Shade Me by Jennifer Brown Page A

him?”
    â€œWell, for starters, what was his relationship with Peyton like?”
    I rolled my eyes. “Detective, I already told you. I’m not friends with the Hollises. I don’t know anything about Dru Hollis.”
    â€œBut you’ve spent some time with him since the incident,” he said.
    The smell of the coffee wafted up, intoxicating. “Well, yeah, but it’s not like I’m sitting there asking for details of his childhood.”
    The detective nodded and licked his lips. I ran my fingers along my robe belt, just to make sure it was still intact. “Fair enough,” he said. “Do you know anything about whether or not he’s been traveling lately? Maybe to Vegas? Or anyplace else, recently, where he might have caught up with some old friends? Or has he been pretty much staying around Brentwood? What has he been up to these days?”
    I shrugged. “We haven’t talked about that, either,” I said. “We’re not spending our time sharing our secrets like besties. His sister is lying in a hospital bed.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Does he have secrets to share?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t mean . . . How would I know?” I squinted. “What are you getting at, exactly? Do you think Dru had something to do with Peyton’s attack?” He remained maddeningly straight-faced, and instantly I was taken back to those early days after Mom’s death. All questions, no answers, and a ton of jumping to conclusions that never got any of us anywhere. Dad was right—cops were all alike, no matterhow much yellow I saw when I was around one. I cocked my head to one side. “He’s been by his sister’s bedside since she was brought in. He has been worried sick. He’s cried. I’ve seen it myself. That’s what I know about Dru Hollis.”
    â€œYes, he’s been very interested in Peyton’s care,” Detective Martinez said. But his face was grim as he brought his coffee to his lips.
    â€œYou know, I really need to get ready for school,” I said. I opened the front door, holding the knob in my hand, hoping that my robe wasn’t gaping open, but too irritated to really worry about it too much if it was.
    He hesitated, then gave a single nod and headed toward the door.
    â€œOh, and here. You can have this back,” I said, holding the coffee out toward him. “I don’t like French vanilla.”
    He took the coffee and stepped out. I slammed the door after him, then watched through the window as he pulled the lid off my drink and dumped it out in the grass. And kept watching until he got into his car and left.
    I leaned against the front door for a moment. Clearly he was suspicious of Dru. But was it normal check-out-the-family suspicious, or was there something more to it? Or was he, like the cops on my mom’s case, just completely clueless and reaching for anything he could get his hands on?
    After I stopped shaking, I took a deep breath and decided on the latter, and then went back upstairs. Something I’dseen in Peyton’s pictures was gnawing at the recesses of my brain, and had been since my conversation with Jones. Something blue.
    BACK AT MY desk, I pulled up Peyton’s Aesthetishare account and scrolled through the pictures once again. There it was, the one at the bus stop. Peyton was turned away, her free hand touching her hair. She was pensively staring at something on the ground. All stark black and white. Except behind her, the partially obscured apartment rental ad. Fountain View Apartments, which shone out to me in what I liked to think of as dolphin blue—the color I always associated with water words. Jones had seen Peyton walking near Gibson’s apartment complex. He’d thought they’d been called Fountain something. But just above the ad, scrawled on top of the word apartment , someone had written something. I’d thought of it as graffiti last