he knows him.
Imani's got The Mill in his blood, he's only ever been of and for The Mill. He went to Mill Valley, when he speaks, it's with the slow drawl of the island's poorest – it sounds like home, like his mother, who says he sounds so much like his father... he could never think to train himself out of it. He would never dream of any other voice, any other life.
The people of The Mill are his family, friends, neighbors. They're the ones he kicked a ball with on the streets growing up, they were the first subjects of his photography, each crooked photo slotted into a plastic picture slip in a book bursting at the seams of them. They're grainy, overexposed (sometimes underexposed), obviously taken from the height of a small child at first, before they started getting better, more professional, the boy becoming a man, learning how to work the camera he'd inherited from a father no longer of the earth.
In those books, there are classmates, older students, younger students, anyone who was near enough, anyone willing to stand still for even a second – and candids of those who didn't notice him walking by.
Ray Ventura is barely a year older than him. They shared classes together – Coronadan History, Geometry... Art. They share a district. He's practically kin. His family brought the Eberles meals after the fire, he taught Imani how to tie knots used at the docks (learned from his father, and his father before him, and his father before him) to help tie the fishing boats down. They would sneak off some nights on his father's boat just to sit on the water under all those stars.
There are at least three dozen photos with Ray in them, from his gap-toothed grin as a child, a boy finally growing into his boots, a smiling teenager pushing away Imani's camera lens, hands already calloused from working alongside his father. There are graduation pictures, birthdays, weddings. Little memories, like raindrops on the pages of a book left out in the rain. They will always be there, no matter how much you try to dry the pages.
Ray Ventura is not a killer. Imani has so much blood on his hands, he knows what a man who doesn't looks like. Ray used to hate even the thought of gutting a fish, why would he even think about stealing a rifle? What would he have possibly been doing in Villa Solana? He will never get those images of Ray being led through The Mill in chains out of his head. The news was already speaking about him as if he was the killer. No due process, no assumption of innocence... He's being framed.
But what can Imani do but sit and watch? He has no power, what little money he has is paying his brother's way through university right now, and what's he supposed to do, try to convince the entire du Bois clan that they got the wrong guy?
The Premier's killer is still on the loose somewhere. And if Ray is killed for this, for a crime he didn't commit, Imani will never be able to sleep at night in his head. Mani, he hears Ray's voice in his dreams every night, ayúdame.
his hands will be stained with this blood, too. but, this time, he'll never be able to wash them clean.