Okay, so this girl was shrewd. I knew she was on the paper with Constance, so she was probably
pulling a Lois Lane here, trying to sniff out my motive and stuff like that. Live the life of an ace
reporter as she imagined it.
"I'm helping a friend out with a story," I said, thinking quickly. "You know Marc Alberro, right?"
Lara relaxed. "Marc? Yeah, I know him."
"Well, he's doing an in-depth piece on where various people of interest were that night, so I told
him I'd help out with the interviews,"
135
I said quickly. I glanced at Kirsten and away from Lara's prying eyes. "So you guys were all
together."
"Yeah. That was the night we tried out that new workout DVD, remember?" Kirsten said, turning
as she yanked a lip gloss out of her bag. She looked at Lara in the mirror. "Some kind of Pilates
fusion thing? Our abs hurt for days. And then, in the middle of the night, Amberly knocked over
that bottle of water we left out and it woke us all up and you threw your Build-A-Bear at her?
Remember?"
"Kirsten!" Lara said through her teeth. She looked at me and blushed. "I do not have a Build-A-
Bear."
I stifled a laugh as Lara's skin tone deepened. "So Amberly knocked over a water bottle in the
middle of the night," I said. "Coming back from the bathroom, or... ?"
"Yep," Lara said, crossing her arms over her chest. "Coming back from the bathroom."
"No! She went out, remember?" Kirsten said in a scolding tone as she finished glossing her lips.
"She disappeared for, like, hours and then snuck back into the room at, like, the ass crack of
dawn?" she said, narrowing her eyes as she tried to recall. She lifted a desperate hand in Lara's
direction. "I can't believe you don't remember this. You were so mad!"
My heart skipped a beat as I took this information in. Disappeared for hours? And Lara was trying
to cover it up? Did that mean that Amberly went somewhere she shouldn't have gone? Did she
have time to--
"It wasn't dawn, Kirsten, it was more like two a.m.," Lara corrected
136
her friend. "I remember that because it was still totally dark out and we had to turn the light on to