“The girl never got her memory back, is that it?”

“No, she never did.

“You know, we rigged up a line, used dummies with the kid’s approximate weights and tried to do a reenactment of that day. We pitched rocks, we played with the tie lines. We did it all. The final result was death by misadventure. I will say one thing, though. Whoever threw those rocks had one hell of a pitching arm. Even some of my guys couldn’t whack the dummies we had sliding down that zip line. If you’re going to ask me if it was an accident, my answer would be, I just don’t know. This town was in such an uproar, we had to bring closure as fast as we could. To this day I don’t know if we were right or wrong. I never want to see anything like that ever again.

“How are you going to write that all up, son?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Wallaby. The camera foil, did it have fingerprints on it? Where is it? Did it go into an evidence bag?”

“It was smudged, no prints could be retrieved. I’m sure it’s been filed away somewhere. We never threw evidence away,” Wallaby huffed.

“If you were me, where would you look? Who would you home in on?”

Wallaby didn’t have to think about his answer. “The twins. The girl especially. The boy was pretty wimpy as I recall. That little girl had a mouth on her that was downright sinful. She was bossy as all get-out. That first day we had the three of them together, and she called the shots. She answered for all of them. I think, mind you, this is just my opinion, it was so they could all get their stories straight. What really amazed me was they didn’t buckle. Little kids as a rule are afraid of the uniform. When it was his turn, the Ward kid just stood there next to his parents and gave us his story real straightforward, and that was that. He said he was at the pond earlier with Jeff King, and no one else was there so they went home. If he was lying, I sure couldn’t tell. What good is this going to do if you dredge it up all over again?”

“Don’t you think Cady Jordan deserves to know what happened?”

“Sometimes the truth is bitter, Larry. It’s that old let sleeping dogs lie thing, if you know what I mean.”

“You know what, Mr. Wallaby, she has a right to know the truth, even if it is bitter. She’s all grown-up now, and I think she can handle it. How would you like to go through life with everyone thinking you’d had something to do with a friend’s death? That has to lie pretty heavy on a young person’s shoulders. She has to be able to get past it. Otherwise, how can she move on with her life?”

“Yes, I guess you have a point, Larry. The fallout, I’m thinking, is going to be horrendous.”