Page 58

Moscow, Idaho

I t’s cold.

Even with the blanket Ava has placed over her shoulders, Emily is cold. She’s in shorts. So are Dylan and Bethany. None of them is wearing shoes.

They’ve been sitting out here for hours now. Crying, freezing, numb.

Captain Berrett gently asks them to go to the police station for interviews.

Emily feels for the captain. She can tell how sad Berrett is to see her and Ava crying like this. They are like daughters to him.

Emily just wants to do something.

She’s just lost her best friend. She has no idea how or why or who did this.

Her world is in free fall.

She wants to be able to control something.

She looks around. She can look after Dylan, her Little, and Bethany, who has lost her Big, Maddie. She can give them clothes, protect them as best she can, like a mother hen.

So before driving to the police station, Emily pops into her apartment to get clothes for all of them. And bottles of water, and snacks.

When they get to the station, it feels as if the officer on duty isn’t sure what to do. It dawns on Emily that it isn’t just her world that’s been rocked.

None of them, not even the police, are ready for a tornado like this.

The friends sit together, mostly in silence. Random people enter and leave. John Hennrich, the director of student care and case management, appears, along with a woman counselor who asks if they want to talk about their feelings.

The group says no. They aren’t ready to talk about anything with anyone. They just want to be left alone.

Hennrich assures them before he leaves that the last thing they need to worry about is classes. He’ll be in touch with all their professors.

Emily peers downstairs at one point and, with a pang, sees Jeff and Jazzmin Kernodle being led into a room on the first floor.

She intuits that the story is overtaking them. That the news of what’s happened is likely to reach their nearest and dearest before they can get to them, thanks to social media.

So she phones her mom, Karen.

“Mom, I’m at the police station, I’m safe, I don’t really wanna talk about it, but I’m not gonna have my phone for a while.”

Karen is in disbelief. She hasn’t seen or heard anything. And Emily wants to protect her from the details for as long as possible.

“All you need to know is that… they’re just all gone. And we can talk about it later.”

One by one, the friends are peeled off and taken to interview rooms like you see on crime dramas. A room where the tape recorder is going and the window is a one-way mirror.

They never learn who is watching their interviews. They just know they are being watched. They don’t know if the prosecutor, Bill Thompson, is there or not. They later wonder if he might have been. He’s going to need the answers to the questions they are asked.

Like why, the police want to know, were Emily, Hunter, Josie, and Linden awake so late the night before?

Why would Emily have texted Xana at that hour?

Who exactly did Dylan see?

Why did she think he was a firefighter?

Did he see her when she saw him?

Was he in the house already when everyone got home?

Why does she think the masked man in black walked away from her?

( Thank God, Emily thinks, the man in black did walk away from her .)

Is this person now coming for them ?

After their interviews, the friends determine they are not going to separate. No one wants to go home; for Bethany and Dylan, that’s not even possible.

They swear to look out for one another. To protect one another at all costs from whoever attacked their friends.

It’s the only positive step they can take when everything else has gone irretrievably backward.