The Telling (33 page)

Screw kissing Josh ever again; getting asked to homecoming; crowding in the bleachers for football games with the core and flannel blankets and passed flasks of anything but schnapps (none of us will ever drink peppermint again); finally graduating Gant High with Willa. Forget everything but missing Ben.

I must not be too far gone, since there's a vicious little voice in my head screaming
no
, screeching on about making whoever took Ben from me—and Becca from the core—pay. And like I said, rather than let myself be sucked into that bottomless hole, I go for the journal, where I keep Ben's last words to me, those written on the inside of the origami crane. This note revived me once; its magic will work again.

I flip the bedside light on and stare at the words written in a younger version of Ben's handwriting on the binder paper, all creased from its past life as a crane. The note was written three years ago, right after he got his tattoo, and he either didn't have the nerve to deliver it to me or decided it was a bad idea then. He held on to it, waiting for his moment to come. He decided it had once he returned home from Guatemala.

I glance over it now and wait for it to take effect like enchanted
cough syrup. This is what got me out of bed a month ago. It's what started
after
; the prime meridian of my life.

Lana—I'm an idiot. A waste of space. I don't think it even means bravery, because when the Chinese guy pulled the binder out and flipped to the foreign characters, he was smirking. Dumb white boy, he thought. I proved him right.

You cried for the three hours it took for me to get this shit tattoo, and all I wanted to do was say it wasn't supposed to be random crap. That's why it's so fucking ironic that the symbol might or might not mean bravery. I am a coward.

We got there and I freaked over what Cal would do. Cal would take one look at it and he'd think I was a perv. He wouldn't get that I know you're young. I know. Cal wouldn't have gotten that I just wanted to tell you what you mean to me. I've never had anyone who is mine and I'm theirs.

But when we got there, I wimped out and got a crap tribal tattoo that may or may not mean bravery, when all this worthless jackass wanted was to get LANA tatted on his back.

Those words were bigger than I knew words could be. They made booming thunks as they tumbled to the floor of my bedroom. The reverberations they caused traveled up into my mattress and into the side I reclined on.

There are sentiments that once expressed, alter your molecules.

I thought back to the day in the restaurant. My teeth chattered at the hornet's buzz of the needle poking into Ben's skin. Hot oil gurgled from the deep fryer, separated from where we sat in the kitchen by a curtain. The air shimmered with clouds of oily steam. Crunchy fried wontons got trapped between my teeth when we ate dinner after the tattoo was finished. Ben's shadow cast on the table flickered as the yellow lantern behind his head rocked in the wind bursting in with each new diner.

Ben's hand rested on the table like an empty cup to be filled. I always wanted to fill it. I placed mine on top. I hadn't done that since we were younger. The way his eyes lingered on our hands and then on my face . . . I should have known. But I was fourteen.

I slept in a ratty old Powerpuff Girls T-shirt and was stuck believing I was bad for liking Ben. I was dirtier than girls are supposed to be. Ben was right; I was young. I didn't have my first kiss until six months later, with Theo, the math decathlon team captain. And even then I had to concentrate really hard not to giggle.
Look like you've been here before,
my mother wrote in the margins of her journal when she was an initiate at her sorority. That's what ran through my head my first few awkward kisses.
Look like you've been here before. Like you know what you're doing.

I was too immature to recognize that Ben loved me like that—in the dirty, bad, forbidden, wonderful way—until I read his note.

Me? I never had a shot at not loving Ben. He stomped everything else out. I walked onto the terrace and he loomed bigger than the harbor. He made the yellow sun gold and the wind scented with summer. Ben was sunshine, a boost to reach the monkey bars, the pop of water balloons tossed on the terrace, root beer bubbles making
me sneeze, and a velvety smooth voice telling stories that
used to be
fiction. Even with the sun cast at our backs, his shadow was darker, more vivid.

My heart aches as though it has been kicked. Ben is gone. Wholly. It's better this way. He doesn't have a part in this dark narrative. Ben's ghost wouldn't kill Becca or her dogs. He wouldn't hurt Maggie. I'm less certain about Ford.

He wasn't just bigger than everyone else for me; he made me bigger. He never stopped acting as though I were the brave one. His last words to me made it possible to imagine that I made him more too. Ben felt what I'd felt, and if I'd been brave and confessed, we wouldn't have left to drive Maggie home that night. He wouldn't have opened the door no matter how many times the bell rang. Ben would be alive, golden, and stubborn. His opinions would sing. We'd be planning our escape from Gant Island. Together.

That's why I got out of bed, left
before
in those filthy, stale sheets. Plodded downstairs to the lower terrace. Set the fire in the pit. Stoked the flames high and leaped over them. Singed my socks and began to grin again.
Grin, grin, grin until you feel it taking hold.

It was too late for Ben—even for Mom—but it wasn't too late for me.

That's what gave
after
its daring, hungry voice. And for the most part, I like the changes in me. What's strange, though, is that however much I've changed, my perception of who Ben was has changed more. Increasingly, he's a boy I don't recognize. He's a boy with secrets
from
me rather than
with
me. I know there's a line between what you show the world and what's inside. I was stupid to think that didn't apply to Ben. Ben was as bottomless as the next person. So how didn't I see it?

I should have known. There were signs. The sleeplessness, for one, should have clued me in. For all those nights he dragged me down to the fire pit, there were as many where I woke to see him sleeping on my window seat, his knees bent and his arms holding a lacy pillow at his chest. He rubbed the cold and the cramp from his joints as he got up. He brushed it off each time. He'd clap me on the back and make a joke.
I sleep better with your snoring in my ears
, or,
My mattress is harder than your window seat
.

I let all those times slide by. I looked forward to them. I'd crack my eyelids, and my lashes would make shapes out of the luminous streaks and the dark edges, and then Ben would appear. One of those early mornings, maybe a year ago, I slipped out of bed, soundlessly, and tiptoed to his sleeping form. Before I considered the consequences, I bent and skimmed his forehead with my lips. It was like tasting color and music. He stirred. I couldn't breathe as I pulled away and retreated before his eyes opened.

The fear must have come for him at night. Our giant house creaked. The rain and the hail hissed on the roof. The occasional car passed, headlights like coal-red demon eyes reflecting through his bedroom window. Each groan might have sounded like a creeping footstep. The branches of the trees outside made shivering shadow animals on his walls. And that very human man, who'd chased them for years, must have seemed almost supernatural in the dead of night.

Y
esterday I was a damaged nerve. I was numb in some places and too sensitive in others. This morning I know exactly what must happen next.

I thought I was the only person alive who knew Ben's stories. I'm not. There's another, and Ben's tales actually belong to them—to
him
, whoever he is. Ben just dusted them off and added the two of us in. He spun them into his own, equipped with adolescent warriors and endings that left us satisfied. Ben made me the hero. And perhaps it's not too late to bring my braver, fictive self to life? I was weak, sad, and a tiny ball when I first suspected that Maggie had a hand in Ben's death. I was stuck in grief and couldn't unstick myself for revenge.
He
doesn't get such a feeble, broken girl as an enemy.

As I climb out of bed, I have my cell to my ear and I'm listening to Detective Sweeny's phone ring. After the eighth it goes to voice mail.

“Hi, Detective. It's Lana McBrook. I need to talk to you. As soon as you can, call me. It's important. I haven't been honest with you. I can prove that there's someone who's been after Diane and Ben. Ben
knew. There were these stories that Ben used to tell, and they tie all the murders together. Um . . . uh, okay, call me, please. Thanks.”

Next I dial Josh.

“Hey, you and Willa okay?” he says.

While his warm voice doesn't exactly make my resolve falter, I do feel queasy at how angry he'll be when he realizes what a liar I am. “Hey. Yeah, we will be. I need to see you guys—all of you—ASAP. I'm not sure if everyone's parents will let them leave the house or even if the police will, but we have to figure something out.”

“You don't know,” he says. It isn't a question.

“Know what?” In dismay, I drop the shorts I was about to pull on.

“They found Skitzy-Fitzy.
Fitzgerald Moore.
”

I'm silent. I think it's more than likely that the next words from Josh's mouth will describe Skitzy-Fitzy's gruesome murder. I drop to the window seat.

“Someone spotted him walking along the highway last night and called it in. The police searched the surrounding area. Even my mom and some others from the station went out to help. They finally found him at four this morning. He had bird beaks in his pockets.” There's only muffled, heavy breathing for a minute. “Are you there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“
Bird beaks
, Lana.
And black feathers
. The FBI profiler the cops brought in said that the crimes could be the work of someone who's not mentally all there. The police are searching the woods south of the lighthouse, since that's where they found him. My mom says that the police are being cautious, but they're pretty certain that he's the one who killed Becca, Ford, and Maggie.”

“Becca, Ford, and Maggie?” I whisper.

“Yeah.” He sighs like it pains him to say what comes next. “I don't know about Ben. It's the bird beaks that tie Skitzy-Fitzy to Becca, and the cops think that whoever must have hurt her also hurt Ford and Maggie, because their deaths were so . . . so out of the ordinary. It's just that Maggie said it wasn't him on the highway with Ben. I guess it doesn't matter what she said, since everyone knows she's a liar.”

I shake my head to clear it. “So can I come over?”

“Oh, sorry, that's what I meant to say. The others are on their way. You and Willa should come too.”

“Be there in twenty.” I feel momentarily blindsided. I can't figure out where Skitzy-Fitzy showing up with bird beaks in his pockets fits into this, but he doesn't stack up as the killer. In some ways he's the obvious suspect. He's schizophrenic. Suspects with mental illness are always guilty of grisly crimes in movies.
The voices told me to do it
and all that. Skitzy-Fitzy is the obvious choice, unless you know that Ben and Diane were being followed for years and that fragments of our make-believe have been scattered across Gant in the form of murders.

I check the guest room down the hall for Willa; her bed has already been made, the fluffy duvet pulled over the embroidered pillows. I move to the staircase. Indistinct voices stream up from the living room. Dad must have made Willa her usual double-shot mocha, and I can just picture their two maddeningly reasonable and appropriately concerned faces as they mull over the events of yesterday.

I make a hairpin right at the bottom of the staircase rather than continue on to join them. I move softly toward Dad's office. Its door is cracked open, and I slip through without disturbing its creaky hinges.

The room is lined with cabinets and bookshelves stacked with yearly almanacs full of commercial real estate regulations. It's a tidy and uninteresting place. The desk was Dad's great-grandfather's, and when I think about how old that is, how many generations of McBrooks sat at it, it doesn't make me warm and fuzzy and ready to take my turn. It creeps me out, like it's seen too much.

I cut across the Turkish rug that's almost as old and go for the personal files Dad keeps in his bottom right-hand desk drawer. Dad's never told me to stay out of here, though him discovering me at his desk, with only a line of natural light seeping through where the blinds meet the windowsill to illuminate my way, would lead to an uncomfortable conversation. He'd want to know what I was looking for and why I hadn't asked him outright. I'm curious to see if Dad has information on Ben and Diane. Dad won't even discuss our family issues with me; he tiptoes around mentioning Mom. Why would I believe he'd be more forthcoming about Diane?

I glide the drawer open; its tracks whine in protest. I strain to listen for the steady rumble in the living room. It's there. I finger through the folders. This is where Ben and I found the key to Mom's hope chest under the
M
s. Ben fingered a folder marked Wright, his former last name, decided not to withdraw it, and closed the drawer with a determined bob of his head. I retrieve it now.

There's a solid, sliding object within, one of those old-fashioned handheld tape recorders. There's also Ben's school transcript from the first half of sixth grade at a middle school in Savannah. Ben spent six months there; this is more than I knew. I flip the recorder over in my hand, twist the volume dial until it's turned low, hit play, and gradually
turn the volume back up until it's faint but clear enough if I hold the speaker to my ear.