“How could I raise it? I didn’t know.”

“How familiar were you with the car?”

Jeremy thought. “The first time I saw that car was when I got in it. When I was shitfaced. The second time I saw it was yesterday, parked out front of Madeline’s house.”

I’d been there. Jeremy didn’t go anywhere near it, so he couldn’t have looked inside it, wouldn’t have noticed what was between the front seats.

“Look, Mr. Weaver, Mom and Bob and Mr. Finch and Madeline and even Mr. Broadhurst all talked about the best way to get me off, and they came up with, you know, the whole Big Baby thing. And even though I hated it, at least I’m not in jail now.”

“True enough,” I said. “But is it possible, Jeremy, that you didn’t want the stick-shift thing to come up?” I was diving down for that theory, seeing if it could be brought back to the surface, given mouth-to-mouth.

“Huh?”

“Is it possible it did come up, and you shot it down?”

I might as well have told him the sky was green, the way he looked at me. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was putting on a show. Overreacting on purpose.

“That’s nuts,” he said.

“Tell me about Charlene.”

“What about Charlene?”

“Were things a little more serious with her that night than you’ve let on? Was she your girlfriend? Were you seeing her and Sian at the same time?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Help me out here, Jeremy. Something about this is not right. Let me ask you again. All this time, have you been taking the blame for someone else? Willingly?”

“What?”

“I noticed Charlene knows her way around a stick shift. And she made a point yesterday of saying that Sian ran in front of the car, that anyone would have hit her, drunk or not. Why would she say that?”

“That’s just her opinion.” He shook his head angrily. “This is all bullshit.”

I had another question, but we had almost reached our contemplative guy. He must have heard us coming, because he opened his eyes and turned to look in our direction.

“We’ll talk about this later,” I whispered to Jeremy.

“I don’t think so,” he whispered back.

The man on the beach gave us a broad smile. “Hey.”

“You had a real Zen thing going on there,” I said.

The man nodded. “I guess so. It’s just so . . . wonderful.”

“Yup,” I said. I’ve always been a master of small talk. I glanced at Jeremy, who was looked slightly shell-shocked. His eyes weren’t focused on this new guy, or anything else for that matter. He was just staring.

“Haven’t seen you on the beach before,” the man said.

“We just got here,” I told him.