The Secret Place

The narrative shifts to the past. When the third- and fourth-year students at Colm’s and St. Kilda’s attend the Valentine’s dance, Selena, Holly, Julia, and Becca dance together. They studiously ignore Joanne and her friends, who mock Becca’s choice to wear jeans to a dance and make fun of the dresses that Julia, Holly, and Selena are wearing. Julia gets bored with dancing and strikes up a conversation with Finn, one of the few Colm’s boys whom she doesn’t completely loathe. She and Finn sneak outside to drink the alcohol that the Colm’s boys deposited in the bushes behind St. Kilda’s. Meanwhile, Chris approaches Selena to chat. They cannot quite hear each other over the blaring music, so they get permission from one of the nuns to sit and talk just outside the doors.

Back in the present, Antoinette startles Stephen by bursting into the girls’ room as he is searching it. She triumphantly holds up an evidence bag, revealing her discovery of the phone that Chris gave to Joanne, which Alison began using after Chris and Joanne broke up. Because Alison did not switch out the SIM card, the detectives will have access to Joanne and Chris’s full communication history. They agree that Chris probably had his own secret phone. His family is affluent, and if he had enough money to buy Joanne her own phone and the foresight to use secret phones to evade detection, he must have had another phone of his own. This would explain the apparent lack of call or text history between him and the eight girls.

Suddenly, Antoinette’s techs call and tell her that they have retrieved Joanne’s phone history, which shows communication between her and an unknown number (presumably Chris’s secret phone). The texts go back and forth until Chris begins responding intermittently and then not at all. The detectives realize that the unknown number matches the one that sent the text about where to find the missing key. They wonder if the person who killed Chris kept his phone, or perhaps just the SIM, in order to make an anonymous call. Alternately, the killer could have given Chris’s phone to someone else, who then texted the location of the key. They also mull over the possibility that the killer tossed the phone, after which someone else found it.

They decide to interview Joanne again. She is initially dismissive but becomes cooperative when the detectives explain that because she had an outside key, she could have snuck out to kill Chris. She counters that Julia also had a key; the detectives tell her that they have not been able to verify that. They also have no evidence of her claim that Chris and Selena were dating. At that, she retrieves her phone and produces a video of Chris and Selena kissing in the cypress grove where he later died. The video is dated in April, just three and a half weeks before his death. Joanne smugly tells them that they now have “proof.” She adds that she engineered Chris and Selena’s breakup; she didn’t think that Selena deserved Chris, so she had a talk with Julia, who took care of the matter. Joanne initially denies having dated Chris herself, but when the detectives produce the phone records of their texts and calls, she admits to it. She explains that they kept their relationship a secret because their love was so “special.” The detectives are skeptical because Chris was obviously manipulative, although Joanne hadn’t realized this. They press her further, asking if she was present on the night Chris died or if she was protecting someone. She adamantly denies this, and they end the interview.

Later, Antoinette and Stephen discuss the case together. They doubt that Julia would have listened to Joanne’s demands that Selena and Chris stop dating, so the reason for that breakup is still unclear. They wonder if Chris sexually assaulted Selena, as this would explain the girls’ collective choice to stop dating. They ask Ms. McKenna for permission to conduct additional interviews without chaperones present, explaining that the girls might feel more comfortable talking about breaches of school rules. Reluctantly, Ms. McKenna agrees.

The narrative shifts to the past. Julia and Finn head to the back of the school grounds and find a stashed bottle of rum. They discuss the legend of the ghost nun, a story told by both Colm’s and St. Kilda’s staff to keep the students out of the grounds at night. Both Julia and Finn agree that the ghost nun probably isn’t real, but they do speculate that ghosts might actually exist. Each claims not to be afraid to be out at night, but it is only nine o’clock. Finn challenges Julia to sneak out later, at midnight, and she tells him that at the next dance, she’ll have a photo on her phone to prove that she was willing to sneak out at that time.

Meanwhile, Selena and Chris are talking together on the stairs. Selena points out that he was rude earlier when he made fun of Becca for wearing jeans. He explains that wearing jeans to a dance leaves Becca wide open to criticism from people like Joanne. Selena points out that Chris liked Joanne, and he tells her that “hooking up” with her a few times and liking her are different things. He calls Joanne “a total raving bitch” (226). Selena argues that Joanne would be unkind to Becca no matter what she was wearing, and Chris agrees. He admits that his younger sister will be attending St. Kilda’s in two years and that, like Becca, she does “weird stuff” and doesn’t care what people think. He’s worried that she will be teased. He notes that although Selena is not “that weird,” she also doesn’t care what people think, and he asks her how she manages this. She struggles to respond but then tells him that it is important to believe in something bigger. He asks her if she means God, and she says that she doesn’t, not exactly. He seems smitten and tells her that she isn’t like other girls. He asks to meet up again. They are unsure how to make that happen, but they both agree to try.

In the present, the detectives head to the room that Joanne shares with her group; they intend to look for the SIM card. They chat as they work, and Stephen is pleased by their easy rapport; he no longer fears that Antoinette will take him off the case. A tech tells them that Chris’s phone records have arrived; he turned his secret phone on right before the start of the academic year and received messages from two different numbers. He then gradually ghosted both girls and started texting Joanne instead. After a few months, another number appeared, and he stopped returning Joanne’s texts. Then, he stopped texting that girl and began texting yet another girl. By February, he was texting someone else: Selena. During his relationship with Selena, there were no other numbers in his phone. On April 23 (the night Joanne took a video of Chris and Selena together), their text pattern changed. They went back and forth until May 16, each texting the other without getting a response and then abandoning the conversation. However, they did connect on the night Chris died. The detectives pose various theories about what happened between Chris and Selena and wonder if something went wrong, causing one of the girls to kill Chris in order to protect Selena.

The detectives interview Selena again, showing her the video that Joanne took of her and Chris. Selena admits to the relationship and claims that their feelings for each other were real. She tells them that she ended the relationship because she knew that dating brought out the worst in Chris, and she didn’t think their connection would last. She texted him a few more times because she wanted to remain friends. She denies telling her friends about the relationship. Antoinette and Stephen both find her responses to be evasive and wonder what details she might have omitted from her story.

The narrative shifts to the past. It is almost Easter. Students from Colm’s and St. Kilda’s are at the Court. Becca cannot find the photos on her phone and starts yelling. The boys begin mocking her, and her friends return even worse insults to them. Chris offers to help Becca and manages to locate the folder that she had moved her photos into. While he is sitting by Becca, he slips a secret phone to Selena.

Chris and Selena begin meeting outside in the girls’ secret cypress glade at night. She is wary because she knows how many girls he has dated during the past two years, but the two nonetheless develop a genuine connection. They share stories from their lives, and Selena thinks he may be a kindred spirit. Like her, he seems to value solitude. When they are alone together, he is thoughtful and considerate. She does not tell her friends that she uses Julia’s key to sneak out at night. She is surprised that her friends never wake up when she is gone and that the nuns don’t catch her on the grounds with Chris.