Sadie’s spreadsheet looks like it could run a small government.
Columns march across my laptop screen in rainbow bands: Name, Role, Source, Confirmed Presence, Conflicts, Notes. Every cell is a little universe—prom programs, yearbook captions, alumni Facebook posts, staff directories, public salary records. She’s color-coded them in a way that probably makes sense to her brain but just makes mine feel underachieving.
“Okay,” she says, her video square flickering from my choppy laundromat Wi-Fi. “Scroll right to the green section. Chaperones.”
The dryers rumble under my feet, a low industrial heartbeat. The air smells like clean cotton, salt air sneaking in whenever the front door opens, and the faint chemical sweetness of the nail salon two doors down.
“You know normal fans send, like, fanart,” I say. “You send pivot tables.”
“Don’t knock the craft,” she says. She sounds tired, but her eyes are bright, darting as she tracks cells I haven’t even clicked yet. “I pulled the list of official prom chaperones from the program Katie scanned for you, then cross-referenced it with the 1997 yearbook faculty pages, then checked those names against district employment records and, uh, some other open-source stuff.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Define ‘other.’”
“Public certification databases, archived websites, a few obituaries,” she says quickly. “No passwords, no paywalls, nothing illegal. Promise. I know where your line is.”
The line has been shifting under my feet lately, but I let that go. “And?”
“One name doesn’t add up,” she says. “Row twenty-three. Highlighted yellow.”
I scroll, the trackpad warm under my fingertips. Cooke, Daniel P. — English, 11th/12th grade. Every other entry has reassuring little checkmarks sprinkled through the columns: photo in gym, quoted in local coverage, statement in police summary. Row twenty-three, though, is a crime scene. Under Source she’s listed: prom program, yearbook faculty page, prom candid photo (Harrow wall), student interview (anon), district payroll 1997. Under Confirmed Presence, she’s written: Yes — present in candid photo 11:22 pm, back wall of gym. Under Conflicts: No mention in police witness lists. Resigned June 1997. No public comment ever recorded.
“District records show employment ending right after that school year,” Sadie says. “No sabbatical, no ‘transferred to another building.’ Just… gone.”
“Teachers leave,” I say, but the hair on my arms pricks. “They move. They burn out.”
“Sure,” she says. “But that’s not all. Look at the Notes column.”
I read: Alum DM’d me: ‘Cooke was at prom, pacing by doors like the fire marshal. Then after Juliet, he freaked out and quit. People said he saw something.’ Another line: Appears in Harrow Media hallway prom photo (provided by Mara). Partial profile, labeled as CHAPERONE: D. COOKE.
The memory of Elliot’s hallway hits me: glossy frames, Juliet’s laugh frozen mid-flash, a line of adults along the wall. One man half-turned, shoulders hunched, trying to disappear into the cinderblock.
“He’s the one who looked like he wanted to melt into the banner,” I say.
“Exactly,” Sadie says. “And guess what? He doesn’t exist in any of the public write-ups after Juliet’s death. Not quoted, not even a bland ‘no comment.’ It’s like he evaporated.”
Energy snaps through me, sharp enough to cut through the fog from my fight with Jared and the weight of Elliot’s folder still stuffed in my tote. “Do you know where he went?”
Sadie’s smile is quick and grim. “I’m a paralegal. Tracking people is my love language. I found a Daniel Cook—no ‘e’ now—tending bar in a town eighteen miles inland. Same middle initial, same face aged twenty-five years, same slouch. Public arrest record for a DUI in 2006. Nothing since.”
“You’re sure it’s him.”
“I’m never one hundred percent sure of anything without a DNA test, but I’d put this at ninety-five,” she says. “I can send you the folder. Or I can pop by and order a drink.”
The thought of Sadie showing up alone to poke a nervous, possibly drunk, possibly traumatized witness makes my gut knot. “No,” I say. “You’ve done enough. I’ll take it from here.”
“You’re going to go?” Her voice lifts, hopeful and hungry.
“I’m going to ask Luz to go,” I say. “Exhuming missing chaperones is above my informal pay grade.”
Sadie exhales, clearly pleased. “Then let me at least color-code a list of questions.”
“Of course you will,” I say, and my chest warms despite everything. “Sadie?”
“Yeah?”
“You did good,” I say. “Really good. But this doesn’t go on the Discord. Not yet.”
She nods, expression sobering. “I know. I’m not leaking this. Promise.”
A dryer buzzer shrills behind me, loud and abrupt. By the time it dies, I’ve already decided: if the system erased Mr. Cooke once, I’m not giving them a head start this time.
Luz agrees to meet in the police lot, not my apartment.
“Optics,” she says when I slide into the passenger seat of her unmarked car. “You climbing into a detective’s car outside the laundromat makes you look like an informant. Or a suspect. Neither helps your custody case.”
The car smells like stale coffee, mint gum, and the faint metallic tang of gun oil she can never quite scrub from her gear. Afternoon light slants across the dash, catching a tiny crack in the windshield on the passenger side, a spiderweb starting to spread.
“So instead I’m getting into a detective’s car at the very heart of justice,” I say. “Much better.”
She snorts, pulling out of the lot. “The heart of paperwork, mostly.” She glances at me. “Tell me about your missing chaperone.”
I walk her through Sadie’s spreadsheet while we head out of Crescent Bay, away from the cliffs and the tidy promenades lined with plaques bearing the same surnames repeated in school board minutes and donation lists. As we crest the hill by the high school, I can see the ocean briefly, glittering and cold, the treacherous rock shelf hidden under those perfect Crescent Bay postcards.
“Prom program lists him,” I say. “Yearbook shows him. There’s a photo from Elliot’s office wall where he’s literally standing behind Juliet. But your witness summaries don’t mention him once.”
“My witness summaries,” she corrects, jaw tight. “Calder’s team’s summaries. I was still in middle school. I pulled the old case file after you called. The only adults documented as chaperones are three teachers and the vice principal. No Cooke.”
“Convenient evaporation,” I say.
“Or sloppy record keeping,” she says, but her tone lacks conviction. “We’ve got plenty of that.”
We pass the edge of town, the air changing flavors: salt and hair spray fading into damp leaves, exhaust, the faint hint of manure from a farm I never picture when I think of Crescent Bay’s glossy brochures. As the harbor disappears in the rearview, I think about how stories work the same way—cropping out whatever clashes with the brand.
“You okay?” Luz asks.
I realize I’m winding my fingers in the strap of my tote so tightly the faux leather creaks. “If he saw something and left, that’s one thing,” I say. “If he told Calder and it got buried, that’s another.”
“If,” she says. “We’re here to find out, not write your next episode.”
“You know I can’t separate those things anymore,” I say.
“Try,” she says, and there’s no softness in it.
The bar sits on the edge of a sagging downtown, the kind of once-industrial river town that never got a glossy rebrand. Its sign reads The Waterline in peeling blue paint, and the front windows are fogged with a mix of fryer grease and years of cigarette smoke that never quite left.
Inside, the air is thick with the smell of stale beer, fried onions, and an undercurrent of pine cleaner that can’t win. A jukebox in the corner plays a 90s ballad, the lyrics warbling through blown speakers. A few regulars hunch over their drinks, the clink of ice and low murmur of conversation filling the space between notes.
Luz flashes her badge at the guy behind the bar. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, face flushed from heat and whiskey. His name tag says Dan, the letters printed with the careful anonymity of someone trying not to have a last name.
“We’re looking for Daniel Cooke,” Luz says.
His hand tightens around a bar towel. “Nobody by that name here,” he says. His eyes flick over me, then back to her badge. “Cops from Crescent Bay don’t usually drive out for the wings.”
“We’re not here for the wings,” I say. “Hi, Mr. Cooke.”
He stares at me. There’s a second where I watch him decide whether to lie or run. Then his shoulders sag.
“Bar’s busy,” he says, even though ten stools sit empty. “If you want to talk, take a table. I’ll send someone over.”
Luz doesn’t move. “We can do this here,” she says. “Less dramatic.”
“You turning my workplace into a crime scene is pretty dramatic,” he mutters.
I slide onto a stool, leaving one between us as a buffer. Luz takes the other side of me, boxing him in just enough that he notices.
“We just have a few questions about a night twenty-five years ago,” I say. “Crescent Bay High’s prom. Juliet Reeves.”
His jaw works. Up close, I see the red veins threading the whites of his eyes, the capillaries blooming in his nose. There’s a ink stain on the cuff of his shirt, the kind teachers and bartenders both earn.
“I already talked to police,” he says. “Back then.”
“Then this’ll be easy,” Luz says. “You can tell me what you told them.”
He lets out something between a laugh and a scoff. “That file’s collecting dust somewhere, right?”
Luz’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Based on what I’ve seen, there is no record of your statement.”
The towel twisting in his hand goes still. A bead of sweat runs from his temple down to his neck.
“You cops lost a lot of things back then,” he says.
“Which is why I’m here now,” she says. “Help me write it down right.”
He looks from her to me. “You’re that podcaster,” he says finally. “The one with the glass… what is it. Flowers.”
“Roses,” I say. “Glass Roses.”
“My regulars watch that case on the news,” he says. “You know what they say? They say you’re gonna get yourself or your kid hurt.”
A tremor zips through me, but I keep my face neutral. “Good thing I brought a cop,” I say. “Mr. Cooke, we know you were a chaperone that night. We have the prom program, yearbook, photos. We know you were in the gym.”
“Every teacher was in the gym,” he says. “At least on paper.”
“Juliet’s sister said you used to give Juliet extra time on essays,” I say. “That she said you were one of the only adults who saw her as more than a dress size. Doesn’t that mean you owe her the truth now?”
He flinches like I slapped him. For a moment, his eyes go glassy, distant, fixed on some point over my shoulder—the gym banners, the bleachers, the waxed floor.
“You don’t understand,” he mutters.
“Then help me,” I say. “Help us understand.”
Silence stretches, filled by the jukebox grinding into another song. He reaches for a bottle, then thinks better of it and leaves his hand flat on the bar. His knuckles are mottled, the skin around his nails chewed.
“I was by the side doors,” he says finally, voice low. “Near the concessions table. Kids going in and out to smoke behind the gym. My job was to make sure they didn’t topple off the hill onto the track.”
The track that runs parallel to the cliffs, I remember, separated by a chain-link fence and the illusion of safety.
“Around eleven-thirty, the DJ switched to a slow song,” he continues. His eyes stay on his own hands. “Juliet left the dance floor. I noticed because everyone always noticed her. She cut right across the room toward the exit, fast, like she was trying not to draw attention and failing.”
My fingertips press into the bar’s sticky surface, grounding myself against the sudden rush of images.
“Was she alone?” Luz asks.
He hesitates. “No.”
“With Noah?” I ask, hearing the thinness of my hope.
“No,” he says. “Not with Noah.”
The words land in my chest like a dropped stone.
“Describe him,” Luz says, her voice gone clinical. “Height, build, clothing.”
“Tall,” Cooke says slowly. “Taller than Noah. Broad shoulders. Dark suit, light shirt, no boutonniere. Hair… lighter. Sandy, maybe. I only caught the back of his head at first. He caught up to her by the doors and grabbed her elbow. Not hard enough to cause a scene, but enough that I saw it.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t Noah,” Luz presses.
Cooke shakes his head, a tiny, miserable movement. “Noah’s hair was dark, almost black. He was in a tux with a white rose. This boy’s rose was red, and it was on the wrong lapel. Someone else must’ve pinned it.”
My mouth goes dry. A red rose. Wrong side. A detail so specific it could have been planted, except Cooke hasn’t heard my episodes. His bar TV is tuned to sports, not true crime.
“Did you hear them say anything?” I ask.
“Just pieces,” he says. His throat works. “She said, ‘I’m done being your secret.’ He said, ‘You’re being dramatic.’ She laughed, but not in a funny way. Then she said—” His voice falters.
“She said what?” I lean in, fabric of my jacket squeaking against the vinyl stool.
“She said, ‘If you want to talk, we’re not doing it in front of your fan club.’” He swallows. “Then she pushed the door open. The music blew out into the hall. I told them they couldn’t be out there alone. He said, ‘We’re just getting air.’ I thought they’d walk around to the side exit and come back. Kids fight, kids make up. I didn’t… I didn’t follow.”
His fingers tremble now, the towel damp under his grip.
“When did you find out she was dead?” Luz asks.
“About an hour later, someone started yelling that a girl was missing,” he says. “Then the sirens. Calder pulled me aside in the hallway. Asked what I’d seen. I told him. Every word.” He glances toward the far end of the bar, where a couple of patrons pretend not to listen. “He got this look. Not shock. Annoyance.”
My stomach turns.
“He said, ‘Cooke, you know how rumors work in this town,’” the man continues. “He said I’d been by the doors all night, I’d seen kids sneaking out, I’d had a drink or two at dinner beforehand, and mixing those facts together could ‘muddy things’ if this turned into something bigger.”
“Did he record your statement?” Luz asks, though we both know the answer.
“He wrote something down in that little notebook he used to carry,” Cooke says. “Then he put his hand on my shoulder and told me that if I started telling people Juliet left with someone who wasn’t her boyfriend, I’d blow up three families and ruin my career over nothing. That the fall had probably been an accident, that the boy didn’t matter, that kids make mistakes and the town needed a clean story.”
The bar’s ice machine coughs to life, loud and jarring.
“He told me to forget it,” Cooke finishes. “So I tried.”
“You quit three weeks later,” I say quietly.
He gives a humorless smile. “Kids kept asking me if I knew anything. Parents gave me looks in the grocery store. Some of them angry, some of them… eager. Like they wanted me to confirm their favorite rumor. I couldn’t stand it. So I left. That’s what cowards do, right?”
The word hangs there, sour.
“Why didn’t you ever tell this story?” I ask. “To the press, to Juliet’s family, to anyone?”
He looks at me, really looks, like he’s seeing Juliet’s cardigan-pinned shadow standing where I sit. “Because the man telling me to keep my mouth shut wore a badge and had the power to make my life hell,” he says. “Because the boy I saw with her belonged to people who sit on boards and own cliffs. Because I convinced myself that if it really mattered, the police would handle it.”
Luz’s jaw is clenched so hard the muscle twitches. “Do you know who the boy was?” she asks.
Cooke’s gaze drops back to his hands. “I have a guess,” he says. “But guesses don’t stand up in court, and I’m not giving you a name for your podcast to eat.”
Heat spikes behind my eyes. “This isn’t about content,” I say. “This is about the fact that Juliet didn’t walk to those cliffs alone.”
“I know that now every time I close my eyes,” he snaps. “You think I sleep at night? I see her walking through those doors over and over, and every time I tell myself to move my damn feet and I don’t. You want a villain, lady, you’ve got plenty. I’m just the bystander who flinched.”
The jukebox clicks, switching to something newer, the bass thudding against my ribs. My hands have gone numb on the bar edge.
Luz slides a card across the counter, the motion controlled. “I need you to come in and give an official statement,” she says. “We can meet somewhere neutral if you prefer. But this goes in the record this time.”
He stares at the card like it’s a live wire. “You really think they’re going to thank you for that down at your station?” he asks. “Last I checked, Calder’s name is still carved into half the plaques in that town.”
“I’m not doing this for thanks,” she says.
“You’re doing it for her,” he says, nodding at me. “For the show.”
“I’m doing it because the truth is the only thing that doesn’t rot.” Her voice is flat and steady. “And because if you die with this in your head, you’re exactly the coward you’re afraid you are.”
His shoulders sag deeper. His fingers close over the card. “I’ll think about it,” he mutters.
“Think fast,” she says. “We’ll follow up.”
We leave him there, framed by neon and guilt.
Outside, the air feels thin, stripped of salt, heavy with exhaust and the river’s damp metal breath. A train horn wails in the distance, long and lonely. I lean against the car for a second, the cold pressing through my jacket, and focus on my breathing until my racing pulse slows enough to let words form.
“He saw her,” I say. “He saw her walk out with someone else. He told Calder. Calder shut him down.”
Luz unlocks the car with a chirp that makes me jump. “I heard,” she says. Her voice has gone quiet in a way that scares me more than any anger. “I’ll write it up as a supplemental. My lieutenant’s going to love this.”
“They’re going to come for us,” I say. “For you. For me. For Sadie, if they ever figure out how we found him.”
“They were already coming,” she says. “This just gives them a better reason.”
I laugh once, sharp and mirthless. “You know what Elliot told me yesterday? That stories need safeguards. That he’d help me sharpen my words instead of stabbing myself.”
“You sounded skeptical,” she says.
“I still am,” I say. “But right now, the people holding the red pens are the same ones who told Cooke to forget a girl walking out of her own prom.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I fish it out, expecting Sadie’s name, already rehearsing how I’ll tell her we were right.
The notification makes my stomach drop. New email: Raymond Calder — Subject: Lunch?
I open it with fingers that don’t feel like mine. Mara, it reads. I think it’s time we had a proper conversation about expectations and responsibilities. Country club on Thursday? My treat. — R.C.
I stare at the glowing screen, Mr. Cooke’s shaking hands still vivid in my mind, Juliet’s ivory dress brushing past the gym doors in a loop I can’t stop.
“What is it?” Luz asks.
I lock the phone and slip it back into my pocket like it’s incriminating evidence. “Your old boss wants to buy me lunch,” I say. “I think he’s worried he’s not the one telling the story anymore.”
For the first time since we left Crescent Bay, Luz smiles, but there’s no humor in it. “Good,” she says. “Maybe that means we finally are.”