Cade tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Everything was closed. Everything.
“I don’t even know where to buy chemicals!” Mattie burst out. “Especially at ten thirty at night!”
He and Ivy were in the backseat together. Cade had insisted on driving.
“We have to figure something out,” Ivy said quietly, her voice still choked with panic. “There has to be something.”
“Mattie’s right,” Cade said. “Even if we find something, who knows how much it’s going to cost? And what am I going to do, put the chemicals on my dad’s credit card? And what happens if they’re the wrong ones?” He hit the steering wheel with a fist. “This was a stupid plan, you guys.” He lowered his voice. “Stores have cameras. The school might not, but any store nowadays has cameras. Like, all of them. And what happens if we buy the wrong chemicals, and someone finds the body, and we just happen to have that strange combination on our receipts?”
Cade knew. They couldn’t go in there.
“So what do we do?” Mattie asked. “Just go back?”
Cade didn’t answer. There was nothing else to do. He started the car and began to pull out of the parking lot. A faint bolt of lightning erupted in the distance. The storm was leaving, but the rain was still falling—not hard, but steadily.
“Yeah. I mean, what else are we going to do? Any genius ideas?”
He watched in the rearview mirror as Mattie and Ivy exchanged glances. Ivy had retreated into a corner of the car, her back against the door, like she could disappear into the upholstery if she tried hard enough.
“No,” she whispered finally.
“No,” Mattie admitted. “Let’s go back.”
“ ‘How do you get rid of your dead professor’s body?” Ivy laughed, suddenly, but it was harsh and grating, like a metal chain dragged over gravel. “I guess I should have paid more attention to the mystery novels my mom has.” She laughed again, and Mattie reached over to take her hand.
Cade fought the sudden urge to yell at her. The truth was, he was barely keeping it together, and if someone went over the edge, he wasn’t sure if he could handle it. What was wrong with him, anyway? He was the one who should be in charge here, not that brat Kinley. Sure, Kinley was from a well-known family, and her father was powerful, but they weren’t rich. Not like his father.
But why the hell couldn’t he think of one goddamn thing to do? He was the one who knew how to work people. He’d worked Bekah for two years before she’d caught on and ditched him.
He fought a lump in his throat as her memory floated across his mind. God, he wanted her now. He could have never told her, but he wanted her. She was so serene. She just went along with stuff. She’d calm him down now, or maybe he’d calm her down, and all this would seem just a shade more okay.
They didn’t talk on the way back to the farm, not even when Cade took two wrong turns and nearly fishtailed into the ditch. They got quietly out of the car, and Ivy and Mattie followed Cade back into the barn.
Cade clung to the quiet. Quiet meant no one was losing it. Quiet meant keeping it together. He counted his breaths. Concentrated on his steps. And then found Kinley and Tyler in full make-out less than twenty feet from their professor’s body.
“What the hell?” Cade shouted. “Are you kidding me right now?”
The couple separated. Kinley scooted away and ducked her head, but Tyler just sort of shrugged. “You guys were gone for a while. Chemicals?”
Cade shook his head and explained the situation. “We need another plan. Can’t we just bury him somewhere?”
Tyler stood up and began to pace. “With what? I think I saw a rusted pitchfork in the back. But that takes time. It’s not like in the movies where you can just knock out an eight-foot hole in twenty minutes. It’ll take all night. And with the mud? The rain? No way, man.”
“You’d know,” Ivy quipped, but Tyler ignored her.
“We could burn him,” Mattie offered. “It would get rid of the DNA, right?”
“Two things, genius,” Cade sneered. “First, how the hell would we get anything to start on fire tonight? All the wood is wet. Second, what if someone sees the smoke? It wouldn’t be completely weird for someone to call in a brushfire. Do you really want the cops on the site of a fire that turns out to be a burning body? What happens then? ‘Oh, sorry, officer, I accidentally set my dead professor on fire’?”
The group was quiet then. Cade felt a hot orb of rage rising in his chest, bubbling dangerously near the surface. It was the rage that ran in his family. That made his father so scary. He needed to do something before he blew up.
“The river,” Kinley spoke, still sitting on the lopsided bale.
“What?” Tyler asked. Cade turned toward her, flexing his hands into fists.
“Let’s throw him in the river. I think burning is frankly the best idea, but let’s get rid of the body in the water. We’ll throw some driftwood on him, and chances are he’ll get stuck in it downriver. He’ll get so bloated with water by the time anyone finds him that they won’t be able to determine the cause of death.” She bobbed her head. “In theory.”
Cade glanced at the corpse and imagined it, fat and blue-purple with water, the skin loose and translucent. He let his breath out. The idea almost calmed him down, strangely.
He unballed his fists and scratched his head. It was throbbing, his pulse pounding in his ears. “Yeah, but how far is that? Are we going to have to throw him off the bridge downtown?”
“No.” Kinley pointed to the east. “The river runs through the town. And then it runs through the farm. No one will ever need to know where, exactly, he was thrown in.”
“But he’ll be found,” Cade said.
“Yeah. But he won’t be found with us. It’ll take him far away. Maybe so far that they won’t track him back for a while. Maybe . . . maybe they’ll think he drowned. Or something.” Kinley rubbed her arms. “Any better ideas?”
The barn was quiet. The wind swept around the corners and made high, keening noises that sounded like crying ghosts.
Cade turned it over in his head. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to be rid of the thing in the corner.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s throw him in the river. Can we get him back in the trunk?” Cade led the way to the corner. And when he turned Dr. Stratford over, a fat black beetle crawled out of the corpse’s mouth.
Cade’s stomach lurched. He turned away and vomited, very quietly, in the corner next to his dead professor.
“What?” asked Tyler. “What happened, dude?”
Cade cleared his burning throat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nothing. Just . . . grab on to him. Let’s get him out to the car.”
They were better at it, this time. The corpse-carrying. It was something, unfortunately, that got easier with practice. They got Dr. Stratford back into the car in record time, and Kinley drove them to the river.
“He stinks,” Ivy whimpered. “God, he already stinks.”
“No.” But Cade wasn’t sure she was wrong. He felt like the corpse was invading his nostrils. The feel of Stratford’s waxen skin against his hand was infiltrating every pore. It was like Stratford was already haunting him, and he had been dead only a few hours.
He remembered the last corpse he’d seen. Somehow, he assured himself, it had been worse than this.
He would get through this.
He would.
He’d done harder things. Maybe.
Kinley pulled up to the riverbank and pressed the button to pop the trunk. It was raining harder now. Good, Cade thought. It would wash away any tracks they left.
The five gathered at the trunk and lifted their professor out, his legs catching on the lip. One of his shoes slipped half off.
“Put it back on!” shouted Kinley. The river was moving quickly, and it roared in their ears.
Ivy stepped away, her hands in the air. “No!” she yelled. “I can’t!” Rain streamed over her face.
“Holy shit, Ivy. I will, okay? Sue me if I don’t want a dead man’s shoe in my car.” Kinley leaned one of Stratford’s shoulders against the back of the car and pushed past everyone like they weren’t even there. And she grabbed Statford’s leg and shoved his shoe back onto his foot.
“Let’s go.” She grabbed on to a calf. “Come on!”
Together, they heaved the body down toward the edge of the riverbank, slipping and sliding in the mud. Tyler went down once, and popped up, half covered in the thick river sludge.
“Are you okay?” Mattie asked.
“It’s fine, dude. Let’s just do this.”
Tyler grunted under the weight of the body. Cade’s back strained. But together, they moved Dr. Stratford toward the river.
They paused at the very edge. The river had risen to the top of its banks, and it was rushing by with an intensity that Cade had never seen.
In town, there was a tiny bridge arching over the river, which was calm and lovely on most days. The kind of river people stopped to dip their toes in. The kind of river people spread picnic blankets beside and jumped into from giant rope swings.
But not tonight. Tonight, he imagined the water was nearly touching the bottom of the bridge. If the river flowed in the opposite direction, Dr. Stratford might even get caught against it, swept over the top, and found the next day, draped across the walking path with muddy clothes and leaves in his hair, by terrified lovers who were up for an early-morning stroll.
He shook his head, forcing the image away.
The rain and wind were coming in bursts now—for a moment, the rain and wind would buffet them and then it would stop before it began again.
“Okay!” Kinley shouted. “On the count of three, throw him in!”
Cade looked around the group. Their faces were drawn and wet, and their hair lay over their faces in giant flat strands.
“One!” Cade shouted. “Two . . . and three!”
And then they heaved their professor’s body into the river.
It barely splashed. He was there, on the surface, and then he was gone, into the stormy darkness, swallowed by the furious river.
They all stood there, together, for a moment, the wind and rain battering against them and the river rising steadily.
“We should have weighed him down,” Ivy said suddenly.
Cade stared at the river. “Let’s just go.”
And he turned his back to the wet grave that hid their crime and climbed into the car. They did it quickly, their wet clothes trailing after them, desperate to be gone. They shut the doors, closing out the weather and the storm and the river and what they’d just done.
It was then they heard a voice, tinny and upset.
Coming from Mattie’s pocket.
Mattie froze for a few moments while the voice echoed in the car. He grabbed his phone frantically and it dropped on the floor. Mattie picked it up and tapped the screen.
It was silent.