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Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Rob Thomas. Nothing belongs to me except my actual words.
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Was that your secret, Lilly? Were you having an affair with Aaron Echolls and did he kill you after you stole the tapes?
It all made intuitive sense. Aaron Echolls was a man who loathed bad publicity and didn't mind sleeping with underage girls. Lilly Kane would have slept with Aaron Echolls in a heartbeat if she thought she could get away with it -- and would have taken the tapes if she'd figured out she was being recorded. The combination could have easily ended up his beating Lilly to death by the side of the Kane pool. I could visualize it all.
And neither one of them would have wasted a single second worrying about whether it would have hurt Logan.
Why the Kanes and Clarence Weidman had been so heavily involved in a cover-up was, of course, obvious. They wouldn't have crossed the street to protect Aaron Echolls.
They thought Duncan had done it -- possibly in one of his epileptic fits. I very much wanted to rub the fact that they'd wasted everyone's time and gotten my father fired for nothing directly into their faces, but it wasn't the time.
I backed away from the open drawer, breathing a bit heavier than normal. "Logan," I said, "Come over here."
"I'm not really interested in a list of my father's Playmates of the Week," Logan said.
"Logan!" The sarcasm disappeared from his face. "Come here. I want you to look through this and see if you come to the same conclusion I do."
I got out of the way and he began looking through the drawer. "Yeah, he was home for nine months straight at this point except for some voiceover work for Justice League," he muttered. "He did the voice of one of the villains. Very appropriate." After a second, "What am I supposed to be seeing here?"
"The gap," I said, not trusting myself to say anything else.
"The gap," he said, looking through more closely. "There's a gap between the middle of September and the middle of October." He looked up at me. "You think my father killed Lilly."
"I do."
"It can't be him," he said angrily. "It can't be --"
"Of course it can," I said, and began to explain.
"Not what I meant. My father was a manipulative violent son of a bitch. He could. He hit me enough that I'm not going to waste a second wondering about whether he could have killed someone. But Lilly --" He stopped, on the verge of tears. I'd only ever seen him cry twice before. Once at Lilly's funeral, once in class after we found the video of Lilly's body on the internet. "Lilly -- do you really think Lilly --"
"Yes," I said. "I love Lilly. But she would have."
After a very long pause while we stood there and looked at each other, he said, "Yes. She would have." He laughed. "Of course she would have. How could any woman turn down the great Aaron Echolls? And how could any man turn down Lilly Kane?" He closed his eyes and said, "It wouldn't have mattered."
"What wouldn't have mattered?"
"You ratting me out to Lilly. Lilly loved me -- I know this -- but she wouldn't have passed up the opportunity. She would have found some reason to dump me so she could go play with my father for a few weeks, and then it would have been back on, and I would have taken her back. It wasn't your fault."
I'd always thought that, but it was good to hear Logan say so too. "Thank you." Then, after a second, "He hit you?"
"Remember the bumfights?" I said I did. Logan pulled off his shirt and turned around. "I got these up here," he said, touching his upper back, "from that."
There were scars all over his back, not just where he was pointing. Those would have gone a long way towards making Logan Neptune High's obligatory psychotic jackass.
He misread the look on my face. "I don't want pity, Veronica."
"You're not getting it," I said. "You're getting rage. If I'd known this I would have --"
"Would have what?" Logan said. "Would have turned him in? No one would have believed the great Aaron Echolls, star of stage and screen, would have hurt his little boy. No, I'd've been this generation's Christina Crawford if I'd tried. And you'd have been run out of town."
"If I'd known this," I said evenly, "I would have killed him myself."
"Three months ago, you would have laughed," Logan said.
"Not at this," I said. "Not ever at this."
Logan looked at me and actually smiled. "I do believe you would have killed him." The smile vanished. "So, what next?"
"What next. Good question." The problem was, while my intuition was screaming that Aaron killed Lilly, everything I'd found could just have easily been used against Logan. I explained as much to him.
"Of course," he said. "Now you and I know who killed Lilly and we can't do anything about it."
"We can't even tell my father." We couldn't. Dad would insist on everything being turned over to Lamb -- despire our shared opinion of his incompetence -- and try to get Abel Koontz cleared. Which he would do. Then Don Lamb, embarrassed and looking for someone else to throw into the line of fire, would take a live Logan over a dead Aaron.
Damn. There had to be a way to work this out. "I'll figure something out," I told him.
"I'm sure you will," he said. No sarcasm, no snark, no Logan attitude. Just confidence.
I liked that.
"The first thing we have to do," I said, "Is find where Lilly hid the tapes. There's only one place she would have, you know. You taught her that."
"Then we can burn them, too."
"No!" I said.
"Veronica, I don't want people's lasting memories of Lilly to be my father having sex with her."
"I understand," I said. "I really do. But we need those tapes to help prove your father's guilty, when we get around to it." He looked dubious. "Promise me you won't."
He gritted his teeth, but he made the promise. "In the meantime," he went on, grabbing another drawer full of videotapes and wrestling it free , "I have a long-overdue bonfire to plan." He carried the drawer out and dumped the tapes by the edge of the pool.
I helped him, carefully finishing up with the one with the gap. As I took it poolside, Logan went into the house. "Have to find that accelerant," he mumbled. I ran through the house carrying the drawer and put it in my car. Then I ran back and stood by the side of the pool.
Every other tape, plus the monitors, was there by the side of the pool. I moved anything else flammable out of the way; Logan was clearly preoccupied and making sure he didn't burn down his house in clearly wasn't his main concern.
He dumped lighter fluid over everything. Then he turned to me, swaying a bit as though he was drunk, and said, "Any words of wisdom, Veronica?"
"C'mon baby, light my fire."
He laughed, but there wasn't much joy in the laugh. "I think Sylvia Plath said it best." The next line he said as coldly as I'd ever heard him say anything, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." and tossed a match onto the pile.
I came over and put my arm around him. It seemed appropriate. He put his arm around me also.
And we stood there and watched it burn.