The Telling (36 page)

We make it to Duncan's SUV; a police cruiser is idling parked beside it. An officer jumps out, his hand on the walkie clipped to his shoulder, and regards us suspiciously. “You kids know you're not allowed to light bonfires or smoke out here,” he warns in that robotic-cop voice all male police seem to have.

Josh, true to form, describes the fire and the location of the cabin. The officer talks into his walkie and requests a fire truck. I check my own cell and see that Sweeny hasn't returned my call. I slump against the car door as Josh spells all our names for the cop, who wants to write them down, just in case he stumbles across the remains of a bonfire or cigarette butts. Carolynn props her elbow on the car's hood beside me and cradles her head in her hand.

“It was just there, on the top of a stack of magazines, waiting for us,” I tell her quietly.

“Not waiting for long,” she says. She rocks her head in her hand. “The flames would have destroyed it.”

“Yes,” I drag out the word as I think, “but didn't it seem weirdly easy for us to find it?”

She raises an eyebrow. A smudge of soot covers the tip of her nose, and the diamond stud looks covered in coal. “We had to hike through the preserve, brave a fire, survive a collapsing cabin, and escape whatever full-on sociopath has been killing our friends.” She waits a beat, and her face stays close to mine. Her sharply drawn cheeks stand out more than usual. “Easy is not what comes to mind. Whoever we're dealing with was burning evidence. He had no idea we were there. It was the first break we've had. It was luck.”

She takes the album from my hands, shakes her head in a state of irritation, and climbs into the car.

I regard the preserve's primeval green beyond the edge of the access road. All these seams of trees fill up our island with places for
him
to hide. It doesn't feel like luck that we stumbled on him at the exact moment he was destroying evidence. It feels like being outmaneuvered in a game I hadn't realized I was playing.

C
arolynn fiddles with the bracelets around her wrist, their charms and beads clicking faintly as the boys pile into the SUV. I stare at the cover of the album after trying three times to reach Sweeny. I'm aware of Carolynn spinning the gray and indigo square beads on a delicate gold-linked bracelet in my peripheral vision. Becca had its mate.

“I feel like we just escaped death,” she muses quietly, turning each square bead on the bracelet until they're aligned neatly. “Have you ever seen those fish that are accidentally yanked up in the crab pots?” The boys stop talking. “They're all crisscrossed with rope, red slit gills opening and closing desperately, eyes bugging out because
they know
.” What she says brings a gloomy dream over the car.

Duncan twists in the front seat. “What do they know?”

Carolynn looks up, seemingly surprised that she wasn't just speaking to herself. “That they're about to die.”

“Morbid much?” Rusty says.

“I'm saying that that's how I felt, like Lana and I were about to die. But we didn't.” She glances back to her bracelets.

“Whoever is doing this to us is about to get kneecapped, and then
he's
going to die,” Duncan says. He accelerates too fast. There's the ping of rocks spitting under the wheels, and we cross the gravel shoulder to the highway.

“So that's just it?” Rusty asks. “We gave the cops our names and the fire department is going to handle the fire and we just have to wait for Ward and the lady detective to pull their heads out of their asses and call us?”

“Basically,” Josh says. “That officer said they're swamped with the search for more evidence where they found Skitzy-Fitzy over by the lighthouse, and I couldn't even get through to my mom. You want to give Sweeny another try?” He gives me a hopeful look over his shoulder.

“I left three messages while we were waiting for you guys,” I tell him.

His mouth winds up in dismay, and then he bobs his head, resigned.

“Why aren't you looking through it?” Carolynn asks. She nudges the album, which is resting unopened on my lap.

My fingers have been tracing the frantic design of curling vines on the front cover. “It was just before my eleventh birthday when I snuck into Ben's room to find this,” I say. “I only had time for two pages before he walked in on me.” Me: hot-faced and caught in the act, my hand hovering above a picture of Ben on a brightly painted carousel tiger. Ben: a wiry figure in the doorway who said in a deadly calm voice, “If you don't put that back, I'm not going to come to your party and we won't be friends anymore.”

I didn't hesitate. I slammed the cover closed, leaped up, left the album where it fell to my feet, and bolted from the room. Funny, but now it's
painfully obvious that it wasn't really my decision to turn Ben into a magical boy without a past. I was choice-less and made the best of it. That's me, Lana I-can-make-the-best-of-losing-my-mom-and-my-stepbrother-and-my-friends McBrook. “I might not have even remembered this album if he hadn't made such a big deal out of it,” I finish aloud.

The sticky album paper with its plastic sheath crackles as I open the cover. Carolynn scoots her thigh flush with mine. Her being here, radiating strength and spine, makes my fingers shake less.

The pictures of Ben as a child and the Ben in my head don't match up. The photos capture a house of ivied brick; a maze of hedges, overwhelmed by flowering vines; a trellised garden; a terraced brick patio with a white alabaster fountain and a toddler knee-deep and shirtless in its water; a boy in a tiny wool peacoat, hugging an iron lamppost outside a horse stable; a boy on his stomach, his hands propped and cupping his chin as he looks onto an open book by firelight. There are photos on white powdery beaches with the aquamarine sea beyond, and others where the boy wears a miniature tuxedo and poses with other children who are spangled with ribbons and frills.

“Huh,” Carolynn exhales. My eyes cut pointedly to her. “I did not see
this
coming.” She flurries her pink chipped fingernails over the pictures. “Ben was loaded in his former life. Not Gant rich, but old-white-dude, seaside mansions, ponies, and debutantes loaded. Did you know?”

I shake my head, but it isn't enough. “I had zero idea. Diane had
one
dress when she married my dad.”

Carolynn sniffs and looks—
for once
—impressed. “Whatever made them run and leave all this behind must have been really effing horrible.”

I turn back to the photos. It doesn't make sense. Ben became angry with Gant over what it had. He spit
privilege
like it was the dirtiest word he knew.

As each page turns, Ben gets a few months older. He's up to four or five by now. The pictures capture him mid-jump, leap, or monkey-dangle with two other kids. A tiny girl, about four, with large, grave eyes is usually joined in hands with a boy a year or so younger. His eyes are just as big, but rather than emitting grave intelligence, they're in a permanent state of alarm. When the three pose on a plaid blanket by the sea, the littlest boy stares at the waves, as if they're a roaring tsunami. When the three stand along a brick wall that's no more than two or three feet high, his mouth is drawn into a tight O and his eyes stretch wide, as if he's about to be pushed.

“Weird that there are no grown-ups in any of these,” I mutter.

Carolynn presses closer to me and taps the photo on the right of the page. “They're always just out of the frame or else they've been cut out. This one is a weird size—square.” She has a point. Many of the photos have been cropped to exclude what's just on the periphery, their edges slender dark borders.

“I haven't seen any addresses or landmarks. I guess we could try to figure out where this is by the way the beach or house looks?” I suggest.

“My money's on North Carolina,” Rusty pipes up. He's been quiet this whole time, looking over my shoulder at everything we've seen. “The sand looks like it did when my parents took us to a beach house there. Why don't you just show up at the mental hospital your stepmom's in and demand answers?”

“Rusty, man,” Josh says, dodging his headrest to see him. “Sensitivity training.”

“He's right,” I say. “I should show up at Calm Coast and demand she tell me what's happening. She won't be able to deny that she has secrets if I have this with me.”

The boys prattle on about logistics. Duncan knows where Calm Coast is, across the Olympic Peninsula and on the Pacific, because he had an aunt who stayed there one summer after she got drunk one Tuesday afternoon, climbed into her car, and pinballed from mailbox to mailbox down a mile stretch of road before the police pulled her over. They argue about driving there straightaway. Rusty says that baseball practice starts this afternoon, and everyone is horrified that he's actually planning on going. I flip through the last pages, half listening to the discord, Rusty explaining that he can't let the team down.

“Do you think Ben had cousins?” I ask Carolynn. Jealousy is threatening to cut off my air supply. Here are two kids who actually have that shared history with Ben. They had summers capturing fireflies and sunny afternoons playing in the hedge maze. They even, as is evident in the very last photo, had a childhood full of blanket forts.

Carolynn responds—what, I don't hear.

I'm hunched over the final photo. There are high-backed chairs, jutting up under sheets to make a blanket tent with the look of one of those white churches you see on Greek isles. Ben and the other two kids—the kids I was envious of up until a second ago—are huddled together. Firelight reflects on their round cheeks and amplifies details. All three sets of their big eyes—a shape and shade that are too similar not to be related—are fearful and liquid. Their chins point up. Their pink doll mouths grimace. Their foreheads glisten with nervous sweat. All are listening attentively to a figure in a chair. Their little features are
tortured
.

The adult figure is close to the camera; an edge of his rib and bottom of his elbow are all that's captured in the frame. The rest of him is out of the shot, except for his shadow, projected onto the white tent by the fire. The shadow man's head and spine are held at a manic angle. His mammoth left hand is tense and curved in the air, as if pretending to cuff a neck. His other hand is fisted higher, the arm arched and slightly bent. He appears about to plunge an invisible dagger into his imaginary victim.

Here
He
is. A shadow man cast on a white tent, tormenting three children with his stories. He was the shadow figure dragging Ben's limp body across the highway. I flip back through the pages. I don't care that the car has pulled to a stop in front of Josh's. Everyone but Carolynn has climbed out and we're sitting alone in the stuffy cab, our breaths magnified and mingling as she takes in what I point to.

I see the pictures with new eyes. The unsettling details weren't noticeable at first glimpse. Unless you were scouring the images for the dark, subtle things kids are sensitive enough to pick up on, you wouldn't notice that they're there. Kids are finely attuned to the horrible. They're always the first to see ghosts and monsters.

The carousel animals are wrong. The tiger's eyes are open and bloodshot, the fangs tipped in red. The giant purple bunny the little girl straddles is footless. “Rabbit feet are lucky.” The lion the younger boy rides has a gazelle's hoof and leg sticking from its mouth. These vicious and mutilated animals were toys in their extravagant lives.

Even the pictures that appear more benign are not. On the beach, or picnicking on an expansive and velvety lawn, or knee-deep in a meadow fuzzy with yellow wildflowers, the children's eyes are red-rimmed. They don't have the injuries most kids get. There are no
scabby knees. No runny noses. The kids are stiff in unwrinkled, formal outfits and staged as little life-size props rather than preschool-aged children.

The series of moments captured at the hedge maze gut me more than the rest. The four pictures were taken in rapid succession. They capture a sequence of bounding steps. The three kids are fleeing the photographer. In one, Ben is checking over his shoulder, his tiny features rearranged in horror, in another all three kids appear terrified, and in the remaining two, Ben's relatives have stumbled to the ground in their haste, and they're continuing to flee on their hands and knees.

What's pictured isn't imagined terror. I've experienced that. Kids pretend to chase. To be chased. Panic spreads and you run faster. You begin to believe that there's something at your heels. Not this. However real that feels, it isn't. I only know this now. After this summer. After I see the dread in the strange little boy's eyes and the hopeless resignation in the girl's. She knows that running is futile.

They will be caught. They know it. And they run anyway.

R
usty stays behind for his afternoon baseball practice and Duncan to watch his younger brothers while his parents are at work. He doesn't say it outright, but he's nervous leaving them with only their babysitter while he knows there's a killer in Gant who's managed to evade the police.

“What I can't figure is why
He
left the album in the house if he saw us coming. Sure it might have burned up, but he also ran the risk of us running inside and leaving with it. Why risk giving us this major clue?” Josh asks.

“We don't know he saw us coming,” Carolynn points out.

“And is it a major clue?” I say. “What empirical evidence has it given us? His face isn't pictured.”

“We know that Ben's childhood was the stuff of freaking nightmares because of it,” Carolynn interjects, leaning up on the center divider from where she sits in the rear seat of Josh's car.