“No.” Seth places his phone on the table in front of us, and after a moment, I do the same.
“We won’t tell anyone anything you tell us,” I say, not knowing whether I’m lying. “We just want to know who did this. Up until recently, I thought Thatcher killed my sister.”
At this, Caleb comes alive. “He didn’t.” His voice is quiet but forceful.
“But you weren’t actually with him that night. Were you?”
His eyes go from me to Seth again, and then he exhales. “No,” he says. “No. I told the police I was because…they were asking him questions, and I had some gallant notion of saving him, I suppose.” His mouth twists briefly into an imitation of a smile. “Not that it mattered, in the end.”
“Can you start at the beginning?” Seth asks.
Caleb grips his coffee cup in both hands. “There is no beginning. I did meet up with Thatcher that night, at the parade. But we both went home around eleven. I told the police I went to Thatcher’s house instead of saying I went back to my own.” He looks at me. “He didn’t ask me to do that. It was my idea.”
“Why did you feel like you had to lie?” I ask.
“I thought it might look bad. We saw Fiona that night, before we went home, and she and Thatcher were fighting again.”
I go still. “Fighting again? About what?”
“I didn’t hear. We saw her across the green, looking upset. Thatcher ran ahead of me to talk to her. Whatever he said seemed to upset her more, and she ran away. I just assumed it was more about the ballet school money, but when Thatcher came back to me, looking angry, he said he didn’t want to talk about it. So I didn’t push it.”
I blink. “What do you mean, the ballet school money?”
Caleb’s eyebrows go up. “When Fiona went to Thatcher about ballet school.” I must look totally clueless, because Caleb goes on, “They only gave her partial financial aid. She wanted Thatcher to lend her the money for the rest of her tuition.”
Beside me, Seth sucks in a breath. But I frown. “No. She got a scholarship for the rest of it.”
“That’s not what she told him. She came to him sometime in the spring, asking for money. He said no. And she got…upset with him.”
I sit back, processing this. “But—she was going to the American Ballet Academy. She was leaving in a week. She was practicing extra and everything.”
“Did you tell the police this?” Seth asks Caleb. “Did Thatcher tell the police this?”
Caleb shakes his head. “Maybe I should have, but I didn’t want them to have any more reasons to look at Thatcher. I don’t know if he told them. He stopped talking to me after that week.”
“How much money did Fiona ask Thatcher for?” I ask.
“Forty-two thousand dollars and change.”
I let this sink in. Then I ask Seth, “Did Thatcher have that much money?”
Seth nods shortly.
“That doesn’t mean he had to give it to her,” Caleb says. “You know how Thatcher felt about Fiona, I presume?” He directs the question at Seth, but I nod. “She knew, too. She told him a few years back that she was sorry, but she just didn’t feel that way about him. Then one day last spring she showed up at his place in the city, asked him if they could talk. And she just flat out asked him for money.” He shrugs. “It bothered him. And I don’t blame him. He told her she didn’t get to use him like that, and she got upset. Then he got upset with her for being upset, and…it affected their friendship, to say the least.”
My mind is going furiously. I wonder how upset Thatcher really was. I catch Seth’s eyes on me and feel like he’s reading my mind.
“He did feel bad about it,” Caleb adds. “It wasn’t even that much to him, and she needed it so badly, but he didn’t like feeling used. I told him it was the right thing to do. But then again, I’m biased.” His mouth twists again, and it’s then I see it: the deep sadness in Caleb’s eyes.
I want to leave Caleb alone, to his grief. But there’s no helping it. We need to know everything we can. I lean forward. “But why were they fighting that night? And why did he show up at our house looking mad last July? He’d already said no. She had the scholarship, she didn’t need his money. It was over.”
He lifts his shoulders. “I don’t know. All I know is what Thatcher told me.”
“Why do you think Thatcher stopped talking to you?” Seth asks then.
“I don’t know.”
“Did he seem scared of someone to you?” Seth presses.
“I don’t know,” Caleb repeats. “There’s not much you can guess from one text message.”
“What text message? What did it say?”
“Thanks for everything, C. It means a lot. Need some time to process all of this. Be in touch when I can,” Caleb quotes.
“And you never heard from him again?”
Caleb shakes his head. “I gave him a week, then just texted him to check up on him. He was at Oxford by then. But he didn’t answer me. He never answered me. Not my texts or my emails. I sent a card when I heard about your grandma. And then when I heard about—” He chokes on the words, and I feel awful again for being here, for making him talk through all of this.
“I couldn’t go,” he near whispers. “I couldn’t see him—not like that.”
The pain on Caleb’s face. His soft voice. I believe him.
I never really believed that Caleb was the killer. But now I’m sure. It wasn’t him.
Which means it was someone else.
And I have no idea who.