Forget Me (12 page)

“You really think that's still working? The electricity was cut to this place years ago.”

“What if it didn't run on electricity?”

“Face your fears!” I yelled and started jogging the length of the building.

“Don't leave me here!” Toni said, half laughing, half legitimately scared.

We turned the corner to where the exit had been, and it was still there. Just a black painted door. No planks, no giant bolts. I reached out for the knob, expecting it to be stiff, but it turned.

“It's unlocked,” I whispered. Though I didn't know why I suddenly felt the need to lower my voice.

“Fantastic,” Toni snarked back.

Once the knob turned completely, the door released and slowly opened inward with an eerie creak. Outside light illuminated the first couple of feet of flooring. But then after that—darkness.

“You are
not
going in,” Toni said behind me, her voice panicked.

“I am.” That memory of Flynn leaning up against the building had stirred something inside me. I was determined to have a look.

“This is how every teen horror flick starts. You're like the stupid girl you yell at in the movies.”

“I'm not the stupid girl. There's nothing in here. It's daytime. And this isn't a horror movie.” I tentatively stepped on the square of wood that used to trigger the blast horns. Nothing. That was a relief. The slightest noise would send Toni tearing out of here. She was sticking so closely to my back, I could feel her breathing on my neck.

“I can't see anything,” she said, peeking over my shoulder. “Didn't there used to be a window in here?”

This had been the final room to the fun house. Lit by black lights, it had painted monsters on the walls, and a window where kids waiting outside could pop their faces up or bang on the glass to scare their friends. I turned to the right, where I remembered it being. A dim yellow glow came from the area.

“What are you doing?” Toni screeched.

“I'm finding the window.” I took slow steps over to the yellowish glow, my hands out in front of me. Finally reaching it, I felt something under my fingertips. I ripped at it, and sunlight poured in.

Toni held her hands up to her eyes and yelled like a vampire being scorched.

“The window was covered with old newspaper,” I said. “I just tore it down.”

“Warn my retinas next time!” she yelled.

She brought her hands down and both of us waited a beat for our eyes to adjust to the light. The monsters were still painted on the walls—a werewolf, a vampire, a ghost baring sharp teeth. Though they were more cheesy than creepy now. But the room was no longer empty as it had been back in the day.

A thick blue sleeping bag lay unrolled by the far wall. A battery-operated camping lantern lay beside it. A pile of clothes sat folded in the corner, and beside those was a ratty black backpack.

“Someone's living here,” Toni whisper-screamed. “You promised! You said no serial-killing vagrants!”

I knelt by the sleeping bag and ran my fingers over the top of the nylon. It was dusty. No one had slept here in a while. I picked the first item of clothing off the top of the pile and unfolded it. It was a thin, black T-shirt with a swirly blue design in the center.

I recognized it.

“This is Flynn's shirt,” I said.

Toni paled and her eyes went to the backpack. I grabbed it, yanking the zipper open, and turned it upside down. I wanted all his secrets to spill out onto the floor, but instead it was only toiletries—a comb, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a deodorant stick.

“He was living here,” Toni said quietly.

I pushed myself back up to standing and looked at the mess. I couldn't believe it. He was a runaway, sure, but I just assumed he'd been staying with someone.

My chest hurt. I would've helped him somehow, if he'd told me. Why would he stay here?

Toni had picked up the backpack and started squeezing it. “There's something else in here.”

She held the bag out to me and I unzipped the front pocket. I reached inside and pulled out a small notebook with a pen stuck in the coil. I flipped through and read a few of the scribbled notes inside. They made no sense to me. There were a few mentions of Stell Pharmaceuticals, which was weird. One page just had the sentence
Cops on the take.

“This is really messed up,” Toni said, practically taking the words right out of my mouth.

I flipped from back to front, skipping all the blank pages, in an effort to find the last thing he wrote. I stopped when I found the final page. This one was different. Instead of a hurried, barely readable script, his handwriting was neater, purposeful. My heart began hammering wildly in my chest as I read the first two words. It was a note, and it was addressed to me.

Dear Morgan,

I'm writing this in case something happens. Don't come looking for me. I want you to move on with your life.

Forget me.

I want you to know that you're the best thing

The note ended abruptly, as if he had been interrupted.

But now I knew. He
had
cared about me. The breakup in the car was just . . . what . . . him thinking he was protecting me? A tear leaked out of the corner of my eye. I didn't wipe it away. I let it trail down my cheek and drop to the dusty floor. I wished he'd gotten to finish the note. I wished he'd been more honest with me.

“Whoa,” Toni said, reading the page over my shoulder. “You know what this means, don't you?”

I nodded. “He was interrupted and didn't get to finish the note.”

She knocked on my head. “Hello, Morgan! Wake up and smell the conspiracy.”

I blinked quickly. “Conspiracy?”

“All his weird notes. Mentioning the cops. Then writing a good-bye note to you in case something happens. He stumbled onto something. Something big.”

I looked at Toni through glassy eyes. “What are you saying? Do you think he was murdered?”

She shrugged. “Think about it.”

The night Flynn was killed, my instincts had told me he'd been waiting on that road for someone. He kept looking around and acting nervous. My insecurities had immediately jumped to thoughts of another girl. But now I wondered if someone else had told him to meet there. Someone who could have been involved in this. His strange behavior made more sense. Why he'd wanted me away from there. Why he started a fight when I pushed him for answers.

He was trying to protect me.

Familiar feelings of guilt gnawed at me. If only I could have kept him in the car. If only . . .

I
stayed up too late trying to make sense of the chicken scratch in Flynn's notebook. At best, they were barely readable notes. At worst, they looked like the rantings of a madman. There were dates—none of which meant anything to me—and names I could barely decipher. Even some algebra. One page only said
NT=X.
I saw the word
Stell
a couple of times. I assumed he was referring to the company. After a while, many notes included only the initial
S.
Were those also referring to Stell? Why had he been researching the company? And what was up with
Cops on the take
? Flynn was insanely private and a liar, yes. But was he a crazy person, too?

I kept the notebook tucked in my backpack at school Thursday. For some reason I wanted to have it by my side at all times. Like if I kept it at home or in my locker, it would disappear. Maybe just reading Flynn's thoughts was turning me into a paranoid freakazoid like him.

We had a quiz in pre calc, but in my other classes, my mind wandered. I revisited the night of the accident again and again. But now the black SUV was increasing its speed and purposefully swerving toward Flynn. My memory was changing to accommodate the new information. I couldn't even trust my own brain.

The note he left for me wasn't evidence that he was murdered. Yeah, it seemed shifty that he left a note “in case something happens,” and something did, in fact, happen. But that might have been a coincidence. I didn't exactly have anything to take to the police. Especially after they had already investigated the hit-and-run. And double especially when the notebook insinuated that the cops themselves were corrupt.

The last bell rang, and I grabbed what I needed from my locker, then wandered over to Toni's to see if she needed a ride home. But she had her back to her locker and her tongue in Reece's mouth.

“Eww, guys,” I said. “PDA is so first boyfriend, freshman year.”

They—thankfully—separated their faces. Toni giggled and tucked her hair behind her ears. “What's up, Morgan?”

I shifted my backpack to my other shoulder. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

“Nah, I'll give her a ride,” Reece said, and made a thrusting motion with his hips as if the joke itself wasn't obvious enough.

Toni gave him a look that could freeze a fireball in midair.

He cast his eyes down like a scolded dog. “Sorry.”

She looked back at me. “He's a work-in-progress. But, yeah, he'll drive me home.” Then she pointed down the hall. “Oh! I left my notebook in Spanish. Be right back.” She shuffled off with a giant goofy grin on her face.

It worried me. I wasn't quite convinced that dating Reece was a good idea. And Toni didn't date lightly. She fell hard. It happened twice freshman year and once in tenth grade. She also tended to forget she had a best friend during these times. Until the relationship crashed and burned and her crying face became a permanent fixture in my bedroom every afternoon. But, if I warned her not to go too fast with Reece, she'd just tell me that this time was different. That's what she said every time.

I felt sort of awkward, momentarily abandoned with Reece. “So . . . how are things in Happy Love Land?”

I expected a Too Cool Reece response since we were in the school hallway and all, but he only smiled and said, “It's great.”

I took a moment to take in everything about him. Despite his momentary slip a minute ago, his look, his demeanor, all seemed to be dedouchified. Undouched, if you will. “You're different,” I said.

“It's nice not to have to be
on
all the time, you know?”

His sincerity chipped away at my skeptical little heart. “So you really like her?”

“A lot.”

Toni being lovestruck wasn't as bad if Reece was equally so. But still, it couldn't hurt to give him one last tip. I took a step closer and lightly pressed my finger into his chest. “Good. Because if you hurt Toni, they will find your body in twenty-seven pieces at the bottom of the river. Got it?”

He smiled and swatted my finger away. “Got it.”

Toni returned at that moment, witnessing my threat. She rolled her eyes. “Is Morgan getting all best friend protect-y?”

“Protective,” I said.

“You've got nothing to worry about,” Reece said, grabbing her hand.

I wanted desperately to believe that this wouldn't end in tears. That this would be different from Austin in ninth grade or Corey in tenth. But the way Reece looked at her, like she was an amazing miracle and he was lucky to just be standing by her side, gave me hope.

And for some reason, it made me think of Evan. Not Flynn, which was weird, so I pushed the thought away.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, shooing them off. “Go have fun playing tonsil hockey.”

“I'll call you later!” Toni yelled as she hurried away from me.

I'd barely reached my car when my cell rang. I pulled it out of my bag and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Morgan, it's Felicia at the paper.”

A group of girls walked by practically yelling rather than talking. I got into my car and closed the door so I could hear. “Hi, Felicia. What's up?”

“Want an assignment? You'd have to go right now.”

“I can do that,” I said.

She let out a sigh of relief. “Great. Rebecca is in labor and Chris is at his other job. You're my only freelancer available.”

“Where do you need me?”

“There was a suicide at the falls. A man who'd lost his home to foreclosure, then his wife took the children and left. Yada, yada.”

My stomach lurched, but Felicia continued as if she were ordering from a menu. “We'll need a photo of the falls, from whatever angle makes them seem most treacherous. And if anyone has laid a wreath or some sort of memorial there, I want a shot of that, too. Double pay if you get crying mourners. You have the release form for them to sign?”

“Yep,” I squeaked. I always had extra release forms in the car. People needed to sign them before you could use their photograph in the paper. But I wouldn't bring one to the falls today. If anyone was there, crying, I wouldn't take a picture of them. It just felt wrong.

“I'll e-mail you what I get,” I said.

• • •

Cascade Falls was beautiful, especially after weeks of heavy rain, when the waters raged as if controlled by an angry, invisible hand. During the Great Depression, they'd been dubbed Suicide Falls. Reason: obvious. But jumpers went over only once every couple of years now. Including this morning, apparently.

The falls were in what used to be a River's End town park. But the park lost its funding, the land overgrew, and now it was yet another place in town that once held beauty and now only sadness.

It was usually an empty area. Sometimes you'd find a couple attempting to have a picnic, but they'd try it only once. The falls were loud. And mist sometimes blew in your face when the wind changed direction. So it wasn't as romantic as it looked from a distance.

Today, though, as I parked my car in the lot and walked the well-worn trail to the waterfall, I knew I wouldn't be alone. If I've learned one thing from my newspaper job, it's that tragedy attracts looky-loos. And there they were. Just a handful of people milling around, but they wouldn't have been there on a normal day. They were curious. The type of people who slow down to gaze at the carnage of a car wreck.

I didn't want to stay any longer than I had to. The whole scene felt morbid to me. I got as close to the top as I safely could and snapped a photo looking down. It was probably a fifty-foot drop, dangerous in and of itself, but the river's wild current dragged you down after that. There was no surviving a fall here.

I shivered as the misty spray spat at the nape of my neck below my ponytail. I took another handful of shots, then worked my way down the trail to the bank of the river to take some pictures from below. I was more comfortable there. Away from the dizzying heights. Down where the air was drier, the waterfall's roar less ear-splitting.

I snapped more photos from this position and knew from previewing them in the display that one of these would be the winner. From below, the waterfall seemed even more menacing. For good measure, I took a couple of shots of the river itself. The water was dark, almost black, with a churning white surface.

A makeshift memorial was beginning to grow on the largest rock on the riverbank—a few flowers, a candle. At least the looky-loos paid their respects while they were here. Though, now, as I cast a glance around, I realized most of them had returned to their lives, their curiosity sated. Only one person remained, a man about my dad's age. He wore a business suit and stood facing the waterfall, staring at it with an expression I could almost, but not quite grasp. Regret, maybe?

He probably knew the guy who'd jumped. He would probably stand there all afternoon, wishing he could go back in time and save him.

But I knew there was no going back. No matter how much you tried to relive a moment. How much you wished you could change one small thing, bump the time line, know then what you know now.

Once the dead are gone, they're gone.