What Have You Done (Adler and Dwyer, #0.5)

On his way to the store, Roy sees Edward’s taillights but doesn’t know who they belong to. He tries to follow him, but Edward drives too fast and loses him. He goes to the police, afraid that there may be another body in one of his fields.

Paula is worried about her daughter, Taylor, after seeing her sitting alone in the cafeteria. She goes up to Taylor’s room with her husband, and they ask her if everything is alright; Taylor insists that everything is fine. Paula points out that she is always alone at school, but Taylor tells her that she is fine that way. When Paula asks to see Taylor’s phone, Taylor refuses, and Paula wonders if she should force Taylor to show it to her.

Back downstairs, she and her husband decide that they need to figure out how other parents handle situations like this. Everything that has happened—Diana’s death, the allegations against Brad, and Principal Kelly likely losing his job—makes Paula “sick to her stomach, thinking about it all” (228).

Detective Stone and his partner visit Joe Prior at the construction site on Tuesday morning. They ask him why he went to Quebec, and he lies and says that he went shopping. However, when they ask him what he bought or if he has receipts, they realize he is lying. They leave him, and Joe watches as they go over to talk to Roddy. Joe thinks the conversation lasts too long, and he can see in Roddy’s body language that he tells them more than he did before.

Brenda walks around her house, knowing for certain that she can “sense” Diana’s presence and talks to her. She realizes that she has not been out of the house in a long time and texts Riley and Evan. They come over, and she asks them to go to the grocery store for her. When they leave, she continues talking with Diana, asking for a “sign” if she is there.

Diana watches as the detectives interview Joe Prior. She notices his smell, like he does not wash his clothes or bathe often enough. She breathes it in, hoping that it will trigger the memories of her death, but it doesn’t.

The police tell Joe that Roddy admitted to lying to them; he has no alibi for the night Diana died. Joe insists that he did it so the police would leave him alone and reminds them that he came in the first time voluntarily. As they speak, Diana remembers something about Joe’s smell: She once smelled it in her car after work. She realizes that he could have looked at her documents and gotten her address. She also remembers a night when she looked out her window and saw a man standing in the street watching her. The feeling of “terror” she had that night is the same one she feels now, looking down at Joe. She yells at the police, trying to tell them, but they cannot hear her.

On the way home, Joe thinks about how he could end up in jail. It reminds him of all the horrible places he lived as a kid, like the cheap apartments, a trailer, and the closet where his father used to lock him up for days without food or water.

Paula goes over to Brenda’s house to offer her condolences and give her some of the work that Diana did in her class. Brenda tells her that Diana is there in the house with them, startling Paula. She also says that she worries that she is being “selfish” by keeping Diana there and not allowing her to rest; she hopes that at the funeral the next day, Diana will find peace. As Paula leaves, she thinks of how Brenda “seems to have lost her mind” (239).

Diana watches her mother talk with Paula and worries about her but realizes there is nothing she can do to help. Parts of her memories are coming back in fragments as she still struggles to remember who killed her. She thinks back to the conversation where she told Principal Kelly about Brad and how Brad denied everything and said that Diana tricked him into coming into the locker room.

Joe watches as the police search his apartment. Even though he knows they won’t find anything, it still makes him nervous, and he wishes he had never told Roddy to lie.

Ellen tells herself to continue to ignore Brad, but she breaks down and reads his messages. He begs her to answer him and insists he did nothing wrong. In the last message, he tells her that he got a lawyer, and the lawyer is sure that he is fine.

Brad is shocked when he receives a message from Ellen asking him to tell her more about his meeting with the lawyer. He asks her to come over, but she refuses, so he texts her. The lawyer told Brad that he saw the file at the school, and the stuff in it was only “minor.” According to his contacts with the police, there is no real evidence in Diana’s murder case against anyone, and the media is just creating hype around it.

Ellen responds that she wants to see the file. Brad agrees to talk with Principal Kelly. Ellen allows herself to have “a little hope,” convincing herself that the girls could be lying and he would support Brad, as he could possibly be the “victim” (246).

Kelly sits at home, drinking when his wife comes in. She confronts him about the situation, and he admits that he handled Diana’s accusations wrongly and he could lose his job over it. He thinks of how he wishes he were “a man of action” (248), like trying to fix his marriage instead of having an affair and reporting the incident with Diana, even if he didn’t believe her.

Paula tried talking with her friend, Karen, about how she handles problems with her daughter, but Karen was no help. She decides to talk with Taylor again. She tells her that she is thinking of changing schools because her teaching there has an impact on Taylor, but Taylor insists that is not part of the problem and then begins sobbing.

Ellen goes over to Brad’s house, and he shows her a copy of the file from the school. In it, Kelly writes that he had a meeting with Diana and Brad, and Diana complained of Brad looking at her and touching her inappropriately. Brad apologized and insisted he never meant to make her uncomfortable. Because Diana did not want anyone else to be told of the incident, Kelly notes that he was inclined to believe Brad and thought that Diana may have either misunderstood or made it up. Ellen is slightly reassured but still wonders if she can ever truly believe in Brad’s innocence and trust him again.

Taylor tells her mom that Principal Kelly’s daughter, Sadie, has been bullying her at school. She told Taylor that if she told anyone, she would use her dad to get Paula fired. Paula reassures Taylor that there is nothing Sadie can do and that she will handle it. Taylor then admits that Brad sometimes looks at her chest, and when she catches him doing it, he “just smiled and did it anyway” (258). She admits that she was too embarrassed by it to talk about it before. Paula reassures her but is furious that Kelly’s inaction allowed this to happen.

Diana watches at 11:00 pm as the police interrogate Joe. They tell him that they found the body of a 16-year-old girl, Katie Cantor, in upstate New York. Joe was questioned about her disappearance because he had made her uncomfortable at her job. The police hold him overnight in a cell as Joe asks for a lawyer.

Riley wakes up on Wednesday morning, thinking about Diana’s funeral that day. She suddenly realizes that there is an even older cemetery in town, Macklin Cemetery, and decides to go there. She finds the grave of Simon Foster, born in 1861. She is “unsettled” by the discovery but decides that she can’t talk to Evan about it because he would just explain it away as a coincidence. Instead, she decides to talk with Sadie Kelly, who was with her and Diana when they used the Ouija board.

Cameron and his parents go to Diana’s funeral. They decide not to offer their condolences to Brenda and speak with as few people as possible, arriving early and sitting in the back. They are unsure how the town feels about them and know that at least some people must think Cameron is guilty. Cameron spends most of the time looking at the ground, but near the beginning of the service, he catches Evan’s eye at the front of the church. The two stare at each other as Cameron refuses to look away, but then he begins to cry. He wonders if Evan and Riley think he killed Diana and is frustrated that they can’t see that “he’s hurting too” (266).

Ellen and her parents argue over whether she should go to the funeral. They want her to stay away and not cause more gossip when she did not even know Diana, but she wants to go to support Brad—who insists he needs to be there to show he has nothing to hide. Although she is not fully convinced the girls lied, she has enough doubt to stay with Brad for now and decides to go to the funeral.

Brad enters the church and looks around. He notes that Taylor is there and thinks that she could be a problem. Then, he spots Zoe as he pushes his anger down.

Principal Kelly sits in the church, thinking of how he is in front of God as he continues to lie about the situation with Brad. He thinks of how he has “come to realize that he’s a weak man, a coward” (269), and he considers whether to tell the police the entire truth.

Paula looks at Kelly and his daughter. She realizes that most of her anger lies with Brad and Sadie, but she also holds some toward Kelly for not preventing what happened. She decides that she needs to tell the police about her daughter’s experiences with Brad, at the very least, to make sure that Brad never teaches again.

Riley sits through the service, barely able to pay attention as she stares at Diana’s coffin. Despite her worries, she follows the procession to Diana’s grave. As they lower her body in and throw in the first pile of dirt, she faints.

Diana watches over her funeral, noting all the people who attended and the grief she sees in her mother, Riley, and Evan. She realizes that she is angry toward Principal Kelly for not supporting her and becomes even angrier when she sees Brad. She then has a flashback to the night she died, her memories finally coming back to her. She saw a man on the road, staring up at her in her bedroom. She shut off her lights and looked for her phone but realized she left it downstairs. She then heard the man come into her house and start up the stairs. She attempted to open her bedroom door and flee, but he was right outside it. She suddenly sees his face and remembers that it was Brad Turner. Now, she is overcome with rage and dedicated to finding a way to “haunt” him “for the rest of his miserable life” (274).

Joe waits in his cell, panicking as he has flashbacks to his time being locked up as a child. He did kill Katie in New York, then moved to Vermont to get away from it. He considers it “sheer shitty luck” that Diana died (275), and they saw him on the Home Depot camera, as he never intended to kill her. He is finally brought into the interview room on Wednesday night. They tell him that DNA evidence was found on Katie’s body, and the New York State Police are on their way to arrest him.

Principal Kelly tells his wife about his affair and then goes to the police station to tell them the whole story that he was told by Diana. During it, he weeps and now feels relieved, even though he knows he will never work in a school again.

Brad is called down to the police station. The detectives tell him everything that they learned from Kelly; they now have all the details from the first meeting but also know that there was a second meeting. The night before Diana died, Brad went into her house and made her undress, then told her no one would believe her if she told. At school the next morning, Diana went to Kelly and demanded that Brad stay away from her, or she would call the police. To keep her quiet, the detectives surmise that Brad went back to her house that night and killed her. Brad adamantly denies it, but the police inform him that another survivor, Taylor, has come forward, too.

That night, Ellen sits down with her parents to watch the news. They see the report on Brad’s arrest. In response, she has a “disorienting” feeling of “total emptiness” (281).

Paula and her husband also watch the news. Paula realizes that Kelly likely gave more information to the police. She is relieved that Diana’s murderer was found but also feels nauseated that it could have been Taylor next.

The next morning, Riley wakes up, having slept fitfully after fainting. She feels overwhelmed by the idea of trying to move on without Diana. She tried to get Sadie to help her contact Diana with a Ouija board the day before, but Sadie claimed she didn’t fully remember that night and didn’t believe it had worked.

Riley texts Evan and then goes over to his house. She tries to convince him to contact Diana, but he insists that she needs to calm down and prepare to move on. She admits that he is right, then he offers to let her take a nap. When he goes down to get her a drink, she spots something under the bed. She pulls it out and realizes it is Diana’s phone.

Diana watches Riley and Evan as they grieve for her. She sees Evan go downstairs, and then Riley discovers her phone under her bed. She suddenly remembers what happened to her on her last day. She went to Principal Kelly and Brad and threatened to go to the police. She was afraid of not being believed but also of how Cameron would react—if he would be angry at Brad or angry at her, thinking that she somehow led Brad on.

That night, after breaking up with Cameron, she went home, and then Evan knocked on her door. She let him in so he could borrow a book, and she told him about breaking up with Cameron. Evan then told Diana that he loved her. After everything she had been through, she laughed in response, feeling on the verge of “hysteria.” Evan then became enraged and hit her, knocking her down, then climbed on top of her and strangled her with her jump rope.

After finding Diana’s phone, Riley calls 911. She tells them her address and that she is there with Diana’s murderer but then hangs up when she hears Evan coming back up the stairs. She pretends to be asleep, but when she looks at him, she realizes that he knows she is lying. He becomes enraged and forces her to show him her phone. He sees she called 911 just as they hear sirens in the distance.

Ellen hears the news that Evan was arrested, but she still does not go see Brad. Instead, she goes to Principal Kelly and demands that he tell her everything he knows about Brad. He tells her the whole story. She leaves, “sickened,” and decides that she is going to move to a new town and start a new life.

Diana looks down at Evan as he sits alone in the interview room. She notes how she saw him transform into someone different, both when he killed her and when he found out that Riley had called the police. However, her desire for revenge is fading as she realizes that “Evan will pay the price” and “suffer for what he’s done” (300).

Evan sits in the interview room, thinking about how he killed Diana. He knew that he always had another side of himself, angry and capable of murder, buried deep in him, but it surprised him nonetheless when it came out. However, he harbors anger toward Diana for making him do it—for laughing at him and causing him to snap.

Now, he thinks of the cameras rolling in the interview room and how much he would like to be able to watch all the tapes from the past few days. He thinks of it as good research for the book that he is going to write. Although he never planned on getting caught, he decides it is not such a bad thing to go to prison to be able to earn a degree and write his book, especially now that he will have some fame from being known as a murderer.

He also thinks about the journal he had been writing. Even though it was all lies, he realizes that “he doesn’t really want to be this other Evan” (306). He wishes he were the one in the journal. When he finally writes his book about his experiences, he is excited to “play” with the truth as he did in his journal, something that all writers do.