The Devil You Know (20 page)

“Your mom will know the truth.”

“She'll
suspect
the truth,” Matt corrects. “But there won't be any more proof than there was with Lily. And she always keeps my secrets.”

“Why?”

“Because she knows that if she tells anyone, I will kill her, too.”

With a gun at our backs and Noah only able to use one arm, we carry the canoe to the launch ramp and slide it into the water. Matt follows behind us with a pair of wooden paddles.

“Ladies first.” He motions for me to sit in the middle and for Noah to take the front. Noah can't paddle with just one arm and Matt is wielding a gun, so most of the paddling falls to me. I alternate strokes—left, right, left, right—as we move through the launch basin. Along the mangrove shoreline I see the dark, bumpy shape of an alligator floating on the surface.

Back in about second or third grade, a Florida Wildlife officer brought a four-foot gator to school. We thought it was funny that he carried it in a plastic dog crate and even funnier when it peed on the classroom floor. The alligator's mouth was bound shut with electrical tape to keep it from biting, and as we ran our fingers over its rutted
hide, the officer explained the difference between alligators and crocodiles. Primarily, that alligators prefer freshwater and that crocodiles have narrower snouts.

I reach over the edge of the boat, dip my fingertips into the water, and touch them against my tongue. Salt. Even though I can't see its snout, I think the gator-shaped form must be a crocodile. They're rarer than alligators, and I've never seen one in the wild.

We pass through the narrow cut of the launch basin into Florida Bay and Matt points to the dark shape of a mangrove island up ahead. “Paddle there.”

Every single day boats pass by that island. Fish and crabs live among the tangly mangrove roots, and birds nest in the branches, but there's nothing there for humans. No reason to ever stop. Noah and I will turn to sun-bleached bones without anyone ever finding us, and Matt will get away with it because no one will ever think to look for us here.

When I was little, my favorite bedtime story was
Scuffy the Tugboat
, about a toy boat who felt too big for the toy store that contained him. He goes from bathtub to stream to river to the edge of the sea, where he realizes that maybe there is a limit to his bigness. For most of my life I've ignored the part where—just as he's about to sail off into the vastness of the ocean—a hand reaches out and brings him back to the safety of the bathtub. Right here, right
now, I'd give anything to be in my own bathtub with Daniel Boone on the other side of the door, telling me he needs to go potty. Because there's a good chance I won't make it home. And it may just be too late to hope for a hand that will bring me back.

Tears trickle down my face as Matt's words echo in my head—“you let your stupid, useless feelings get in the way of what needed to be done”—and I'm struck by a moment of clarity. I can't just paddle us to our deaths when I could do something. When I know what needs to be done.

It's too quiet on the water around us so I can't warn Noah. I can only hope that what I'm about to do doesn't make everything worse and that he will be okay.

The blade of the paddle drips across my shins as I lift it out of the water and bring it in front of me, as if I'm switching to the other side of the canoe. My heart beats so loud I can barely hear anything else. My hands meet in the middle, just as they normally would—one hand facing me, the other facing away. It's not a strong hold on the paddle, but it will have to do. I tighten my grip and draw in a deep breath. Shift my feet to the left and hope I can do this. Give a quick, matching half turn in my seat.

And swing as hard as I can.

The edge of the paddle slams with a wooden
thwack
against Matt's head, just above his ear, knocking him sideways. I launch myself in the same direction, forcing the canoe to capsize. Spilling all three of us into the warm, dark water of Florida Bay. My body goes under completely and I'm disoriented until my feet find the mucky bottom and I come up standing. The water is torso-deep, shallow enough to stand.

Noah and Matt surface with me, gasping, and Matt lunges for the canoe. I realize then that his hands are empty. He must have dropped the gun in the boat. “Stop him!”

Noah tackles Matt around the waist and drags him under, both of them thrashing wildly as Matt struggles
to free himself and Noah struggles to hold on. I push through the water to the swamped canoe and find the gun lying at the bottom, submerged in about a foot of water. I don't know whether a wet gun will fire, but I grab it anyway and turn around.

Under the light of the big summer moon, I can see that Matt has his hands around Noah's neck, pushing him underwater. Choking him. Drowning him. Noah pries weakly at Matt's fingers, trying to pull them away.

“Stop it!” The words come out louder, harsher than I expected, as fear turns to anger. With both hands tight around the grip of the gun, I lift it. Point it at Matt. “Let Noah go. Now.”

Matt's laugh cracks like a whip as he lifts Noah's head out of the water but doesn't let go. “You're not going to shoot me, Cadie,” Matt says. “The guilt will eat you up.”

Except the life is draining out of Noah. His body is limp, his eyes rolled back in his head. I am not going to let him die. “If I have to live with the guilt of someone dying,” I say, “it's going to be you.”

My body jolts with the force of the first bullet leaving the gun, and the sound roars in my ears. Matt releases Noah on impact, staggering backward. I fire again.

And again.

I'm deaf to the click of the empty gun, but I feel it and I see Matt fall backward. He goes beneath the surface
briefly, then bobs, floating faceup just a few feet from where Noah does the same. I close the distance to Noah. Curling my arms beneath his shoulders to keep his head above water, I haul him to the knee-deep flats.

“Stay with me, Noah.” I sit down and hold him against me, my hand on his cheek. His skin is cool, and I don't think he's breathing. “You can't die now. Not after I saved you.”

I learned how to do CPR when Danny was born—just in case—but I can't lay Noah down flat to perform chest compressions, and I don't know what else to do. I keep his head above the water and say a silent prayer that he starts breathing.

Noah's chest expands suddenly, rapidly, as he pulls in a sharp gasp. Breathing turns to coughing, and seawater spills from his mouth until his breath returns to something close to regular. Finally, he vomits.

“Are you okay?” The words sound as if they've clawed their way out of him. “Where's Matt?”

“He's, um—over there.” Several yards away, Matt floats, unmoving, and I have no idea if he is alive or dead. Once I saw a movie in which a crazy woman pretended to drown in a bathtub. She lay beneath the surface with her apparently lifeless eyes open until her prey—and the whole theater—believed she was dead. We all screamed when she came surging up out of the water.

Leaving Noah in the shallows, I move gingerly toward Matt's body, the empty gun in my hand, terrified he's going to reach out and grab me by the leg and drag me under. There are two holes in his shirt—left shoulder and right chest—where I shot him, and bile creeps up from my stomach. His eyes stare up into the midnight sky like the woman's in the movie, but Matt doesn't surge. He doesn't take a breath. He is not faking. He is dead.

Four days ago I was a girl pulling off a minor rebellion by going to a campfire party in the woods. Now Jason Kendrick is broken, Lindsey Buck is dead, and I've
murdered
someone. The force of Matt's last words—“the guilt will eat you up”—hits me like a sucker punch to the heart. All of this is my fault.

A sob scorches its way up my throat. “I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I just—he was drowning you and—”

“Cadie.” Noah is beside me now. How he can be upright, when my bones feel like they're going to collapse into a pile, is beyond me.

“I only wanted him to stop,” I say. “I didn't mean to kill him.”

“Keep it together.” He wraps his good arm around me and holds me against his chest, his T-shirt wet against my cheek. It's only then that I realize we're holding each other up. “It's going to be okay.”

“What am I going to do, Noah? I don't want to go to jail.”

“That's not going to happen.”

“But—” I try to close my eyes, but all I can see is Matt absorbing the blow of a bullet. Staggering. Falling. “I just kept shooting. And I hit him twice.”

Noah releases me, reaches out, and tips Matt sideways. The way he handles Matt's body seems so disrespectful, and I have to remind myself that Matt left a naked dead girl in the woods. I think about her family having to see her like that. Matt doesn't deserve any better than this. Noah digs his hand into Matt's pocket and pulls out the phone. Pressing the on/off switch through the waterproof case, he brings the screen to life.

“We have evidence,” he says. “And if anyone asks, we tell them I shot Matt.”

“I can't let you do that.”

“Look, I don't think either of us is going down over this,” Noah says. “But if we're going to have a worst-case-scenario plan, I've been to jail once. I can do it again.”

“They won't hire you for a national parks job.”

“I don't care.”

“I do.” Maybe he is right. Maybe the fact that I killed Matt in self-defense will be enough. Maybe the photos on Matt's phone will be all the evidence we need. But even if Noah is wrong, I won't let him suffer the consequences for me. “We have to tell the truth.”

The canoe has drifted since we've been in the water. It's close enough that I could swim to it, but the paddles are gone and we're too far from shore for the phone to pick up a signal.

“What happens now?” I ask.

“I'm pretty sure my arm is broken, so you're going to have to get the boat,” Noah says. “We'll put Matt in there and—I don't know. I guess if we stick to the flats we can pull the canoe back close to the shore and then swim it the rest of the way in.”

I'm already so mentally and emotionally broken that I don't think my body can take this, but the alternative is spending the night in the water with the body of the boy I killed. Crocodiles lurk among the mangroves and how long will it take before a shark smells Matt's blood in the water? It takes all my strength not to cry. “Okay.”

I walk the flats toward the canoe until it gets deep enough to swim. The canoe is in the boating channel that leads out toward the ocean, but I don't have to worry about being run over when the world around me is almost completely silent. The only things I hear are my strokes cutting through the water and the sound of my breathing from inside my body.

I can do this, I tell myself. I can do this.

The swamped boat is heavy, and the returning takes longer than the leaving. I have to hold on to the side, paddling with one arm until I can stand on bottom again.
Pulling the canoe is easier, but by the time I get back to the flats, my arms and legs are crying in pain. I don't know how I'll be able to swim to Flamingo. Except I look at Noah—blood loss, broken arm, and nearly drowned—and dig for the strength to keep going.

Together, we invert the canoe to empty out the water. I turn toward Matt and see a narrow snout and a pair of dark reptilian eyes surface just beyond the body. The Florida Wildlife officer back in elementary school told us that alligators and crocodiles don't usually attack humans, but said that they can be opportunistic when faced with the chance for a free meal. And right now … I don't even want to think about what Matt's dead body looks like to this incoming crocodile.

“Noah.” I keep my voice low. Steady. But really I'm terrified. “We have company.”

“Get in the boat.”

We climb carefully into the canoe as the crocodile—maybe the one from the shoreline, maybe a different one completely—tugs at the hem of Matt's shorts. The body dips gently below the water like a fishing bobber. The crocodile tugs again, this time a bit harder, with the same results. Meeting no resistance, the reptile opens its jagged-toothed mouth, clamps it around Matt's leg, and drags him under.

The ripples have faded and the water is serene before I speak. “Did that just—”

“Yes.” Noah nods.

“What do we do now? I mean … Matt is
gone.
”

“Well … it feels fucked-up beyond measure to say this, but I think our problems just got easier,” Noah says. “You don't have to prove self-defense if there is no body, we still have the photos of Matt's victims for the police, and—”

“And Lindsey's family gets poetic justice.”

It's so not an appropriate thing to say and it's even more inappropriate when we both start laughing, but I'm so far beyond normal right now that I don't even know what it looks like anymore. We laugh because if we don't I will have to look at Noah—sitting opposite me in the canoe—and remember that he is the same guy who stirred up something good inside me four days ago on the Magnolia loop road. We can't ever go back to that moment in time. And if there was a chance for something more than just this weekend together, what kind of future can there be for us now when death is what binds us? We laugh because otherwise I will cry.

Once the laughing has tapered to embarrassed-for-laughing silence, Noah runs his belt through the eye loop at the front of the canoe and we walk the flats—moving slowly because Noah is not okay—pulling the empty boat across the shallow water until we reach the mangrove-thick shore. There is still the matter of negotiating across the deepwater basin to the launch ramp.

“Get in the canoe,” I tell him. “Let me do this part.”