After the Woods (8 page)

I feel for nonexistent seat belts.

“So where are we going?” Liv says, her temple pressed against the glass, her hand limp on the seat between us. Her sleeve is hiked up, exposing an odd new thatch of golden down on her forearm.

“I hadn't thought past smacking down a stoner and taking a hit in the gut,” Kellan says, flexing his knuckles on the steering wheel, examining his cuts.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

“I usually wear hockey gloves when I throw punches,” he says, smiling back at me.

Liv pulls out a white plastic bottle. The label screams,
Now with caffeine!
She shakes out two horse-sized pills that smell like licorice and tosses them to the back of her throat.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Herbal energy supplement. Yo, up front!” Liv yells. “Can you drive a little more smoothly?”

“Sorry, my truck doesn't have shocks,” Kellan explains.

Liv presses the heel of her hand to her skull. “Well, you're hurting my head immeasurably, MacDickwad.”

Kellan does a double take past his headrest. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Liv says.

“Did you just call me a dickwad?” he says.

“MacDickwad,” she replies.

I rush to speak. “Liv gets mean when she's nervous.”

Liv narrows her eyes at me.

“But it's true. You get snappish when you're frightened,” I say.

“Who said I was frightened?”

“Listen. I get that you two went through something,” Kellan says. “I'm sure it was terrible. But that's no excuse to be so rude.”

“You didn't have to rescue me, MacDickwad,” Liv says.

“I'm sorry. You would have preferred getting trampled and/or totally exploited by some slimy reporter?” Kellan says.

“You're just pissed at Paula Papademetriou because she's exposing the police for the lame job they did keeping a paroled predator off the streets. Your daddy doesn't look so good anymore, does he?” Liv taunts.

My hand reaches for the notebook inside my bag. I need to make notes while they're fresh, stare at the page until it means something.

veterinary, computer, smartphone, killer

cantaloupe rinds, silver wrappers, water bottles, sneakers

I feel kidnapped and anxious. The connections between what I heard Paula say at the schoolyard and what I saw in the pit want to be made now, and all this driving and arguing is a waste of precious time.

Kellan takes the winding border road that leads to the highway and merges into the rotary, looping and exiting again in the same spot. “You ladies have any particular destination in mind? Because I'm feeling really good about chauffeuring you two right about now.”

“No one asked you to,” Liv says.

It becomes clear. I must see exactly where Ana was found.

Kellan grips the wheel and sits back. “I'm starting to get why you hang around with a lowlife like Shane Cuthbert. Two peas,” he tells Liv.

They're wasting time.

“Oh please. What about that preppy—check that,
aggressively
preppy—blonde? Granted, she doesn't have a brain in her head, so she can't threaten your manliness,” Liv retorts.

“Nice. Real nice,” Kellan spits.

In my belly, the black thing opens one scaly eye.

“I mean, why not a real girl?” Liv says. “Like Julia, for example. Julia's a certified heroine, not some flaky puck-f—”

“Take us to the woods!” I shout.

Kellan's eyes flash at me in the mirror.

Liv's head snaps around. “We are not going to the woods.”

Kellan pulls over hard into a drainage ditch and twists in his seat. “Why would you want to go back to the woods?”

“To see where they found the dead girl.”

“That is the absolute last place I would think you would ever want to be,” Kellan says incredulously.

“It is,” Liv says, blinking madly. “We are not going.”

“I hate to admit it, but Liv's right,” Kellan says. “There's an extremely good chance my dad could show up there. And the Fells is probably Paula Papademetriou's next stop.”

“We are absolutely, positively not going,” Liv murmurs, shaking her head.

“You're talking about nosing around a crime scene where the police dug up a body. Maybe a
murdered
body,” Kellan says.

“No one said anything about digging,” I point out. “Based on my research, the elements would have exposed her.”

“Aren't you afraid of what you'll see? There could still be remnants. Hair. Blood,” Kellan continues, as though he's thinking of these possibilities for the first time and starting to freak out.

“Doubtful,” I say. “The rain would have washed them away.”

“Seriously, what's wrong with you?” Liv says. “Do you have to be so macabre?”

I shoot Liv an insulted glare. But Kellan ignores us, earnest as all heck, determined to offer some special wisdom gleaned from being the son of a cop. “You have no idea what's up there. And seeing disturbing stuff can really affect you. There's no unseeing it. My dad knows cops who have this condition called PTSD from the bad stuff they've seen—”

“You might say I know something about it,” I interrupt flatly.

“Right. I'm sorry.” His eyebrows gather, pained. “That was out of line.”

That's when I notice his eyes are clear green glass, eyes GIRLS titter about, and there is empathy there, but not pity. I know pity, it repels me, and his eyes do not repel me. I could get lost in them, but I won't. I sort of wish he would turn around, because it's easier to look at the back of Kellan's head than his eyes.

“I just don't get how seeing a grave can be a good thing,” he continues, his voice softer, the edges of his words rounder. “Given what you've been through.”

Green glass. Rare. An eye color no one else has.

“That body has nothing to do with what happened to us,” Liv says firmly. “It's irrelevant.”

I pull my eyes away from Kellan. “Relevance is elusive,” I tell her.

“What does ‘relevance is elusive' mean? Can you ever talk like a normal person?” Liv replies.

“It's interfering with a crime scene. And that's what we'll get punished with: under federal law we could get twenty years,” Kellan says.

“We'd get off,” I say. “Any lawyer would argue lack of knowledge and lack of intent.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Kellan asks.

“I researched it,” I say.

“Of course. Let me try a different tack,” Kellan says. “I know I can't possibly understand what you went through—”

“Well,
I
understand what she went through,” Liv interjects. “And there is no reason for us to go into the woods. Period.”

“No, you do not understand. Because you weren't with me. You. Left. Me.” I bite off every word.

Liv throws up her hands. “Oh fine! The whole world knows: you went through hell and I didn't. You screwed up your ankle. You got hypothermia. But you didn't get raped. The doctors said you weren't raped.”

Kellan turns forward, the tips of his ears turning red. “We should head back.”

“You got away, Julia. He couldn't catch you. You won!” Liv says.

“What do you mean, I won?”

“I mean, we're here and he's dead! We're putting this behind us, like we've had a thousand conversations about, like you
said
you were going to do.” She looks from me to Kellan, desperate. “The whole idea of hiking up there is stupid. Kellan, tell her.”

Kellan lets out a hard puff of air. “Is this some kind of closure thing?”

“If closure implies a need for information and an aversion to ambiguity, then that sounds about right,” I reply.

“What if I have an aversion to your sick fetishization of things ghastly and
irrelevant
?” Liv says.

Kellan meets my eyes in the mirror. “Is this what you want to do?” he asks.

I nod.

“What if they assume we're kids who skip school to smoke in the woods, and they chase us off?” he says.

“We'll leave if they make us,” I say.

Kellan falls back into his seat and is still for a minute. Liv sits erect, holding her breath. He checks his side mirror and pulls out, tires squealing in the mud, and makes a sudden turn in the opposite direction. My bag spills onto the floor. Liv tumbles across the seat into me.

I look down at my lap and soften my voice. “Donald Jessup is dead. There's nothing in the woods to be afraid of anymore.” She scrambles off my lap as though it's on fire. Smoothing her hair behind her ears, she settles in her seat, her eyes sharp as she works her jaw, tight and angry.

Kellan guns the gas with a low growl. “If this thing will get above forty miles an hour without falling apart, we might actually beat the reporters there.”

*   *   *

We roll up to the main entrance in our truck plastered in Chieftains Hockey stickers. Police cars and detective sedans overload the parking lot. Kellan creeps a quarter mile down the main drag and pulls over.

“This is smarter than parking in the lot,” he mutters to himself, jumping down from the truck and stuffing his hands into his front pockets. “We say we just happened to stumble upon the scene.”

It's like a sick-humored Mother Nature served up a diametrically different tableau for my first visit back. That day, everything felt alive with possibility. Today, everything feels dead. The hard rains have washed away the scents of living things, along with the debris that hid Ana Alvarez. Cops talk into headsets and phones and two-way radios. The news vans haven't arrived. Liv walks a step behind Kellan and me, her pale hair knotted in the back now, jamming on oversized sunglasses. We come to the entrance gate where my sneaker slipped before our run almost a year ago. Electricity thrums my spine as I realize that some of these guys may recognize me, never mind Kellan. I calm myself by remembering Mom was strict about not letting the cops near me more than necessary. If they recognize Kellan, well, the jig's up.

A husky detective approaches, tucking his shirt into chinos cinched by a belt with three weathered holes. I angle to read the ID trailing over his belly bump, but it's impossible. Kellan does the same. The detective points to a strip of yellow tape stretched between two trees at the top of the stairs, the ones Liv sprinted up first. I look to Liv, wondering if she's remembering the same thing. She catches my eye and looks away, hugging her elbows.

The detective holds up his palm. “Can't go into the woods today. Police business.”

“What's going on, detective?” Kellan says.

“Nothing for you kids to worry about.” The man dips his head to read the embroidered arm of Kellan's sweatshirt, hairs combed over his scalp. “You a Chieftain? What position you play?”

Kellan runs his hand over his mouth. Finally, he says, “I'm Joe Mac—”

“Offense, sir!” I blurt. “Right wing, mostly.” Kellan sneaks me a look of surprise that I should know this.

“Nice! I played defense myself, back in the day. Kept going in an old men's league.” He holds his back and twists at the waist. “Before sciatica started giving me trouble.”

Liv steps forward. “Did they take it out yet?” she asks.

The detective lifts his chin at Liv, wary.

“The body. Did they take it out yet?” she says.

“Now, I can't comment on a crime scene. They're still working up there. It's going to be a while. The woods is no place for you kids today.” He leans close to Liv and sniffs; she pulls away from his attempt to smell weed.

A second detective, stern-faced with a brush cut, approaches, and they leave together, knuckles on hips. I strain to hear over the workmanlike buzz among the other cops and the traffic hum on the border road.

“Not … a print?” the first detective says.

“… even a fiber,” the second detective says.

The first detective shakes his head. “… miss a hole in the ground?”

The second detective raises his voice defensively. “You ever been up there? The trails only circle the perimeter. Deep inside, it's like it was back in the Indian days. Twenty-five hundred acres of nothing but trees and swamp. So unless she got dragged up there, she was running off trail.”

“Wasn't saying anyone's at fault. They gonna put out a statement?”

“No way. Too gruesome.”

“Let's hope the news doesn't get it.”

Liv is at my side, dragging her nails down her cheeks. “What did they say? You heard, I can tell.”

“It sounds like they didn't get any evidence off the body.”

“That means Donald Jessup might not have done it,” she says.

“Or that more than a year has gone by and weather has advanced decomposition and erased evidence,” I say.

The second detective yells over: “You kids should stay out of these woods anyway. S'not safe to begin with. Never has been. You're asking for trouble, going in there. Hey, shouldn't you be in school?”

“Thank you, detective.” Liv spins on her heel and charges toward the car, head down, as though counting steps.

Kellan lets me go first. Once we're out of the detectives' earshot, I say, “We can still hike up to the Sheepfold. We'll park at the back entrance in Parlee and walk east toward the fire watchtower. It's overgrown, but you'll be okay in sneakers.”

Kellan stops short. “You mean that. You're serious.”

“I always am.” If I was the kind of GIRL who cared about making myself attractive to Kellan MacDougall, this would be an epic fail moment.

He smiles, warm and wide. I was wrong about his eyes; they aren't sea glass at all. They're darker, with depth behind, and a glow, maybe. What does admiration look like?

He takes my arm and gently moves me toward the car. “Dumb and Dumber haven't figured out who we are. Let's not push our luck.”