Sidetracked-Kobo by Brandilyn Collins

minutes?”
    She looked up at him blankly. “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    She shook her head. Who cared about ten minutes anyway? Except that they were ten minutes in her old life. If she could just get them back now, relive them again. Stay in them …
    “Can you try to remember for me, please?”
    Suddenly the answer came. “Oh. I didn’t go in the house right away.”
    “Where were you?”
    “On the porch.”
    “What were you doing?”
    “Looking at catalogs of dresses.”
    “Catalogs? Where did you get them?”
    “From my backpack.”
    “Why were you looking at them?”
    Laura ran a hand over her face. She didn’t want to answer because it would sound so stupid. He would never understand, this dark man in his ugly tie who didn’t know her mom.
    “Laura. This is important.”
    “Why?”
    He spread his hands. “I need to understand every minute of what happened.”
    She sighed. “I was looking at pictures of prom dresses.”
    “For ten minutes?”
    Had she taken that long? She shrugged. “I guess.”
    “How many pictures did you look at?”
    How stupid was this? “I don’t know.”
    “Why were you looking at them?”
    No. Huh-uh. This man did not need to know about her private life. About Matt and the prom and her dreams and everything. How could he possibly understand? He couldn’t even dress himself right.
    “Laura. I need you to talk to me.”
    She shot him a hard look. “Kylie gave me the catalogs, okay?”
    “Who’s Kylie?”
    “My best friend.”
    “What’s her last name?”
    “Russo.”
    “Spell it for me.”
    Laura spelled it.
    “Do you have her phone number?”
    Of course she had her phone number, what kind of dumb question was that?
    “Would you give it to me, please?”
    Laura gave him the number. “You going to call her?”
    “I might.”
    “Why?”
    “I may need to talk to her about giving you the catalogs.”
    “Why?”
    He patted his fingers against the table. “Let’s just talk about you, okay? Tell me about looking at the pictures of the prom dresses.”
    Laura’s neck muscles felt like rocks. She stretched her neck to one side, then the other. “Fine.” She told him about the dresses. He wanted to know more, pushing and pushing. He tried to sound nice, but it ticked her off all the same. Still, in the end she told him. She had to—he wouldn’t let up. She talked about wanting to go to the prom with someone—she wouldn’t say who. And how Kylie and she had talked about dresses and gathered pictures.
    “So you stopped on your porch before going into the house, and you looked at these pictures?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And you did that for ten minutes?”
    Hadn’t she already answered this? “I guess. I wasn’t watching the time.”
    The detective nodded slowly. “You told me the front door was standing open. And when you saw that it seemed odd to you.”
    Laura’s stomach felt so empty. A big cavern that could never be filled. Like the rest of her. “Yeah. Didn’t look right. Mom never leaves the door hanging open.”
    Mom never leaves … She’d said it like her mom was still alive. The thought froze her. How could she start talking in past tense about her mom?
    “And you went in just after seeing the door standing open?”
    “Yes.”
    “So … the ten minutes you were on the porch, looking at the catalogs—all that time you didn’t see that the door was open?”
    Oh. Laura frowned. “I guess not.”
    “Your porch isn’t very big. You must have been close to the door.”
    “Yeah. But I was leaning against one of the pillars. Not really facing the door.”
    “I see. Why didn’t you tell me this the first time we talked?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it.”
    “You said you told me everything that happened.”
    “Well, I just forgot, okay? My mind was a little full.”
    He nodded. A long moment of silence ticked by. “Another thing that bothers me, Laura. There was no sign of forced entry on that front