Set Me Free (12 page)

I
sat on the bench
, numb and speechless, while Mrs. Gautier made an awkward goodbye and said something about having my painting at the Graveside. I hardly heard her. My body and soul split apart, shattered, particles cascading across the universe.

It couldn’t be true. Owen would never hurt anyone.

I thought about the way he’d grabbed Scott by the throat after the fire at the Lodge, and how unbearably cold he’d been to me yesterday at the Widow’s Walk, even though he could tell I was upset.

I’d felt a pull towards him since practically the first moment I’d met him, as if I’d known him in another life. But the truth was that it had only been a couple of weeks. And I was the same stupid girl who’d moved to Connecticut with Rhys after only a month.

I hugged my knees to my chest and pressed my face to the denim of my jeans. What kind of man kept his dead girlfriend’s self-portrait locked in his spare room?

He had promised to tell me everything, but all he had told me was that he and Suzanna had dated. He had let me believe that the town didn’t like him because he’d tried to have Suzanna all to himself. He’d let me feel sorry for him—and all the while, he’d been keeping this from me. That he’d been accused of killing her—Beloved By All.

I swept my hair back from my forehead, trembling. Could
this
possibly have been what he’d wanted to tell me—at the Widow’s Walk, of all places, on the morning after?

How could it be? There had to be something else—some other secret, dividing him from the town. Some other explanation for Suze’s death.

Slowly, clumsily, as if I were underwater, I turned on my phone and dialed Owen’s number.

It rang and rang while I tried not to think about what I was going to say.

Then, horribly, it went to voicemail.

I listened to Owen’s deep, even voice asking me to leave him a message, and wanted to cry.

It beeped.

“Hi. It’s Miranda.” My voice cracked. “If you have a moment…I would like to know what you were going to tell me yesterday. I just heard something about…Suzanna…and I…”

My face burning, I hung up. Of course I had to go all stiff and proper and British.

Memories circled me like vultures: his hands on my skin, his scent, his gentle laugh.

Feverishly, I stood up and grabbed my paints. I had to know more. I had to know everything.

* * *

I
found
my housemates sitting around a campfire in the backyard, making s’mores and drinking Schlitz. Kaye had come back home from Portland while I was out, and I’d never been more relieved and grateful to see her.

“There you are!” Kaye glanced up from the marshmallow she was toasting to smile at me.

Andy handed me a toasting stick of my own. “More errands?” He winked.

I meant to respond with a joke, but the words got lost. I sank into one of the plastic lawn chairs in between Kaye and Andy, holding the stick across my lap. “Can I ask you guys something?”

Kaye and Andy both looked at me, Kaye’s wide smile faltering and Andy’s pierced eyebrow arching. On the other side of the campfire, Scott frowned into the depths of his beer can.

I took a shaky breath. “I need to know about Suzanna White. I need to know how she died. If it’s true…about Owen.”

The fire popped and hissed. In the thick forest behind our small backyard, insects chirped. Kaye and Andy exchanged one of their glances that spoke volumes without actually saying a word.

Scott crushed his beer can in his fist. He stared at me, his dark eyes intense. “It’s true, Miranda.”

Before I could react, Andy rolled his eyes. “Scott, seriously…”

“I
am
fucking serious,” Scott snapped, pointing the ruined can at Andy. “I wanted to tell her as soon as she got here. I don’t care if she’s not staying. Everybody needs to know about that guy, and what he did.” On the last word, Scott’s voice hitched.

“Wait,” I said, trembling. “Which is it?”

“He was charged with her murder,” Kaye said softly. “But he was acquitted. Eventually. It took almost two years. There was a mistrial, and…it was complicated.”

“But if he was acquitted…doesn’t that mean he’s innocent?”

“No,” Scott spat. “All that means is that the jury didn’t convict him, even though they should have. It does
not
mean he’s innocent.”

Suddenly, everything made sense: the curious, nervous stares from almost everyone in town, the way Violet and Scott had accused him of setting fire to Suzanna’s paintings in the Artist’s Lodge, even the death threats. Every single person on Fall Island thought Owen had murdered Suzanna and gotten away with it. They thought a killer lived among them, keeping to himself, only ever visible when he was walking his mom’s huge dogs.

“I’m sorry, Miranda.” Kaye bit her lip. “We talked about whether we should tell you, but we didn’t know how long you’d be staying here, and… It’s so hard to know how people will react. Some people just can’t stop talking about it. Some of the tourists come here to gawk at us, or because they think of themselves as amateur sleuths.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. They should have told me. They should have
believed
me when I said I was going to stay.

“Then, even though he was acquitted…you all think he did it.” My voice came out small and wretched.

Kaye’s expression softened. “We don’t want to believe it about him, M., but you have to understand, it looked really bad. There were other suspects at first, but they all had solid alibis. Owen didn’t. He didn’t even really try. He just said he was sitting at home, practicing the cello—”

“But he did used to play the cello—”

“
And
he had a motive,” Kaye insisted. “Something no one else had. Look, Suzanna was incredibly popular. Everyone loved her. She had lived here her whole life, on the south side of the island. Her dad was a lobster fisherman and her mom was an artist. If you could take the hopes and dreams of a whole island and make it into one person, that was her.”

Beloved By All
, I thought sadly.

“So Owen moved here in high school, after his parents got divorced,” Kaye continued. “And we all became friends, all us artsy, band geek kids. They started dating. She had already taken a year off to paint before she started art school at Pratt, but then she pushed it back again, another year, to be with Owen. He seemed almost good enough for her.” Scott snorted, but Kaye just shrugged helplessly. “He
did
. He was a cellist. A good student. He was on the football team. He was like her. He had this…brilliance…like she had.”

“But she kept putting off going to Pratt,” Andy interjected. “People were unhappy about it. All that talent gone to waste, they said, although she was still painting, having shows, selling her work…”

“No one was sure they wanted her to stay with Owen,” Kaye said. “Could anyone really be good enough for her? And—things had changed between them. Everyone knew they were having problems.”

“Problems?” I echoed.

“She cheated on him,” Kaye confessed. “Several times, it looks like. Once with her ex, Jonas, and…other times. No one knows who else there was.”

Despite the irony of feeling sympathy for Owen at a time like this, my heart went out to him.

“So…they were having problems,” I said. “Okay. But is that it? She cheated on him, so he killed her? They never found…a murder weapon, or whatever?”

“He drowned her,” Scott said. “He didn’t need a weapon for that.”

“I just don’t see how anyone can be sure about what happened,” I said.

“You think Suze went out on a boat in the middle of the night, in September in Maine, all by herself?” Kaye shook her head. “Suze didn’t even like boats. We all knew that, because it was a sore spot between her and her fisherman dad.”

“There’s more,” Scott said.

Kaye nodded slowly. “There were injuries. They said the injuries were ‘not consistent with an accidental death.’ They thought…there were injuries consistent with being thrown against something, like maybe a railing? And being struck in the face. All prior to her death.”

Kaye’s large, light-colored eyes met mine. The grief in her face was stark.

“She had a split lip,” Scott said. “And she had cuts and bruises on her knee and hip.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

Andy gave a short, mirthless laugh. “The problem with all of this, of course, was that they never found a boat. As far as we all knew, Owen didn’t have one. Suze didn’t, either. And no one knows who they would’ve bought or borrowed a boat from, since we know they didn’t take her dad’s.”

Scott scowled at Andy, but Kaye just smiled weakly.

“Andy has more faith in humanity than the rest of us,” Kaye said.

“Yeah, I think I might,” Andy muttered.

“Then…what do you think happened, Andy?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t
know
what happened. Nobody knows. That’s why he was acquitted—innocent until proven guilty. But if you ask me, Owen didn’t kill her. He wouldn’t have hurt a hair on Suze’s head. He worshipped her even more than everyone else on the island did.
She
was the one who kept hurting
him
.”

“She hurt him?” I said.

“Not physically,” Andy said. “Not like that. But in other ways. Back then, Rusty, Owen and I used to hang out all the time, so Rusty and I saw a lot of Suzanna. More than most, I’d say. And she was different, sometimes, in private. She could be mean, especially to Owen. Calling him names, that kind of thing. She used to break plans with him all the time, at the very last minute, like some kind of power game—”

“Don’t you dare talk about Suze like that,” Scott interrupted fiercely. “It’s bad enough you stick up for Larsen—I won’t let you criticize her!”

“Scott, she was only human, all right?” Andy snapped. “We need to stop talking about her like she was some kind of angel—”

“You don’t understand!
She was
different!
” Scott leapt to his feet, knocking his chair backwards onto the grass. His expression was all fury. For a second, I thought he might hit Andy, but instead, he stalked across the yard into the house. The screen door slammed behind him.

Andy stared at the house, his expression troubled.

Kaye sighed, running her hands through her hair. “Sometimes I wonder if Scott was one of the guys Suze was involved with.”

“I doubt it,” Andy said. “When we were in high school, she barely knew he existed.”

“Maybe that was part of their act. Keeping it secret,” Kaye suggested.

“Maybe,” Andy said. “But I always thought Suze wanted Owen to know. Part of her power games. She was awfully obvious about Jonas.”

I couldn’t stop myself from shaking my head. “I can’t believe she cheated on him. Everyone talks about her like she was a saint. Except you, Andy. And Owen did once say she had a bad temper. But even he—” I swallowed. “Even he sounds like he’s still in love with her.”

Andy shrugged. “Whatever else she was, she was brilliant. And beautiful, obviously.”

Kaye frowned at him. Then our eyes met, and her expression changed, her eyebrows rising, her mouth falling open. “Oh, Miranda. It’s him, isn’t it? I knew you had a guy, but I never thought—”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m going to bed. Thank you for telling me about this.”

Frozen grass splintered under my feet. The screen door shrieked. Going upstairs felt like climbing up an M.C. Escher lithograph.

I closed and locked my hatch door, not because I needed to, but because it made me feel better. It was quiet in here, mercifully quiet. The small pink lamp next to my futon mattress bathed the bed in rose-gold light, but left the rest of the attic in shadows. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to see my easel, which was still set up with Suzanna’s portrait, or my crystal-quartz necklaces, which were hanging on the wall.

I flopped down onto my futon and hugged one of my pillows. For the first time since I’d come to Fall Island, I missed Florida. I missed the funny little house my dad and I had shared, with its overgrown gardens and its old swimming pool-turned-frog pond. I missed Rosa living right down the street. I missed all our old friends.

An irritating buzzing radiated through the room. Rhys always managed to call me when I felt at my absolute worst, as if he were psychic! I leapt to my feet and tore my phone out of my purse, ready to tell Rhys to leave me alone before I called the police.

Then I saw the name flashing up on the screen. Owen. He must have gotten my message from earlier, in the graveyard. It felt like days ago.

Answer
, I told myself.
Answer it!

But I couldn’t move. What on earth would I say to him? How could I trust anything he told me now, when he hadn’t mentioned something so devastatingly important?

It rang twice more, then stopped. After a few moments, it buzzed again: voicemail. I stared at it, trying to sort out my thoughts—but that was impossible. I pressed play, my hands shaking.

“Miranda, it’s me.” Owen’s voice made my chest ache. How could I
miss
him? God, I was so messed up.

“Sorry I missed your call,” he said. “I’m in California. Going to visit my dad and stepmom. My flight just landed, matter of fact.” In the background, an intercom crackled, and trollies beeped. I imagined him standing in a corner of the airport, looking very rugged and out of place among a lot of gray carpeting and potted plants. My heart gave another painful twinge. I slumped back on my bed, still cradling the phone to my ear.