I slide my arm around her shoulders. “He won’t. I promise you there is no way I’m going to let anyone hurt you, but you have to talk to Officer Grady. You have to help him find the people who hurt Cora so they can’t hurt anyone ever again. Okay?”

“I don’t think I can,” she says, looking helplessly up at me.

“Of course you can. You’re my brave girl, right?”

“You can’t catch someone who is already dead, can you?” she asks and it takes me a second to realize she’s serious. She thinks a ghost or a ghoul, whatever this Joseph Wither is, stabbed her best friend and evaporated into thin air.

“Who else was there, Violet? Who else hurt Cora?”

She hesitates but finally speaks. “Jordyn.”

“Jordyn?” I repeat. “Jordyn helped stab Cora?”

Violet shakes her head. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. We were just going to play a joke on Cora. Scare her, but Cora wasn’t scared. She said she already knew that we were going to play a trick on her—that she wasn’t scared one bit. That she knew that Wither wasn’t going to hurt her. He loved her.” Violet pauses in her story to take a deep breath.

“Jordyn called her crazy, said he wasn’t real, and Cora said he was. Jordyn pushed Cora down. Hard. She fell against the train tracks. That’s when I ran. I ran and hid.”

I’m afraid to speak. Afraid that my voice will interrupt Violet’s train of thought and she’ll stop talking. But I have so many questions. When I’m sure that Violet isn’t going to go on, I say, “If Jordyn pushed Cora down, don’t you think it makes sense she stabbed her, too?”

Violet shakes her head. “No, Jordyn ran away, too. I saw her run.”

“But she could have come back, right?”

“I saw something moving through the grass. It was going toward Cora. She was sitting on the tracks holding her arm and crying.” Violet shivers and presses her face into my neck. “I couldn’t watch. I ran away but I heard the screams. I swear someone else was there. It was him. It was Joseph Wither.”

“Oh, Violet,” I say, holding her more tightly. “You have to tell Officer Grady all of this. You have to tell him everything.”

“But Jordyn will hate me. She told me not to say anything.”

“When? When did she tell you this?” I ask. I had no idea that Jordyn and Violet had even spoken since the overnight.

“She called the house last night. We talked for just a second.” Violet sniffles. “She told me not to say anything about their fight. She said if I was her friend I wouldn’t say a word.”