I think many of us had been hoping against hope that somehow Jason Blossom hadn't drowned on July 4, that we'd come to school Monday morning and there Jason would be, or that we'd see him and Cheryl in a booth at Pop's. But that was before the undeniable, irrevocable fact of his bloated, waterlogged body, a corpse with a bullet hole in its head and terrible secrets that could only be revealed by the cold, steel blade of a coroner's autopsy scalpel or the telltale beating of a guilty heart.