She didn’t expect X to fall, but his body collapsed under her, and they went sprawling onto the lake. For half a second, they lay entangled. His skin smelled of pine and campfire smoke.
Zoe waited for him to spring up again, but he lay on his back, twitching with pain. He was more feverish than she’d realized. She got to her feet, and turned to Stan, who was sobbing in the water, his skin turning blue-gray. The thought of touching him repulsed her, but it wasn’t right that he die that way, no matter what he’d done.
She reached out with both hands and helped him out of the water. He stood in front of her shivering, his clothes soaked against his body. He looked scrawny and pathetic, like something that’d been pulled out of its shell.
“Hallelujah, girlie,” he said. “Your daddy’d be proud.”
It felt disgusting to be thanked by him.
Zoe said nothing. She just watched as he raced for his truck, the pale soles of his boots shining as he ran.
The engine coughed but wouldn’t start. Zoe knew what an engine sounded like when it wanted to cooperate. This one just wanted to be left in peace. After thirty full seconds of profanity—in which Stan strung together curses that she was pretty sure had never been strung together before—he got out of the truck, pulled a blanket from the back, and ran into the trees like an animal.
X sat up on the ice. She expected him to be in a rage, but he just stared at her, mournful and confused.
“What have you done?” he said.
Zoe didn’t answer—she didn’t really know what she’d done, other than act on instinct.
X turned to track Stan’s progress into the woods.
“Don’t go after him,” Zoe said. They were the first words she ever said to him and, though she often encased even the most sincere statements in sarcasm, she dropped her guard now. “Please. It’s wrong.”
X weighed her words.
“Yet if I do not go after him,” he said, “someone will surely come after me.”
But still he didn’t move. He lingered on the ice with Zoe, listening to branches break as Stan scurried up the hills in the dark. Why wasn’t X chasing him, Zoe wondered. Why was he doing what she wanted? Why would he care what she wanted?
“If you kill him, you’re as bad as he is,” she said. “It’s not our job to punish people.”
X lowered his head.
“Perhaps it is not yours,” he said.
Zoe stumbled back to Bert and Betty’s house to retrieve Jonah, pausing just long enough to take a picture of the license plate on Stan’s diseased-looking truck. Spock and Uhura followed her. X did, too. Zoe didn’t look back, but she could hear him wading through the snow behind her. He didn’t follow her inside. He stayed on the porch out of respect—or shyness, maybe. He hushed the dogs when they whimpered so he must have known somehow that Jonah was sleeping. Spock and Uhura lifted their heads and eventually X figured out that they wanted to be scratched under their chins. He knelt and rubbed them cautiously and whispered their names. Zoe set a candle on the windowsill and watched for a long moment.
Jonah was still lying on the couch. He appeared to have slept through the chaos. But when Zoe went to lift him his body seemed tense, not the floppy mass of bread dough it should have been.
Holding Jonah made Zoe’s arms ache—she’d never get him home this way. Still, she couldn’t bear the thought of rousing him and forcing him to march back through the woods. He deserved to wake up in his bed, the nightmare over and his Nerf guns and Stomp Rockets right where he left them. She wanted innocence and forgetting for Jonah—all the more because she couldn’t have them for herself.
She laid him on the couch again, her palm cradling the back of his head like he was a newborn. Then she stood and waited for a solution to appear out of the ether.
Through the window, she saw X sitting with the dogs on his lap. His face was damp with sweat, and the snow on his coat was turning translucent as it melted. Spock nipped at him playfully, which seemed to startle him. Had he never played with dogs before? At last he understood what Spock wanted. He pretended his hands were birds and teased the dog by making them swoop and dive just beyond his reach.
X must have known he was being watched. He looked back at Zoe through the glass. She was struck again by how sick he’d become. But he seemed not to be asking for help but to be offering it. Did he have some plan for getting her and her brother back to their house? Because that was the only thing in the world Zoe wanted right now. She met X’s eyes. She didn’t move, she didn’t so much as mouth a word—but he nodded.
After that, she saw flashes of sky and what seemed like a video of the trees blurring by on fast-forward.
X was dizzy and staggering and in the grip of some sickness that Zoe had never seen.
But he carried them home.
Even in the darkness, Zoe could see that the snow in the driveway was untouched, and her heart sank at the sight of it: her mother hadn’t made it back yet. She was desperate to see her, but it was just as well that she wasn’t home. Zoe couldn’t have explained the strange figure who had delivered them and who—after refusing water, shelter, gloves, a hat, a blanket, and even veggie jerky (but then who said yes to veggie jerky?)—was now retreating in the direction of the woods.
She looked out at X one last time. She saw him stagger a few feet, then fall to one knee in the snow. She made herself turn away.
Zoe opened the door of the house, a difficult maneuver now that Jonah was sleeping in her arms. She found the Post-it on the fridge where her mother kept all the contact information for the police, and—holding it between her teeth—struggled up the staircase with her brother.
Jonah’s bed was small and shaped like a ladybug. When Zoe finally lowered him onto it, he rolled onto his side without waking, and began drooling onto the pillow.
She sat on the floor by Jonah’s bed with her phone, and e-mailed the picture of Stan’s license plate to the police, along with a message that read: “This truck belongs to the man who killed Bert + Betty Wallace. With the poker from their fireplace. His name is Stan something. His truck is still at their house. He’s maybe 45 + about 6 feet tall. Skinny. Buzz cut. Messed-up eyebrow. You’re welcome.”
Once she’d sent the e-mail, she scrolled through the clump of texts that had finally broken through. There were some from Dallas (who was “full-on stoked” from “rocking out” in the blizzard), Val (who had missed it entirely because she was napping), and her mother (who was just generally frantic). Part of Zoe felt abandoned by her mom, but she couldn’t help but smile as she read her stream of messages: Roads horrific. Can’t even get out of grocery store. So sorry, Zo … Still horrific. Still sorry … Don’t let J eat cereal before bed. Try gluten-free waffle … ARGH. Radio says snowplows aren’t even going out tonight. No way to get up mountain … Still in grocery store! Will live in grocery store forever, eating chemicals and pesticides, like real American … Are U OK? … U know what? If J wants cereal, he can have it … OMG Rufus just rescued me in his big-ass van, like a knight. NO, he’s NOT in love with me—I heard that! I’m going to crash on his couch … Tell me you’re OK? … Can’t sleep. Worrying about you. Did J want cereal?
Zoe sat pondering what to text back.
We’re OK, she wrote finally. More later. I gave Jonah some Pringles dipped in cake frosting. Is that cool? Rufus is OBSESSED with you. Go 2 sleep, now! XO.
Zoe went on Snapchat and Instagram for a while, hoping that life might start to seem normal again. It didn’t. How could it, after Stan and X and the hole in the ice?
She crossed the hall to her room and stood, tired and unsteady, in the doorway. On the wall at the foot of her bed there was a photo of her and her dad from one of their caving trips. They were wearing matching one-piece flight suits, which they’d bought at the Army Navy in Whitefish for 17 dollars a piece. Zoe had a battery-powered headlamp. Her father, being a dork, used an old-fashioned carbide lamp that looked like a miniature blowtorch. In the photo, he had a wide, geeky smile and some pretty crazy bed head. Her dad had always had bed head—he used to call it “hair salad.”
Zoe heard Stan’s voice spreading like dye in her brain: “You barely knew who he was. And then he died in some goddamn cave? And nobody even bothered to go get his body? What the hell kind of people are you?”
The words raced around her mind, like birds chasing one another.
Was it her fault that she hadn’t known her father better? He was never around! Zoe’d had no choice but to rely more and more on her mom. Her mother had dropped out of medical school and worked multiple jobs to support the family while Zoe’s dad came and went. She’d thrown everything she had into being a mom—and she raised the kids to be resilient and strong. When Zoe was a baby, her mother dressed her in onesies that said Hero and Protagonist. Her father’s love might have been like a candle or a lantern, but her mom’s was better: it never went out.
Zoe was too tired to think anymore, even if it was only 9:30. She stripped off her clothes for bed. Her whole body felt dirty and sore. Her legs were stubbly, her breath was horrendous, her shoulders were tender from where her bra straps had dug into her skin. She should have showered, brushed her teeth, something. But she couldn’t do even one more thing today. She fell headlong into bed, like someone who’d been shot.
Her mother finally made it home in the middle of the night. Zoe heard the front door whoosh open in her sleep. She felt relief wash through her, and immediately had a dream in which she was a child again, laying her head on her mother’s lap. She wanted to talk to her mom, but couldn’t pull herself out of sleep. When she awoke again, hours later, it was because she heard voices—men’s voices—rising up through the floor.
She tried to shut them out. She refused to open her eyes. She tried to grab on to the dream she’d been having but couldn’t quite catch its tail.
There was music downstairs now, but it was weirdly out of place—Buddhist chanting set to keyboards, acoustic guitars, and finger cymbals. That meant her mom was trying to calm everybody down. Or she was trying to annoy them so much that they’d leave.
Zoe was wedged up against the wall—at some point in the night Jonah had crawled in with her. He always started from the foot of the bed and tunneled up under the sheets, like a gopher. She could feel the heat of his body against her back. She could feel his tiny toes against her leg.
The front door slammed. Somebody had gone outside for a cigarette. Zoe heard him coughing and crunching around in the snow. She smelled the smoke slither in through her window. The man pulled open the door again—so hard that it slammed against the side of house—and came back in without bothering to knock the snow off his boots.
Zoe turned onto her back. Pain shot up her neck in sparks. Soon the voices were impossible to ignore. They were squabbling like pigeons. Zoe was never going to fall back asleep. What the hell was going on? She drew in a long breath and released it slowly. She finally opened her eyes.
It was still night. That was a surprise—she’d assumed it would be morning. There was no moon. No wind. The snow gave off a faint blue light and the pines stood mysterious and still, as if they’d just been talking to one another. Zoe took her phone from where it was charging on the windowsill. It was 3 a.m.
She tapped the flashlight app and swept the room with it. Her mother must have been in and out because there were plates, glasses, and bowls huddled on the floor, like a ruined city. Zoe had no memory of any of it. There was red pepper, aloe leaves, sprigs of mint, a bowl of water with some yellowish tincture suspended in it like a cloud: it looked like either a frostbite remedy or a voodoo ceremony.
Nearby, there was a fat paperback lying open on a chair—a time-travel romance about a guy in a kilt. Its pages fluttered like overgrown grass in the wind. Her mother must have sat watching them for hours. She had also bandaged the cut on Zoe’s forehead—she’d been in med school just long enough to learn to administer excellent first aid.
Zoe shone the flashlight over Jonah. His cheeks, which had been chapped by the wind, were glistening with aloe now, and his fingertips had been individually wrapped. For a moment, the light came too close to his eyes. He winced but kept on sleeping. One thing about her brother: he slept fiercely. He would sweat through his T-shirts—he was wearing one now that said I Do My Own Stunts—and make such an indignant harrumph of an expression that it always cracked her up. What was he mad at? Who was he fighting, or protecting, in his dreams?
As Zoe shifted in bed, she felt something tug at her leg. She peeled back the comforter and sheet. Jonah must have been afraid that she’d sneak out of the room without telling him, so—as a kind of alarm system—he had tied a skateboard to her ankle with yarn. When he was scared, he hated waking up alone. It made him feel wobbly inside, he said.
Gazing down at her brother now, Zoe felt competing waves of guilt and relief and fear and love. He was curled against her in a crescent like a baby deer. Look at him, she thought. She untied the skateboard from her ankle and tied it to his own. Tag, you’re it.
Downstairs one of the men broke a glass on the countertop.
It nearly woke Jonah. Zoe flushed with anger, and shot off a text to her mother.
It said only: Who??
The moment she sent it, she heard her mother push her chair back from the kitchen table and bound up the stairs. After everything that had happened in the blizzard, the sound of her mother rushing to her was so comforting that Zoe’s anger dissipated in an instant and—before she even realized she was in danger of it—she started to cry.
Her mother pushed open the door of the bedroom and then closed it behind her, so that the wedge of light made the trophies along the wall gleam briefly and then go out. Zoe didn’t want her mother to know how upset she was. She did what she always did in moments of uncertainty, she blurted something random: “So, you back from the store?”
Her mother laughed.
“I am,” she said. “Anything happen around here?”
One of the things that Zoe loved most about her mother was that the woman understood her jokes even when they were totally bizarre. Very often they were the only people in the room laughing, while everyone else fidgeted uncomfortably. Not even her father—when he was alive and when he was around—had really understood Zoe’s sense of humor.
“There’s a stowaway in here with me,” Zoe said, nodding toward Jonah. “We have to whisper.”
“I can do that,” her mother said.
She came to kneel by the bed.
Zoe could just barely make out the outline of her mom’s face in the darkness. Neither of them spoke. The lightness of the moment drained away.
“Is Jonah gonna be okay?” said Zoe.
“Frostbite-wise, yes, he’ll be fine,” her mother said. “But he seems pretty traumatized by whatever you went through.” She paused, and her voice softened. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Zoe searched for an answer that would sound remotely sane. Downstairs, one of the men turned off the Eastern chanting. The other men let out grunts of relief and applauded.
“Who’s down there?” said Zoe.
“That’s not important right now,” her mother said. “But apparently they’re not Buddhists.”
She waited for Zoe to answer the question still hovering in the air.
“Talk to me,” she said.
Zoe’s instinct was always to tell her mother everything, and she wished she could pour out every crazy, hallucinogenic detail about the lake glowing orange, about the movie of Stan’s sins—about X. But what could she say about him? What did she even know apart from the fact that he radiated loneliness? And that she’d been drawn to him.
She fought back the image of his face. She knew if she said too much, she’d make no sense at all.
“The short version,” Zoe said, “is that Jonah and the dogs went in the woods—and I let them.”
Her mother let a few moments go by, like she was waiting for a train to pass.
“Okay, look, I’m sorry to be pushy,” she said. “But I’m going to need a slightly longer version.”
“I can’t, Mom,” Zoe said. “Not yet.”
“Zo—”
“I mean, the longer version is that I suck and I almost got him killed.”
“Zoe, stop. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“All I keep thinking is that when Jonah wakes up, he’s going to look at me like I let him down. And I did. I let the little bug down.”
She shouldn’t have spoken at all. She began sobbing in that awful, hiccupy way. Her mother reached over Jonah to touch her face, but had trouble locating it in the darkness.
“I’m trying to stroke your cheek sweetly,” she said. “Is this your cheek? Am I stroking it sweetly?”
“No, that’s my forehead,” Zoe said. “And that is my nose.”
“Okay, well, picture me stroking your cheek,” her mother said.
“I’m picturing it,” Zoe said, and laughed despite herself as her mother’s hand groped around blindly. “Now stop it, Helen Keller. Please. That’s my ear.”
“Zoe,” her mother said, “your brother loves you like a crazy person—and that will never, ever change. The kid tied a skateboard around your leg.”
Zoe started to say something but was interrupted by a commotion downstairs. She and her mother listened as one of the men stood, his chair screeching against the floor, and said, “Enough of this horseshit, boys.” They listened to the heavy tread of the man’s boots coming up the stairs. Zoe’s mother didn’t allow shoes in the house, so the noise sounded almost like violence.
“I wish I could give you more time,” her mom said. “But I can’t, baby. You’re going to have to tell your story—because the police are here.”
Zoe’s mother shooed the cop out of the bedroom immediately, and asked Zoe to come downstairs when she was ready. Zoe hadn’t seen the police since her father died, and knowing they were in the house stirred some prickly memories. The police were the ones who’d left her dad’s body in the cave. The cop who had just banged on Zoe’s door—Chief Baldino—had decided it was too dangerous to go get it.
Zoe slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Jonah, and dressed in the dark. Minutes later, she padded down the stairs, and peeked out at the kitchen table, where her mother sat with Baldino and two of his troopers. Baldino was big, blustery, unpleasant—and actually bald. Just now, he was scratching like a dog at a scaly red rash below the collar of his shirt.
The chief sat next to a skinny young trooper whose last name was Maerz. Zoe remembered him being slightly dopey, but harmless. The chief obviously detested him.
The third cop at the table was Sergeant Vilkomerson. He was the only one who’d ever bothered to tell the Bissells his first name—it was Brian—and the only one to hug them at her dad’s funeral service in town. When Zoe entered the kitchen, Vilkomerson stood and pulled out a chair for her. Unlike Baldino and Maerz, he’d taken his shoes off out of respect for the rules of the house, which were posted at every door.
Officer Maerz had been asking Zoe’s mom boring background questions about Zoe—where she went to school and if she had any hobbies. Zoe’s mom had been stalling so Zoe could get dressed and think through what she wanted to say. Her mother had her laptop in front of her on the table. It was open, for all to see, to a page entitled, “The Rights of Minors During Police Questioning.”
Zoe loved her mother’s feistiness and felt proud that she’d inherited it. Her mom worked six days a week managing a dumpy spa called Piping Hot Springs (“Relax and rejuvenate in one of our healing pools!”). She also worked as a hostess at a great café called Loula’s, in Whitefish, and directed traffic on a road crew whenever they repaved Route 93. Even so, Zoe knew her family was always short on cash. She knew her mom felt like she was running down a train track, just a couple of steps ahead of the train.
Zoe’s mother told Officer Maerz that Zoe’s hobby was collecting trophies, which seemed to impress him. The truth was that Zoe literally collected trophies—she thought they were ugly and ridiculous and awesome so she bought them at yard sales and thrift stores. If you went into her room and didn’t know any better, you’d be amazed that one girl could be so good at swimming, public speaking, archery, macramé, ballooning, and raising livestock.
Zoe’s mom began rambling magnificently now. She described hobbies of Zoe’s that were entirely made-up. One of her supposed collections—32 of the 50 official state spoons—so piqued Maerz’s interest that Zoe was afraid that he’d ask to see it.
Zoe sat down next to her mother.
“I am all about state spoons,” she told Maerz. “I’m starting to worry that I’m too into them.”
Zoe’s mom bit her lip, and kicked Zoe gently under the table.
“Yeah, okay,” Chief Baldino said gruffly. “I think we’re done with the icebreakers.”
He signaled to Maerz that he’d be taking over the interrogation since Maerz clearly wasn’t up to it. (Zoe’s mom shot her a familiar look—the look that said, Alphas are the worst.) Maerz shrank in his chair, looking hurt.
Baldino slid a piece of paper across the table to Zoe.
“Can you confirm that you sent this e-mail to us at nine fifteen last night?” he said.
Zoe glanced down. When she looked back up at Baldino, all she saw was the man who had abandoned her dad’s body.
“Yes, I sent that e-mail,” she said, “which is why it has my name on it.”
Baldino put on reading glasses that seemed weirdly dainty for such a fat, overstuffed armchair of a man, and read the e-mail aloud. Zoe’s mom grimaced when she heard the name Stan—if her dad had known him way back when, in Virginia, her mother must have, too—and again when Baldino got to the sarcastic final sentence, “You’re welcome.”
“I assume those are your words?” said Baldino. “Since they have your name on them?”
“Yes,” said Zoe.
“So how about you tell us how you know all this?”
Zoe’s mom made a show of scrolling down the webpage, then nodded to her. Zoe knew she couldn’t tell the whole truth, but she could at least tell nothing but the truth.
“Jonah and I were trying to find the dogs,” she said.
She glanced at Officer Maerz, who had been sullenly taking notes ever since he’d been removed from power, and then at Sergeant Vilkomerson, who gave her an encouraging you’re-doing-good sort of nod. Baldino folded his arms tightly across his chest and puffed his stomach out so far that he looked seven or eight months pregnant.
“We got caught in the blizzard,” Zoe said. “We went to Bert and Betty’s place to warm up. We used to stay there all the time.” The memory was so painful that she couldn’t help but add, “After my father died—and you guys refused to go get his body.”
Baldino was unfazed by the remark, but everybody else shifted unhappily in their chairs. Zoe’s mom leaned over and whispered, “Don’t, honey. That’s not fair.”
Zoe pulled away from her, surprised.
“How is that not fair?” she said.
Baldino interrupted before her mother could answer.
“So you encountered Stan Manggold at the Wallaces’ former residence?”
“Yes—if that’s his last name. He called himself Stan the Man.”
“My god,” said Zoe’s mom.
She even recognized the nickname.
“And how exactly do you know that Mr. Manggold is responsible for the deaths of Bertram and Elizabeth Wallace?”
“I saw—” Zoe began, then broke off immediately. She’d been about to say, I saw him do it. That would have gone over well: I saw it in a movie on the back of a superhot guy.
“You saw what, exactly?” said Baldino.
“I saw how he bragged about it,” she said. “And I saw the poker he killed them with. He thought Bert and Betty were rich. He was still trying to figure out where they hid their money. But they didn’t have any money—and now their bodies are in the lake.”
Her voice was shaking.
“Zoe,” said Baldino, “did you and your brother see anyone other than Stan Manggold while you were out at the lake—anybody you knew, anybody you didn’t know, anybody at all? I want you to think carefully about your answer. Because we’re going to write it down.”
At this, Officer Maerz looked up at his boss, as if to say, Are you talking about me? Baldino rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, Stuart, whatever she says, write it down.”
Everyone looked at Zoe, waiting. X’s face flashed into her head. She felt protective of him. He had carried them home.
Just then, there were noises from outside—it sounded like animals had gotten into the garage and toppled the garbage cans.
Zoe’s mother stood.
“Raccoons,” she said. “We’re going to need a quick recess. No questions while I’m gone.” She turned her laptop to face the policemen. “If you have a problem with that,” she said, “you can take it up with legalbeagle.com.”
“Would you like some help, Ms. Bissell?” asked Sergeant Vilkomerson.
“No, but thank you, Brian. The raccoons are just going to have to find a new place to play.”
Zoe stood, her calves rippling with pain, and went to one of the duct-taped windows in the living room. Outside, the clouds had shifted. The moon was a bright, white eyeball in the sky. The mountains were just wavy lines receding into the distance.
She felt weary for the thousandth time. She thought about Bert and Betty, about her father, about the big roiling mess that everything had become.
She thought about X. She knocked on the window—she didn’t know why. He was out there somewhere. She shouldn’t have let him go, but she couldn’t exactly force him to stay.
Zoe headed back to the table. She knew what she was going to say.
“We didn’t see anybody but Stan. Why?”
The moment Zoe said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. Miscalculated, somehow. Even her mother seemed to know she was lying, but how could she? Zoe’s stomach tightened again, like someone was turning a wheel.
Officer Maerz, she noticed, hadn’t written her answer down—not because he’d forgotten but because he knew it would be used against her later. Zoe thought that was cool and kind. In her mind, she put a star next to Maerz’s name, though she knew his little rebellion was about to get crushed.
“Stuart, write down what our young friend just said, word for word.”
This was Baldino. He smiled, drummed on the tabletop, and sat up straight. Now he looked merely three or four months pregnant, like he’d just begun telling people he was having a baby.
“Brian,” he said, “let’s show her the photo. You got it handy?”
So there was a photo. How could there be? And of what? The wheel in Zoe’s stomach turned three times in quick succession.
She was about to speak when her mother startled everyone by slamming her computer shut.
“What photo?” she said. “Why are we only hearing about it now—and why are you playing games with a seventeen-year-old girl?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Bissell,” Vilkomerson said, as he searched his phone for the picture.
“Why on earth are you apologizing to this woman?” Baldino said. “We gave the kid a chance to tell the truth.”
“I accept your apology, Brian,” said Zoe’s mom. “But you”—she was pointing at Chief Baldino now—“are starting to piss me off.”
It was the Instagram. Brian had an annoying daughter a couple of years behind Zoe at school, and the girl had seen the photo, thought it was hot, and left some lame comment, like YAASS! She’d also shown it to her dad.
The photo showed X from behind, his arms and legs spread so wide that he looked like an actual X. You could see his broad, shirtless back, lit by the glow coming off the ice. You could see the primitive tattoos running down his forearms. You could see Stan cowering miserably at his feet.
“Now, there are many odd things about this photograph,” said Chief Baldino. “For instance, the lake is orange.”
“That’s just a filter,” said Maerz. “Everybody uses them.”
Zoe had stopped listening. She was staring not at X but at Stan. Her mother was staring at him, too. She seemed stunned to see him again after what must have been decades. The man was vile: The buzz cut. The shock-white eyebrow. The ugly boulder of a head. Zoe had not just let him live, she had let him escape. She couldn’t pull her eyes away, even when she tasted bile in the back of her throat.
Baldino began hammering her with questions now: “Can you confirm that you took this photo last night? Can you confirm that you took it outside the former residence of Bertram and Elizabeth Wallace?”
Zoe felt dizzy. Only Vilkomerson noticed. He put a gentle hand on her arm, and said something she couldn’t quite process. Everything was sliding. Everything was flying sideways.
And Baldino wouldn’t shut up.
“We know that this man here is Stan Manggold,” he said. “The truck was stolen but we ran his prints, and it turns out he’s wanted by the State of Virginia for a whole bunch of nasty stuff. What we don’t know is who the other man in the picture is—the one with the tattoos. We ran the image through our database, and came up empty. So why don’t you stop wasting our time and tell us who he is?”
“I don’t know,” said Zoe.
“Do you know if he was involved in the murder of Bertram and Betty Wallace?”
“He wasn’t involved. No way.”
“How can you know that if you don’t even know who he is?”
“I just know.”
“How about you tell us everything else you just know about him?”
“I told you—I don’t even know his name.”
Baldino grunted. He was sure she was lying.
“You want to sit here all night, Miss Bissell?” he said. “I don’t—but I will.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Zoe said. “He came out of the woods, and then he went back into the woods. I didn’t say two words to him. I don’t know who he is.”
“Then why have you been lying to protect him?”
Zoe was close to tears now. She looked to her mother.
Her mother stood up.
“This is totally unacceptable,” she told Baldino. “You’re harassing a girl who’s talking to you of her own free will. You think because I do yoga, I can’t find a lawyer who will kick your ass?”
In the silence that followed, there was a racket on the stairs. It sounded like a prisoner with a ball and chain. Everybody turned.
It was Jonah, looking horribly betrayed. His fingertips were covered with Band-Aids. His right ankle was dragging a skateboard on a piece of purple yarn.
Baldino shook his head and said, quietly for once and to no one in particular, “These people are not normal.”
Jonah told the police everything—because, as Zoe feared, he’d seen everything. He had woken up on Bert and Betty’s couch. He had shouted for Zoe. When she didn’t answer, he’d wiped the window with a cold little hand and peered outside.
Now Jonah was sitting on Zoe’s lap at the table, and pointing at the Instagram.
“That’s Stan,” he said. “He said his last name was The Man, but he maybe made that up so you should check.”
Jonah stopped for a second.
“I threw a rock at him,” he said, then looked at his mother uncertainly: “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay just this once,” she said. “Your dad introduced me to Stan many years ago, sweetie—way before you kids were born—and I wanted to throw a rock at him, too.”
“What else can you tell us, son?” Vilkomerson asked.
“Stan was mean,” Jonah said, his voice breaking for the first time. “He hurt Bert and Betty, and he tried to hurt my dogs. I don’t know why. This other person in the picture, the kind of naked one … I don’t know his name, but he’s magic—and he saved them. He also made the ice get all orange like that.”
When Jonah finished speaking, everyone let his words settle. No one spoke, except for Officer Maerz who said, “Seriously—it’s a filter.”
Baldino turned back to Zoe.
“Young lady, can you corroborate any of what your brother is saying?”
“I can corroborate all of it,” she said.
Did he think she didn’t know what the word meant?
“Interesting,” said Baldino, the patronizing edge creeping back into his voice. “Even the part about the magic?”
“Especially the part about the magic.”
Chief Baldino announced that he was sick of being lied to—of being “trifled with by a damn teenager”—and soon he and his men were driving off into the night. The Bissells watched from the front door until darkness swallowed the squad car a quarter of a mile down the road.
Zoe’s mom asked her and Jonah to follow her out to the garage.
“There’s some mess we have to clean up,” she said.
“Now?” said Zoe.
It was four in the morning.
“Now,” said her mother.
“I hate raccoons,” said Zoe.
Her mother seemed not to have heard her—she probably hadn’t slept in 24 hours—but at length she responded.
“Hmm?” she said. “Yeah, I hate them, too.”
The garage stood on the other side of the circular drive. Zoe had lived on this plot of ground her whole life, but it still amazed her that it could be so quiet—deep-space, science-fiction quiet—when it was nighttime and there wasn’t a wind. Silence, her mother liked to say, could heal you or it could make you crazy. It all depended on how you listened to it.
Zoe couldn’t tell what the silence would do to her tonight.
“Why’d you tell me to shut up when I said the thing about the cops not going to get Dad’s body?” she asked her mother.
“First of all,” her mother told her, “I would never tell you to shut up, because those are uncool words. But nothing good’s going to come from stirring everything up now. The police didn’t do their job. End of story.”
Zoe let it go, and they trudged along some more.
“I know you think we were lying about what happened with Stan,” she said as they crossed the drive.
“We weren’t, Mom,” Jonah interrupted. He had stopped to stab holes in the snow with a stick. “We weren’t lying at all.”
“Of course you weren’t, sweetie,” said Zoe’s mom.
“Stan really did hurt Bert and Betty,” he said. “And the magic man really did save Spock and Uhura.”
“Of course he did, sweetie.”
Zoe was annoyed by the way she was just yes-ing him. She fell behind to walk with her brother, who was still hacking at the snow like it was his enemy.
“Can you not?” she told him. “The snow is dead. You killed it. You win.”
She loved Jonah, even during his weird outbursts. She felt it strongly now. She wished the night could have bound them even closer to their mother, and for a while it’d seemed as if it would. Now her mom was floating away from them, looking up at the stars like Zoe and Jonah weren’t even there.
“We didn’t lie, Mom,” said Jonah, trying to reel her back in. “We didn’t.”
“Just drop it, Jonah,” Zoe said. “It’s not important that Mom believes us—because we believe us.”
They were 20 feet from the garage, and only now was it taking shape in the darkness, like the bow of a ship approaching through fog. It was a shingled shed built for two cars and divided down the middle by a thin wall. Jonah was strong enough to open the doors all by himself. He rushed forward delightedly.
“Which one?” he asked his mother.
“The one on the right,” she said. “But let me do it, please.”
The carport on the left held her mother’s silver Subaru Forester. Zoe’s car—a heinous old red Taurus that she referred to as the Struggle Buggy—used to be parked on the right. But Zoe had let Jonah convert her side of the garage into a mini–skate park so he could practice year-round. Her brother had installed a quarter pipe and a rail, and covered the walls with posters that said, Shred Till Yer Dead, and, Grind on It!
Zoe’s mom let out a sigh that made a cloud of vapor in the air. She asked Jonah to step back. Jonah wasn’t happy about it—he stamped his feet in the snow like an impatient horse—but he did.
Zoe stood by her brother, his partner in pouting. From inside the garage, she could hear scratching and scrabbling. She pulled Jonah even farther away, prepared for the raccoons to come tearing out. They were nasty animals. She picked up a snow shovel that was leaning against the garage and gripped it like a baseball bat.
Zoe’s mother reached down to open the door, then stopped and turned to them.
“I do believe you guys,” she said. “I’m sorry if it seemed like I didn’t.”
She appeared to have more to say, but she opened the door before continuing. It swung up with a metallic groan.
“Later, I want to hear all about the magic man,” her mother said. “But right now—”
Zoe saw a dark figure huddled on the floor of the garage. The figure turned to her, his face damp and beautiful and as pale as chalk.
“Right now,” her mother said, “you’ve got to help me get him inside.”