Page 71

He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Heard arguin’ and that goddamn wolf making a racket, so I went outside and she was there.”

“Doing what?”

“She was leavin’ with her boyfriend.”

Through the window across the street, I could see Sadie with her face in her hands. Amelia was still beside her, the walkie-talkie raised to her mouth.

“Who was arguing?”

Rhett shrugged. “Don’t know. By the time I got there she was climbin’ in Ben’s truck.”

My eyes drifted back to the street.

So, Johnny had been with Autumn that night, but if she’d left with Ben, then Johnny wasn’t the last one to see her.

“Did you tell Amelia this?” I asked.

“I learned a long time ago that the last people you can trust to find the truth are the people who get paid to do it.” He glanced at the diner window. “Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.”

Is that what I’d been doing? Taking matters into my own hands? Is that what Rhett Walker had been doing the day that he knocked on the door and took a handful of my hair, screaming?

I held out the handkerchief. “Thanks.”

“Keep it.” Rhett looked at me for another moment before he started up the sidewalk, adjusting the hat on his head. He didn’t look back before he ducked into the market.

I waited in Amelia’s truck, watching in the side mirror as the red mark on my face grew darker. When she finally got back, she sat in the driver’s seat, staring at her steering wheel.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said, voice tight. “It was completely uncalled for.”

“He was at home that night,” I said.

Amelia turned to me. “What?”

“Johnny. He has an alibi.” I wiped at my cheek again, folding the handkerchief. “Rhett just told me that he saw Autumn leaving Johnny’s late that night with Ben Cross. He picked her up outside.”

I watched as Amelia stacked the new information against what she already knew.

“They were arguing.”

“About what?”

“He doesn’t know. But my brother wasn’t the last one to see Autumn Fischer alive.”

Beside me, Amelia paled. I could see her thinking the same thing I was. No one had been looking for Autumn because no one knew she was missing. But if Johnny found that backpack out in the gorge, he would have known who she was with that night.

If there was anyone who’d want to be sure that Johnny didn’t make it back to tell anyone, it was Ben.

Twenty-Four

It took four hours to recount the odyssey I’d been on for the police, and I still wasn’t sure I understood everything that had happened.

After going through the two weeks I’d spent in Six Rivers, struggling to exhume every detail of every day, I laid out the clues I’d uncovered about Johnny’s connection to Autumn Fischer and the timeline before his death.

To call them clues felt like a betrayal. Like I was admitting that Johnny had something to hide. But that’s what they were—breadcrumbs I’d followed to the fraction of truth I’d managed to mine from the quiet existence my brother led in this town.

The investigative team had come from Eureka, setting up a search that should have happened months ago. No one had said it yet, but the odds that Autumn Fischer was alive were almost zero. Some would even say the odds didn’t exist.

I went through Johnny’s phone with the police, waiting as they logged each phone call, text, and Instagram direct message. I pried apart my brother’s life like an apple cut in two.