Killing You Softly by Lucy Carver Read Free Book Online Page A

mud down his cheek and caked in his short, dark hair, but I
    didn’t feel I knew him well enough to point it out.
    ‘OK, now that I’ve run into you . . .’
    ‘Literally!’
    ‘Don’t worry – I would’ve braked.’
    ‘So, now that you’ve run into me?’
    ‘I guess we could have a conversation,’ he mumbled.
    I nodded. ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘First – I heard you were in the village, sticking your oar in as usual.’
    ‘Who told you – your granddad?’
    ‘No – Jayden.’
    ‘Typical. Anyway, I wasn’t sticking my oar in. I care about what’s happened. I thought maybe it would help to talk.’
    ‘ “Care”?’ he mocked. ‘Like the journalists who showed up on our doorstep? Or like the cops – “Where were you on the night of the thirty-first of
    January, between the hours of midnight and three a.m.?” ’
    ‘Neither.’
    ‘And why would it help me to talk to you, Alyssa?’ Alex grew more hostile as the conversation developed, as if he couldn’t help blaming me for something, and I couldn’t
    work out what. ‘Are we back to the same old stuff – teenaged super-sleuth with the amazing memory is on the case; she’ll have it solved before the end of the week?’
    I dropped my gaze and stared at the tyre marks in the mud. Whatever the reason, if Alex Driffield didn’t want to talk, that was up to him. ‘You’re right. I’ll back
    off.’
    ‘Cool.’
    ‘Is that it?’
    ‘Yeah. Well, no. Second of all, it wasn’t me – I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
    ‘Who said you did? You’d only been going out with Scarlett for about a week. You weren’t even at the party, according to Ursula.’
    ‘Anyway, Scarlett?’
I remembered asking.
    ‘Yeah. Really clever but not geeky.’ Ursula is ready with the low-down on Scarlett, much more open and friendly than I expect. She takes me by surprise. ‘Everyone liked
    her, especially the boys. Alex practically stalked her for a whole term before he found the balls to ask her out.
    ‘Exactly,’ Alex snapped. ‘I wasn’t even there.’
    ‘But you’d had a thing for Scarlett for ages before you started going out?’
    ‘What if I had? What difference does it make?’
    I sighed and tried to take the tension out of the situation. ‘You’ve got mud on your cheek.’
    Savagely he rubbed the wrong cheek with the back of his hand.
    ‘Other one.’
    He rubbed again.
    ‘You actually knew her,’ I say to Ursula. ‘What was she like? Was there an old boyfriend who got jealous when she chucked him and started going out with Alex?
    Where’d she been on New Year’s Eve? Was she at the party? Did she try to walk home alone?’
    ‘I’m telling everyone I wasn’t there, but no one will listen!’ Alex repeated, and his voice bounced off the grey oak trunks and fell to the cold, black earth.
    ‘The first I knew about it was the cops coming knocking at my door, not telling me what it was about, asking when did I last see Scarlett? I say, in Starbucks in the shopping centre at one
    o’clock on New Year’s Eve – why? They asked me loads more questions and I felt sick to my stomach because I was guessing now what this might be about – Scarlett had gone
    missing, or she’d had an accident and she was in hospital. But they still didn’t tell me. They asked did we have a fight, how long had we been together, why didn’t I go with her
    to the party?’
    ‘That must have been really hard to deal with,’ I murmured, knowing that my pathetic comment would bounce right back at me because the words that were pouring out of Alex were like
    a dam bursting, sweeping everything before them.
    ‘I’m saying’ what’s wrong, what’s wrong? And my dad is in the hallway behind me, dragging me back and telling the cops I was only a kid and they couldn’t
    throw their weight around like this and why the hell were they asking all these questions? And then they said they were sorry to inform us that Scarlett was dead and it was like I walked off