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“It’s funny you should ask that,” Josh says, still gazing out the windshield. “Because we’re not.”
In an instant, all of Charlie’s hopefulness disappears. Because she knows the object Josh is thinking of—a realization that makes it feel as if all the blood has drained from her body. Ice water pours in to replace it, leaving Charlie motionless and numb.
“You know the answer, don’t you?” Josh says.
Charlie nods, too unnerved to speak.
“Then say it, smarty-pants.”
Charlie swallows and forces herself to speak, willing the words onto her tongue and into the stifling air of the car.
“Is it a tooth?”
“It is.” Josh smiles, proud of himself. “Very good. You solved it in sixteen questions.”
“What made you pick that object?”
“I don’t know. It just came to me.” A stricken look crosses Josh’s face. “Oh, shit. I’m so sorry, Charlie. I wasn’t thinking. No wonder you look like you’ve just seen a ghost. It’s because of your friend. That guy pulled out one of her teeth after killing her, didn’t he?”
Charlie shakes her head, wanting him to stop talking. Needing him to stop. The urge to shut him up is so great that she’d lunge into the driver’s seat and clamp a hand over his mouth if there was a way to do it without them running off the road. Because the more he talks, the worse the situation becomes.
Still, she has another question. One she must ask. She needs to hear Josh’s answer. She wants to believe what he says, even though every ice-cold nerve in her body tells her she won’t.
“How did you know about the tooth?”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
“It wasn’t in the papers,” Charlie says.
“I’m positive I read it there,” Josh says.
He’s lying. The police wouldn’t have made her swear not to tell anyone about Maddy’s missing tooth if they planned on giving that information to the press, and Charlie assumes she would have heard about it if they had.
She runs through all the ways Josh could know about the missing tooth, the least scary being that he’s somehow related to Maddy and heard it from her mother. But that makes no sense. If Josh was a family member, it’s likely Charlie would have known about him when Maddy was alive. Even if Maddy hadn’t mentioned him—and she loved to talk about her family—there’s no reason why Josh wouldn’t have brought up the connection immediately.
Next, Charlie considers the idea that Josh could be a cop. Or used to be one. Again, it’s unlikely. Any cop familiar with Maddy’s case would also know Charlie had been her roommate.
That leaves one last possible reason Josh knows about the tooth.
One so scary it makes Charlie simultaneously want to scream, throw up, and leap from the moving car.
Josh knows about Maddy’s missing tooth because he’s the one who took it from her.
Which would make him worse than anything Charlie had previously thought of.
It would make him the Campus Killer.
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie remains motionless in the passenger seat, thinking the unthinkable.
She might be in a car with the man who killed Maddy.
A man who might also plan on killing her.
A man who had flat-out warned her such a scenario could happen.
Charlie stares out the windshield, her gaze fixed on the yellow beams of the headlights chasing away the last bits of fog as she recalls what Josh had told her earlier.