Brynn
I pause to let my words sink in, keeping my eyes on the photo of Mr. Larkin. He’s wearing his signature lemon tie, its bright colors muted in the black-and-white photo. I asked him once why he liked it, and he told me it reminded him of his favorite motto: When life hands you lemons, make lemon cake. “That’s not the saying,” I told him, feeling a small thrill that I knew more than a teacher. “It’s ‘make lemonade.’ ”
“Yeah, but I hate lemonade,” he said with a shrug. “And I love cake.”
Carly crosses her legs and taps the toe of her shoe against the table leg before reaching for her laptop. “You said this is unsolved?” she asks.
My pulse picks up at her show of interest. “For the most part, yeah.” Her eyebrows rise. “That’s usually a yes-or-no question.”
“Well, the theory is that a drifter killed him,” I explain. “There was a guy who’d started hanging around downtown a few weeks before Mr. Larkin died, swearing and yelling at people. Nobody knew who he was or what was going on with him. One day he came by Saint Ambrose and started screaming at kids during recess, so Mr. Larkin called the police and they arrested him. He spent a few days in jail, and Mr. Larkin died almost
right after he got out.” I smooth a wrinkled edge of the clipping. “The guy disappeared after that, so people think he killed Mr. Larkin in retaliation and took off.”
“Well, that’s a tidy resolution,” Carly says. “You don’t believe it?”
“I used to,” I admit. When I was in eighth grade, it made the kind of sense I needed. The notion of a violent stranger passing through town was almost comforting, in an odd way, because it meant the danger was gone. And that the danger wasn’t us—my town, my neighbors, the people I’d known for most of my life. I thought a lot about Mr. Larkin’s death over the years, but somehow I never applied a journalistic lens until I binged a season of Motive to prepare for my interview. As I watched Carly methodically break down flimsy alibis and half-baked theories, all I could think was Nobody ever did that for Mr. Larkin.
And then it hit me, finally, that I could.
“But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I moved back to Sturgis,” I continue. “And it feels too…well, just what you said. Tidy.”
“Indeed.” Carly is quiet for a few beats while she taps her keyboard. “I don’t see much media coverage on this. Just your local paper, and a couple of brief mentions in the Boston Globe. Latest story was in May, a few weeks after he died.” She squints at the screen and reads, “ ‘Close-Knit School Rocked by Teacher’s Death.’ They didn’t even call it a murder.”
My friends and I rolled our eyes at close-knit back then, even though Saint Ambrose’s motto is literally Stronger Together. Saint Ambrose runs from kindergarten through twelfth grade so that, theoretically, students can be stronger together right up until college.
Saint Ambrose is a strange kind of private school, though; it charges tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, but it’s located in run-down, unglamorous Sturgis. Every smart local kid applies in the hopes of getting their tuition covered by scholarship, so they can avoid the low-ranked Sturgis school system. But it’s not prestigious enough for people who have their pick of private schools, so the paying kids tend to be lackluster students. Which creates a have/have-not rift that not many students crossed when I was there.
In middle school, before Dad got the big promotion that sent us to Chicago, Ellie and I were scholarship students. Now we can afford the tuition, and my parents wouldn’t hear of us going to Sturgis High instead. So we’ll be heading back to Saint Ambrose in a few weeks. Stronger together.
“Yeah, it never got picked up anywhere else. I’m not sure why,” I say. Carly is still gazing at her screen. “Me either. This is true-crime catnip.
Fancy prep school, handsome young teacher murdered, his body found by a trio of rich kids?” She taps the edge of the Sturgis Times photo. “Including your buddy—what’s his name? Noah Talbot?”
“Tripp,” I say. “He goes by ‘Tripp.’ And he’s not rich.” Or my buddy. Carly blinks. “You’re telling me a kid named Tripp Talbot isn’t rich?” “It’s because he was the third Noah in his family,” I explain. “His dad
is Junior, and he’s Tripp. You know, like ‘triple’? He’s a scholarship kid, like I used to be.”
“What about the other kids?” Carly’s eyes return to her screen as she scrolls. “I don’t see any names here, although that’s not surprising, given their ages at the time.”
“Shane Delgado and Charlotte Holbrook,” I say. “Were they scholarship students too?”
“Definitely not. Shane was the richest kid at Saint Ambrose, probably,” I say. In fourth grade, when we did family trees, Shane told us that his parents had adopted him from the foster system when he was a toddler. I used to try to imagine what that must have been like—going from a life of uncertainty to one of total luxury. Shane was so young, though, that he probably doesn’t even remember. “And Charlotte was…”
I’m not sure how to best describe Charlotte. Wealthy, yes, and almost shockingly beautiful for a thirteen-year-old girl, but my strongest memory of Charlotte is of how infatuated she used to be with Shane, who never seemed to notice. That doesn’t feel like the right kind of detail to share, though, so all I say is “Also rich.”
“So what was their story?” Carly asks. “The three kids, I mean. Why were they in the woods that day?”
“They were collecting leaves for a science project,” I say. “Tripp was Shane’s partner, and Charlotte…Charlotte pretty much went wherever Shane was.”
“Who was Charlotte’s partner?” Carly asks. “Me,” I say.
“You?” Her eyes widen. “But you weren’t with them?” I shake my head, and she asks, “Why not?”
“I was busy.” My eyes stray to the photo, taking in Tripp’s thirteen- year-old self: all skinny limbs, braces, and too-short blond hair. When I learned that I’d be moving back to Sturgis, curiosity got the better of me. I looked him up on social media, and was shocked to see he’s had an epic glow-up since I saw him last. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and the hair that always used to be in a crew cut is longer and attractively tousled, framing bright blue eyes that were always his best feature. The braces are off, and his smile is wide and confident—no, cocky, I decided. Tripp Talbot got unfairly and undeservedly hot, and worst of all, he knows it. All of which I added to my list of reasons to dislike him.
“Too busy to do your homework?” Carly asks.
“I was finishing a story for the school paper,” I say.
It’s true; back then I was always finishing a story. The Saint Ambrose Sentinel, our middle-school paper, had become my life, and I worked there most afternoons. Still, I could’ve made time for the leaf-gathering excursion. But I didn’t, because I knew Tripp would be there.
We used to be friends; in fact, between sixth and eighth grades, we were in and out of one another’s houses so much that his dad used to joke about adopting me, and my parents made a habit of stocking up on Tripp’s favorite snacks. We had all the same classes, and friendly competition for grades. Then, the day before Mr. Larkin died, Tripp loudly told me, in front of our entire gym class, to stop following him around and asking him to be my boyfriend. When I laughed, thinking he had to be joking, he called me a stalker.
Even now my skin crawls with remembered humiliation, how awful it felt to have my classmates snicker while Coach Ramirez tried to defuse the
situation. And the worst thing was, I had no idea why Tripp had said that. I’d been at his house doing homework just the day before, and we’d gotten along fine. There was nothing I’d said or done that he could’ve misinterpreted. I hadn’t so much as flirted with him, ever; the thought had never crossed my mind.
After Charlotte, Shane, and Tripp found Mr. Larkin, there was something strangely glamorous about the three of them—as though they’d aged a decade in the woods that day, and knew things the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand. Tripp, who hadn’t been at all friendly with Shane and Charlotte before, was absorbed into their group as though he’d always been there. I never spoke to him again; people used to roll their eyes if I so much as looked in his direction, like my alleged crush was even more pathetic now that he was a semi-celebrity. It was a relief, two months later, when my dad’s transfer to Chicago went through and we moved away.
I’m not going into that level of detail with Carly, though. Nothing screams I’m still in high school louder than being mad at a boy for embarrassing you in gym class.
“Fascinating to think you were almost a murder witness, isn’t it?” Carly says. She squints at her laptop. “This says there was no physical evidence left at the scene, beyond fingerprints from one of the boys picking up the murder weapon. Was that Tripp?”
“No, that was Shane.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Did people think he might’ve done it?”
“No,” I say. I certainly didn’t back then, and even though I haven’t seen Shane since eighth grade, it’s still hard to imagine. Not because Shane was rich and popular but because he always seemed so laid-back and, well, uncomplicated. “He was just a kid, and he got along great with Mr. Larkin. He had no reason to hurt him.”
Carly just nods, like she’s reserving judgment on that. “Did anyone?” “Not that I ever heard.”
Carly gestures at the laptop screen. “This article says your teacher had been looking into a recent theft at your school?”
“Yeah. Somebody stole an envelope full of money that had been raised for the eighth-grade class trip to New York. It was more than a thousand dollars,” I say. That happened at the end of March, and I was excited to have actual news to report. Mr. Larkin was asked to lead the internal Saint Ambrose investigation, so I interviewed him almost daily. “The school searched our lockers after Mr. Larkin died, and they found the envelope in Charlotte’s locker.”
“Charlotte from the woods?” Carly asks, a note of incredulity creeping into her voice. “Let me see if I have this straight. One of the witnesses leaves his fingerprints on the murder weapon, another took the money your teacher was looking for, and—what? Nothing happens to either of them?” I nod, and she folds her arms. “Let me tell you something. Things would have been a lot different if kids of color had been involved.”
“I know.” I hadn’t considered it at the time, but I did when I thought about the case during my Motive binge—the way that Tripp, Charlotte, and Shane had gotten to be kids. They weren’t doubted, or scrutinized, or railroaded, even though nobody other than the three of them could corroborate their story. “But Charlotte said she didn’t know how the envelope got there,” I add.
I’d been hoping to interview her about it, but I never got the chance. After Mr. Larkin died, all extracurricular activities were put on hold for a few weeks, and when they started up again, our head of school, Mr. Griswell, told me I couldn’t report on the theft anymore. “This school needs to heal,” he said, and I was too shell-shocked over Mr. Larkin’s murder to argue.
“Okay.” Carly leans back in her chair and spins in a slow semicircle. “Congratulations, Brynn Gallagher, you have officially captured my interest.”
I almost bounce in my seat. “So you’ll cover Mr. Larkin?”
Carly puts up a hand. “Whoa, hold up. A lot more goes into that kind of decision than just—this.” She waves a hand at my folder, and I flush, suddenly feeling naïve and out of my depth. Carly seems to notice, softening her tone as she adds, “But I like your instincts. This is absolutely
the sort of case we’d consider. Plus, your portfolio is solid, and you don’t let a few dick pics get you down. So, what the hell. Why not, right?”
She pauses, waiting for my response, but that’s not quite enough information for me to go on. “Why not what?” I ask.
Carly stops spinning her chair. “That was me offering you the job.” “Really?” The word comes out like a squeak.
“Really,” Carly confirms, and a surge of excitement—mixed with relief
—buzzes through my veins. It’s the first good news I’ve had in a long time, and the first sign that maybe, possibly, I haven’t blown my entire future. Carly glances at a calendar on the whiteboard, where the month of December is so overbooked that it’s impossible to read anything from where I’m sitting. “Are you in school right now or on break?”
“No. I mean, it’s not break yet, but we only moved back last week, so my parents figured we could start classes with the new semester in January.”
“Great. How about you come in around ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and we’ll get you started with orientation?” I just nod, because I don’t trust myself not to squeak again. Then she adds, “And by all means, write up what we discussed about your teacher, and I’ll have one of our producers take a look when they have time. Can’t hurt, right? And who knows.” Carly closes her laptop and stands, signaling that my time is up, for now. “Maybe we’ll get a story out of it.”
