Burned by Sara Shepard Page A

a sea grape tree.”
    Graham pulled out his cell phone, pressed the BROWSE button, and typed sea grape into Google. Pictures of a large-fronded tree with green grape clusters appeared on the screen. “The largest group of sea grape trees is on the southernmost tip of the island,” he read aloud.
    “I guess that’s where we’re going,” Aria said, then turned on the sidewalk toward the ocean.
    Graham exited out of Google, and his phone returned to the main screen. When Aria saw that the wallpaper was a picture of Tabitha, a scream froze in her throat. Tabitha was sitting on a stone wall, dressed in a pink shirt and skinny jeans.
    She turned away, but not before Graham caught her looking. “Oh. That was my girlfriend. The one who was … you know.”
    Aria nodded, taking in Tabitha’s familiar blond hair, big blue eyes, and the faint burn scars on her neck from a childhood fire. “She’s, um, pretty.”
    “Yeah.” Graham sighed heavily. “She was gorgeous.” His voice got a little choked up.
    Aria paused at a corner. “You miss her, huh?”
    Graham nodded. “It’s … hard. And weird. I don’t know anyone our age that’s died, you know? I’ve sort of had a hard time with it, which is totally lame, because we weren’t even together when she passed away.”
    A car whizzed past, kicking up the ends of Aria’s hair. “You weren’t?”
    He shook his head. “We dated in tenth grade, but I always felt like she was just waiting for something better to come along. Even when I asked her to the tenth-grade dance, she was so blasé about it, like she would’ve rather gone with someone else.” He kicked a loose pebble on the ground. “I said some pretty awful things when we broke up, mostly about her being crazy. But then, after she went to the hospital again, I felt like the biggest jerk in the world.”
    “S-she was in the hospital?” Aria asked, hoping she sounded surprised.
    “Yeah. She was in and out of a hospital for years,” Graham answered, stepping back from the edge of a curb to avoid getting clipped by a fast-moving scooter.
    “For what?”
    “Depression. She had a lot of problems with her family.”
    There were no more cars coming at the corner, so they crossed the street. “Did you ever visit her?” Aria asked.
    “Once.” He made a wry face. “The place she was in looked really beautiful on the outside and had this amazing lobby, but once you went to the patient rooms, it was pretty miserable.”
    “Huh,” Aria said, keeping her features completely neutral. That sounded like The Preserve at Addison-Stevens, all right. “Did she have any friends there?”
    Graham stared up at the sky for a moment, thinking. “There were these two blond girls who were, like, the queen bees of the place. They insisted on hanging out with Tabitha when I visited her—I think they were sizing me up, deeming if I was worth talking to or not.”
    Even though the sun was blaring down hard on the top of her head, Aria shivered. She wondered if one of them was Ali.
    “There was a guy, too,” Graham went on. “I could tell he was into her—he kept giving me these nasty looks across the room.” He set his jaw. “She was probably hooking up with him. All the girls thought he was pretty hot.”
    Then he glanced at Aria. “I’m making her sound crazy, but she wasn’t—she was pretty awesome. Everyone was after her—I don’t know why she picked me.” There was another sigh. “I’ve talked to a therapist about it. She was actually the one who told me to go on this trip. She thought it would help me get over what happened, separate from the craziness surrounding Maplewood right now.”
    “I hear that.” Aria’s skin felt so prickly she just wanted to scratch and scratch. What would Graham think if he knew he was standing next to Tabitha’s murderer?
    They approached a public beach with a small boardwalk. A weathered man stood under a striped umbrella, selling sodas out of a cooler. Two tanned boys sat