Part 13 (1/2)

This was the girl that everyone thought Mark had murdered.

'I'm sorry,' Hilary murmured. 'Tresa never mentioned it to us.'

'Well, I'm not surprised. We all treated it like it had never happened. I think the idea was, if you didn't talk about it, it didn't exist. Everyone was trying to spare Glory. Who wants to remember listening to a family burn to death?'

'Did she go through therapy?'

'I hope so, but people aren't big on that around here. It's like a character flaw if you have to see a shrink.'

'It must have been hard on Tresa, too,' Hilary said.

'Sure it was. She became the forgotten sister.'

Hilary shook her head as she considered the wreckage of the Fischers and Bones. People were fragile things. You scratched the surface and found pain everywhere. When something bad happened to someone, it had a ripple effect, was.h.i.+ng away other lives as the circles got larger.

The two women continued walking slowly toward the school building. They were already late for the next cla.s.s.

'So Mark's paying the price for Harris Bone,' Terri told her. 'That's part of what's happening here. People around here are sensitive to the idea of a man getting away with murder. They don't want to see it happening again.'

Hilary stopped and put a hand on Terri's shoulder. 'Getting away with murder? What are you talking about? You said they found Harris Bone at the ruins.'

'They did. Harris was tried, and he got life in prison. A lot of people wished we had the death penalty in Wisconsin. Most of us thought life in prison was too good for him.'

'That's not the same as getting away with it.'

'I know, but Harris escaped,' Terri said. 'He got away as they were taking him to the Supermax facility in Boscobel. He's been on the run ever since. He's out there somewhere, hiding.'

Chapter Sixteen.

Amy Leigh's room in Downham Hall at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay looked out on the remnants of a cornfield from the previous harvest season. Beyond the rows of broken stalks, she could see the line of barren winter trees marking the Cofrin Arboretum that ringed the entire campus, isolating it like an island protected by an enchanted forest. It was late afternoon on Tuesday, but the ashen sky made the day look later than it was. Cla.s.ses had begun again, and she had psychology books piled on her bed that she needed to read, but she was finding it hard to concentrate. Rather than working, she kept looking outside at the desolate field and thinking about Glory Fischer and Gary Jensen.

She'd thought about nothing else but the two of them since the bus arrived back in Green Bay: the girl who'd been found dead on the beach in Florida and the coach who always seemed to be stripping her naked in his head when he looked at her.

'Gary and his wife went rock-climbing in Utah in December,' Amy murmured, studying the article she'd pulled up on the Internet. She wasn't even aware that she'd spoken aloud until her roommate rolled over on her back on the opposite bed and groaned.

'Are you on about this again?' Katie asked.

Amy took the pen from her mouth. 'His wife died. She lost her grip during the climb and fell more than two hundred feet. There was no one in that area of the park but the two of them. If you wanted to murder someone and get away with it, can you think of a better way to do it? Who knows what really happened out there?'

Katie laid the textbook on her bare stomach. She wore a sports bra and loose-fitting sweatpants. 'I remember you telling me that Gary looked devastated when you saw him on campus in January.'

'People can fake that. What if she found out the kind of man he was?'

'What kind of man is he?'

'He's a pig. He comes on to all the girls.'

'So do half the older men in the world.'

'It was in the papers after she died,' Amy said. 'The police in Utah investigated her death.'

'The police are going to investigate any time somebody falls off a cliff. They didn't charge him with anything, did they?'

'No.'

Katie sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. 'Look, Ames, just because your coach is a jerk doesn't mean he's some kind of serial killer. First he kills his wife and now some girl in Florida he doesn't even know? Does that make any sense?'

'I just wonder if I should tell someone. I mean, I think I saw Gary with Glory Fischer.'

'You think?'

'OK, I'm not sure.' She added, 'This is personal for me now. Because of Hilary.'

'She was your coach. You haven't seen her in years.'

'Yes, but you saw the news,' Amy said. 'They're looking at her husband. He's the prime suspect.'

'Well, he knew the girl, and he had a room right near where she was killed, and he had a grudge against the family. Sounds like he deserves to be a suspect.'

Amy took a strand of her curly blond hair and twisted it between her fingers. She shook her head. 'I remember him. He was a nice guy. Hilary wouldn't marry anyone who could do something like that. She's way too smart.'

'Wow, don't tell me you're that naive,' Katie said. 'If you're going to be a psychologist, you better learn real fast that you can't trust people just by looking at them, you know?'

'Yeah, I know.'

Her roommate got off the bed and grabbed a Green Bay sweats.h.i.+rt from the top of her laundry basket and shrugged it over her skinny torso. She peeled off her sweatpants and squeezed her bare legs into a tight pair of jeans. Sitting on the bed again, she laced up her sneakers. As she bent over, her gla.s.ses skidded down her nose.

'I'm going to dinner,' she told Amy. 'You want to come with me?'

'I'm not hungry.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah. You go.'

'OK, whatever. See you later.'

Katie left Amy alone in the room. Amy got up and paced back and forth between the walls, then tried to clear her mind with a series of yoga positions. It didn't help. She sat down at the desk again and reread the story in the Green Bay paper about the death of Gary Jensen's wife four months earlier. It was the kind of accidental tragedy that happened every day. There was nothing suspicious about it. She was making Gary into a monster in her head for no good reason.

Amy called up the home page of Facebook on her computer. She had almost four hundred friends on the network, including everyone from her high school cla.s.s and dozens of dancers she'd met from schools across the country. She did a search and found the profile for Hilary Bradley, who was one of her friends, and clicked over to her former coach's home page.

Hilary's profile photo showed her on a bicycle somewhere on a tree- lined road. She had a big smile, her long hair blew behind her, and her blue eyes were hidden behind sungla.s.ses. She looked happy. Amy figured the photo had been taken where she lived now, in the rural lands of Door County. Hilary didn't look as if she had changed much in the three years since Amy had known her in high school in Chicago. She was pretty and blonde, like Amy, and she was tall and full-bodied, which was also like Amy. That was one of the things she'd liked most about Hilary. She wasn't a stick. She didn't make any apologies for her figure. She'd always told Amy that you could be a big girl and still be graceful and s.e.xy.