Oblivion (25 page)

T
here’s a red mark on the side of my neck where my mother held me against the wall. With my scarf, I’d hidden it from the orderlies. I have to believe she hadn’t meant to hurt me, she hadn’t meant to scare me, except maybe to scare me off my quest for information. That’s why, when the orderlies asked why I’d hit the button so many times, I told them my mother simply hadn’t been herself today.

My mother.

Rather, the woman who stabbed Palmer Prescott in the thigh.

They’re two different people in my mind, and they have to remain so, if I’m going to get through this with
a modicum of sanity. There’s my mother—the one whose hair looks like mine, the one who creates and turns Tarot cards for cash and sings. And then there’s the woman who’s responsible for the mark on my neck.

Serena and I have always been a team. Us against Palmer. Us against the rent check. Us against the world. The woman who bruised me is not the same woman who birthed me.

I want to head back to the Vagabond, curl into a ball, and cry myself to sleep, but I have homework to do and the answers to a million questions to research. I exit the bus at the library and hurry down a long, winding path from the road through sprinkling rain to the portico, which welcomes visitors like open arms.

The Lehmann Public Library is a Victorian, if not Gothic, structure, situated inland from Lake Nippersink, near Carmel Catholic, built in a grove of willow trees. The Lehmann building is complete with a spire-topped turret and a stone façade. Whether it was meant to look holy or not, it demands respect.

Obeying the rules, I turn off my ringer on my cell phone. I don’t need the distraction of texts anyway, not that Lindsey’s doing much to communicate with me. I wonder how long it will take her parents to realize I’m gone. My foster sister has been covering for my absences for so long that the space I leave behind must no longer be a void. I wonder how long I’ll be gone from John’s life before he stops missing me, too.

I take a seat at a computer table near the back of the building and stare out the leaded-glassed window at the rain amassing outside. The droplets streaming down the windows further distort the lake in the distance; it looks like a ferocious beast of blue-silver waves. I’m far from the shore, but I smell it here, as if the lake air is embedded in the old wood slats beneath my feet.

The library feels like home, but more than the scent of it comforts me. I eventually realize it’s because it reminds me of Holy Promise: the Gothic archways and corbels, the leaded glass, the polished mahogany benches. If I close my eyes, I might even be able to fool myself into believing that I’m praying in the nave, instead of traveling the stacks in search of sources. Even the book-lined paths remind me of the corridors I used to explore as a child.

A presence looms behind me. Hair pricks on the back of my neck, and a chill races up my spine, the type of sensation I feel when someone’s breathing too close to me. I’m afraid to turn around, but I manage to brave a glance over my shoulder.

Of course, no one’s there.

Heads bend over notebooks and keyboards. Everyone’s writing here. Maybe not the way I write, but they’re writing. A sense of normality filters through me. Maybe there’s a chance I can belong somewhere, after all.

And then I see him: John, looking a few minutes past a shower, a little fatigued, which makes sense because he’s
just come from football practice. He’s wearing black insulated athletic pants, the kind with white stripes down the sides, and a gray hoodie over a white T-shirt. He offers a wave. Smiles.

I give him a nod, but quickly turn away.

I wonder if he’s here to write the same twelve-page paper for Mr. Willis I have to catch up on, seeing as I missed a couple days of school—having cut once with John last week, and spent yesterday sleeping off a graphomania attack in the nurse’s office.

But I don’t have time for school assignments right now. I pull up the Internet and type in a search: Reverend Palmer Prescott.

There are a few new articles listed on the search page—“One Year Later: Authorities No Closer to Answers in Hannah Rynes Kidnapping”—but I’m more interested in reading the old news.

I click on an old story: “Reverend or Madman: Two sides of Palmer Prescott.” I’ve read this one a million times, but I reread everything. Maybe I’ve missed something, a clue, a detail …

According to police, a source, unnamed, says the founder of the Church of the Holy Promise and the missing suspect in Hannah Rynes’s disappearance, Palmer Prescott, is not who he appears to be. If allegations are correct, this information may give credence to the police’s theory that Prescott is solely responsible for Rynes’s kidnapping. The source alleges physical and emotional abuse against unnamed parishioners, painting a grotesque picture of the man beneath the cloth, yet a great percentage of the Holy Promise congregation contends the reverend is incapable of committing the abusive acts, let alone carrying out a kidnapping. Prescott’s followers insist if he’s involved, it is due to foul play, to which perhaps Prescott himself fell prey. According to parishioner James Brandiwyne: “He was a man of God, a good man. He baptized my children, held them in his arms. If these people are telling the truth, that the reverend did these unspeakable things, why are they hiding behind anonymity?” This isn’t the first time Prescott faces allegations of abuse. The first accusations came a year before Rynes’s disappearance; the accuser is now a resident of the Meadows Mental Health and Rehabilitation Center
.

I’m the unnamed source in this article. Mr. Brandiwyne wasn’t the only one to contradict my statements. Considering my graphomania, the blackouts, I have to wonder if maybe Mr. Brandiwyne is right. Maybe I don’t know what really happened. Am I as crazy as my mother? Did I imagine hearing my mother’s cries from the confessional? Did I invent
the story about the fountain, and conjure the belt slashing and biting into my flesh?

Tears rise before I can stop them. I bring a hand to the scar on my shoulder. Is Palmer really responsible for it? Maybe nothing is real, maybe I’m as insane as I feel, maybe—

“Hey.” A hand on mine shocks me more than comforts me at first. John.

I wrap my fingers around his.

But I can’t stop the revelation spinning in my mind: he slept with my sister, he slept with my sister,
he slept with my sister
. I pull away. Turn back to the computer screen.

“I don’t blame you for being mad. I should’ve told you.” He takes the chair next to mine and pulls a chunk of hair away from my face.

I give him a quick glance from the corner of my eye. “Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t she?”

“She doesn’t have to tell me, John.” But I’ve been wondering the same thing. She tells me everything. Why wouldn’t she have told me about this?

“Okay.” When he sighs, his cheeks puff up a little. “Okay, it was last spring, end of March.”

Before me. Late March. That’s why Lindsey didn’t tell me about it. It was right around the time I came to live with the Hutches. She didn’t know me yet, let alone trust me enough to tell me who she’d slept with. And I didn’t know any of her friends.

“We were on my boat, a bunch of us, and—”

“Shh!” A librarian gives us a threatening stare.

I roll my eyes, refocus on the screen, on a black-and-white candid of Palmer with hands raised to heaven on the altar at Holy Promise.

John whispers: “Listen, that night, I wasn’t quite … you notice I don’t drink. Or smoke.” His tongue touches his lower lip as his eyes narrow in an expression between frustration and contemplation. “Lindsey and I, we’re friends … sort of. I wouldn’t have … I didn’t use her.”

“You had sex with her.”

The nearly imperceptible bob of his head can pass for a confirmation.

“And you weren’t planning on dating her.”

“No.”

“So how is that not using her?”

“Because it was her idea, all right?” His blue eyes harden. “I’m not blaming her, I’m not, but I was sort of drunk—it’s one reason I don’t drink anymore, not that I ever drank too much—and she kept making moves, she had … you know … protection, and it just kind of … happened.”

“The way it just kind of happened between us? I had protection, too.”

“God, Callie, no.”

“And I played right into your hands.”

He slumps back in his chair. “Is that what you think of
me? You think I just go around screwing girls I don’t care about?”

“If the shoe fits …”

“So that’s what you think.” He knots his fingers in his hair. “You think I just … do this … with other girls.”

I don’t think that, not entirely. Blood buzzes as it rushes through my veins. Every nerve in my body hums, but as much as I want to cave, as much as I want to put stock in what he’s trying to say, I force myself to remain stoic. It’s one thing to be put over by Elijah, but I refuse to let John snow me, too. I raise an eyebrow and repeat, “If the shoe fits …”

“Fine,” he says. “But you’re wrong.”

“Two girls living in the same house say I’m right. Odds are—”

“I made one mistake, and I made one decision. There hasn’t been anyone else, Calliope, and I don’t want anyone else.”

Butterflies kick up in my gut. I meet his glance.

“That’s right. Once with Lindsey, once with you. That’s about the size of it. And if that makes me a guy who just screws girls he doesn’t care about … okay.”

I feel my shoulders sag a little, feel tension releasing in my jaw. “You should’ve told me about you and Lindsey.”

“Yeah, I should’ve, but would it have changed anything?”

“We’ll never know.”

“Callie, I wish Lindsey and I hadn’t—believe me, I wish we hadn’t—but I can’t change the past.”

I glance again at the picture of my father on the computer screen. “No one can.”

He touches me on the neck, fingers the mark my mother left there.

The Lehmann Library blackens in my peripheral vision—“I need a pen”—and suddenly I’m throttled through avenues of my memory bank.

There’s a blue duffel bag in the rowboat.

A man digs on the Point.

Someone’s crying, muttering three imperceptible words over and over again.

I can’t make out what she’s saying. Listen hard. Harder. She’s crying. I can’t hear her. Can’t hear.

What’s in that duffel bag?

“Callie?”

I look again over my shoulder, toward the rowboat, but there’s nothing there. Nothing there. Black night. The piney odor of Palmer’s aftershave looms behind me.

I gasp for breath, collapse into the earth.

“Callie.”

The gluey scent of fresh felt-tip meets my nostrils.

I lift my head, take in the sight of Lehmann Library, then look to my notebook:

Strangled by the cords of daisies I killed him I killed him I killed him. I killed him. Killed him.

John’s hand is warm against my neck.

I’ve been craving his touch all day, and at the same time wishing I wasn’t. Still at odds, I now stiffen with the contact.

I close my eyes and again bury my head in my arms. “Johnny?”

“Yeah?” His fingers are now caressing the tender flesh my mother marred.

I twist my head just enough to meet his glance. “I think I remember something.”

His fingers still. “What?”

“A blue duffel bag. On Highland Point. There are things—other things—buried up there.”

He’s nodding. “Want to call that detective?”

“You heard what he said. Tangible evidence. All these snippets of memories aren’t going to help without tangible evidence.”

“Thousands of leads.”

“Not enough time, not enough man power, to follow all the leads that come in.”

“Go after dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“Pick you up at Lindsey’s?”

“I can’t go home tonight.”

He pulls his cell phone from the pocket of his sweatshirt, and punches in a text. “Wanna have dinner at my place, then?”

Despite the initial elation fluttering in my heart, I’m still not sure how I feel about Lindsey and him. “No.”

“You gotta eat, right?”

The closest I’ve come to the whole meet-the-family thing was the day Elijah and I went AWOL from County and hopped a train to hit a rave in North Chicago. His biological mother lived on the way, he’d said, in the ineptly named Bel Air Motel. I’d stared at the drab stucco façade, so dirty, and the half-lit neon sign with Vegas-style bulbs blinking an unwelcoming beckon.

“You want to stop to say hello?” I’d asked.

He’d replied with two words—“Hell no”—and quickened his pace.

It was the only time we’d ever discussed his mom, whom he said he hadn’t seen in a few years.

His dad was another story. He’d
never
seen him, save a mug shot posted online.

So it’s safe to say I’m a little less than practiced in this regard.

“Relax,” John says.

Impossible. My fingertips feel numb, my heart races, and I can’t keep my feet still for the life of me.

Out the car window, along the winding driveway to the mini-mansion John calls home, the trees blur in dizzying palettes of yellow and green amidst the misty rain. I imagine I’m going to feel just as shaky when I come face-to-face with the Fogels as I do now.

What if I graph out in the middle of dinner? God, they’re going to think I’m crazy.

John brings the SUV to a gentle stop in a circle drive before the home, which backs to one of the nine interconnected lakes along the Chain. I couldn’t tell you which—we’ve twisted and turned too many times to keep track—but I already smell the water.

The distinct sound of a basketball repeatedly hitting pavement rises the moment he kills the engine.

On a brick-paved section of the driveway, a girl bearing a striking resemblance to the guy who slept with my sister shoots hoops. As soon as John opens his door to get out of the car, I follow suit and wait while he gathers his school bag and practice gear from the backseat.

He saunters not toward the main entrance to the place, but toward a door near the garage. “Hey, Abby. It’s raining.”

“Hey, John-boy.” Bounce, bounce, bounce. Shoot. “I won’t melt.”