If I Die Tonight by A.L Gaylin

Author:A.L Gaylin [Gaylin, A.L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2017-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Wade wouldn’t look at Jackie. She was sitting right next to him in the guidance counselor’s office, with those two cops from assembly and two state police detectives. She kept saying his name and yet he wouldn’t look at her. Wouldn’t speak. ‘Wade,’ she said again. ‘Please …’

‘Wade,’ Mr. Penny said. ‘Are you all right?’

Jackie wanted to slap Mr. Penny, with that suspicious tone of his, the way he tilted his head to the side the better to examine the state of Wade’s pupils. She half expected him to ask her son how many fingers he was holding up. He’s not on drugs, you judgmental ass. ‘Of course he’s all right,’ Jackie said. ‘Why wouldn’t he be all right?’

‘Nobody’s in any trouble here, ma’am,’ said the male state police detective. So condescending, that ‘ma’am.’ ‘We’d just like to ask your son a few questions. We can all go by the station, if you feel like you guys might be more comfortable there.’

Right, because a police station is the most comfortable place there is. It made Jackie think of something her grandmother once told her: ‘Never believe anything said through a mustache.’

‘Wade has school today.’ She threw another pleading look at her silent son, feeling as though she’d stepped into one of those dreams where you can’t move and you can’t speak and nothing goes the way it’s supposed to go. ‘He needs to get to class.’

‘It’s perfectly all right for him to miss class,’ Mr. Penny said, ‘considering the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances?’

The female detective was saying Wade’s name now, asking him to please respond, again and again. Jackie leveled her eyes at both the uniformed officers, neither one of them much older than her son – the boy officer in particular, with his teenage skin and the way he’d practically cried onstage. A child. ‘What circumstances?’ she asked him directly.

He turned away. What a strange response.

‘Mrs. Reed,’ said the female detective. ‘A witness claims to have seen your son with the carjacking victim the night Liam Miller was killed.’

Jackie blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘That’s a lie,’ Wade said, coming to life. He looked at Jackie. ‘I wasn’t with anybody.’

‘According to the witness,’ the detective said, ‘a young man with your name and fitting your description was at Club Halifax where Aimee En had been performing …’

‘Aimee En?’ Jackie said. ‘The singer from the eighties?’

‘… between six and eight pm. You want to tell us where you were during those hours if you weren’t at Club Halifax?’

‘He was at his SAT class. It goes on till seven pm,’ Jackie said. She looked at Wade, and again he wouldn’t return her gaze. ‘Weren’t you? Wade?’

He stared at the desk. ‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said softly.

Jackie’s face heated up. She felt dizzy. ‘Aimee En?’ she said again. ‘Aimee En was the carjacking victim?’ As though that was the point of the story – the celebrity tie-in to Liam Miller’s death – and not the fact that her own son had been at a club when

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