you would. How much longer do you need with the girl?”
“Maybe till the sun comes up.”
Officer Rick held out an unsealed envelope. “This might speed things up for you. Dr. Hilt finished his preliminary examination. That body we found in the hills? It belongs to Jane Retton.”
Fisher didn’t accept the envelope. The pain he had felt earlier when looking at Jane’s picture came back, only stronger, because now he knew about her and she was real to him.
She had been real.
“Hilt’s sure?”
“Yeah, no question about it.” The young officer wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t like this. A girl drowns out in the ocean and we find her body burned to a crisp up in the hills. What the hell’s going on?”
“I wish I knew, buddy.” Fisher leaned against the wall, his weariness suddenly returning. “Alice gave the impression we might find another body in the ashes.”
“She said that?”
“She implied it. She may have been thinking of Sharon Less, but I’m not sure yet.”
“I haven’t heard anything. The captain called off examining the wreckage until we get some light.”
“Tell the captain we can’t wait. If our people have already left the area, send them back up. I don’t want a single cinder of that house left unturned.”
Officer Rick departed to carry out his order. Back in the room, alone once again with Alice, Fisher opened the yearbook and stared at the photograph of Jane, noting again her distracted expression, the faraway look in her eyes. Perhaps part of her had known she wouldn’t be around all that long.
“What is it?” Alice asked.
Fisher sighed. “It was Jane’s body.”
Tears welled up in Alice’s eyes. “I knew it must be,” she whispered.
He closed the annual. “Let’s go back to when Jane disappeared.”