The Telling (23 page)

“I wouldn't have let them. It was my fault you were there.” I trace a sad face on the window, but there isn't enough steam to make it last. “I should have seen that right away.”

“I have free will, best friend of mine. I was there because I wanted to be. Even I am not immune to my teenage biology and its mad desire to be accepted by populars.” By the time we hang up, things are right between us.

Dinner is with Dad. He phoned Calm Coast earlier, and Diane refused to talk with him. Her doctor made chipper promises about progress. Dad poured himself a scotch over ice. I doubt that in their short long-distance relationship before they married, Dad had noticed the similarities between Diane and Mom. Both are fragile in a way I am not. Even before Ben died she was spacey. It was eerie walking through the kitchen and spotting Diane in a black cocktail dress, glass of wine at her side, staring off at the middle distance of the harbor. After we lost Ben, I worried history might repeat itself.

“Diane needs time, Daddy. That's all it is,” I say. “She'll come home.”

He stares at his salmon until we give up pretending that either of us can eat and go our separate ways. I go into Ben's room, curl up
on his quilt, and bury my head in his pillow, which is laced with stale hair gel and almost-gone body spray. I'm warmed from my toes to my head. Diane is a few hours away, but she seems more gone than Ben does lately. I fall asleep in this weird state, daydreaming that I'm shipwrecked on an enchanted island where stories from Ben's imagination come true.

Where Ben and I are heroes.

Where villains are separate from the shadows.

Where we don't let the bullies win.

Ever.

T
hey found Ford,” Josh tells me over the phone. His usually rich, bouncy voice is flat this morning.

“Oh?” I say, trying to mask my disappointment. I wasn't hoping for bad news about Ford per se, I just didn't want good news, either. The enchanted island in my mind punishes people like Maggie and Ford. I switch off the water I was running over a basket of blackberries in the sink and dump the berries into a cereal bowl. It's midmorning, and Dad is either out running errands or at his office downtown. Basel is meowing at my feet, trying to persuade me to give him a second breakfast. I usually give in.

“Can I just come over to tell you?” Josh asks abruptly after a weirdly long break.

I place the honey back on the shelf after squeezing a golden thread on the berries. “Sure,” I say. My stomach's instantly fluttery. Josh and I have been alone only a handful of times since the first night he drove me home from Marmalade's. “Are we still going to meet at Becca's later to finish planning Ben's prank?” I add. I pop a berry between my teeth. Honey, blackberry juice, and Ben's prank
have me feeling bright and weightless. The prank is business Ben left unfinished, and now I'm going to finish it for him.

“Uh, yeah,” Josh answers, distracted. “We need to talk about everything,” he ends intensely, and the sweetness of honey is diminished on my tongue.

Josh arrives just as my cell is buzzing with a call from Willa. I answer her after I've opened the door for him. “Josh just got here. Lemme call you back soon,” I tell her before hitting end.

We settle in the kitchen. I lean on the counter and watch as Josh stands from crouching over Basel. I grip the counter at my waist as I see his face. “What's wrong?”

His shoulders are stooped forward as he braces himself on the kitchen island. “They found Ford.”

I nod. “Okay, that's good, right? He's your friend.”

“He wasn't alive,” Josh says. He looks to the ceiling, blinking to clear tears, and continues. “His parents found him early this morning, before the sun came up. The police had stopped searching because of that activity on Ford's bank card. His parents worried Ford had been attacked
and
robbed. The attacker might be using the card in Seattle. They were with some other parents, walking the woods all night along the road where that junior spotted him. They got home, and their German shepherd was going crazy in the house. He'd tried to claw through the back door. Mr. Holland let the dog out and he raced into the trees. Ford's dad ran after him.” Josh's features distort to make a crying face without the tears.

I am motionless and quiet. I'm listening, but what's disturbing is that it isn't Josh I'm waiting to hear from. We're the only two people in the room, and yet my ears are straining for Ben's voice:
Bullies don't get to win.

Ford was a bully. Ford is dead. And it would be so like Ben to have had some part in that. I can almost see him sitting on the countertop, heels beating the cabinets, smiling smugly as he flicks his hair from his eyes.
You thought being dead could keep me from revenge?

I am light-headed, sweating, weighted against the counter, Ben's gloating laugh ringing in my ears as Josh continues.

“His dad found him—can you imagine? I guess you of all people can. You saw Ben.” He drags a hand down his face. “Shit, Lana. I'm so sorry.” He makes a choking noise. “Ford was just on the ground . . . pale and dead.”

I swallow. “How?”

“Dunno yet. Ford's mom called her best friend, who lives next door, and she works with my mom at the firehouse and that's why I know anything. The cops are over there. The scene's all cordoned off and they're searching.”

“For what?”

“Evidence. Maybe for who did it.”

I turn from Josh in that instant, hold either side of the sink, and try to concentrate on breathing to stop the kitchen from spinning. Basel's still begging, his meowing coming from every direction. The police are searching for
who
killed Ford. Any half-decent and mostly sane person would want a murderer found. Me: I worry that the answer to who killed Ford Holland isn't as simple as all that. I worry that being dead isn't what I used to think it was. And this matters because the person I loved best in the world isn't alive.

For someone who's dead, Ben is everywhere. He's in the sailboat that showed up on my steamy window; he's in my great-great-grandmother's rosary appearing in our hiding spot; he's in the fog; he's in my doorway; he's
at the foot of my bed; he's downtown, stargazing. Ford is dead, and I wonder if Ben was in the woods behind his house with him. What about when Maggie died? Did Ben chase her through the preserve? Is it being alive that limits you to one place? You're stuck in class, or at home blowing out your hair, or on the couch texting your best, or wherever, just so long as it's a single place, constrained by time and distance. I used to think that death limited you to zero places. You died and that was it: dead. But perhaps dead doesn't mean gone?

A hand cups the back of my neck. I start. “Sorry,” Josh mutters, stepping away, jamming his hand in his pocket. “Are you okay? I was worried about telling you.”

“Why?” I ask, suddenly annoyed. I hated Ford—Ford who called me foul names and whispered lurid insults in my ear. I'm glad he's gone.

Josh's brows shoot up. “Because of Ben,” he explains gently. “Because it's another death and that probably dredges up . . . pain. Plus”—his eyes go around the room—“I heard that you and Ford were outside at my party toward the end and that maybe you . . . liked him?”

I frown. “No,” I say. “I didn't like Ford. Not at all. Although I'm sorry for his parents. We just ran into each other in your backyard, and truthfully, he was never nice to me.”

“Oh, okay,” Josh says, the lines there between his eyebrows.

“There wasn't anything obviously wrong with Ford's body?” I ask. “Injuries? Signs of how he died?”

Josh rubs his closed eyelids. “Not that my mom heard, no. The coroner took him and they'll do the same tests they did on Maggie, same exam they'd do on anyone, I bet.”

Josh's pocket buzzes angrily. His hand comes out with his cell. “Crap,” he says. “I
was texting with Duncan and Rusty when my mom heard about Ford, and I told them. They must have told Carolynn, because she keeps calling.”

“They'll be able to tell if Ford was poisoned,” I say. “If rosary peas were in his stomach.”

Josh looks up from texting on his cell. “Yeah, sure they will. Do you think the same person who killed Maggie killed Ford?”

My hands are jittery at my sides. “I don't know. Probably. Their deaths were in such close proximity, time-wise and both here on Gant, where there's never been anything like this before Ben.”

“But who would kill Maggie and then Ford? They only knew each other from school, and they weren't even friends. There's no connection.”

There is one glaring connection Josh doesn't see. Ben had reason to be angry with them both. I shrug in a vague way. I want Josh to stop thinking about it. He couldn't come up with the answer I have; he isn't increasingly uncertain about what's impossible. “They're random victims,” I tell him.

His cell clatters on the counter where he'd placed it between us.

At B's. Where R U?

The text is from Carolynn.

Josh snatches it up. “We should go over to B's,” he says.

I follow him to the front door. “I'll come in a few minutes. I need to call Willa.” I watch Josh walk, dazed, cutting across our neighbor's lawn. I wait until he disappears, and then I sprint through the back door. My bare feet pound the stairs cut into the rocky slope, my
hair comes loose from its ponytail, strands slashing what I see of the harbor. With the wind still, the water has the look of a frozen ice-blue pond. There are trails of smoke emanating from the opposite shore in the brush. A bonfire's recently been put out.

Basel meows above me from the upper terrace. I don't turn to close him inside. I go for our hiding spot. I have to see that the rosary is still there; that it exists; that I'm not crazy; that Ben's . . . whatever hasn't taken it to act out a grudge against Ford. My brain is picking at what Rusty said nights ago. Ben McBrook's ghost would have wanted Maggie dead.

I'm out of breath arriving at our secret place. My fingers shake as I slip my hand into the crevice. My fist curls around an object. I pull it out, unfurl my fingers, and stare at the rosary. It's shorter in length, by nearly a half. It would be if its peas were used to kill Ford. If the killer got it right this time. If he used enough poison for it to prove fatal.

I
hold up the rosary, let it dangle in the sunshine. The red berries seem to pulse with their own heartbeat against the backdrop of the blue harbor. No, that's my screwed-up head, my tightening throat siphoning off air, not allowing enough oxygen to my brain. I snatch the rosary to my chest and whirl around. I'm out in the open, squinting into the sun, where anyone could see me.

I watch the coastline. I scan for a variation in the reedy sameness; a flash of fabric or the suggestion of skin. There's a distant cough, but the cougher isn't visible. A black Lab on the other side of the harbor is running down the grassy slope of his backyard. I feel his marble eyes on me. The tumbling laughter of children from far away, or maybe Ben and I are laughing in the past and the clear, sharp sound is cutting through time. I replace the rosary as soon as I'm sure I'm not being observed.

Upstairs I call Willa and ask her to meet me at Becca's. I keep the shortened rosary to myself. It's the kind of thing I should dial Dad about; tell the police. Confess to everything I think I know. At best this would get me sympathetic stares and concerned whispers.
Lana
McBrook thinks her dead stepbrother is picking off the kids who wronged them.
And what if Detective Sweeny or Dad or any adult who mattered believed me? I would be telling on Ben.

Not the Ben who was crackling with life, who blew into a room like saltwater wind, frizzing your hair with a static charge, tickling a smile out of you, but Ben as he is now.

Willa's Prius is parked behind Duncan's SUV in Becca's driveway. When no one answers, I push open Becca's door. No one bothered to lock it. Offhandedly, I think this is weird, and then I see the boys on the terrace. Josh is a blur of circuitous motion; Rusty and Duncan are statues. I discover Willa on the kitchen floor, knees pulled to her chest, back slumped against the stainless-steel fridge, fingers gouging into her temples.

I kneel beside her. “What's wrong?” I ask.

Her face has a scrubbed pink look. “I was already on my way here. Carolynn called me. Just go see.”

I sidestep shards of white glass, a puddle of coffee, and Duncan's abandoned skipper hat. At the threshold I stop short. A coal-black mangy-looking bird is in the middle of a wooden plank of the terrace.

“It's beakless,” Duncan says. Rogue feathers are scattered across the deck, their filaments trembling in the breeze. Off to my left the waist-high gate that connects the terrace to the side of the house is blowing open and shut, creaking and rattling with each swipe. Rusty braces himself over the railing, his knobby spine showing through his ribbed tank top. His puke smacks the rocks below. Josh has come to a stop at the side of the house, his arm propped up, bent, and his eyes hiding. Becca's dogs are at his feet.

“Dead,” he says. “Winkie and Twinkie are dead.”

“How?” I direct it to Duncan. He's the most composed.

He rubs his forehead with a fist. “Who the fuck knows? I called Carolynn about Ford and we came over here to find Becca hyperventilating.” Duncan looks slowly from Josh to me. “She was
screaming
. She had scratches all over her arms.” He runs his hand from his shoulder to his wrist. “And she was yanking her hair. It was a grade A meltdown. Her dogs are dead and there's this bird . . .
butchered
. Some psycho took its beak.”

“What do you mean,
took its beak
?” Josh says. He's shouldering the side of the house like he's trying to push it down.