The Boys Are Back in Town (35 page)

His eyes opened and he snapped violently awake, as if pulled from a dream in which he had been suffocating. The car horn was blaring, and for half an instant he thought it was coming from somewhere far away. But no, it was the Jetta. There was a hand on the horn, and it was not his.

Barely able to move, he let his head loll to the left, eyes rolling up to see a dark figure leaning in the shattered window, one hand on the horn. With the other hand, the figure grabbed a fistful of Nick's hair and yanked his head back. The headlights from the car that had forced him into the tree still illuminated the inside of the car, and from this new angle, Nick could see that face.

His upper lip curled. Something was wrong with his head, with his lips, even. It was almost as though he had forgotten how to form words. Still, he managed to get one word out.

“W-Will,” Nick slurred.

Will James . . . a grown-up Will James an entire decade Nick's senior . . . glared at him with a blazing hate.

“How's your head?”

The wail of approaching police sirens gave Will and Brian little time to figure out how to explain it all to the authorities. Above all, they did not want to have to answer questions that might lead the police to try to verify that they were who they claimed to be. Will quickly rattled off instructions, and then the two of them ambled between houses on the far side of Little Tree Lane, leaving Young Will and Ashleigh to handle the fallout.

Brian was a mess, his split lip having bled all over his shirt, and he walked with the caution of the elderly, hissing through his teeth with every other step from the pain in his side. The kicks he had taken had likely cracked at least one rib, and Will knew they would have to get Brian healed up as soon as possible. But for now the only priority was avoiding the police.

In the backyard of one house they found wooden slats nailed to the trunk of an oak, a ladder that led up to a well-constructed tree house, complete with roof and windows. Some father had put a great deal of effort into pleasing his son. Either that, Will mused, or some of the local kids had swiped wood from a construction site and built themselves a hangout that was a thousand times cooler than the storage area under his old house on Parmenter Road.

Brian went up first, one arm held against his side as though in a sling. It was slow progress up the ladder but he made it without mishap. With a glance back at the road, where blue lights now washed in waves over the two crumpled cars and over the faces of the houses, Will followed Brian up. His own chest hurt badly and he wondered if in the crash the tug of the seat belt had torn muscles, or perhaps cracked some ribs.

They crawled into the tree house, breathing in sharp, pained gasps. “Give me a couple of minutes,” Will grunted, “and maybe I can muster up a healing spell.”

But Brian was not listening. He had propped himself against the inner wall of the tree house and was staring out the window at the spectacle unfolding in the street. Will knew they were both silently hoping none of the neighbors had seen them slip away, or at least hadn't noticed where they'd slipped away to.

One hand pressed against his chest—the pressure helped dull the pain—Will sat beside Brian. As he looked out that window, distant blue lights casting them both in a strange, gauzy gloom, he saw two figures emerge from the path that led to the lake. Fully dressed now, Tess walked side by side with Young Brian Schnell, his arm around her in a gesture of protection rather than intimacy. Even from this distance Will could see that he was speaking to her, soothing her.

“You're not a bad guy, you know that?” Will said.

Brian chuckled weakly. “I'm been trying to convince myself of that for a lot of years.”

Will frowned and turned to gaze at him in that flickering cerulean light. “Me, too, man. Me, too.”

Together they watched as the police hurried to talk to Tess, an officer pulling Young Brian aside even as Ashleigh and Young Will rushed over to talk to him. This was a key moment. Will had worked out the story, but it was up to his younger self to pull it off, to get Brian to play along while the cops were watching. Witnesses from the school, including Mr. Murphy, would say that when they discovered Tess had walked home around the lake and that she had a date, the three teenagers took off in pursuit of her. Ashleigh would testify that Nick had attacked her earlier in the week and that only her friends' arrival had saved her. She had been debating reporting him to the police and had just decided to do so when she found out that Tess was supposed to meet him that same night.

Ashleigh and Brian had followed along the lakeshore, trying to catch up with Tess to warn her. They'd found her there moments after Nick had raped her. Will had taken the car, planning to confront Nick at the O'Briens' house, hoping to beat Tess there, but only arriving as Nick fled, with Ashleigh running after him. Will had known something terrible had happened but had taken his eyes off the road for just a moment, distracted by Ashleigh. He had plowed into the back of the Jetta and broken his nose on the steering wheel.

In the tree fort, the elder Will ran his fingers over the bump on his nose where it had been broken. The bump had appeared there at the very same moment when Young Will's nose had been shattered.

The Buick belonged to Brian Schnell, bought with money he'd taken from his savings account without his parents' approval or knowledge. The title was in his name, after all, and no, he hadn't registered it yet. How they would explain the stolen license plate was something Will hadn't had time to address, but as he sat in the tree fort, the pain in his chest beginning to diminish, a new memory began to form in his mind as though bursting through a splintering eggshell.

“I found it on the side of the road, Officer,” he remembered telling the cops, blinking away the blue lights even as he wiped a streak of blood from beneath his broken nose. “Brian wanted to wait to register it until Monday, after he told his parents, but I found this license plate and I figured what the hell, let's take it out for a ride. I know we shouldn't have, but—”

And in his mind's eye, Will could recall exactly what the cop said next.

“Looks like it was a good thing you did.”

Will smiled there in the tree fort, proud of the kid . . . proud of himself. More lights were flashing now, red and white, as two ambulances arrived. Neighbors had come out of their homes and were standing in their front yards watching as the EMTs removed the unconscious form of Nick Acosta from his father's Jetta. Not so terrifying now, he was just a broken, bloody teenager and a big question mark for Will.

“Do you think Tess will testify?” Brian asked, fingers still gingerly exploring his side.

“I don't know. But with Ashleigh and me and you—you know what I mean,
the guys
—they've got an airtight case.”

“So it's pretty much done,” Brian said.

Something about his tone unnerved Will, who slid around to put his back against the wall of the tree house, letting the exhaustion in his muscles take over at last. He studied Brian's face in the gloom.

“What's on your mind, Bri?”

The other man drew his palm over his ragged goatee. His sickly pallor, even in that blue light, suddenly seemed not entirely due to his cracked ribs. His eyelids fluttered and then he stared right at Will and the tree house seemed very small.

“The memories . . . it's happening to you, right? New ones are slipping in. You kept saying it was like a deck of cards shuffling in your head, but now new cards keep getting added.”

Will nodded grimly. “We're
adding
them.” He touched the bump on the bridge of his nose again. “My nose wasn't broken before. And all of this . . . with Nick and Tess . . . I've got two sets of memories of it. One's mine and one's
his
.” It was strange to refer to his younger self in the third person, but Will was certain that Brian would know precisely what he meant. “And at the same time, other memories are changing slowly, fading, being replaced.”

Brian nodded. “Exactly. For instance, I know Nick recovers. And I know he ends up in jail. I sort of remember the trial, at least some of it.”

Will could feel it, too. They both testified. The stare of the judge as he spoke each word had felt like a terrible weight because even though the vital facts were all true, there were things they were all hiding. Tess had broken down in tears on the stand, but she had told her story. Will remembered Mr. and Mrs. Acosta sitting in the courtroom and how he hadn't wanted to look at them.

“So do I.” A tentative smile teased the edges of his mouth. “But I don't remember seeing us—the older us—again. So I guess it's time to go home. Back where we belong.”

Car doors slammed out in the street and he peered out the tree house window. There was no sign of Ashleigh and their younger counterparts; a tow truck had arrived to drag Nick's Jetta away. When Will glanced back at Brian and saw the sickly look on his friend's face, any trace of well-being he had been feeling evaporated.

“What?” Will demanded.

Brian's eyes were downcast. “I did the spell to get back here days after you had already gone. I've got those few days of memory that you don't have. Something's been shuffled into the deck that wasn't there before, a new memory.” He lifted his gaze to stare at Will. “We're not the only ones who are changing things. And they're not only changing here.”

“What is it, Brian? What's the new memory?”

“A couple of days after you left. I can remember it now, but it wasn't there before, Will.”

“What wasn't, damn it!”

Brian flinched. “The family that lives in your old house on Parmenter. There was a . . . a massacre there. Someone broke into the house, killed the parents. I remember seeing it on the news the day after the night at Papillon. The kid, Kyle—one of his friends was murdered, too, but the kid was the only survivor. Stabbed and beaten. In a coma, they said. The police found all kinds of symbols in blood in the room under the house and there was talk of Satanic rituals, shit like that.”

Pressure built up in Will's temples and at the center of his forehead. He put a hand to his head and let out a long, shuddering breath. “Fuck,” he whispered. “Oh, fucking hell.” He had gotten Kyle's parents and best friend killed, and the kid was in a coma. Depending on his wounds, he might never wake up.

Will looked up at Brian. “We have to assume the circle I made is gone. And if mine's obliterated, it stands to reason they got to yours.”

“They?”

“Well, if Nick was the one who pushed Lebo out in front of us Saturday night, somebody else had to be behind the wheel of the other car. The one that would have hit him if we hadn't been there.”

Brian shifted uncomfortably, groaning as he pressed one hand against his side. “Shit, I guess I just figured it was magic.”

“I did, too, but you saw Nick. Someone knew we were here, in this time, and went forward to our time to take Kyle out, making sure even if I figured out how to get back that I wouldn't have a way to do it. I left the door open. Somebody's got enough skill to jump into the future and close it, and probably come back again without much trouble. Does Nick look like he's capable of that kind of magic?”

“No. No, I guess he doesn't. But this isn't the end of the world, Will. I mean, we know where the Gaudet book is. We have your younger, more arrogant self get it for us, undo the spell he put on it, and we can figure out a way to go forward from here. It should work. If we go back early enough, we can get there before this kid and his family are killed.”

Will shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus, when does this end?”

With a long sigh Brian glanced out the window. “I don't know, Will. But we don't have much choice. We have to try. Otherwise we're stuck here, and that isn't going to work. We have to go back.”

“All right,” Will said with a grim nod. “But we can't leave yet.”

Brian frowned, eyebrows knitting. “Why not?”

Will's throat was dry again and he licked his lips to moisten them. Gruesome images flitted through his mind and he drew his knees up under him and covered his face a moment, as though he might screen them out.

“We couldn't save Mike and we couldn't stop what happened to Tess, but at least we got the fucker. Nick's going to jail. We both remember it that way, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.

“Then how come I still remember Bonnie Winter's murder?”

C
UT THE CARDS.
Shuffle the deck. Slip in a few wild cards.

On Saturday at eleven o'clock in the morning Will James found himself in the bleachers at Cougar Stadium, watching a football game he had seen before. He clasped both hands around his Styrofoam coffee cup and blew through the tear he had made in the lid, trying to cool it down. Memories crashed in waves across his mind, more in conflict than ever.

Eleven years ago:
He had watched this game with his friends, barely paying attention, eating too much junk and looking forward to the dance that night and the riotous sex he expected to have afterward. The sight of Caitlyn in her cheerleader's uniform did nothing to distract him from these thoughts. Mike Lebo had been a second-string defenseman in that game, and he'd made a sack on the Natick High quarterback that got them all on their feet. Ashleigh had screamed her voice hoarse. Now Will could barely hold on to this memory. It was as vague and insubstantial as a dream, half-remembered.

Eleven years ago:
A week after Mike Lebo's tragic death, the game had gone on. There had been talk of canceling the entire slate of Homecoming weekend events, but after Principal Chadbourne met with the senior class officers and most of the teachers, he decided to forge ahead. The Cougars had played in Lebo's memory. Nick Acosta, one of their best running backs, had scored the deciding touchdown and dedicated it to Lebo. Even this memory was fading, merging with new ones that had taken its place.

Eleven years ago . . . and now:
Lebo was dead. Nick was in the hospital with a police guard, under arrest on charges of rape and aggravated assault. The Homecoming Queen had been his primary victim and would not be riding in any parade. Word had only just begun to circulate, in whispers. Will's mind was filled with two sets of memories, all unspooling moment by moment as he watched the game. His teenage self and Young Brian sat with Ashleigh and Eric, but their cheering was halfhearted. Eric didn't have a fucking clue what was really going on, but he knew about Nick and Tess, and he was as somber as the others. They were preoccupied, too, keeping an eye on the players, on the cheerleaders, and on the crowd as well.