The Telling (17 page)

I pull my knees to my chest and absently yank on a thread from a pillowcase. My cell vibrates on my comforter. The picture Becca programmed to show when she called lights up the screen. Her green eyes, one winking, stare at me.

I let it buzz four more seconds. I wanted to talk to Willa, not her opposite.

“H—”

“Did you hear?” she shouts.

I hold the receiver away from my ear. “That we're sneaking back to the spring to hunt for evidence and clear our names?” I say.
It was my idea.

“Oh my God, you didn't. Listen. Ford is
missing
. Since last
night. No one remembers him leaving, and his car was still there this morning. No biggie—there were tons of cars left, and Josh's moms figured kids were being responsible and getting rides. Ford's car was still there after the police station and Karen called Ford's mom to see if they needed help getting it home, and Ford's mom is all, ‘I figured Ford was still with Josh.' ” All this is said with a giddy lilt that doesn't match the words. Becca's pace snowballs as she continues, “No one was freaked yet, but Ford's mom started calling his cell, which was going straight to voice mail, and then she got her phone tree out and people have been calling for hours trying to find him. Some junior thinks maybe he saw Ford walking along the highway at midnight but couldn't stop because he had six drunkies in his car.”

I bob my feet over the edge of the bed. “If he walked home, couldn't he be passed out somewhere, sleeping it off?” I ask, unconcerned.

“For twenty hours? Doubtful. Car and I think Maggie's killer has struck again,” she says bluntly.

My stomach drops and I go still. “Why?”

“Everyone thinks it was Maggie and one of her trailer-park-hill people who got Ben, yeah? We figure it's something more dramatic and dark, like a serial killer who picked Maggie and now Ford off. I hope they do one of those made-for-TV true-crime stories about Gant. I could totally play myself.”

I pull my knees to my chest.
I know the truth, Ford. You are a zombie, completely unoriginal, pathetic, feeding off your brother's popularity and nastiness, hoping that no one sees how mind-suckingly boring you are.

“
Hellooo
, you there?”

“Yeah, I am,” I say, absorbed in the previous night.

“Are you, like . . . upset? You hate Ford. You said so.” A confused beat. “Ohhhh, wait a sec, is it one of those you-hate-him-because-you-think-you-can't-have-him dealies?”

“No,” I say firmly, “it definitely is not. And I said I
couldn't stand him
. Hate is a lot more than that.” A shudder moves through me. I absolutely hate Ford. I told him that the kids he considers friends think he's a hanger-on. He deserved it.
He earned it.
Ben used to say:
Bullies don't get to win.
Ford didn't last night.

“Can't stand him, hate him, same difference,” Becca's saying. “Which is why I called Liddy a lying whore when she said she saw you guys outside.
Together.
”

I struggle to catch up. “Who?”

“You and Ford,” she sighs, exasperated. “She said you guys looked super intense and that you came in with this mushy smile on your face. And then she went outside and asked him what was up, and he was all, ‘That girl's always wanted to get up on me.' ” I'd smile at Becca's Ford impression if I wasn't frowning.

“That isn't true,” I say.

“Oh, I know. Anyway, it's sort of a compliment. People don't lie about you unless you matter,” she says, a wistful quality to her voice.

I'm sick with mingling emotions after we hang up. Ford wasn't like Maggie. His actions didn't physically harm anyone. He was cruel and vindictive, though.

Maggie dying and Ford going missing feels like the universe setting itself right. Obviously, this isn't true. If the universe was going to fix bad stuff in the world, wouldn't it stop kid hunger or all the wars
before it picked off the people who've been nasty to Lana McBrook of Gant Island, Washington?

The universe wouldn't bother with me.

I recline slowly and heavily.

No. Whatever remains of Ben would.

I
t's the dark side of dawn when I lock the front door behind me. I tossed and turned last night. There was noise, unidentifiable, soft, and persistent. It was the hum of things going wrong in my head. It resembled footsteps and whispering all muddled together, and when I opened my eyes from the pillow, I half expected to see a shadowy figure swaying in my bedroom doorway. I expected Ben. The house felt occupied.

I talked myself out of it. Repeatedly. I fell asleep and would wake with a bit of a start, as if I could sense someone at the foot of my bed, observing me. Even this morning with my eyes open, it's a hard conviction to shake.

I zip my fleece to my chin. My eyes water in the brisk air. I scan the front yard before running for my car. The porch lantern's glow floods the lawn; beyond it there are the shadowy rounds and columns of tree trunks. Perfect hiding places for anyone watching. I check the backseat before slipping into my car.

Our street follows the horseshoe-shaped harbor. Houses behind brick-and-iron gates stud the shoe. I follow the roads terracing up the hill to Josh's.
I pull in behind Carolynn. She's stepping out of her car in fur-cuffed suede boots, her blond hair in a French twist.
Mom
is what I think of whenever I spot a hairstyle too elaborate for me to master. Moms are the ones who teach you how to braid, twist, and pin.

It's chilly outside for August. September will mean rust- and fire-colored trees and the beginning of one long rainstorm that lasts until next summer. It means the tang of bonfires in the air will be replaced by wet earth rot. It means autumn and starting school without Ben. Instead of having to think about the dead and missing, we should be excited or dreading back-to-school. My fingers fumble popping the trunk.

I reach for the flashlight under the jumper cables of the emergency kit. I stare at the large, forest-green metal chest behind the kit. A stripe of masking tape runs its length, with
Summer Provisions
in marker. I hear the squeak the marker made as Ben labeled the box. I close my eyes for the barest second and can see what Ben did next. He wrote
Summer Provision
on an additional strip of masking tape. He peeled it from the roll and ran his fingers from one end to the other, smoothing it over the skin of my forearm. I left it there. Some feelings are as undeniable as they are inexplicable. I open my eyes, scratch my arm where the tape was once, and stare down the green chest.

We left it in my trunk after our last day on the boat. It was miserably cold, a wet February, and the week before Ben left for Guatemala. Without opening it, I know its contents: two aluminum foil balls from our turkey avocado sandwiches; one bag of unopened salt-and-vinegar potato chips; two empty bottles of root beer; one empty can of actual beer; a set of mini waterproof speakers;
two rain slickers; a seagull's feather; and a flare gun kit. The day was that big. It would be our last on the sailboat for months. I am a just-poked bruise.

“Hey, you.” Josh's voice makes me jerk from my thoughts. “Whatcha doin'?” he asks, rosy-cheeked in the chill morning.

I feign a smile and hold up the flashlight. “Grabbing this. You guys ready?”

Josh stands a little taller and says pluckily, “You bet.” He cranes his neck, peering through the back window. “Willa meeting us there?”

I shake my head. “She isn't coming. I didn't ask her to.”

Carolynn circles to join us, her eyes narrowed. “Why? All of us are going.”

“I know,” I say sharply. I take a breath. “Look, P.O. wasn't going to miss her sneaking out this morning. It would have caused us more trouble.”

Becca warms her hands on a pink plaid thermos. Josh rocks his head side to side. “Willa could tell the cops we hurt Maggie,” Carolynn says to him.

“We've already been through this, remember? She's not lying to the police,” I say. “We're going to find proof that someone else was at the spring.”

Carolynn and Becca exchange a look, their collective stare diverting to Josh for a moment. An unsaid agreement passes between them. I see it, gold and shimmery, tying them together. Willa and I are the outsiders. They are the core. Our four-week guest pass into their world doesn't change this. If needed, they'll strike at Willa preemptively.

We pile into Josh's Jeep to ride to the spring together. One car
parked along the road will draw less attention than multiple vehicles. There is no banter, no laughter, no smiling in the Jeep's cab. The possibility that today could be the day the police decide to arrest us for Maggie's murder turns the air stuffy, unbreathable.

“If I have to listen to sports radio for one more second, I am going to kill all of you and dump your bodies in the spring,” Carolynn says humorlessly.

Becca applies makeup while wedged between me and Rusty in the backseat. “I'm no fatty, but I could eat this ChapStick, it's so delicious,” she says, a moment before capping it and spritzing her neck and cleavage with body spray.

“Don't get your perfume and shit on me,” Rusty complains. I'm smashed against the window as she scoots toward me so she doesn't have to touch him. I'm twitchy, knees jittering, eyes resting on nothing. I shouldn't have replaced the rosary in my hiding spot. My fingerprints are on the peas. But it won't be found. Ben and I never showed another person our secret place. We never went for it when anyone else was around, and it's unlikely that anyone else saw Ben pulling a flask from it or me retrieving gummies, even more unlikely that this person turned out to be a homicidal maniac who would later hide a murder weapon there, and even unlikelier that that same person would someday have my great-great-grandmother's rosary in their possession. One unlikelihood piled on top of another.

“Ford's parents and a bunch of adults are searching the woods along here later this morning. This is the way he'd have gone to walk home,” Josh announces.

I stare out the window. Is Ford there, under the brush, passed out or worse? Did someone follow him home with the aim of hurting him,
or was someone lying in wait and Ford was a victim of convenience?

“My money's on Holland showing up in a day or two,” Rusty says.

Duncan snickers at this. “You think he went into the city hammered, trying to score some weed?”

Rusty shrugs. “He's always getting wasted and doing dumb shit. Remember when he did a backflip off the diving board at school and fractured his collarbone freshman year?”

There are murmured
oh yeahs
.

Josh cracks his window and says into the rush of wind, “I dunno. It's been more than twenty-four hours. It's too much of a coincidence that Maggie turns up dead and then Ford goes missing. Maybe it's the same killer?”

I stay staring at the trees. The shadows between their trunks curl and twist until I see staggering, starving creatures watching the car speed past. Some of the forms bound after us, marking our trail by shedding skin and coats. I wonder if Ben's imagination bled into reality in a similar way in the moments before his death. Did he see the shadow man as I did or did he see a human face? Did he suspect that the ogre with the two-pronged tongue from one of his stories had found him? There's a little nip of my conscious mind, like my dreaming memory is stirring, poking my waking memory in a certain direction, but before I go there, the others are unloading on the access road.

We file down the path. Pockets of fog like clouds gather in the dips of the trail. The feathery masses are opaque. We disappear into them and as we emerge, I'm tingly like my atoms have been altered in some tiny way.

Glossy green leaves as big as dinner platters shine from the undergrowth. They have traceries of veins and scrolling tips. Everything
is saturated, dripping, and verdant in the beams of our flashlights. The sun spills over the low points on the horizon, but the tallest pines keep the forest floor in manufactured night. The long, frilly threads of neon moss hanging from pine boughs put off bioluminescence.

In addition to our shuffling steps and sniffling, the preserve has its own symphony. The wind sings through the trees, and there are groans and creaks from their ancient trunks. There's a faint
shhhhhh
from the water surging against the beach a mile away. No one speaks. It's as if they sense as I do that we're sneaking into an enchanted land, alien from Swisher Spring. We shouldn't let the natives hear us coming.

I wonder what it means that I am less and less anchored by what is in front of my face. Nothing feels real. Alone, with these five, anything—the horrible as much as the good—is possible.

My thighs get tired navigating over the slick rocks. I swipe my wet palms on my jeans after leveraging over a fallen trunk. My heart lodges itself higher in my throat. This is it. We may have only hours to clear our names. Then the police could come.

When they do, might they find my hiding spot? Having the rosary may make me appear even more suspicious. And yes, I think my hiding spot is secure, but if someone other than me or Ben put the rosary there, then maybe that someone is trying to make me look guilty? All they'd have to do is phone in an anonymous tip. I should have destroyed the rosary. Dumped it in the harbor. Anything so there was no chance I'd be tied—any more than I already am—to a murder. My instinct was to hide it again. As I said, I am a sometimes liar.

My heart is in my mouth.
Calm down. Breathe.
I need to be the
braver version of me from Ben's stories. She was cool and calculating.

We trickle out on the rocks surrounding the spring. The faint light doesn't penetrate the water, only reveals the silhouette of the shore. Our flashlight beams crisscross, darting around as if the whole group can't focus. I sweep over the ferns, trying to see through the understory. If Maggie's killer watched us drag her from the water, he might have been hiding behind the waist-high hedge of green. I search for shoe prints, cigarette butts, anything left behind.