CHAPTER 33
Cory
The interrogation room could double as a meat locker. It’s freezing in here, so cold that I can see little puffs of air in front of my mouth, but no one makes a move to turn up the heat. Maybe this is a form of torture? Slowly turn the musician to ice; that’ll get him to talk. I’ve done nothing but talk for twenty minutes now. Tired of rehashing the past, I take in the room for a long moment.
White walls and steel gray furniture added to the atmosphere—cold, hard, no-nonsense, wouldn’t want anyone to get too comfortable or think this was a friendly chat. I shift in my chair, exhausted by the questions the two men across from me have asked all afternoon, knowing they aren’t close to wrapping up. We’ve already run through the story once and I’m currently on the second time around, but they keep pressing for more details. More descriptions. More information. At first I was hesitant. Now the release of long-held secrets feels a bit liberating. Finally, I can be done with hiding.
“So when you arrived, Miss Rogers was already drunk?”
Miss Rogers. Ten years ago, I thought I was in love. Until today, I didn’t even know her last name.
“Yes.”
“And what had she been drinking?”
“Does it matter? We were teenagers. She shouldn’t have been drinking anything.” Liberating sure, but they’ve asked this question three times already and I know they were taking notes.
“Just answer the question, Mr. Minor.”
“Vodka and two bottles of beer. Like I said already, that was all I saw her drink, but there were empty bottles scattered everywhere. Maybe they were hers, maybe someone else’s.” I scan my memory, remembering the bottles, the clear liquid running down Angela’s chin. I should have thrown them away, carried her to my car, driven her to safety. I should have done so much more.
“And after you saw her drinking, how much time passed before she jumped into the lake?”
By then I was drunk, and the memories were fuzzy. Still, I know the timeline; I’ve mentally replayed everything a million times in my head since that night. “A little more than thirty, I think. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but I remember when I arrived and what the clock on my dashboard read when I drove home.”
“Did you try to stop her?”
“Yes.”
“And she wouldn’t listen? Why weren’t you successful? A big guy like you, why couldn’t you keep her from going into the water?”
I study the man. “I was seventeen, a little smaller than I am now. And I was drunk too.”
The officer makes a note on the pad in front of him, then folds his fingers together and looks at me. “So we have two drunk teenagers that more than likely couldn’t hold their liquor sitting by the pond late at night. An age old case of bad combinations.”
I lick my lips, despising the idea of being just another cliché. Another statistic. So many years of mind-altering worry came down to this harsh reality. The officers share a look, one I can’t quite decipher. Probably something along the lines of why are teenagers so stupid? I’ve been asking myself that for years.
“The witness says he heard you scream at Angela. Something about not swimming in her condition. What were you referring to? Anything other than the alcohol?”
I swallow. Two hours ago, this revelation hit like a hand grenade to the face. A witness. Someone who saw and heard everything. Someone behind that light that had flickered off in the distance.
A flashlight. A young boy, outside looking for a misplaced Gameboy after dark, his house separated from the park’s edge by a chain link fence. He’d been eight years old at the time, curious about the voices that drifted across the pond. Scared but too involved in the happenings to head inside, he turned off the flashlight, climbed the fence, and crept unnoticed toward the two teenagers in front of him. He watched the entire exchange, coming forward only last week when he saw an ad for my new album online. The kid had never forgotten my face or the way Angela screamed my name, but it wasn’t until the ad that he put two and two together. Still, thinking he was half-insane to implicate Cory Minor in a crime he’d witnessed over a decade earlier, he quietly called the police.
They called Kyle.
He called Sal.
Sal called Big Jim.
Jim came to my house and rang the doorbell.
I still don’t know all the details of the boy’s statement. Not that it matters. I’m not afraid of much anymore. The worst has finally been revealed. Still, there is my usual worry about a lawsuit; what I do know of the boy’s story rings true. What I don’t know—mainly the motive for telling it—is still up in the air. Celebrities attract lawsuits the way normal people attract local gossip. I remember the fear of being sued after Kassie’s death. That is laughable compared to this.
“Mr. Minor, did you hear the question?”
I blink, pulled from the memory. “Yes, sir.”
“Then can you please tell us what you meant by the words “In your condition?”
That she was drunk. That’s all I meant at the time, but the boy. He’d heard it all. He knew the horror of what Angela had revealed when she was vulnerable and without that wall around her that was usually so firmly in place. I want to lie. Angela can’t defend herself, and it doesn’t seem fair to drag her name farther into the dirt when what she really deserves is to rest in proverbial peace.
And there is the matter of her family. Maybe they hadn’t known. This news might devastate them, and once again I will be the cause of someone’s grief. How many lives can one man ruin in the course of a single lifetime?
A question without an answer. One that somehow still carries a death sentence. Namely mine—a hanging by self-loathing, a beheading in the gallows in front of cheering witnesses.
I stare out the window behind the officer’s head, toward the people I suspect are watching from the other side of the one-way glass. More police officers, a prosecutor or two…I can only guess the rest. Swallowing his fear of being hated by all, I sit up straighter and answer the question.
“She told me she was pregnant. She had just found out.”
I can’t hear the gasps, but it isn’t hard to imagine them.
The officer massages his temple. “Did she seem upset? Depressed? Had she shared anything else that night that might give us an indication of her state of mind?”
I look between the two men, wondering what they know. What they aren’t saying.
“She was scared, sir. That was her state of mind.”
They glance at each other, and I know. Down deep in my gut I’m certain they asked the question to be polite and that tougher ones are coming. As much as I hate this interrogation, the worst part is just now beginning.
“And that’s all? Nothing else to indicate what would drive her to drink alone by a pond so late at night? Anything that would indicate a reason for her depression. You had known her for a while, right?”
I nod. “We met the year before.”
This time the officer stares so long that beads of sweat break out on the back of my neck. The room is freezing, and I’m sweating. By this time tomorrow, the pneumonia should be fully set in.
“You spent a lot of time together?”
The hairs on my arm stand at attention. Angela’s family. If they’re watching this, they won’t be happy with my answers.
“Yes.”
“Were you ever physical?”
An accusation. One we both know the reason for. “We kissed once, that was all.” I deliver the words like a shot of whiskey. Strong and to the point, no time to mess with lighter things. It hits me then that although I’m on top of the world in my career, I’ve hit rock bottom in life. Maybe God won’t listen to someone like me, but I fire a quick prayer toward heaven that there might be a way up.
“So you kissed.” The officer seems to turn that bit of news over in his mind. “Nothing else?”
“No sir.” I run a finger across my shirt collar, the air cold air feeling warm all of a sudden.
“And in that time, she never mentioned anything to you at all? Nothing from her past? Nothing to give you a reason to question her stability?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” my lawyer says.
I ignored him, suddenly finding the way up. When you hit your lowest point, you have two choices: stay down and let the circumstances drown you, or find your footing and kick until you eventually break the surface. I decide to kick. I might not make it to the top, but at least I won’t stay in one place. Anything was better than feeling this low.
I take a deep breath and ignore my lawyer. “She mentioned an uncle.” It’s all I can manage and, my throat tightens on the last word. My stomach clenches at the meaning behind it.
The officer puts his pen down and tents his fingers, looking me in the eye. “Mr. Minor, were you aware that Angela’s uncle was released from prison three months before the accident?”
My mind reels trying to process it. Her decade-old words came rushing back Got pregnant…don’t know what I’ll do about this time.
“She told me he was still in prison,” I say.
“Then she lied to you.”
She lied. Of course she had. Why would she want me to believe otherwise? The truth was too dirty to speak when a lie would keep anyone from finding you covered in mud. Isn’t that what I had believed about myself?
My head hurts.
Eyes hurt.
Chest hurts.
In all the places a body can feel pain, mine feels it all and then triples the amount.
“Mr. Minor?”
I stare at my hands, at the tear that drips and lands on my first knuckle.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
Why?
I would have helped her.
Why?
I wouldn’t have been jealous of the guy she’d slept with. Maybe…just maybe…I might have understood. Instead, I couldn’t see past my envy.
That’s what it comes down to. My jealousy. My selfishness in wanting a part of her that someone else had experienced first. It’s the reason I didn’t stop her. It’s the reason I let her swim out alone to the middle of the pond. One look at a half-naked girl who wanted me, and I threw down my convictions for a chance to be with her. It didn’t matter that we were drunk. It didn’t matter that I was taking advantage. I wanted what I wanted, and I’ve paid for it ever since.
Failure. Coward. Cheat. Murderer.
And now add selfish to the list.
My condemnation is playing a loud cadence in my head when I remember something. A tiny detail Angela had mentioned in passing.
“But I thought…I thought…”
A heavy silence, thick with blackness darkened the room. “Thought what, Mr. Minor?”
I look at him as anger begins a slow simmer under my skin. Because this. This is everything thing wrong with a broken legal system.
“His sentence wasn’t up. If he was already out of prison, that means he didn’t serve even half of his original sentence.”
The officer says nothing, just closes his notebook and sighs. “Most of the time, the system works, but sometimes…sometimes people are released before they should be. Or in this case, sometimes technicalities happen and the wrong people are let go.” He clears his throat, visibly uncomfortable and anxious to wrap this up. The harsh glare of the spotlight is sometimes tough to handle, especially when you’re part of the problem.
“We have just one more question, and then we can all go home.” He leans back in his chair and locks both hands behind his head. “Do you have any reason to believe Miss Rogers didn’t want to be rescued? That under the circumstances, she might have—”
“No.” The word has claws that grip everyone in the room. “She didn’t want to die. She tried to swim back—kept calling for me to help her—but she got turned around. If anyone is at fault, it’s me. Not because I couldn’t reach her quickly enough, but because I was drunk. If I hadn’t made the stupid decision to drink that night, maybe things would be different now. As it was, by the time I made it out to where I saw her go under, she was gone.”
I lock the officer in an unwavering gaze. No room for argument or discussion.
“I’m telling you, without a doubt, Angela wanted to live.”