Never Missing, Never Found (19 page)

“Oh my God, oh my God, are you okay?” someone is saying, and I nod before I realize they’re not speaking to me. Someone is shaking me hard by the shoulders, and my head is shaking like it might fly off.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” someone is saying, and her voice is shaking, and my knees start to shake as I realize that it’s Cady, that she hasn’t fallen after all.

“Scarlett, what the hell?” A fine spray of spittle coats my face, but at least my shoulders stop shaking. I don’t know who spoke.

I’m so confused. I don’t know what’s happening to me right now, but I don’t like it. Not at all.

“Did Scarlett just…?” Rob is speaking now, in that slow, measured tone of voice he used when he told me not to come to the memorial in the first place.

Maybe I should have listened to him.

“Ask her,” someone urges.

Rob clears his throat. “Scarlett, did you just try and push Cady off the platform?”

I recoil, sending my back into the safety rail and nearly sending
myself
over the edge. When did I turn around? “No!”

Cady is in a heap in Connor’s arms, her shoulders shaking, but her words are distinct and clear. “I felt hands on my shoulders, somebody tried to push me, somebody tried…” She trails off, like she’s unable to comprehend the depravity of that somebody’s soul.

Somebody.
Because that somebody wasn’t me. “I didn’t do it,” I say hotly, and beads of sweat spring up in a string of pearls around my throat. “I swear to God. I would never.”

Rob is giving me that stare again, the stare that might mean he’s about to press a button and fry me. “Did anyone see anything?”

“This is crazy,” I say before I realize I’m talking over Cady, and that she’s saying much the same thing.

“This
is
crazy,” she echoes. “Scarlett would have no reason to hurt me. Scarlett’s my friend.”

Connor, Rob, and I share the same flinch, passed from one of us to the other like a particularly noxious brand of flu. Or mono, as the case may be. “Yeah,” I say anyway. “I would never—”

“I saw it.” Katharina’s words stop us all in our places. She’s commanding, regal; her hair, unraveling from its braid, flaps in a cape behind her. “Scarlett…how could you?”

I’m going to throw up my beating heart, and it’s going to burst and spill my blood all over everybody’s feet. They’ll never be able to get their shoes clean. “I swear I didn’t—”

“I saw it,” Katharina thunders. I wait for anybody, for Melody, to defend me, but everybody else is silent. “They were both looking over the side, and all of a sudden Scarlett turned and shoved.” Katharina clearly sees me blanch, and she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Scarlett, but I saw it.”

“I didn’t.” My forehead is getting very hot and there are spots dancing in the corners of my vision. “I
didn’t do it.
”

Cady—of all people—leaps to my defense again, but she sounds considerably less sure this time. “Guys, let’s be real. Scarlett would never—”

“Scarlett hooked up with Connor,” Katharina announces. Cady stops talking midsentence, and Connor’s face goes so white his freckles stand out like stars. A hush clamps down on all of us. All of us except Katharina. How does she even know? “At the bonfire, in the barn.”

I don’t hear whatever she says next; the rushing in my ears is too loud. “I didn’t do it,” I say again, as loudly as I can, trying to speak over the noise.

Now Katharina’s got her phone out. Her screen flashes as she turns it on. “Guys, should I call the police? Or Cady’s parents? Anyone?” And then she glances up at me and gives me this little smile, the same smile I saw the time we found the knife.

It’s her. She’s back somehow. I don’t know how, but she’s back, and she’s trying to ruin my life.

The dots cluster and swarm and then everything is black.

I didn’t do it.

That’s the refrain that runs through my mind the rest of the night. During the stiff, steep march down the safety stairs into the arms of two park security guards, one of whom is, conveniently, Tina’s boyfriend and who therefore lets us stroll out the employee exit. During the walk back to the parking lot I am an island off to the side, plodding along, numb, whispering my refrain under my breath to drive it into my brain as the others whisper among themselves. During the scatter in the parking lot: Cynthia, Tina, and Randall race off, tossing excuses into the wind; and Rob and Connor walk off, Cady held up between them, staring at the ground, mute, like she can’t believe everything that’s happened, like her legs have just decided not to work anymore.

Katharina disappears. I look for her, a swell of fury rising in my chest, so ready to yell, and she’s nowhere to be seen. I don’t know where she went. The swell of fury rises in my throat as a hysterical laugh.

“Scarlett,” Melody whispers, her eyebrows knitted together. “Scarlett, you sound crazy.”

“I am crazy,” I say drily. “Didn’t you hear?”

“They’re not going to call the police or anything,” she continues, like I haven’t spoken at all, like she hasn’t heard me, or like she doesn’t care. “They can’t prove anything. But, Scarlett, did you really try to push Cady off the ledge?”

My shoulders slump and I shake my head, slowly at first, then more vigorously. I cannot speak. I’ve run dry of words.

“Okay,” Melody says, but she doesn’t sound convinced, and somehow that’s the worst part of all.

All I want is for Melody to like me.

“Let’s go home,” she says.

The next day passes in a blur. I spend most of my time in bed. Matthew comes and prods me on the shoulder a few times, but I’m about as responsive as a dead frog and not nearly as interesting, so eventually he leaves me be. My dad does about the same thing, just more subtly, with calls through the door and concerned-sounding inquiries of “Are you okay?”

Connor tries to call once, twice, but I send him straight to voice mail, which I proceed not to check. Katharina doesn’t show her face either, which does surprise me. I expected her to pop through my window or burrow up through my carpet, to do something so completely crazy I’d just completely crack.

On Sunday, I finally drag myself out of bed to go to work. I’m not going to let them scare me into missing work and getting fired and stopping me from being Skywoman. Because I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.

I dress mechanically, eat cereal that tastes like shreds of paper, and head out the door. My stomach roils the whole time I’m waiting in line at the employment office; I don’t know whether it would be worse to get sent to the south side with Connor and Rob, or the north side with Cady. Randall works on the east side, Tina on the west. There is no escape.

So I’m pleasantly surprised when they send me to central. Central is the park’s Main Street area, with squat brick stores selling practical necessities like sunscreen and key chains and disposable cameras for the only people left on the planet who don’t have a camera in their phone. I get installed on a cart just outside the entrance, which means I don’t see any other team members but the manager assigned to ring me out and cover for me on bathroom breaks. Usually I hate being on a cart, because it’s hot and lonely and you don’t have a park phone, so if you need to go to the bathroom, you have to try to flag somebody down to tell your manager, but today I’m thrilled. If I were a superhero, I’d be Luckwoman.

My new superpower holds until the end of the day, in the parking lot. Until I’m about to climb into my car, flush with luck and feeling like I’ve gotten away with something, which is stupid because I didn’t actually do anything.

“Scarlett.” Katharina sings rather than calls my name. I stiffen. “Showing your face at the park?”

I can feel her eyes raking the back of my neck. I can’t turn around. If I turn around, she wins. “I’m not afraid to show my face. I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say evenly. One hand unlocks my door, the other wraps around my can of pepper spray. “Have a good night.”

“Scarlett, wait.” She’s talking, but I’ve caught a flash of copper hair at the other end of the parking lot: Connor. I duck into my car and peel out before anyone can see me. Katharina tosses words after me, but they must land on the pavement, because I don’t hear them.

My heart rate starts to calm as I turn out of the employee entrance and onto the road, but then I glance in my rearview mirror and see it. Her. Katharina. She’s in her car, and she’s following me.
She’s probably just going somewhere. She was going to her car at the same time,
I tell myself, but I make a left and she follows, and then I make another left and she follows, and I make a right for no reason but to see if she turns too, because nothing is that way but woods and my thinking cabin, and she
follows.
And I’m actually happy, because it’s time to end this.

Still, my heart jumps into my throat. Recklessly, I toss my car to the side of the road, shift it into park, and lunge out before it shudders to a complete halt. I can see the surprise on her face as she jams to a halt too. Which is good. If she wanted me dead, she could have just plowed me over. “What do you want?” I scream at her. My shoulders are quaking, and my hand around the pepper spray is trembling too.

She’s shaking her head as she gets out of the car. “I just wanted to talk to you, Scarlett,” she says. “I really think you should quit your job. You’re clearly not stable enough to be around people.”

Maybe she’s right
goes through my head in a flash, but I push the thought away. “Why did you try to push Cady off the platform?” I don’t know I’m going to say it until it comes out, and then it all comes rushing out. I didn’t see anything on the platform, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. Katharina gaslighting me, trying to ruin my life. She was the only one who “saw” me do it, after all. “Did you do it specifically so you could blame me, or do you have something against Cady? Would you actually have pushed her over the side? Was she lucky she managed to catch herself, or did you grab her before she went over?”

Katharina smiles patronizingly at me. It’s not even really a smile; it’s just the corners of her lips turning up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Scarlett.
”

It’s the way she emphasizes my name. It’s that that makes me certain, absolutely certain, it’s
her.
“Get back in your car and drive away,” I say, swallowing hard, trying to ingest some courage.

She “smiles” again, and this time it’s twisted at the edges. “No, it’s time we talk. It’s about time. Don’t you think?” And she takes a step toward me.

I’ve got my pepper spray out before I can blink, and it arcs in a long, shimmering line straight into her face. She shrieks in pain and doubles over, coughing so hard I think she might throw up. Her eyelids are already red and swelling. A little bit of pepper spray floats back toward me, a cloud, and I cough too.

I have to get out of here. Her car is blocking mine, so there’s only one way to go: into the woods. To my thinking cabin. I can hide out there until she gives up. I go to run, take a step, and then stop.

If I leave her here, she could press charges against me. Even if I toss my can of pepper spray into the woods and claim ignorance, she can snap a picture of my car with her phone, drag me into a mess. I have a personal interest in avoiding the police, for reasons Katharina fully understands. If she’s really her, alive somehow.

I just need time to think things through. I just need time.

I’m still not sure how I get Katharina to my thinking cabin; it’s all a blur of leaves and pine-needle crunches underfoot. She shrieks as I pull her, but when I let her go, she can’t do much but blindly stumble into trees, and nobody’s around to hear her scream. My heart is pounding by the time I’ve gotten her secured in the cabin, my padlock locked. I brought it out one year to keep out kids or vandals or the ghost of the mad hunter who may or may not have built the cabin, and never took the key off my key ring.

Her screams echo in my ears all the way back to our cars, long after I’ve left her in the distance. Katharina’s keys are still in her car. I don a baseball cap I find scrunched in the backseat and return her car to the employee parking lot, careful to keep my head low so all that the cameras will be able to see is the hat. We’re similar enough in height and build and skin color that the black-and-white cameras won’t be able to tell the difference, I hope. I walk back to my own car through the woods and toss the hat into a creek once I get far enough away.

I’m not a bad person. All I need is some time. Things aren’t always black and white. Skywoman and the Blade could tell you that.

Skywoman, a.k.a. Augusta Leigh Sorensen, and the Blade, a.k.a. Emma Leigh Jacobs, were friends for most of their childhood and young adulthood. Their enmity began at age nineteen, when Emma Leigh Jacobs killed Augusta Leigh Sorensen’s parents and then absconded with papers from their secret library. Augusta Leigh was shocked and horrified and racked with grief, from both the death of her parents and the betrayal by her friend. Augusta Leigh’s parents had always treated Emma Leigh with nothing but care and respect, and here Emma Leigh had slaughtered them, had bashed them over the head and cut their throats like animals, with no motive at all. Emma Leigh certainly didn’t give one then, and every time she came face to face with Augusta Leigh–turned–Skywoman, she wouldn’t give one either. She copped to killing Skywoman’s first husband and many others, but she wouldn’t give a reason for the murders that launched her into her status as one of the comic-book world’s most notorious villains.

Until one of the later issues. Readership was flagging, and Prodigy Comics had to do something to boost it, so they started teasing the series’ most dramatic revelation to date almost a year before the comic book was actually released. It worked. Everybody wanted to know, and everybody bought the comic book. Even the cartoon got on board, teasing the revelation with fades to black and dramatic voice-overs.

Setting: the roof of a skyscraper, headquarters of the Silver Corporation (where Augusta Leigh’s parents worked for many years) in Silver City. Skywoman has been called to the scene of a dramatic break-in, only to discover scientists scattered dead over the floor and the Blade patiently waiting. Well, not so much patiently waiting as frantically searching, rifling through files and tossing papers over her shoulder. She stops as Skywoman bursts in through a window. “I thought you’d come,” the Blade says.

Skywoman spares scarcely a glance at the five dead scientists. “You didn’t think I’d come—you knew I’d come,” she says. “We need to end this.” Though the shattered window is at the other end of the room, somehow wind still causes her unmussed hair to float in the air.

The Blade stands, clutching a file to her chest. “Did you ever wonder why I killed your parents?”

Skywoman flinches at the Blade’s bluntness. At this point readers were (or at least I was) screaming at the page, “Of course she wondered! She asks you every time you two see each other! She thinks it every night before she goes to sleep! She angsts about it to Wonderman every chance she gets!”

Skywoman is much politer than the readers (a.k.a. me). “It doesn’t matter,” she lies through her (perfect, shiny, straight, white) teeth. “This needs to end.”

The Blade paces circles around the room, stepping carefully over the bodies. Skywoman follows, stepping over the dead just as carefully. “Your parents worked for the Silver Corporation, in this very building,” the Blade says. Obviously, this was on the page and not on the screen, but I liked to imagine her voice as neutral, carefully measured, the same monotone as her voice actor. “For years. Did they ever tell you what they did?”

The next panel is a close-up of Skywoman’s face, her eyes narrowed, her lips clearly trembling with the effort not to burst out and yell. All she says, though, is, “This needs to end.”

“I’m sure you knew they were scientists,” the Blade continues as if Skywoman hasn’t spoken. The way she is stepping over the bodies over and over, backward and gracefully, is beginning to look like a dance. “But did they ever tell you what they
did
? What they were doing, here, in this building?”