THE BLACK CHERRY ice cream was frozen solid. A thick layer of white frost circled the edge of the bin, making it impossible to get through to the pinkish ice cream underneath. I hacked away at the frost with a metal ice-cream scoop, but I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. The lack of sleep the night before was catching up to me, and my limbs felt heavy and useless. As I worked, my knuckles turned blue with cold, and jagged pieces of frost flew up against my apron with every fresh blow.
“Hey, what’d that bin ever do to you?” Cindy’s warm voice floated across the store. I turned to see her standing in the door to the kitchen, a spatula in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. She looked at me with a bemused expression, but there was concern there, too.
“Picked a bad day to mess with me,” I joked weakly, once again plunging the metal scoop down to the rock-hard surface of the ice cream.
“Well maybe go easy on it, hmm? Every day’s a bad day to be black cherry ice cream.” She wrinkled her nose.
I backed reluctantly away from the case, running the scoop under a stream of warm water in the sink. The truth was, it felt good to hack away at the frozen bin, to do something physical and repetitive. Even if I was incredibly tired.
I couldn’t stop seeing the image of the sheriff, staring vacantly across the crater at something invisible on the other side. In my mind, the image kept getting conflated with my memories of the night before, and how not there Mrs. Jameson had looked, standing stock-still at the edge of her yard.
And then there was Dad. Let alone what the sheriff and FBI thought of his connection to the murders, the longer he was out there, the less chance he had of coming home alive. The meteorite site hadn’t turned up any more clues as to where he might have gone, but there was always the plant, and the mysterious X10-88 note in his files.
The urge to go to the plant right now, to do something right now, was even stronger than the urge to go home and take a nap. Repeatedly smashing a metal ice-cream scooper into a bin full of frozen black cherry was a barely acceptable compromise, but I’d promised to work while Cindy and Dex left on their catering gig.
I didn’t notice that Cindy had come up behind me until she put one hand on my shoulder. I jumped a bit, startled.
“Honey, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time we called your mom and told her what’s going on.”
I whirled to face her. “No, it’s okay. I’m okay. Honest.”
“What you found in the woods . . . It’s a lot. I know you haven’t been sleeping well, and your dad’s been gone almost a week now—”
“I promise, I’m fine. Really. Mom will just get worried and come back here, and she’s worked so hard to get to Spain. It means so much to her. Plus, if she comes here she’ll be angry with my dad, and she’ll take me away before he gets back, and I just . . .”
I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if what I’d just said was true—if Mom would take me from Dad because she was angry. After our phone call, a lot of assumptions I’d made about my parents seemed to be false. But I did know Mom would be worried. And that, alone, would be enough reason for her to take me back to Chicago before I could find the truth. Before I could find Dad.
Cindy pursed her lips. “I still think it’s her decision to make.”
Her voice was gentle, but she was a mom first, and my friend second. I knew she’d call my mom in a heartbeat if I didn’t.
I took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right. I’ll call her.”
“Good,” Cindy said, giving a small, relieved smile. I felt guilty for misleading her, but technically I hadn’t lied. I was going to call Mom and tell her everything—just not until I figured out what was going on.
“Dex and I won’t get back till after dinner probably. But there’s a lot of chicken casserole in the fridge, and stuff for a salad.”
“Thanks, Cindy,” I said.
“And you really can take Dex’s bed for as long as you need. I could tell you didn’t get much sleep on the couch last night. And Dex, well, that boy can lay his head down just about anywhere and pass out within a minute.”
Cindy grinned. But despite the chilly air behind the ice-cream bins, I felt my face heat up. For some reason, the thought of spending another night in Dex’s bed, lying on his pillow and under his sheets, made my stomach drop in a way I couldn’t explain.
“I can take the couch again,” I said, a bit more forcefully than was necessary. “I really don’t mind.”
Cindy eyed me for just a second before nodding. “Okay, hon, whatever you want.”
A half hour later, she and Dex had loaded up the van with cupcakes and were on their way to a fiftieth anniversary party in Kalkaska. Manning the shop on my own turned out to be a lot easier—and more boring—than I had anticipated. Bone Lake wasn’t the most bustling of towns in the best of circumstances. But in the wake of finding Bryan’s and Cassidy’s bodies, it seemed few people were in the mood to go out and get a cone full of crunchy caramel swirl.
Which left me plenty of alone time to stew over what Dex and I had found. For the third time, I went over to my purse and took out the camera Dad had placed in the woods, searching for more odd pictures like those of the sheriff. But there weren’t any. The only other photograph that had anyone in it was the very first one, which was a close-up of my dad’s face. It must have snapped as he was strapping the camera into the tree. I got the disconcerting feeling that he was looking out of the camera screen and at me, as if he knew I would be the one to find this image.
I clicked the camera off and slid it back into my purse. By the time I looked up, someone was pulling open the door of Sweet Street and sauntering inside.
Reese.
She was wearing a black sundress with tiny white dots on it, and her hair was coiled up in braids around the top of her head, like a milkmaid. She walked right toward me, purposeful, her arms crossed loosely over her chest.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“It’s really rich, you working here,” she said. Her voice was calm, her words deliberate.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, then instantly regretted it. Reese’s lips curved up in a slight, sharp smile, and I knew I was playing right into whatever script she’d written for this moment.
“Don’t you? You say you came back here to visit your dad and work for Cindy, but that’s not the real reason, is it?”
“What?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“I had a nice chat with Hector. You know Hector, at the hardware store?”
I felt a quick thump of anxiety in my stomach, but forced my face to stay still. “Yeah, Reese. I know Hector.”
“He was at church this morning. Everyone was there, preparing for the memorial service. Well, everyone who actually cares about Bryan and Cassidy. So I’m talking to Hector and he brings up this interesting story. About why you’re really in Bone Lake this summer. Doing a little investigating, huh?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m just writing an article for college admissions. It’s not a big deal.”
“Making Bone Lake look bad isn’t a big deal? Using us just so you can get into some snotty school?”
“I’m not using anyone. And Bone Lake isn’t just your town. It’s mine, too.”
“Please,” Reese said, rolling her eyes. “You might come slum it here a couple of weeks a year, but you don’t belong here. You’ve always thought you were better than us.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“There you go, lying again,” Reese trilled. She took a step closer to the counter, so close I could smell the red candy scent on her lips. But if she expected me to take a step back, she was mistaken. I held my ground.
“I’m not a liar,” I said, meeting her glare with my own.
“Really,” Reese said, smirking. “Then why doesn’t everyone know about your little story? Micah, for one, seemed really surprised to hear about it.”
And there it was: the bomb Reese had come all the way here to drop in person. The anxiety that had been building up inside me ballooned into panic.
“Right after I talked to Hector, I called Micah. I knew he was just being nice by hanging out with you, but I figured he had a right to know why you were hanging out with him. He seemed pretty shocked to learn the truth.”
“Why would you do that?” I shook my head, genuinely taken aback, though a part of my brain was screaming at me that I should have been honest with Micah from the start.
Reese’s eyes were like tiny blue stones, hard and cold. “Like I just said, he had the right to know. He said you made it seem like you liked him, got him to open up to you . . . and it was all for some horrible article about his dad. It’s sick, honestly. I knew what you were capable of, but Micah’s never hurt anyone in his life. How could you just use him like that?”
“That’s not . . . I didn’t . . .” I sputtered.
“Typical Penny. Telling lies and doing whatever you want. Not caring who gets hurt in the process,” Reese said. Her mouth pursed, and she spit out her next words like they tasted bad. “Just like your dad.”
For just the briefest of moments, my heart felt like it stopped.
But Reese didn’t notice. She just kept looking at me like I was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. Which was just about what I felt like.
Reese flipped open her purse and pulled out a dollar bill, which she dropped on the counter. Then she plunged her hand into one of the candy bins sitting on a shelf next to the counter, taking out a fistful of individually wrapped Ring Pops. Without giving me a second look, she spun on her heel and walked out the door.
I felt frozen in place until the glass door closed behind Reese and she disappeared from sight. I pulled out my phone and texted Micah—
Did you talk to Reese? I can explain everything, I promise.
But would that matter? If I explained? I waited another minute, then added—
I’m so sorry.
I was jittery for the rest of my shift, but thankfully, no one came in. I closed up the shop early and hopped on my bike. But instead of riding home, to Cindy’s, I went in the opposite direction. To Micah’s.
But what would I say once I got there? If he really believed what Reese said, that I’d only shown interest in him for the article, that I’d purposefully tricked him into opening up and being vulnerable . . . I remembered the night he told me about his mom, and how he said he never talked about it to anyone. Shame burned through me. I wanted to explain that I hadn’t used him. Not intentionally. That Reese had it all wrong. Because she did. She did.
Right?
I rode hard past the rest of the buildings on Main Street, the lone gas station on the corner, the last stoplight in town. The wooden houses on either side of the street got more and more spaced out as I pedaled, until eventually I hit the two-lane county roads. Reese had said that Bone Lake wasn’t my town anymore, but very single inch of this town was still familiar to me. I could probably find my way to Micah’s street with my eyes closed. It was true that I’d wanted to get out of Bone Lake after the divorce—and after I’d lost Reese as a friend—but that didn’t mean I thought I was better than my hometown.
Did it?
I tried to parse out the facts, look at things in black and white. I didn’t like coming back to Bone Lake in the summers, it was true. Partly because I was angry at Dad, and partly because I had no friends here. But it wasn’t just that, was it? Mom’s words came back to me suddenly, the way she’d described feeling stuck in her hometown and believing there was something out there for her, something more. I’d believed it for myself, too. But did claiming Chicago and a future at Northwestern mean giving up my claim to Bone Lake? Maybe Reese was right, and I didn’t belong here anymore. Maybe Bone Lake’s story was no longer mine to tell.
My head began to ache as I rode harder and harder, moving through the humid summer air. I hadn’t meant to hurt Micah, but maybe what I’d meant to do didn’t matter.
Telling lies and doing whatever you want. Not caring who gets hurt in the process.
Just like your dad.
I was out of breath as I neared Micah’s driveway. I steeled myself, urging my heart to stop racing.
I walked slowly up to the front door, took a deep breath, and knocked.
No one answered.
I waited one minute, then three, then five, before I turned around and walked back to my bike. The energy that had been building up in me during the ride over was still all pent-up in my limbs; I could feel it scratching to get out. When I got back on the bike, I didn’t turn toward home. I kept going, past Micah’s house and toward the woods.
Just like your dad.
But I wasn’t like Dad, was I? He falsely represented the truth, twisting it and bending it to make it into something different. Turning bears into monsters, scaring people for profit. He’d exploited Bone Lake after the meteorite crash, not to get to the bottom of things or to expose any great secret, but to make money. I might have misled Micah, sure, but it wasn’t in service of a lie. I wanted to get to the truth.
I nodded along as these thoughts raced through my mind. But no matter how hard I fought against Reese’s words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had a point. Because “misleading” Micah was the same as lying to him, and I was doing it all for my own gain, my own end goal—Northwestern. Was my reason any better than Dad’s?
I didn’t slow my bike until I reached the main driveway of the abandoned plant. Its driveway was cracked, and green weeds pushed up through the asphalt. There was a thin trench in the ground where a large sign bearing the plant’s name used to be. Beyond that, the long, gray building hunched low to the ground, some parts of it hard to see beyond the green saplings that had sprung up around it in the past decade.
The crumbling parking lot was empty, as it had been for years. There was no proof that Dad had come here recently, or even at all. The only reason I had to be here was the single article found in his safe. But it was the only clue I had. And I couldn’t turn back around, pedal back to Dex’s, and wait.
I had to know. I had to. Not just what was going on in Bone Lake, not just what happened to Bryan and Cassidy and that hiker, not just why the FBI were in town and why the sheriff was acting so strange. I had to know why Dad was looking into this story. Why he’d been obsessed with the Visitors in the first place. Why he did the things he did at all.
If we were, at our core, the same.
I had to know.
I texted Dex to tell him I was checking out the plant on my own. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. This whole thing might lead to nothing, but I walked toward the gray building with purpose, as if I were sure of what I was doing. As if I knew my dad—and all the answers I wanted—were somewhere inside.