With a look so purely evil it nearly knocked Mally breathless, David turned and loped toward his car, jumping in and cranking the engine. He shot past them, splattering the two of them with icy mud as he careened past.
Mally dropped the nail gun and sat down hard on the ground. Too wobbly to stand, Meredith plopped down next to her.
“He’s gone. He’s really gone,” she said. “Soso. Don’t cry. He doesn’t know if we really will tell. He’ll never do anything again, Mal. Never.” Mallory couldn’t stop crying. She wiped her face with her shirt. For the only time in their lives to that point, Merry was the one who kept her head. She didn’t shed one tear.
“I thought I would have to shoot him with the nail gun,” Mally sobbed. “And the nail gun didn’t really have any nails! It runs on air and I couldn’t pump it up. He could have . . . he could have run over both of us, Merry!”
“But it was worth it. I saw the poor girl he had in there. She ran by me.”
“What’ll he do?”
“He didn’t get to do anything but hit her,” Merry said. “He was ripping off her clothes.”
“He won’t try it again. You’re right,” Mally said. She got up to her knees and wiped her nose and eyes again with her sleeves.
“That’s so gross.”
“I so care. Do you have tissues?”
“No, but . . .”
“Well then, stop it. I just, God, Merry. Before you believed in this, I did. I sort of lived with it longer than you did. I feel like I’m cracking up!”
“I know,” Merry said. “I’m sorry.” Merry turned to look out at the road. “What about when he’s older, Mally?”
“Mer, we’re, well, we’re children,” Mallory said, her eyes opening wider and fresh tears spilling over. “We can’t guard the world from David Jellico. I think he’s scared. But if he does anything else, adults will have to take care of it.”
At the same moment, they heard the sound of a car, stuck and grinding to get out of the mud.
Mallory gripped Meredith’s shoulder. But fear was quicksand. Neither girl was able to move. The earth might swallow them. At last, choking, Mallory said, “Merry, he is going to try to run us down. Come on! We have to get behind something!”
“I can’t,” Merry screamed. She threw herself on the ground, trying to curl herself into a ball.
“Get up! Get up! We have to run straight back, to where there are houses with people. Behind the housing development. Right now, Merry!”
They heard the car rev its engine and begin to slip and slice through the mud.
With Mallory pulling her, Merry stumbled to her feet. The sound of the car was louder, then even louder, the horn bleating, so near, almost upon them.
But he won’t be able to follow us through the tennis courts,
Meredith thought, running with all her strength.
He’ll have to go around. We just need to get back to the tennis courts,
less than half a block.
And by the time David made the detour, they would be in those backyards they saw, so far away.
They finally heard the yell.
Drew was shouting, “Stop! It’s me!” at the top of his voice. The girls spun around in disbelief. The green beast of his ramshackle Toyota truck was barely visible under the mud. David had zoomed through the muck like a madman off-roading.
“I never saw anything so beautiful,” Meredith whispered. Mallory put her hands over her face. Drew swung up and out of the driver’s seat and approached them. Mallory leaned her head against his chest. When Drew reached up and stroked her hair, she didn’t stop him. Mallory felt so little. The top of her head barely hit his collarbone. Drew picked up the nail gun.
“Were you going to nail somebody, Brynn?” he asked.
“Yes. But it’s empty,” she admitted. “I’m glad he didn’t know it.”
“Jellico.” It wasn’t a question, so Mally didn’t answer it. Instead, she said, “We’re going to get the seats dirty.”
“I can wash the seats. Let me get a blanket out of the trunk,” he said, his voice breaking. “Just a little trip to the mall, huh? And your bike was stolen?”
“We couldn’t tell you. We still can’t,” Mallory said, biting back tears. “You won’t want to be our friend.”
“Too late,” Drew said. “I was born into it. Now, I’ll take you home so you can get your clothes in the washer before you tell me what this really is all about.”
“We can’t,” Mallory said, pulling the blanket around her. The sun winked out, and the wind stiffened. Ragged gray clouds seemed to strain overhead, as if winter had forgotten something and was hurrying back to get it.
“Why did you come in here? What happened to work?” Merry asked, for once the stronger, the less depleted of the two.
“I called in sick because Merry didn’t answer her cell. I figured if Merry didn’t answer her cell, she had to be dead,” Drew told them.
“Drewsky, you really don’t want to know,” Mally said as they turned out of the housing development, back toward Pilgrim Court and home.
“I really don’t, but I think I have to,” he said.
“You’ll be sorry,” said Meredith. “We are.”
THE LONELIEST PLACE
For a long time, neither of them would feel quite safe without the other in sight. When they heard parents talking about how much kids changed when they turned thirteen, they had to bite their lips to keep from falling into a frenzy of laughter. They both felt cored out, their whole former souls replaced by other beings.
“All I want,” Merry said one day as she was painting her toe-nails, “is to feel exactly like I felt before. I don’t need a boyfriend. I don’t need to make varsity. I just want to feel exactly like I did before.”
“I’m becoming a nun,” Mallory said. “I’ll be the only one who isn’t seventy-five. I’ll be, like, the beautiful nun, and people will say, why is she here? What tragedy was in her life? I’m going to be Sister Genesius. He was the patron of actors. I spent all those hours watching soaps!”
Campbell heard them laughing behind their door and was relieved. Although she couldn’t figure out why both girls spent so much time at home—doing things like reading! Playing cards and trivia games! Playing
Monopoly
with their
brother
!—she felt as though she had not heard them laugh for months. When she overheard Mallory, in passing, tell Adam, “I love you,” she nearly wept.
They were healing, she told Tim.
Tim didn’t mind. Mally was available to help out at the store more often. Merry actually volunteered to babysit Adam, though he insisted that she refer to it as “hanging out” with him. The girls went to school. They went home. They practiced what they did well. Merry went to cheerleading every night until six. Mally began her practices for summer soccer. They listened to music and slept.
There wasn’t one always missing and one always nagging to be driven to this girl’s house or that girl’s house or the new shopping center only thirty miles away, and could they pick up Kim and Erica on the way?
Tim was stretched out on the leather sofa in the den late one evening when he noticed Mally slip into the room and sit down beside him. He made room for her by swinging his feet over the back. They watched the Stanley Cup playoff game together. They hadn’t done that since Mallory was eight years old.
The girls didn’t mind the period of restfulness, either.
There were no dreams.
Merry told her friends that all the garbage with the fire and everything meant she had to really book for finals. Mallory told Eden, who called, worried, that she was just kicking back for a while. It had been a weird year.
One day, they went with Drew to Burger Heaven. He never got the true story the day he found them in Crest Haven. But later, what they told him was almost the truth. There was no point in trying to fool him. And there was no point in going further than they had to.
Mallory played with her soda straw until he took it away. Then she said, “Drew, whatever we say now never goes anywhere but here.”
“I mean no matter what,” Merry added. “No matter what you hear about us. You’re our oldest friend. But if our parents or your parents find out . . .”
“They’ll put you in a pretzel factory,” Drew said.
“No doubt,” Merry agreed.
Mallory began, “Identical twins, some identical twins, have what’s called—”
“Telepathy,” Drew said. “I always saw you do that. You would say you wanted a plum and she would come out of the house with a plum. Now tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Mally said, hoping for an easy fake, the thing she did so well on defense, that Drew would accept. “That’s how we figured out that David wasn’t okay. We talked back and forth in our minds about how weird David was, how he yelled at Deirdre, and about how he buried the Scavos’ dog.”
“Why did you talk in your minds?”
“We couldn’t say it out loud. It was too freaky,” Merry said.
“And none of that links up with him
killing
the dog or
hurting
Deirdre,” Drew said.
Mallory took a deep breath. This was true-blue Drew.
“I dreamed that he was going to kill the dog,” said Mallory.
“And I dreamed that he had,” Merry said. “I saw him bury her. In my dream.”
“You dreamed it?”
“Yes,” Merry said.
Silence huddled around their booth—while all around them, the bursts of laughter from kids and teenagers, the clink of dropped silverware and shouts of the short-order cooks seemed to fade. Instinctively, Mallory moved closer to Meredith on the plump red plastic bench.
“Did anything like this ever happen to you guys before?” asked Drew.
“Not until just before the fire,” said Meredith. “We don’t know why it was then and we hope that it will never happen again.”
“What did he do to that girl out there?”
Mally said, “He scared her. But I think he would have raped her.”
He would have murdered her,
she thought, hearing Meredith think the same thing.
“I don’t know how to take this,” Drew said.
“Seriously,” said Mallory. “We think David set the house on fire at our uncle’s on New Year’s Eve. We think he’s the one who was banging on the door when I was home alone.”
Drew raked his reddish hair. “It’s like part of me wants to believe you, and part of me can’t.”
“If I told you we felt like that, too . . .” Mally said.
“Then I would believe you,” Drew said. “Brynn, what are you going to do now?”
“Nothing. Sleep and not have dreams.”
“Nothing since that night?”
“No,” said Merry. “Except I dreamed about the girl we saw out there on a bus.”
“Did you ever think about me telling him that I know?” Drew asked, making a sculpture on his plate with his fries, a house and, behind it, two rectangular squares. Tennis courts.
“That’s great!” said Mally. “That is a great idea! Tell him you know. He’s scared of you. You’re big. You’re our friend. You wouldn’t be scared he’d cut your tires or anything?”
Drew lounged in the booth. “You’re such a kid, Brynn. If he did cut my tires, do you think I’d have to think twice about who did it? And if he would have done anything really bad out there, they could have practically followed the trail of breadcrumbs to his house. Tire marks. Fingerprints. Hair and blood. He left everything but his name written down.”
“I never thought of that,” Merry said.
“That’s why you have me.”
They weren’t sure when it was that Drew confronted David.
But one day, Kim pulled Merry aside and said, “I have a message from David for you.” Merry’s stomach turned to frost.
“What?”
“He says he’s sorry he scared you that time. He was being weird. That’s what he said.”
“Okay.”
“What did he do?”
Siow
, Merry thought to her sister. And with Mallory’s words in her mouth she said, “He should be sorry. He splashed me on purpose with mud when I was running. I didn’t even know it was David. I just heard this car behind me and thought I was going to get run over!”
“Oh, that sucks,” Kim said.
“Maybe all guys are idiots at his age. It made me get over liking him, though.”
“Drew isn’t an idiot,” Kim answered.
“Drew’s not a guy to us. He’s our friend.”
To Drew, they were grateful, forever, for their freedom. When the Brynns ran into David at the multiplex, he was with a group of guys and merely smiled briefly at Tim before slipping into another line to buy tickets. He looked away when Mallory stared at him, his jaw flushed.
The girls no longer saw David cruising when they ran. He seemed as eager to avoid them as they were to avoid him. They ran together in the mornings now—Merry moving the ritual of choosing her clothes to the night before. Each day, they pushed themselves a little farther up toward Crying Woman Ridge.
Their legs grew chiseled.
Mallory soared down the field.
Merry’s tumbling was spectacular. Cheerleading tryouts for high school were only a month away.
Merry knew that Kim couldn’t understand why she didn’t hang out after practice as she had last year. And it wasn’t easy for Meredith to go home on the beautiful long spring nights after practice. But she had a strange sense of the world holding its breath, as if what seemed to have ended would come with a final symphonic note, a final clap of thunder after a rain shower. After a taste of adulthood, which she imagined as a daily confrontation with life-changing choices, she felt safer being a little kid.
Kim asked her, “Is it because of how David acted? He’s acting so freaky. He’s barely speaking to me, Merry. Is that why you don’t hang out?”
“It’s not, Kim. That was my fault,” she said, the words sour in her mouth. “I had this little-girl crush and it wrecked his relationship. That’s not why I’m not hanging out.”
“Then why? I mean, I completely understand you not wanting to be at my house, but you don’t do anything!” Kim said. “Everyone asks. Caitlin and Erika and Crystal and Alli, everyone.”