Free No Such Person by Caroline B. Cooney

or her face may give something away. She slips on a summer robe. It is crispy cotton, white with tiny polka dots in primary colors, like the tips of crayons. She loves this robe.
    I have to behave normally, she thinks. What is normal when the police in your living room have arrested your sister for murder? When you have just switched case colors so that your parents won’t accidentally give away that the police have the wrong iPad?
    Barefoot, in her robe, she pads into the living room.
    The four police officers fill the room, as if they are the only reason it exists. Around their waists is so much equipment it must bruise their hips. They too are crispy, as if they iron and starch their summer shirts. Two of the men are very bulky. They must spend a lot of time at all-you-can-eat chains. The one woman and the other man are slim. All four stand with their feet slightly apart and their arms slightly away from their bodies, as if to draw weapons. All four, extra pounds or not, look fit.
    Her parents are also standing, and they are next to each other behind the sofa, perhaps believing that upholstery will protect them from the news the police have brought.
    All eyes look upon Miranda.
    “I don’t think I heard right,” says Miranda, focusing on the nearest officer.
    “Focus” is the wrong word. The room blurs with her fear for Lander; fear that she will be caught trying to hide Lander’s digital world. The officer is a foot taller than she is, but this is not unusual. Miranda is used to looking up. “You said that my sister—um—my sister…?”
    The police gently repeat their statement.
    Miranda says sharply, “Lander would never hurt anybody. Ever. And besides, she’s very anti-gun. She would never even hold one.”
    “She admits holding it and shooting it,” says the officer. “But she claims she and Jason Firenza were doing target practice and nobody else was there.”
    Target
practice? thinks Miranda. Lander?
    “It’s a strange location for target practice,” says the officer. “It’s a strange location, period. And there is a dead body right where Lander admits shooting.”
    Miranda does not believe this. But the police do. And they have been there.
It’s a hunting accident,
she tells herself. “Who was killed?” Her voice splits down the middle, cracking like an old clarinet reed. “Who is the dead person?”
    “We haven’t identified him yet.”
    There’s no such thing as a person without identification. Everybody has a cell phone and every adult has a wallet.
    Did somebody remove the dead man’s cell phone and wallet? If so, this cannot be written off as a hunting accident, even if it were deer or turkey season, which it isn’t. If the identification is gone, then that murderer walked up to the person he killed, bent down and emptied the pockets. A vision of Lander being there, seeing this, knowing this, is so appalling that Miranda wants to scream and flee all the way to West Hartford. “Lander didn’t do that. She just didn’t. Jason Firenza must have. Here.” She takes her cell phone out of her robe pocket and clicks to the close-up of Jason on their dock, their striped beach towel around his shoulders, their coffee mug in his hand.
    A minute ago, Miranda would have said this was just a nicely focused shot of a handsome young man. But even as the officer takes the phone out of her hand to see better, she is frightened. How intimate the photograph looks. How relaxed Jason seems. He could be part of the family.
    The officer knows that a fifteen-year-old girl does not take one photo. She takes a series. He asks for permission to scroll through the other photos.
    Behave normally,
she reminds herself. “Okay.”
    He studies the photographs. He pauses on the shot where Jason and Lander gaze into each other’s eyes. He tilts it for Miranda to see. “They’ve known each other for a long time, then.”
    “No, no. That was the first moment they met. That we all met.”
    “They look very