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the lab. Listen, Jeremy, I was just talking to your mom,” he said. “We want you to come in for a polygraph reading.”
    â€œHuh? Polygraph?”
    â€œSome people call it a lie detector, but it’s not really. It’s—”
    â€œI didn’t lie to you!” I burst out. I really hadn’t lied, just left one thing out.
    He looked at me kind of funny. “It’s a routine informational reading, not anything official. Not admissible in court, like a statement. It’s just to help us sort things out. Everyone concerned with this case is taking a polygraph test.”
    â€œMy sister?” I asked.
    â€œYes, and the other girls as well.”
    â€œNathan?”
    â€œI can’t divulge that.”
    I walked home and let myself in the back door. The house was quiet. A note on the kitchen table said Mom and the brat were sleeping. I didn’t want to sleep yet. Went to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water and glanced at the mirror over the sink. Funny, the way my mind was swimming, I expected to see me with gray hair like the coroner’s. But I looked just the same as before.

chapter five
    I thought of calling off work that night, but then what would I do? Sit around the house and pick my nose? So I drank coffee to force my eyes open and then I went. I guess Mom figured I was okay to drive, because she let me take the car, but maybe her judgment wasn’t so great that day. When I punched in, Rose took one look at me and said, “You’re on counter. I don’t want you driving deliveries.” Rose is tough and nice. Owns the place, Rose’s Italian Café and Take-Out. Three square tables and a bench, red and green tile on the walls, pictures pasted together out of colored macaroni.
    A sign over the door says, BEST FOOD IN PINTO RIVER. Actually, it’s the only food in Pinto River. Besides Rose’s café, there’s the GGG, Gingrich’s Grocery and General Store, which is where you can usually find Mr. Gingrich, though I guess not today. And there’s the church, Pinto River Presbyterian, and a gas station, and a video rental place, and a woman who does haircuts in her kitchen, and that’s about it, except some old houses with plaster deer in front, and the school complex, and my development. The nearest real town, with a Cinemax and a WalMart, is twenty miles away.
    Usually when I work at Rose’s I do delivery, and I get good tips that way. I hate counter because hardly anybody tips and some people are really rude.
    That night, every single person who came in wanted to talk about Aaron. The murder, I mean. They’d make comments to me, like, “He was your friend, wasn’t he, Jeremy?” and my gut would twist itself into a granny knot and all I could do was nod and say, “You want cheese on that?”
    It wasn’t any better when they didn’t know me and just talked among themselves. “I heard they finished the autopsy,” one old guy said to his wife, girlfriend, whatever, while they were sitting on the bench waiting for their stromboli. “I heard they counted seventy-three slices and stab wounds.”
    â€œ How many?” Her voice went shrill.
    â€œSeventy-three.”
    â€œHow can they count that many in just his neck?”
    â€œI don’t know. They say his head was just about cut off. They say whoever it was kept stabbing him after he was dead. They hacked right through his spine, just left a thread of skin at the back of his neck.”
    I ducked down behind the counter, pretending I was looking for something, so they wouldn’t see my face. I felt like I was going to puke.
    It didn’t help that some guy called across the room to them, “There were lots of cuts in his hands and arms, I heard. Like he flung up his hands trying to defend himself.”
    The woman said, “I heard it was awful. All that blood. They wouldn’t let his parents look at him.