Roadside Crosses

seventeen,” her mother raged, “that’s what!”
    Dance said evenly, “I’ve called an accident reconstruction service, Caitlin. They’re going to look over your car at the police impound lot. They measure things like seat and rearview mirror adjustment. They can tell the height of the driver.”
    The girl was completely still, though her jaw trembled.
    “Caitlin, it’s time to tell the truth. A lot depends on it. Other people’s lives are at stake.”
    “What truth?” her mother whispered.
    Dance kept her eyes on the girl. “Caitlin was driving the car that night. Not Travis.”
    “No!” Virginia Gardner wailed.
    “Weren’t you, Caitlin?”
    The teenager said nothing for a minute. Then her head dropped, her chest collapsed. Dance read pain and defeat through her body. Her kinesic message was: Yes.
    Her voice breaking, Caitlin said, “Mike left with that little slut hanging on him and her hand down the back of his jeans! I knew they went back to his place to fuck. I was going to drive there . . . I was going to . . .”
    “All right,” her mother ordered, “that’s enough.”
    “Be quiet!” the girl yelled to her mother and started to sob. She turned to Dance. “Yes, I was driving!” The guilt had finally detonated within her.
    Dance continued, “After the accident Travis pulled you into the passenger seat and he got in the driver’s. He pretended he was driving. He did that to save you.”
    She thought back to the initial interview with Travis.
    I didn’t do anything wrong!
    The boy’s assertion had registered as deceptive to Dance. But she believed that he meant he was lying about the attack on Tammy; in fact what he’d done wrong was to lie about who was driving the car that night.
    The idea had occurred to Dance when she was looking over the house of Travis—Medicus—and his family in Aetheria. The fact that the boy spent virtually every moment he could in the DimensionQuest game as a doctor and healer, not a killer like Stryker, made her begin to doubt the boy’s tendency toward violence. And when she’d learned that his avatar had been willing to sacrifice his life for the Elvish queen, she realized that it was possible Travis had done the same in the real world—taking the blame for the car crash so that the girl he admired from afar wouldn’t go to jail.
    Caitlin, tears flowing from her closed eyes, pressed back into the couch, her body a knot of tension. “I just lost it. We got drunk and I wanted to go find Mike and tell him what a shit he was. Trish and Vanessa were more wasted than me so I was going to drive, but Travis followed me outside and kept trying to stop me. He tried to take the keys. But I wouldn’t let him. I was so mad. Trish and Vanessa were in the backseat and Travis just jumped in the passenger seat and hewas like, ‘Pull over, Caitlin, come on, you can’t drive.’ But I was acting like an asshole.
    “I just kept going, ignoring him. And then, I don’t know what happened, we went off the road.” Her voice faded and her expression was one of the most sorrowful and forlorn Kathryn Dance had ever seen, as she whispered, “And I killed my friends.”
    Caitlin’s mother, her face white and bewildered, eased forward tentatively. She put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. The girl stiffened momentarily and then surrendered, sobbing and pressing her head against her mother’s chest.
    After a few minutes, the woman, crying herself, looked at Dance. “What’s going to happen?”
    “You and your husband should find a lawyer for Caitlin. Then call the police right away. She should surrender voluntarily. The sooner the better.”
    Caitlin wiped her face. “It’s hurt so bad, lying. I was going to say something. I really, really was. But then people started to attack Travis—all those things they said—and I knew if I told the truth they’d attack me.” She lowered her head. “I couldn’t do it. All those things people’d say about me . . . they’d be up on their site forever.”
    More worried about her image than the deaths of her friends.
    But Dance wasn’t here to expiate the teenager’s guilt. All she’d needed was confirmation of her theory that Travis had taken the fall for Caitlin. She rose and left the mother and daughter, offering the briefest of farewells.
    Outside, jogging toward her car, she hit speed-dial button three—Michael O’Neil.
    He answered on the second ring. Thank God the Other Case wasn’t keeping