MY PARENTS HADN’T spoken to each other in four years. If the last year of their marriage was rough, their divorce was even rougher. I tried to block out as much of their arguing as I could, but it wasn’t like there was anywhere else for me to go. I wasn’t friends with Dex anymore, and Reese wasn’t talking to me. Sometimes Cindy would let me hang out with her in the kitchen of Sweet Street while she worked on cupcake orders, teaching me how to swirl little pink roses out of frosting. But I spent most of my time up in the house that sat high in an oak tree square in the middle of Dex’s yard and mine. Our dads had built it for us as kids, and our names were still carved into the wood boards—Penelope and Dex, 2009.
I was hiding up in that house, reading an old paperback mystery, when my parents’ marriage finally exploded beyond repair. I heard a slamming noise, one so loud it made me jump. I scooted over to the tree house’s tiny window that looked down over my backyard to see my dad storming out of our back door, his arms full of clothes. A pair of jeans hung down from the crook of his elbow, the frayed hem trailing through the dirt. I recognized them immediately as Mom’s.
Dad took four giant steps into the yard and tossed the entire armful—colorful blouses, old worn flannels, even my mom’s favorite pajama bottoms—out onto the grass. Seconds later, Mom came running out the back door. She took one look at the contents of her closet, now splayed across our yard, and her mouth fell open. Even from my perch in the tree house, I could see her hands shaking. She whirled on Dad.
“Really? This is what you’re going to do?”
Dad turned to face her. His movements were incredibly slow, deliberate. His jaw was clenched tight, and a shadow seemed to cross over his eyes. He looked like a stranger to me in that moment, and I unconsciously ducked down lower in the tree house so I wouldn’t be seen.
“You’re damn right this is what I’m going to do,” Dad said. His voice was cold, but there was a fury underneath, like rapids raging beneath a thin layer of ice, ready to crack free at any moment and pull anything in its path into the undertow.
Dad took one step closer to Mom, hovering over her so she had to physically shrink back. “If you don’t want to be here, Nora, then get the fuck out of my house.”
Before she could reply, before she could react at all, he turned and walked back inside, slamming the door in her face.
Mom already had her teaching job in Chicago lined up, and she and I left not long after that. It was much easier to say goodbye to Bone Lake than I thought it would be. The first time I spoke to Dad on the phone from my new bedroom in Evanston, he sounded bright, cheery almost. And when I visited that next Christmas, he already seemed to be putting everything behind him. He was back to throwing himself into work, staying up all night to write in his office and taking trips across the country to “hunt” various imaginary beings he could fool people into believing were real. He never knew that I was in the tree house that day, that I’d seen and heard everything. But even if he could move on, I couldn’t. That memory stayed lodged in the back of my head, the cold anger of his voice, the darkness in his eyes.
Was it possible that wasn’t just a one-time occurrence? That there might be a whole other side to my dad I didn’t know about? I knew that sometimes he put work and his stories before everything else—even the people he was supposed to love most. And when he’d had his fling with Julie, he certainly hadn’t cared about who might get hurt in the process. I’d spent many years being angry with him for that and for everything else. But it was still hard to believe, even for a second, that the sheriff’s theory might actually be true.
That he might be a killer.
After getting back from the police station, I told Dex I wanted to spend some time alone. He dropped me off at my house with a sad smile and a wave and told me he’d be next door if I needed anything.
But there was only one person I needed to talk to.
I walked inside quickly, shutting the door and then all the windows before sitting down in the far corner of the couch, my cell phone in my hand. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to believe there was no way my dad could have hurt Bryan and Cassidy—no way. Guilt ripped through me for even entertaining the notion. But I couldn’t shut it out, either. I had to talk to someone else who knew Dad—and not just the goofy Strange World columnist who was alternately ignored or tolerated around Bone Lake. Someone who really knew him.
I took out my international calling card and dialed the number where Mom was staying in Spain. She picked up quickly, but her voice sounded sluggish when she answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Mom. Did I wake you?”
“No!” she said, her voice suddenly bright. “I was just up doing some reading.” I knew she was lying, and I pictured her sitting up in bed, reaching for her reading glasses, which were probably resting on a pile of books nearby.
“It’s so good to hear your voice! Don’t we have a phone date on Sunday?”
“Yeah . . .” My voice wavered, only for a fraction of an instant. But she heard it.
“What’s wrong?” She slipped into her calm, authoritative tone, the one that always solved problems. It made me want to spill my secrets into the phone, lay my problems at her feet so she could handle them and I wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. And yet . . . if I told her everything that was happening in Bone Lake, about Dad being missing, about the dead teens . . . she’d send me to stay with my grandparents in Florida for the summer. Or worse, she’d fly straight here to get me and take me back to Evanston, where I’d be “safe.” She’d miss out on the sabbatical that she’d lobbied and fought for two years to get, the one she’d been looking forward to her whole career. If that happened I might never figure out what was going on, and there’d be no one here who was on Dad’s side except for Dex.
If I was even on Dad’s side.
I decided it would be best to be vague, for now at least. “It’s about Dad . . .” I started.
There was a pause then, so deep and silent that I wondered if our call had been dropped.
“Okay,” she finally said, cautious.
“I know we don’t really talk about him much. Or at all. But . . .” I took a deep breath.
“Honey, is everything okay?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Of course. It’s just . . . do you think Dad is a good person?”
Another pause. I heard some slight shuffling, as though Mom was repositioning herself. “That’s a difficult question to answer,” she said.
“Because you hate him?”
“No!” The insistence in Mom’s voice surprised me a bit. “Gosh, Penny, I don’t hate your father. Is that really what you think?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, he . . .” I swallowed hard. “He cheated on you, Mom. It’s the whole reason you got divorced. The reason we moved away.”
“Oh, no . . . no, no, no, Penny, that’s . . . It was so much more complicated than that.”
“I was there, Mom. I remember—the cheating, the fights after you found out . . .”
“Yes, that’s part of it, but it’s not . . .” Mom sighed heavily. “I should have talked about this with you sooner. I just didn’t want to force you to discuss the divorce if you didn’t want to. You were at such a difficult age—old enough to know what was happening, but not old enough to want the details. . . .”
“I want the details now, Mom. It’s important.” Embarrassingly, I felt a lump rise up in my throat. Something about talking to my mom over the phone, hearing her voice but not seeing her face, seemed to strip away my defenses. It felt like crawling under a blanket. It felt like being ten years old.
“Your dad isn’t a bad person, Penny. I don’t think things are as simple as that—a good person and a bad,” she said, slow and deliberate.
“Sure it is,” I said. “The good person doesn’t lie. The good person doesn’t cheat.”
“That’s . . . a very black-and-white way to look at things, Penny. Though, knowing you, that doesn’t surprise me.” Mom made a small sound then, halfway between a sigh and a rueful laugh.
“That’s because the truth is black and white.”
“Not always, hon,” she said, then sucked in a breath. “I was very angry with your father for what he did. Not just that it happened, but that you saw it. I’m still angry about that, honestly. It’s a hard thing to let go of. But, Penny, Julie Harper did not cause our marriage to fall apart. It was dead in the water long before your dad cheated. It’s probably why he cheated.”
The lump in my throat grew as I tried to reconcile these words with the memories of that year I had in my mind. The memories I’d gone over again and again, until they’d crystallized into unmovable, unchangeable shards that hurt every time I touched them.
I shook my head, even though I knew my mom couldn’t see. “I know you were fighting some that year—”
“Not just some. And not just that year. Neither of us had the courage to just be honest and end things, so your dad . . . took a more drastic course of action.”
I thought about the photos I’d found in Dad’s living room, the ones dating back to when he and Mom first met. Their happy smiles had faded out long before the year everything fell apart. Exactly when did it all go wrong?
“What happened? Please, Mom. I need to know.”
A silence again. I pictured Mom pursing her lips, winding a piece of long, dark hair around her finger, like she did when she was thinking.
“Okay, Penny. Okay.” Mom cleared her throat. “When I met your dad, he was just . . . different from anyone I knew. He had a way of looking at me that made me feel like I was the most important thing in the world.”
“And then he changed?”
“No, honey. I did. I was twenty years old when I started dating your dad. I was saving up money to go to college, but then I fell for Ike, and then . . .”
“Then there was me.”
“Yes. But listen, Penny,” Mom said, her voice growing forceful. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, then and now. I don’t regret for a second the decision I made to stay in Michigan and have you. Not ever. Do you understand?”
The lump in my throat expanded, and it took all my effort to choke out, “Yes.”
“Good,” Mom said, and let out a big breath. “I really did love your dad, and we thought we could make it work. But with every year that passed, I started to feel it more and more, how small Bone Lake was, how it felt like it was getting smaller. I felt . . . trapped.”
As Mom talked, I pushed myself back farther against the couch cushions, fighting the sudden feeling that I might fall over the edge. Mom had never spoken to me like this, not really. She’d talked to me about my life, about my problems, my school, my dreams. But she’d never really talked about herself in this open kind of way. It felt strange to hear her speak about feeling stuck in Bone Lake. It was like reading the scribbled, confused, and unspeakable things I wrote in my own diary.
It was terrifying.
To imagine that my mom could feel just as lost and stuck as me . . . it was like trying to lean back on a solid, familiar wall and finding it had moved a few feet when you weren’t looking.
“Penny, are you still there?” My mom’s voice sounded small on the other side of the phone, and I wondered if it was just as hard for her to say these things as it was for me to hear them.
“I’m here,” I replied. “So you were unhappy, and then you and Dad . . . fell out of love.”
“Well . . . I did.”
I shook my head, again forgetting that my mom couldn’t see. “What do you mean? Dad was the one who fell for someone else.”
A heavy sigh then. “I think you’re fixating on that one thing. Which is understandable. But your dad tried to hold on to me for a long, long time after I’d let go, after I was already planning a future away from Bone Lake. Because I knew I had to leave, and I knew he’d never go with me. So I pushed him away. Your dad was so hurt, and I didn’t know how to make it better. And then he found his own way.”
“With my best friend’s mom.”
“I’m not saying it was a good way.” Mom paused. “And I know he regretted it, too. Especially since it cost him custody in the end.”
“Wait—what?”
Mom took another deep breath. “When I told him I was leaving for Chicago and taking you with me, your dad . . . didn’t take it well.”
“I remember.”
“He told me he’d fight for you, and then he did.”
I gripped the phone tighter in my hand. “What? But . . . I don’t remember that.”
“Well, we tried to keep you away from the legal stuff as much as we could. Your dad fought to keep you in Bone Lake. But with my increased salary in Chicago, your dad making less and less on his column, then his affair with Julie, and how you were the one to catch them . . . the judge said he was lucky to get holidays and three weeks every summer.”
The lump in my throat had turned sharp and jagged. I barely recognized my voice when I spoke. “I didn’t know he fought for me. I didn’t know.”
“Of course he fought for you,” Mom said, her voice gentle. “Honey, I don’t know what’s going on between you two right now, and Lord knows your dad’s not perfect . . . but he loves you more than anything in this entire world. You do know that, right?”
I pulled the phone away so my mom couldn’t hear the quiet sob I was forcing back down my throat. But she knew anyway. I knew she knew.
“I should have told you all this a long time ago,” she said, and I could tell she’d started to cry, too.
“It’s just . . .” I said, taking a shaky breath, “When I was a kid, I thought I knew Dad better than anyone. He was, like . . . this perfect person. And then all that changed. And for the past few years, I thought I finally knew the real truth about him, and I’ve been so . . . so . . . angry. . . .”
“Oh, sweetie,” Mom whispered.
“And now I just don’t know what to think. About anything. If Dad’s not who I thought he was—again—then who is he?”
“Well,” Mom said, sniffing and slipping back into her calm, reasonable tone. “You have all summer to start figuring that out.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that it might be too late.
“Yeah.” I sniffed.
“And you’re sure there’s nothing else going on? I haven’t heard you this upset in a while.”
“No, it’s . . . I’m fine. Just trying to figure stuff out, with Dad.” I swallowed, hating my half lie. “Plus, I think I miss you a little.”
She laughed a tiny bit at that. “Well, I miss you a lot,” she said.
After hanging up the phone, I sat on the couch, staring off into nothing. I wanted new information, and now I had it. But instead of answering questions, it left me with a million more.
Just who was Ike Hardjoy? All of my memories of him were one swirling, untidy mess in my mind. And maybe I’d never seen those memories from a wide enough angle in the first place. Behind every truth was another perspective, and another. And I was no closer to knowing how Dad was connected to everything that was going on in Bone Lake—
Except . . .
I jumped off the couch, the phone almost flying from my hand. Feeling almost like I’d received an electric shock, I ran quickly to Dad’s office. I threw open the door and sank down in front of his locked safe. By the time my hand reached for the combination lock, my fingers were shaking. This was a long shot, but if what my mom had told me was true . . .
I entered six digits into the keypad. 10-13-01. My parents’ wedding anniversary.
The lock beeped, and the door to the safe popped open with a soft click. So this was one of my dad’s secrets, then: that after all these years, the date he married my mom was still important enough for him to remember. Important enough to guard all his other secrets. I put my fingers around the edge of the door and pulled, ready to see what was waiting inside.