“We thought for sure they would kill us, too. But they didn’t. They put Hana’s body in and covered her up. The next day, they buried Mr. Romero right on top of her. And nobody knew.”

The fact that it was somewhat of an accident and not a planned murder was the only reason in my mind Mimi and Janelle survived. If those boys had been true killers, utterly remorseless, I doubted I would ever have met Mimi.

“I was shaking so hard, I could barely breathe,” she said, shaking almost as hard right then. “And you were right about the bullying.” She looked up at me. “They got more and more brazen, and it just became unbearable. I stopped going to school and then finally begged my parents to let me live with my grandmother here. I just couldn’t live there any longer. I couldn’t look at Mr. and Mrs. Insinga any longer, knowing what they must have been going through.”

“Did they offer Janelle the same treatment?” I asked.

She looked up at me, confused. “Janelle?”

“Janelle York.”

Her face morphed from sadness to disgust. “She became nothing more than their lapdog. She was a part of it, a part of them.”

“I don’t understand.” I rose to my feet. “You two were hiding—”

She frowned at me. “I wasn’t hiding with Janelle in the bathroom,” she said, almost appalled that I would even think such a thing. “She’d been in the room with them, making out with Tommy on a beanbag in the corner. She would’ve done anything for him. When he freaked out about his parents finding out what happened, it was her idea to bury Hana underneath that grave.”

I turned up my palms. “Then who was hiding with you? And who was ha**ng s*x with Hana?”

She swallowed hard. I could tell she didn’t want to tell us. “It was Jeff. Jeff Hargrove was … on her.”

“Wait, Jeff Hargrove was ha**ng s*x with Hana?”

“Yes, well, at that time. I think … I think they took turns.”

“And who were they?”

She thought back with a helpless shrug. “Besides Jeff, there was Nick Velasquez and Anthony Richardson.”

What the hell? “Mimi, who was in the bathroom with you?”

She lowered her head. “This is confidential, right?”

I kneeled down and peered into her eyes. “I can’t promise this won’t get out, Mimi, but we need to know who was there.”

With a heavy sigh, she said reluctantly, “Kyle Kirsch.”

Her answer knocked the wind out of me. “You mean, Kyle had nothing to do with Hana’s death?”

She seemed surprised. “No, not at all. They treated Kyle almost as badly as they treated me. Only he was the son of the sheriff, so they didn’t go quite so far with him.” She gripped my arm, her fingernails sinking into my sleeve. “You would have to know Jeff Hargrove. He’s crazy. Sheriff or no sheriff, he would have killed us both.”

I fell back on my heels. “Okay, so then what?” I asked, thinking aloud. My incredulous gaze landed on Cookie. “Kyle, what? He didn’t want all of this surfacing, so he’s killing everyone?”

“What?” Mimi almost screamed, her fingernails digging in, setting up shop. “Kyle would never do that. He would never hurt anyone.”

“Mimi,” I said, my voice sympathetic, “everyone started dying about two seconds after Kyle Kirsch announced his intention to run for a seat in the Senate. That’s a little hard to explain away.”

“I know everyone started dying, but nobody knows who’s doing it. Even Kyle. He’s scared shitless.” She glanced at Cookie. “Hired all kinds of bodyguards.” After a moment lost in thought, she shook her head. “It has to be Jeff Hargrove. He was always nuts.”

Cookie leaned forward. “Mimi, Jeff Hargrove drowned in his swimming pool two weeks ago.”

Pure, unadulterated shock overtook Mimi’s features. She was just as confused as the rest of us. And I was utterly lost.

“And Nick Velasquez allegedly committed suicide three weeks ago.”

“I knew that. Anthony Richardson did, too, but I didn’t know about Jeff.”

“Sweetheart, they’re all dead, everyone who was in that room, except for you and Kyle. There’s no other explanation.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head in denial, “that’s just not possible. If you knew Kyle.”

“Were you two involved?” I asked her. Love was not only blind, it often careened into Blithering Idiotsville as well.

She cast me another one of her looks of incredulity. She was really good at those. “No, we weren’t … You don’t understand.” She stopped and bit her bottom lip, then said with an acquiescent sigh, “Nobody knows this, nobody, but Kyle is g*y. We were in the bathroom talking about boys.”

Oh, for the love of hush puppies. This just got better and better. “Okay, let me think,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Tell me again, why did you have dinner with Tommy Zapata the other day?”

Her brows crinkled. “He asked to meet with me. I was kind of scared not to. He said he was being blackmailed and he just couldn’t live with himself any longer.”

Blackmail tended to convince people they could no longer live with what they’d done. It was amazing.

“He said he’d met with Kyle and told him he was going to step forward and confess everything, take responsibility for his part in all of it. He asked me if I would back him. He was going to tell the authorities how they threatened Kyle and me, how they forced us to go with them.”