“Did you kill Laura?”

“No.”

“How do you know? You said you don’t remember a thing. You said Dada left without the bat, and the boy who attacked Laura was unconscious in the softball field. That leaves you and the bat, Finn. Maybe you picked it up. Maybe you did what you’d been doing all night. You followed Laura to the north beach.”

Finn squeezed his head with big hands. His fingernails were chewed and bloody. “No.”

“How do you know?” Stride repeated.

“Leave me alone,” Finn said. His yellowing skin burned crimson. He covered his eyes.

“I think Rikke lied for you because she thinks you killed Laura.”

“No.” His voice was muffled. Sweat dripped down his face like tears and spilled off his chin.

“How can you be sure?”

Finn clutched his fingers into fists and beat against his forehead. “I’m not sure! Does that make you happy? I don’t know! I don’t remember! For all I know, I took that fucking bat and beat her into a pulp. Okay? You try living with that. You try not knowing if you murdered a girl. See what that does to your life.”

He shoved his way past Stride and ran for his car.

As Stride watched Finn climb into his vehicle, he remembered talking to Rikke about geometry and realized he was seeing the parallel postulate at work again. He was watching two lines intersect.

Two lines he would have preferred remain parallel, never touching, so that the past didn’t infect the present.

Finn drove a silver RAV.

24
___________

There was no escape from the heat.

Even on the Point, which usually enjoyed a cool breeze off the lake, the evening air was stifling. Stride parked in the mud near his cottage. Heat radiated off the dirt, and the leaves drooped in the trees around him. Serena wasn’t home. He didn’t bother going inside but instead climbed the shallow dune in order to watch the dusk descend on the lake. He and Serena kept two chairs in the sand at the crest of the hill, where they often sat to drink coffee in the mornings.

One of the chairs was occupied. It was Tish.

She didn’t look at him as he took a seat next to her. Her eyes were locked in the distance, watching sailboats on the water. She had a plastic bag in her lap, which she protected with both hands, as if it were a child that might squirm away and fall. They didn’t say anything. The lake was still, like pale blue china, and the line where the sky and the water met was lost in a sticky haze.

“I went to the wrong house,” she said finally.

Stride didn’t reply.

“It was the house where you and Cindy used to live. The people there told me how to find you.”

“I haven’t lived there in a long time.”

“I know,” Tish said, turning to study his face. “Cindy showed me a photograph of your house once. I never forgot it. I recognized it as soon as I saw it. I guess I never really thought about all the time that had passed. Somehow I thought you’d still be there. Cindy, too. I suppose that sounds crazy.”