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LISA PICKED ME UP ON Sunday and drove me to her house.
“The ‘rents are going to want to meet you before you’re allowed in my room,” she said. “Daddy’s on the tractor, but Momma’s out in the barn. Let’s go.”
The Tanners lived in a ranch-style house that had been constructed with red brick in the mid-seventies. The property was enclosed with a chain link fence.
Several buildings stood behind the home. One of them was a long shed that was open on both ends. It was where Lisa’s dad kept his tractor.
“By the way, I like your new ‘do.” With her right hand, Lisa ran her fingers through my shorter hair.
We walked beyond the shed and past two smaller buildings that were made of plywood. The neatly mowed yard dipped and curved under our feet until we came to a building that was tucked so far back on the land that it had been out of sight until now.
“Here we are,” Lisa said.
Personally, I would not have called this a barn. A barn was what was at the Williston’s, but this...
The exterior of the building looked like something you could live in. It had tall, metal walls and carefully landscaped shrubs and flowers around the perimeter.
Once inside, I immediately realized that the building’s primary purpose was to store the camper that was parked against the right wall. A large set of double doors hung at the opposite end of the building. It was where the camper could be driven in and out.
“Hey there,” Lisa’s mother spoke from across the width of the large space. She was on her knees with her hands deep in a five gallon bucket. When she stood up straight, I noticed she was wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves that were covered in something dark and wet. She looked nothing like Lisa. She was tall and rail-thin. Her hair had been cut into a bob.
“Momma, this is Blake.”
The older woman approached and held out her gloved hands toward me. I must have made a face because just a second later she pulled her arms back. “Oh, right, I would give you a hug, but, this...” She waved her right hand in the air and rolled her eyes.
“She’s hulling black walnuts,” Lisa explained. “They’ll stain anything like crazy. Thus, the gloves.”
“Oh,” I answered.
“Lisa’s told me so many great things about you,” her mother said.
The idea that Lisa had been talking about me made me happy.
There was the sound of an approaching tractor. The throttle shifted down, and the tractor stopped. A minute later Lisa’s father was walking through the door. Just like the last time I had seen him, he was wearing a flannel shirt and cap.
He held out his hand to me. “Jacob Tanner,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Blake. I’ve been seeing you around. Lisa told me you’re still trying to decide on where you want to go to school.”
“Yes sir, I’ve been looking at a few.”
“What do you think you might want to do for a living?”
Other than helping out at the pool store, the only job I’d had was the one at Burger Heaven in Ridge Spring. “I’m not really sure,” I told him. “I’ll probably just go in undeclared and decide from there.”
After a few more minutes of small talk, her parents went back to what they were doing, and Lisa and I went in the house.
Lisa’s room was clean and girly. The bed was covered with a white comforter that had gray flowers printed all over it. A zigzagging line of lightning bugs was painted around the wall.
“They glow in the dark,” Lisa said and flipped the light switch.
The room went dark, and each bug glowed a bright, fluorescent green. “It’s glow-in-the-dark stars,” she explained. “I stuck one on the butt of each and every bug.”
Without turning on the light, Lisa moved to the desk that was pushed against the window on the opposite side of the room.
“Let me show you what I’ve come up with.” She powered on her laptop. “Have a seat.” She kneeled on the floor in front of the computer and patted the office chair next to her.
I sat down. I was expecting to see, at the very most, an edited and captioned photo of Cade that was ready to be posted on social media, but when Lisa opened the file, I was shocked at what was on the screen.
There was a photo of a road with a blank billboard, bright orange construction barrels, and a sign—Williston Plaza. Another picture was a close-up of the billboard. Next to all of this was a seemingly endless series of letters and numbers that I recognized as being HTML code that was often used for creating internet content.
“I figured out how to hack into the billboard at the Williston shopping center.” Lisa tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and a new file opened up. It was the photo of Cade and Tristan from the hunting camera. Lisa clicked on the image and dragged it to the billboard where it fit perfectly within the frame.
She enlarged the whole thing and let the cursor hover over the picture. An arrow appeared up on the right-hand side. She clicked it.
The photo of Cade and Tristan disappeared. In its place was another one from the same night—the one of the deputy talking to them. The deputy’s body was circled in neon green. There was a caption—WAS THIS MAN PAID TO HIDE A CRIME?
Lisa clicked the arrow again. Now what I was looking at had a close-up of Cade on the left side and Mayor Williston’s booking photo from when he had been arrested on the right. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON, the caption read.
Lisa was smiling. “It’ll go live on the night of the grand opening,” she explained. “They’re having a big party, and this is what they’ll see.”
For a moment I was speechless. What she was planning was way more than what I imagined.
“You’re really good at this,” I told her.
“Thanks.” She continued to click around on the keyboard rearranging things just so. We were both quiet for a moment.
“Lisa, You know when your dad was asking me about college?
“Yeah.”
“Well, I kind of lied. I have decided, but I wanted to tell you first.”
Lisa stopped what she was doing and looked at me.
“I’m applying to Clemson,” I said.
I was about to tell her the bad part—that Dad and I would be moving to Columbia, but before I had the chance, Lisa screamed, jumped up, and wrapped her arms around my neck.
When she let go and pulled back, our eyes met, and without hardly any contemplation, we were kissing. This went on for a few seconds, then her hand went underneath my shirt and mine went under hers. She sat up straight and slid to the floor.
“Your parents...,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
By then she was unbuttoning my jeans. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
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SHE WAS RIGHT. IT DIDN’T take long. At all.
Less than an hour later we were parked on the back row at the drive-in theater. What Lisa and I had done was just now beginning to sink in. Before that day, I had only kissed one girl—Katie Carmichael, who I worked with at Burger Heaven.
Kissing Katie had been a completely different experience. Davey had pushed me into it. “Just go for it,” he’d urged me. One night, Katie and I had been sitting in the swing at my house, and I leaned over and kissed her. That was as far as it went, and it was the only time.
And now this had happened with Lisa. As daylight slipped into dusk, the full moon became visible. The way that the moon was positioned right above the movie screen couldn’t have been more perfect. Both windows of Lisa’s truck were down. There was a slight nip to the air. The breeze that came in carried the scents of popcorn, cotton candy, and fresh cut grass.
When the sky was finally dark, the first movie of the werewolf double-feature started. It was called Cursed, and even though the movie didn’t scare either of us—we actually thought it was kind of funny, especially when the werewolf flipped off the main character. Lisa and I were huddled close together in the middle of the seat. We stayed that way, with my arm around her, all the way through the second feature, Bad Moon.
After the movies the field lights came on. I looked at the clock on the dash. It was already after midnight. The cars and trucks were headed out of the parking area when, from my right, I heard a loud clatter. I looked and saw an old, green van making its way down the rough red-dirt drive toward the exit. At some point in time, the van’s bumper had come loose and was now tied up with a bungee cord. The tie-job held everything in place, but it didn’t stop the bumper from bouncing up and down and hitting the back end of the van as it moved.
The van came to a screeching stop behind us. The windows were so tinted that I couldn’t tell who was inside. It looked like something that a serial killer would drive.
The passenger side window finally came down. A blonde girl I didn’t recognize was in the seat. She was starring at me. I was confused. Then the driver leaned forward. It was Riley. “Blake,” he called. “I didn’t know you would be here.” The person in the car behind him pressed down on the horn, telling Riley to go. “Why don’t y’all meet us at Waffle House?” Riley suggested.
I looked at Lisa, who smiled, and I turned my attention back to Riley. The car behind him blared its horn again. “Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”
The nearest Waffle House was fifteen minutes away in North Augusta at I-20. When we finally got there, the restaurant was full of people that must have had late-night munchies. There was no open booth; there wasn’t even a spot at the counter.
“We can get take-out,” Riley suggested. “We can go sit by the river.”
While we waited on our food, the blonde girl, Lindsay, who was Riley’s fiancé, was twirling her long hair around the fingers on her left hand. I noticed that her ring finger was bare and remembered that Riley had been saving his tips from the brewery so he could buy her an engagement ring.
“What did y’all think about those movies? Great or what?” Lindsay’s eyes darted from me to Lisa.
After our order was ready, and we were back in the truck, Lisa and I followed Riley’s van to the river. It was only a short drive down Georgia Avenue to where we eventually turned right, just before the bridge that would have taken us from one state to another if we’d kept going. We followed the looping road that eventually led us to the water.
We parked at a small gravel parking lot under the bridge. From there we followed a paved path that went downhill. The wide Savannah River was in front of us. The moon reflected against the water. Across the water the city lights of Augusta were bright. I thought about the story that Riley had told me about his girlfriend—while crossing the bridge to see him, she’d crashed her car and drowned in the river.
While the four of us sat on a pair of park benches and ate our food, the sound of the cars on the bridge above us was a nearly constant hum.
Later, Lindsay and Lisa were walking together along the edge of the water. Riley and I were sitting on the benches.
“It doesn’t hurt to come back here?” I asked.
I could tell that it took him off guard for me to have realized that we were near the spot where it happened. “It took me a long time, but eventually I just said the heck with it, you know? Life’s too short to be dwelling on the past. Instead of letting this be a place that made me feel sad, I focused on the happy times that I had here.”
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THE ROAD THROUGH THE country was dark, but the high beams on Lisa’s truck illuminated the landscape that lay ahead. By then the town and interstate lights were miles behind us.
On Sweet Water Road we were surrounded by cow farms, corn fields, and steep inclines of dense woods. There was only the occasional house to break up the rural landscape. On roads like this, deer were notorious for darting out of nowhere. That was my first thought when Lisa slammed on the brakes—she was trying to avoid a deer.
“Did you see that?” Lisa put the truck in reverse, backed up, and stopped.
A truck was several yards into the corn field on our left. Because of the flattened stalks in the truck’s wake, it was obvious that the driver had lost control and run off the road. I recognized the decals on the back glass. It was Cade’s truck. The headlights and brake lights were on.
Lisa pulled over to the side of the road. We left our doors standing open and followed the flattened path through the corn. The drying corn stalks clattered gently in the nighttime breeze. The red glow from the brake lights on the back of Cade’s truck gave our surroundings the ambience of a Halloween haunted trail. I half-expected a masked man with a chainsaw to jump out any moment.
“I hope he’s not in there getting frisky with somebody,” Lisa said with a giggle that failed to cover up the nervousness in her voice.
Even at seventeen, I couldn’t imagine being desperate enough for some action to go flying through a corn field just to find a private place.
By then we were right behind Cade’s truck. Lisa walked around and stepped closer to the driver’s side. “Cade?” Now, she was tapping on the glass. “Something’s wrong,” she said and was reaching for the door handle.
My thoughts about what could have happened to Cade were shooting in rapid fire...heart attack, stroke, blood sugar crash...I knew all of those things were rare in teenagers, but they did happen.
Lisa swung open the door, and the interior light came on. She screamed at whatever it was that she was seeing. I ran around the truck so that I was standing next to her, and I saw for myself...
The inside of the cab was covered in blood.