No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page B

oddball, a late-blooming beauty—it was clear that Thorpe had used me. Stupidly, blindly, I had delivered Lila right into his hands.
    Nonetheless, in the matter of the murder itself, he was very convincing. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was compelled to believe his version of the story. The case he made wasn’t foolproof. There was no forensic evidence, for one thing, and some questions remained unanswered. In no way would Thorpe’s theory stand up to Lila’s own rigorous test—the standard of absolute proof. She would probably scoff at it, calling it what it truly was: mere conjecture. Nevertheless, Thorpe’s prime suspect—Peter McConnell—made perfect sense.

Seven

    W E LIVE OUR LIVES BY WAY OF STORY,” Thorpe said one afternoon, a couple of months after Lila died. “Over time, we construct thousands upon thousands of small narratives by which to process and remember our days, and these mini-narratives add up to the bigger story, the way we see ourselves in the world.” He was talking to the class, in a lecture loosely based on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I knew his words were really meant for me.
    Looking back, it was easy to see that the major story of my own life had been my sister’s death. Andrew Thorpe’s book had deeply influenced the way I constructed this story. I was twenty years old when I read Murder by the Bay, young enough to believe that the things he said about Lila’s murder, and the things he said about me, were true.
    In the world of mathematics, he wrote, Lila had found her place. When Lila was murdered, Ellie had yet to find hers. The sense of belonging and clarity of direction that simplified Lila’s short life would continue to elude Ellie.
    There were times when I wondered if, in describing my flaws in relentless detail, in using me to create a character to fit the story he wanted to tell, Thorpe had somehow altered the course of my life. The Ellie he put on the page was uncertain, unanchored, incapable of finding her way. Did I take his words too much to heart?
    But there was one part of the story even the author couldn’t have foreseen.
    Nearly two decades after the fact, in a South American café, the villain of Thorpe’s book stood before me, tall and soft-spoken, nervous as a schoolboy, saying, “Do you know who I am?”
    Gazing into Peter McConnell’s dark eyes, I had the same impression I’d had the first time I saw him outside his office at Stanford—the sensation that his face was comprised of perfectly ordinary features which, put together, added up to something memorable.
    “Yes,” I managed to say.
    “May I sit down?”
    This was not part of my story, not part of the plot of my life as I saw it. My sister’s murderer would not simply walk up in a café and ask to join me. I must have nodded again, or perhaps answered in the affirmative, because Peter McConnell proceeded to sit down in the chair opposite me, lay his book on the table, lay his hat on top of the book, and place his large hands palms down, on either side of the book and hat, as if he did not know what to do with them.
    “How did you find me?”
    I was disappointed in my voice, which came out weak and uncertain. All the anger I had silently directed toward this man in the past, all the disgust, remained locked somewhere inside me, in a place I couldn’t, at this crucial moment, quite reach. All that came was my astonishment, which must have been as obvious to him as the sound of Maria’s footsteps in the kitchen.
    “I didn’t. You found me.”
    “I’m just here for work,” I protested. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact of his presence, trying to make sense of how he could have shown up here, of all places, from out of the blue. “I’ve been coming to this village for years,” I added.
    I had given up looking for Peter McConnell a long time ago. My travels to the coffee regions of the world—Huatusco, Yirgacheffe, Poas, Sumatra—were, if