One Night. No Alibis

Chapter three: No Alibis

They met at Zach's house because it was the one place no parent would be for at least four hours. His mom worked Tuesday nights. His stepdad traveled. The house was always either too empty or too loud, and tonight it was the former: dim, slightly cold, with dishes in the sink and the particular stillness of a place that didn't get cleaned until someone was coming over.

Ava sat on one end of the couch. Riley was beside her with her knees pulled up. Logan took the armchair the way he always took whatever position was slightly elevated, slightly apart. Zach leaned against the kitchen doorframe. Caleb sat on the floor with his back against the wall and said nothing for a long time.

'We need to figure out what we actually know,' Logan said.

'What we know is that Sienna is dead and the police are going to keep asking questions,' Zach said. 'That's all I know.'

'They're not going to figure it out,' Logan said. 'Rowan is fine but this is a small department. They don't have the resources. And they're going to spend the first two weeks chasing the wrong things.'

'So what, we investigate?' Riley looked uncertain. 'Us?'

'We knew her,' Ava said. 'We were there. We have context that the police don't, not yet.'

It felt like a reasonable argument while she was making it, and it continued to feel reasonable even though she knew, underneath the reasoning, that part of what drove her was simpler and more personal. She had seen Sienna's face in the hallway. She had heard those words. I told you I would handle it. She was, in some way she couldn't fully explain, already involved.

The tension in the room was quieter than she expected but more persistent. It moved through the silences rather than the conversations, in the way each of them avoided certain statements, certain direct looks. Riley was the most visibly unsettled. Zach had something coiled behind his flippancy tonight that wasn't usually there. Logan was controlled in a way that felt deliberate rather than natural. And Caleb sat against the wall and watched and said almost nothing at all, which was unusual even for Caleb.

'Let's start with what we each actually saw,' Ava said. 'Without the versions we've been telling people all day. What do we actually remember?'

Logan said he'd seen Sienna near the fireplace around eleven-thirty and then hadn't noticed her again. Zach said he'd been doing the card trick and wasn't paying attention to much else. Riley said she'd waved at Sienna across the room sometime around eleven but they hadn't spoken. Caleb said he hadn't really tracked her movements.

None of them mentioned the phone.

Ava said nothing about that yet. She was still deciding.

'Where was everyone when the sirens came?' she asked instead.

Logan: still at the party, inside. Zach: same. Riley: she'd been in the kitchen. Caleb: he'd stepped out to the back patio for a while, he wasn't sure exactly when.

'How long is a while?' Ava asked.

Caleb looked at her with an expression she couldn't fully read. 'Twenty minutes, maybe. I needed some air.'

'Anyone with you?'

A pause that was maybe a half-second too long. 'No.'

Ava nodded and let it go, filing it carefully.

She walked home alone because she lived close enough and needed the air herself, and it was on the shortcut through the park's outer path, not the park itself but the paved strip running alongside the fence, that she saw it.

It was in the grass just off the path, caught on a ridge of dirt near the fence post: a bracelet, silver chain with a small constellation charm, one of the links clearly snapped. Ava had seen it on Sienna's wrist dozens of times. She crouched and looked at it for a long moment, not touching it. Then she took a photo with her phone.

She stood up and looked at the fence and at the path and at the darkness beyond the park's tree line, and felt the cold in a new way.

The bracelet was ten feet from the park entrance, and it had not been there in the photo Riley had taken of Sienna at the party earlier that night, the one she'd posted before things went wrong. In the photo, the bracelet was intact on Sienna's wrist.

Something had happened on this path. Or just past it.