Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

“Of course.” Melody easily accepted the explanation. “I wasn’t allowed to talk to Emily, but I put mixtapes in her mailbox every few weeks. This is the last one I made for her before she was murdered. Look at my silly handwriting. I was trying to disguise my identity in case my mother somehow found out I was disobeying her.”

Andrea pretended to look at the text, but she already knew it by heart. “Did you know Emily well?”

“Not as well as I wanted to. She was an amazing girl, but she had her group. We shared a love of music. It’s such a tragedy that she’s gone and Dean Wexler is still walking the face of this earth.”

Andrea said, “I’ve heard a lot about Emily’s drug use.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit.” Melody finally handed back the phone. “Don’t get me wrong—none of us Just Said No to drugs, but Emily was never into the hard stuff. I hate to sound like my mother, but she hung around with a bad crowd.”

Andrea couldn’t agree more. “Do you have any theories about who killed her?”

“I mean—” Melody sputtered air between her lips. “Everybody seems to think it was Clay. And look at what he did after he left town. If that’s not a pattern, I don’t know what is.”

“Ricky Fontaine had a theory.” Andrea noted Melody’s arched eyebrow when she’d heard Ricky’s name. “She thinks that Jack Stilton did it.”

“For fucksakes!” Melody’s booming laugh filled the room. “Ricky is such a lying cunt. They always hated Jack. We’re talking all the way back to kindergarten. Nardo in particular took a sick joy out of torturing him. Emily hated him for it. She always took up for Jack. There’s no way he would’ve ever hurt her.”

Andrea thought of the restraining order. “Ricky can be a very vindictive person.”

“Understatement of the year. The only thing Ricky Blakely has ever cared about is Nardo Fontaine. She’s obsessed with him, and he never misses an opportunity to screw with her.” Melody’s hands had gone to her hips again. “At least once a week Nardo shows up late at that stupid diner. He drags along Star so she can play his audience. It’s all disgusting, really, but like I said—they must be getting something out of it. There’s comfort in the familiar.”

For the first time, Andrea questioned Melody’s veracity. “Ricky has a permanent restraining order against her. She can’t go within twenty feet of Nardo.”

“I’m legally barred from the farm and I was there this morning,” Melody pointed out. “The law doesn’t matter if no one is going to enforce it.”

Andrea could not say that she was wrong. “Can I ask your opinion on something else Ricky told me?”

“I’m clearly on a tear,” Melody acknowledged. “Go ahead.”

“She said that whatever is happening at the farm today is the same shit that happened to Emily forty years ago.”

“Huh,” Melody said.

Not No way, or Ricky’s full of shit or another For fucksakes.

And then Melody added, “Well, maybe?”

Andrea felt her heart start to shake in her chest. Melody had known Emily. She knew the group. She knew exactly what was happening at the farm.

“Okay—” Melody paused to gather her thoughts. “My mother told me some stuff before she died. I’m not supposed to know because there was a medical confidentiality, but surely that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Andrea held her breath.

“This is a little from Mom and a little from what I heard at school and a little from what Emily told me herself,” Melody prefaced. “Emily was drugged and raped at a party. She literally had no memory of what happened. I don’t think she ever found out who raped her. And it wasn’t a party like what you’re thinking. It was only ever her and the clique. That’s Nardo, Blake, Ricky and Clay.”

“The clique?” Andrea remembered Ricky using the same phrase.

“Oh, yes, the clique. Everyone thought they were so mysterious.” Melody rolled her eyes. “The hilarious part was, they were all kind of pathetic—and I say this as a person who was pathetic myself. Emily and I were both band geeks. We wore Mork & Mindy rainbow suspenders and head gear for our braces.”

Andrea almost laughed. She had assumed the exact opposite. “From her photos, Emily was very pretty.”

“It doesn’t matter how pretty you are if you don’t know it,” Melody said. “Ricky was wildly unpopular. She was volatile and dramatic, even for a teenage girl. And Blake was always calculating. Every conversation, he was looking for a way to exploit you. Then there’s Nardo. Kids would literally take a different route to class so that they wouldn’t run into him. He was and still is unbelievably cruel.”

Andrea had never before heard anyone describe them all so clearly. “And Clay?”

“Well, he brought them together, didn’t he? He made them feel special, part of theclique. They would’ve been nothing without him. All he demanded in return was their unquestioning devotion. And that extended to breaking into cars, taking drugs—whatever Clay wanted them to do.” Her shrug belied everything the group had given up in return. “Clay was the only one of them who was genuinely popular. Everyone loved him. He had an uncanny ability to find out what you were missing and fill the void. He was a chameleon, even back then.”

Andrea knew that he was still a chameleon now. “What about Dean Wexler?”