“Why?”
Pollard turned his attention to Summer, then Quentin. “You’re journalists,” he said. “Can’t you just investigate this?”
Quentin exhaled hard. “Mr. Pollard,” he said. “My mother’s younger sister was killed at the gas station where you worked.”
“I know. And I’m so sorry.”
“Were you there that day?”
“No.”
“Did April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy expect you to be there?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?” Summer said. Quentin glanced at her—those enormous cat eyes, that glow-in-the-dark pale skin, that redhair blazing furiously. Summer’s looks were as arresting as her rat-a-tat speech pattern, and she had a powerful effect on the people she interviewed, like a human interrogation lamp. Quentin had seen subjects break under her unblinking stare, revealing more than they ever intended. “Quentin and I always thought it was random,” she was saying to Pollard. “The police report says the Arco station massacre was a botched robbery. LeRoy had stopped there for gas and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold the place up.”
“That may have been.”
Quentin said, “You don’t think it had anything to do with you?”
“I know it didn’t.”
“How can you know?”
“I just do.”
“Mr. Pollard,” Quentin said. “Even if LeRoy went to your station out of revenge or jealousy. Or if April Cooper secretly wanted to see you again—”
“She didn’t.”
“I’m saying it isn’t your fault.” He kept his tone low, measured. “None of it is your fault. Just like it wasn’t my grandfather’s fault for taking Kimmy to the Arco station. You can be honest with us. It will go no further than here.”
Pollard’s jaw flexed. “Are you recording this conversation?”
Quentin felt Summer’s gaze on him. “I’d never record you without your permission,” he said.
“I’m going to need you to take your phones out and turn them off.”
Summer removed her phone from her purse and placed it on his desk. “It’s turned off already, sir,” she said.
Quentin removed his phone from his jacket pocket. He powered it down and set it next to Summer’s, longing for his pen recorder, his eyes fixed on Pollard’s neat desk, lest someone look into them andread his thoughts. “You aren’t being recorded, Mr. Pollard,” he said. Which technically was not a lie.
Pollard glanced at the door, then turned his attention back to Quentin, his gaze intense enough to give off heat. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so low it was barely audible. “I met April after the shooting took place.”
“What?” Quentin and Summer said it in unison.
Pollard was staring at his hands, clasped against the polished desk as though he were praying for the strength to say more. “I met her,” he said, “after the Gideon fire.”
DURING THE SUMMERbetween his junior and senior year in high school, an honors student, varsity quarterback, and part-time gas station attendant fell in love with a presumed-dead, fugitive murderer and harbored her for twenty-four hours, his parents and younger brother never the wiser. She’d shown up at the gas station where he worked, half dead from hunger and exhaustion. And instead of calling the police, he’d made a gut decision and hustled her out of there before anyone took notice. He’d given her food, shown her around town, shared his deepest secrets with her, and made sure she got out safely, after which he’d gone on with his life, telling no one about his “first love” for more than forty years. It sounded like a pitch for some ill-conceived romance novel, but Pollard swore it was true. Every word of it. And, during the brief time Quentin spent in his presence, he was inclined to believe him.
It wasn’t Pollard’s respectable demeanor. Quentin had met plenty of people, not just in his career but throughout his life, whose kindly exteriors housed evil, untrustworthy hearts. It was something else—the earnestness with which he talked about April Cooper, maybe—that made Quentin think that, whether or not Robin Diamond’smother, Renee, truly was the infamous teenage murderer, George Pollard believed she was. “We hid out in a movie theater—a revival house on the outskirts of town,” he was saying now. “We sat through the same movie for three screenings—at first it was so she could stay hidden. But at some point...”
“Yes?” Summer said.
“At some point, she stopped being who she was and I stopped being who I was, and we were just two teenagers, watching an old movie. Holding hands in the dark.”
Quentin glanced at Summer. He wished his phone were recording. “You never forgot her,” he said.