For a long while Paul lay awake beside me, trying out possible scenarios, but after a particularly lengthy lull in the conversation, followed by regular snuffling sounds, I turned my head to find that he’d drifted off to sleep. I’d thought Dorothy was my friend. We’d worked together, laughed together, cried together. How could she betray me with such a monstrous lie? I knew I had been nowhere near the back of Nimitz Library on the day Jennifer Goodall died. Dorothy had to know it, too. Was she simply mistaken? That hardly seemed likely. Was she purposely trying to frame me? As strange as her behavior had been in recent days, I couldn’t believe that either. My bet, after staring at the ceiling for quite some time, was that in pointing the finger at me, Dorothy believed she was diverting suspicion from somebody else, somebody far more important to her than I was. There were only two people on that list: her husband and her son. Kevin, I knew from Emma, had an ironclad alibi. He’d been doing a Physical Readiness Test at the time of the crime.
