Free Hippie House by Katherine Holubitsky

was a boot—had been stolen by the killer as a souvenir. Doug McCrae, who was playing the Artful Dodger in the school’s production of
Oliver
!, told me the wire had been pulled with such force it had completely severed her head.
    â€œIs that true?” I asked Eric, more horrified by the image of this than anything else I’d heard since the discovery itself.
    â€œNo, it’s not, and why would you believe somebody who doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about? Ask him this—was he there?”
    Constable Wagner held a public information session at the high school in an attempt to ease our fears. Megan and I went together with Mom, Aunt Alice and Mrs. Fraser, who drove.
    Aunt Alice sat in the backseat with us. “It’s all these rumors flying around,” she explained. “They’ve got everyone terrified. On the other hand, there’s always a little truth in every rumor so I’m guessing Constable Wagner just wants to set us straight on what’s true and what’s not.”
    Detective Mather appeared confident, assuring us that the circumstances surrounding Katie’s murder suggested that the killing was random. He also thought it was highly unlikely that the killer was from Pike Creek or that he was still in our midst. “Would he kill again?” Mrs. Gillespie wanted to know. Detective Mather hesitated, shifting his feet a little—until then the only hint of indecision. Finally he acknowledged that any answer he might give would, at best, only be a guess.
    Katie had been raped, most likely in the Hippie House where she had died on the same night. The orange extension cord that had been used to tether her body to the post was a key piece of evidence. It did not belong to us, Uncle Pat or any of Eric’s friends. However, the guitar string—an E—used to strangle her, tightened with such savage force it had cut deep into her throat, had once belonged on Jimmy’s bass. He remembered the day he replaced it, tossing it to the floor after playing “I’m Goin’ Home” four times in a row.
    Mrs. Gillespie was probably not the first in town to suggest that Ross Nash and Lyle St. Vincent might have played a part in Katie’s murder. She was just the first I’d heard discuss the possibility as if it were fact. I was eating chips and gravy with Megan in the Dairy Bar when I overheard her speaking toMrs. Chisholm. The two women sat in a booth across from us, dipping spoons into the whipped cream piled high on their banana splits. Mrs. Gillespie popped a cherry in her mouth. She told Mrs. Chisholm that she hoped the two hoodlums hadn’t been ruled out as possible suspects. After saying this, she drew the cherry stem from between her teeth, leaving a large dab of whipped cream clinging to her upper lip. It wobbled as she continued to speak. In her mind, anyone who would set fire to the teeter-totter in Queen Mary Park was capable of anything.
    I thought about what Mrs. Gillespie said. Ross was far from a model citizen, but the leap from public mischief-maker to psychopathic murderer did seem a very big stretch.
    Ross and Lyle had been interviewed within the first twenty-four hours of the body being discovered, but so had the members of The Rectifiers along with many of their friends. Eric told me they had been asked little about their whereabouts on the night of November 9. The police were far more interested in people they may have recently become acquainted with from out of town.
    Megan and I tried to recall what we were doing on the night of the murder.
    â€œThat was the day Eric and Jimmy drove us down to Toronto to see
Love Story
. Remember? And we cried all the way home. They kept asking us what we were blubbering about because they hadn’t seen it. They’d gone to check out some music stores instead.”
    â€œThat movie was so sad,” Megan sighed. “The part at the end when they’re in the