“Do you remember what she was wearing?”
He looked into his beer, as if to find the answer there. “A shirt? A sweater, maybe? Jeans, I think. I didn’t notice, to be honest.” He drained his bottle and got up. “You sure you don’t want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said. On the drive out, I’d rehearsed a series of questions in my mind, but none of them seemed especially important any more, and being there was making me less comfortable by the minute. “Can I just use your restroom, and then I’ll be on my way?”
He looked at me, his face emotionless. “Sure, Max, you know where it is.”
I nodded. When I reached the little room at the end of the hall, I swung the door shut behind me and leaned heavily on the sink, my pale face gazing back at me from the medicine cabinet’s mirror. I was running out of options. Professor Farmer had been no help, and I was clueless where to go next. If Detective Branigan didn’t know about Katie and me yet, well, he’d know soon, and my ability to find out what had really happened would be severely limited—limited to the inside of a jail cell, probably.
I sat down on the crocheted toilet cover—where had that monstrosity come from?—and buried my face in my hands. I had no idea what to do.
When I looked up again, I found myself staring blankly at the professor’s white wicker laundry hamper, 18 inches in front of me. In the narrow gaps between the wicker slats, I caught glimpses of the blue of a pair of jeans, the white of a T-shirt, the red of—
The red of—
As if in a trance, I lifted the hamper lid and looked inside. Dirty shirts, underwear, jeans. The hint of red, barely visible through the slats, was completely invisible from above. Wincing at the smell of somebody else’s dirty laundry, I held my breath and dug a hand deep into the pile, burrowed down past the denim and cotton and linen and pulled free—a red sweatshirt.
On the front were the words “Property of Hingham Hockey.” Inside was a label with my name on it.
I breathed deeply and stared down at it, confused and disbelieving.
What was my sweatshirt doing in Professor Farmer’s bathroom?
I searched the rest of the hamper, dumped its contents onto the tile floor and went through everything, piece by piece. And buried way down at the bottom were a pair of flared jeans much too small and feminine to be the professor’s, a lilac bra and matching panties, and a pair of flipflops with tiny red lobsters on the straps.
Katie’s, all Katie’s.
I went out to the living room, holding the sweatshirt hidden behind my back.
“Professor?” I said. He looked up blearily from a fresh bottle of #9. “Katie was wearing a sweater last night, you think?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Max, I just don’t recall. There were 15, 16 kids here. I don’t remember who wore—”
I should have run out of the house, jumped in my car and gone straight to Detective Branigan. Looking back at it now, I know that. I was a full head shorter than the professor and he probably had a good 60 pounds on me, but something inside me made me stand my ground, made me pull the sweatshirt out from behind my back and say, “Are you sure it wasn’t a sweatshirt?”
His eyes snapped into cold focus.