“No, wait—” I said.
“Foster,” she mumbled. She took one wobbly step. She threw out a hand and caught the three-quarters-sized fridge. One of her knees buckled, but she stayed upright and took another step. It was pure willpower, I realized, and for a moment, I saw, and I understood. The boy who refused to give up. The boy who hadn’t let anything stop him. Ever.
And then she folded.
I caught her before she hit the floor, and we did a staggering two-person dip until I could lay her down.
“September?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
She was still breathing, and her eyes were half open, and she even made a sleepy sound of awareness.
The idea flashed into my head.
Sometimes, I decided, I wasn’t a very good person. A very good person would have called 911 right then.
But she was breathing. And she seemed like she was okay, albeit knocked out.
I spent another ten seconds trying to decide if I reallywasa good person.
And then I turned on the flashlight on my phone and started to search. There were two things that were still missing: the murder weapon (although if the killer was smart, they would have thrown it into the bay by now), and Channelle’s necklace.
It was a quick and easy search. The camper had a lot of nooks and crannies for storage—trying to maximize the use of every inch of available space—but, since JT had moved September’s belongings into storage, there wasn’t anything in them. I went as quickly as I could, checking September every few seconds, making sure she was still awake and breathing.
And then, in the tiny bathroom, I popped off the cover of the exhaust fan, and cash came tumbling down.
My phone buzzed with a call from Bobby as I gathered up the bills.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“September’s camper.” I filled him in and said, “I think Foster tried to kill her. Remember how I told you about that super weird thing with the pill the last time I was here?”
“Dash—”
“He obviously had something going with Channelle. Maybe she was giving him a cut. There’s got to be five hundred dollars here. I mean, the jackass didn’t have a job, so where did he get this much money?”
“Dash—”
“And then Channelle threatened to cut him off, or maybe he knew something about the murder and tried to blackmail her, and it all went wrong, so he ran her down with his car.”
(That last part was a little foggy since I wasn’t sure Foster had a car.)
“Dash!”
“What?”
“Foster didn’t poison her.”
“I know it’s only a theory until we can talk to September—”
“No, he didn’t poison her. Salk and Dahlberg picked him up a couple of hours ago. September was fine when they left. Foster’s been here ever since. He’s sitting in a cell right now, waiting for his lawyer.”
“Wait,” I said, trying to get my thoughts to settle.
“I’m sending an ambulance over there right now.”
I heard the words, but I said, “They arrested Foster?”
“He had Channelle’s necklace.” Something twisted in Bobby’s voice. “It was in a box on the table when Salk and Dahlberg interviewed them about the eviction. He was going to give it to September as a present.”
