CHAPTER
15
“I
will come back,” he’d said.
It had been nearly a week.
“Just wait,” he’d said, his voice full of tenderness, now that I’d promised to let him handle it. “I’m going to New York, to see my aunt. I have to . . . we still have my mom’s jewelry. I’m bringing it to her.”
There had been silence, then, the sound of his breath in the receiver, the sound of flint striking and another cigarette being lit.
“And you can keep yourself busy in the meantime.”
“Busy?” I said.
“Only two weeks left, right? You’re leaving in September. Don’t you need to pack?”
I’d tried to speak and couldn’t. My focus went to a spot on the floor, where I pushed the toe of my sneaker against the baseboard.
“I’m not sure anymore,” I said, finally.
“Becca—”
“Don’t say my name like that,” I interrupted, fighting against the urge to snap. “Don’t act like I’m a silly girl. I’m not. I’ve thought about this more than you can imagine.”
“Baby,” he said, and my eyes pricked with tears at the tenderness in the nickname. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want you to be here with me. I mean, God, that’s all I wanted for the longest time. I thought—”
He stopped abruptly.
“So what changed?” I whispered, hating the desperation in my voice. Through the phone, with miles in between us, he sounded small and far away.
“I just want you to think about what you’d do . . . if I wasn’t here.”
Inside my head, a sly voice had cooed words I did not want to hear.
Stupid girl,
it said,
you see? He’s making plans with-
out you.
I swallowed, closed my eyes and tried to force it away.
“Where else would you be?” I said.
Quiet. The house creaked around me, and I heard James sigh.
“Nowhere, Becca. Nowhere.”
* * *
I threw myself into work. Extra hours, double shifts, arriving early to set up the dining room and staying late to wipe each surface clean. I watched Craig slug beers at the bar, brazen, while Lindsay danced flirtatiously around him. I had served and bused and brought drink after drink to waiting diners, and tried not to picture James, alone on the road. It worked, until one afternoon when I banged through the door of the kitchen only to have Tom step heavily into my path.
“Don’t you ever take a day off?” he asked, smiling.
“Nope,” I smirked back, and tried to step around him.
He moved with me.
“Yes,” he said. His smile had faded; there were lines of concern around his mouth. “Today, this is your day off.”
“No,” I said, too loudly. Tom’s eyebrows shot up, but I couldn’t stop. He didn’t understand. I needed this—the heavy weight of the trays and the comforting scent of bread, the well-worn path from the front of the house to the kitchen and back. The predictable rhythm of Lindsay’s giggly chatter. The sense, just for a few hours, that I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing and that there was nothing, not a single thing, to be afraid of.
“I need to be here,” I insisted, hearing the edge of panic creep into my voice. Tom’s eyebrows knit together and he placed a meaty hand on my shoulder.
“Honey,” he said, his voice warm and paternal, “even if you didn’t need a break—and you do—I’ve gotta get the new girl in here for training. If she’s taking your place, she needs to walk the floor for at least a couple days, y’know?”
I stared at him, not understanding. He smiled and clapped me on the back.
“Don’t look so glum! In just a couple weeks, you’ll be outta here forever!”
As I plodded back to my car, I heard his voice behind me.
“Hey,” he called. I looked back, desperate, stupid hope all over my face.
Tom was leaning out the door, displaying a smile that carried a hint of puzzlement. “It’s not really forever,” he said. “The job’s all yours for next summer, if you want it!”
Next summer
.
I couldn’t even begin to picture it, couldn’t imagine anything beyond the edge of the yard, the dead heat of another day, the cloying taste of sweet, cheap wine as it dripped down my throat. The bottle in my hand sloshed again, another crimson droplet freeing itself from the slick green rim and landing on my sleeve.
It looked like blood.
Blood in the dirt by the road. Blood in a matted mess of blond, silky hair. Blood on the lips of James’s dead mother. Blood floating like a small red river above Brendan Brooks’s motionless eyes.
Blood on Craig Mitchell’s meaty hands.
I had promised not to think about it, promised to keep quiet.
I had promised, with the weight of my heart behind me, to let James do what needed to be done.
I promised.
I lied.
I had been watching him—searching behind the window glass of passing cars to see if Craig’s overlarge face would appear there. I could remember every ugly thing he’d ever said. I remembered the look in his eyes and the sucking smack of tongue against teeth, the way the spittle had flecked on the fat pink shelf of his lower lip. Licking his chops at other people’s pain. I stood just behind the swinging doors to the kitchen, watching him sit at the bar, watching him swearing and laughing and brazenly drinking beer while he waited for Lindsay to finish her shift and come sit beside him.
I watched the way he watched her, all slow-moving tongue and small eyes, appraising her body as though it belonged to him.
I watched him, and when I couldn’t watch him, I closed my eyes and imagined him watching her die. In my mind, a hulking figure clapped and chuckled at the spectacle as somebody beat the life out of her. In my mind, sometimes, he was killing her. They appeared together in the dark. She struggled as he held her, and his pudgy fingers left dirty streaks on the white expanse of her delicate throat. Choking her life away, hard fists landing on soft places, raining down on flesh that cracked, split, and bled. Growing weaker as he ground away. His grunts, her fluttering cries. He would tell her she deserved it. He would call her a bitch, and she would weep and beg and bleed. She would die, again and again.
* * *
Wine trickled from the bottle; sweat trickled down my back. I liked being drunk: the dulled senses, the thoughts covered by cobwebs, the feeling that my eyeballs could roll independently of each other to look in all directions at once. The night was so hot. I closed my eyes and let the world spin out.
Later, long after the wild roses had shed their petals and the sky had turned white and cold, long after Craig Mitchell’s name had become synonymous with brutality and blood and a crumpled body on hot black asphalt, I would have another chance. I would make another promise. Later, I would step into the wood-paneled witness box in a courtroom and try not to stare into Craig Mitchell’s cold, unblinking eyes, and swear to tell the truth.
This time, it was a promise I would keep.
* * *
I woke in the dark sometime later, with my head resting heavily in the grass and a fine strand of drool draped cooly along my cheek. When I put my hand to my face, I felt the raised pattern of fine lines where the lawn had served as a pillow. The scent of crushed grass was everywhere. With a groan, I got to my feet and searched for the bottle, brushing my fingers through the grass until they touched the alien smoothness of glass, then pitching it away into the dark. I heard the splash and hollow
thunk
as it landed in the creek bed.
Up the porch steps and through the door, a flickering light drew me toward the living room. My father would be there, spending the night on the sofa, TV on mute and remote in hand. If I found him in the morning, he would avoid looking me in the eye while saying that he’d fallen asleep there by accident. I held my breath and peered in.
The couch was empty.
But
she
was here.
The dead girl: her face stared out from the television screen, the same wide-eyed police sketch that was plastered all over town, accompanied by the serious monotone of an announcer whose haggard appearance could only fly on the local news. I focused, fighting the waves of nausea that had arrived to accompany the throbbing in my head, catching only the last few words.
“Police are asking anyone with information about the identity of this woman to come forward.” The announcer, looking appropriately somber, put a special emphasis on the word “anyone.” Police are asking
anyone
. A final plea for help. Cast the net wide and pray that someone knows her—they were out of options.
I leaned forward to hear the rest of the newscast, then jumped at an unexpected sound: the bright clinking of glasses, coming from the kitchen. Steeling myself to face my parents—I had come home drunk before, but never like this—I started carefully toward the door, only to stop at the sound of my mother’s voice. Heavy, dull, and uneasy.
“—think we should just give her time,” she was saying.
My father’s voice was tinged with exhaustion as he answered. “She’s running out of time. She’s always been a procrastinator. I just don’t want . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence, and there was a long silence. The sound of liquid sloshing, of a bottle against the table. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes, trying to keep my breathing deep and even.
My father spoke again. “But you’ve talked to her?”
“A couple times.”
“And?”
A sigh. “Honey, I’m sure she gets it. You’ve got to remember how hard it is, being in love at that age. Everything feels like the end of the world.”
“But she hasn’t broken it off.”
“She hasn’t told me. But who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t.”
There was a pause. “I just don’t want her tied up in any of this mess. She needs to get out of here, Claire. This place isn’t the same as it used to be . . . all this ugliness, and that poor girl—”
“Adam.”
My eyes flew open at the sharpness in her voice. There was a long pause.
“Is there something going on?”
“Claire, I’m not supposed to—”
“So the answer is yes.”
“You know there are things that I’m not allowed to say.”
They were quiet again, sipping in the silence, and I was getting ready to step around the door when my mother’s voice came again.
“Just tell me one thing. Our daughter—is there something I should know?”
No answer.
“Yes,” he said, finally. In his voice, I could hear exhaustion. And something else.
Fear.
“Please,” my mother said. “Tell me.”
He told her.
About a footprint, trimmed in blood. About a break between the trees. About a hidden path, a littered yard, a place where evil had hidden all summer in plain sight.
Ten minutes later, still undiscovered, I crept upstairs with my heart in my throat and my father’s words still ringing in my ears.
They can’t wait anymore.
Whoever did this, he knew where he was going.
Whoever did this, he’s still here.
CHAPTER
16
I
n a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn’t telling.
The police had waited until there was no other option, no other explanation, no other lead to pursue. They had kept it quiet, repeating as needed that there was little evidence about the killer, and even less about the girl.
But little was not the same as none.
* * *
They had found just enough to know that he had come, and left, on foot. Had carved a path back through the roadside brush, through the trees, disappearing into the thick of the forest that climbed the hillside and then gave way to poorly maintained fences that bordered sprawling, woodsy backyards. He had stepped in her blood as he left, dipping the chunky tread of his instep into the fast-flooding pool of red, not seeing in the dark that even in death, she had managed one tiny victory against him.
“D’you see this, boys?” said the chief, tapping his finger against a glossy photograph that showed a barely there cut in the brush. “That, right there, that’s how he left.”
Jack Francis and Stan Murray, shifting nervously from side to side, squinted at the gap. Jack coughed, restless at the thought of a murderer passing through the forest there, only a mile south of the Point, where so many kids—where he, so long ago it seemed like another life—gathered at night to light a fire, to drink cheap beer in the moist dark. Stan, preoccupied by the sensation of his belt buckle digging into his gut and the related, urgent need to pee, jumped into the silence without thinking.
“But that’s a deer trail,” he blurted. “If you follow it long enough, it goes practically out to the Point.”
Stan looked to Jack, who immediately got interested in a small clump of dirt that had settled on the linoleum near his toe. The chief fought against the urge to pity them, to guide them away from the board and into the small kitchen, where he’d pat their shoulders with paternal assurance and tell them not to worry, that he’d handle it, that it would all be fine. Together, the younger men were two kids playing dress-up—holstered and buttoned into uniforms that hung in stiff folds from their not-broad-enough shoulders. They had signed up for traffic stops, for small-town disputes, for the occasional call from a wife whose husband had cracked her across the cheek one time too many. They had expected to get fat on doughnuts and flash their badges for fun at the local bar.
Neither of them, for all their swagger, had signed up to stand face-to-face with the reaper. All summer, Jack had been waking up just before dawn with cold sweat prickling on his temples and soaking the sheets beneath him, remembering the milk-blue glaze of her dead eyes, the skin that draped like parchment on her alabaster bones.
The silence broke when the older man tapped the board again.
“I think we have to face facts: there’s no chance, none at all, that our guy found a deer trail, in the dark, by accident.”
Stan only blinked, but in Jack’s eyes, there was dawning horror.
“He knew it was there.”
The chief’s nod was slow and deliberate. “Yes. Yes, he did. So the person who did this knows our back roads, and he knows our woods, and that means he knows too much to be anything but a local.”
And he did. He knew. He had stepped through the brush and into the dark, disappeared up the hillside, where the thick trees gave way to small homes bordered by the forest. Small, lonely homes where people could come and go in privacy. Homes that were owned by dead old ladies, where the front yard was littered with tossed trash and car parts. Homes that sheltered men who nobody loved, hard-drinking and hard-hitting and willing to hurt.
Men who liked to watch things burn. Men who knew our roads and forests but who weren’t, who would never be, one of us.
That night, Jack would have another dream. In it, he walked the familiar streets of his forever-hometown, stepping cautiously around corners, peering up at houses that peered back at him with locked-and-shuttered suspicion. Knowing that in a dark room, behind dark windows, something was pressing its face to the glass and watching him with cold and loveless eyes. And from somewhere, from every direction, faint but growing louder, came the sound of someone sobbing.
When Jack woke up in the dark, he realized it was him.