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THE NEXT DAY, AFTER a night of fitful sleep, I got up early and walked through the hop yard alone.
The dirt road that cut through the acres of vines had become so dry that every step I took kicked up enough dust that it must have looked like I was leaving a thick trail of smoke behind.
After emerging from the field, I made my way to the spot where the original Williston Hunt Club once stood. I went to the center of the grassy area and sat down. I looked at my surroundings and imagined the old picket fence that used to run around the property. I closed my eyes, breathed in deep, and could have sworn that the musky scent of goat was drifting along the air.
How had I been so naïve that I hadn’t realized I had been sent back to the place where I had come from? The same place that served such pleasant images from my past was also the place of lies and hidden things; things that only become clear by the light of the full moon.
With my right hand, I punched at the ground. I grasped the tall weeds in my fist and yanked. With my fingers bent into something that resembled claws, I dug down deep into the dirt.
From out of nowhere, a shadow spread over me. It was kind of like the effect of the sun disappearing behind a cloud, but this was different. I knew that somebody was standing there. When I looked up, Tristan Clark was staring back at me. He was wearing a plain blue t-shirt and jeans. I realized that he must have been on the way to his morning classes at Tech. It was obvious that Tristan worked out. If he had come to the clearing for the purpose of kicking my scrawny ass he wouldn’t have a problem. I must have jumped or flinched when I saw him because he laughed. “I didn’t mean to scare you there, Blake.”
“I wasn’t expecting anybody to be out here,” I told him as I took deep, lumbering breaths. My eyes darted to the opposite edge of the field where his old truck was parked. How had I not heard him drive up? I got up from where I had been sitting and stepped back, stumbling over my own two feet. “What are you doing out here anyway?” I realized that I had a clump of grass in my hand, and I tossed it to the ground. I hoped that Tristan didn’t think I was throwing it at him.
“Looking for you,” he said. “I just want you to know that I think what Cade did was stupid as shit,” he told me. “You seem like a pretty nice guy, and I don’t want to stand on the sidelines and do nothing.” Tristan reached into his front jeans pocket. When his hand came out, he was holding his phone. He took a step toward me, and I stepped backward, away from him. “I’m not going to hurt you, bud,” he assured me.
I stayed where I was, and Tristan continued to move forward until he was standing just inches away. He was so close that, when he talked, I could smell the spearmint chewing gum on his breath. “I want you to understand something. You don’t need to be getting involved with Lisa Tanner,” he said.
“Lisa’s none of your business,” I shot back. Besides, it was too late for not getting involved.
“She’s not,” Tristan agreed with what I said. “But she’s also far from the perfect little angel you think she is.” He held the phone so that both of us could see the screen, and I knew right away what I was looking at. It was a green-tinted image from a hunting camera, but I didn’t recognize the location. With his fingers, Tristan zoomed in closer. A shirtless boy and girl were on the tailgate of a truck. The girl was straddling the boy’s lap, facing him, and his right arm was wrapped around her back. His fingers were on the clasp of her bra. There were two things that I immediately recognized about the image—the girl’s pigtails and the decals on the back of the truck. I was looking at Lisa and Cade.
I tore my eyes away from what I was seeing. I was disgusted. “That’s...,” I started, but couldn’t think of the rest of what I wanted to say.
“I’m just doing this for your own good,” Tristan said.
I realized then why he’d been at the Williston’s barn the day that Lisa and I had seen him there. There must have been other hunting cameras in the cabinet, and he’d been getting the SD card from one of them. He must have gone home and loaded the files onto his computer and then used his phone to take a picture of the monitor so he could bring it with him that morning. In some kind of twisted way, he thought that, by showing me, he was helping me out.
Finally, I gathered up the rest of my words and continued. “Cade must have manipulated her into it. I know all about the WHC, and how y’all...”
“You’re right,” he cut me off. “The things Cade and I did were wrong, but I’m not hear to talk about that stupid club. I’m done with all of that.” Tristan closed the image and put the phone back in his pocket.
“What are you here to talk about then?”
“Lisa,” He stated bluntly. “Listen, he was only with her one time, and afterwards she wouldn’t leave him alone about it. She latches onto you, Blake. She won’t let go.”
I shook my head. “You’re crazy,” I told him.
“There’s something about her. It’s like she gets obsessed with you or something.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I told him. “If that was the case...”
“Once she realized that Cade didn’t want to have anything else to do with her, she was determined to keep their little fling secret. She doesn’t want anybody to know how much of a skank she really is.”
“You’re no different.” I realized that I had started to think of Cade and Tristan as a single unit—The WHC. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to hit him harder than I had hit Cade that day at school. I wanted to knock his teeth out and make his nose bleed. I wanted Tristan to walk away from the fight with two black eyes compared to my one.
I threw the weight of my body onto him, and both of us fell to the ground. I was on top of him, and I raised my fist high over my head and brought it down onto his chest. When I tried to hit his face, Tristan blocked my blows with his arms.
His hands eventually grasped onto my forearms. He was a lot stronger than me and was able to hold me off. Eventually, he put all of his strength into what he was doing and flipped me over. The back of my head thudded on the ground so hard that I actually saw a brief flash of white.
I think I went out for a second, but, when everything settled again, Tristan was straddling me. I tried swinging my closed fists at him, but all I was able to do was brush his shirt.
Finally, he let me go and hoisted himself off me. He sat down next to where I was lying and started brushing the grass and dirt off his jeans. “Believe me, you don’t want to do this.” He chuckled. And he was right—I didn’t want to fight him. That had been a really bad idea. I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet. By then, Tristan was standing. “There’s one more thing I wanted to show you.” He reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a folded piece of paper and tossed it toward me. “I don’t understand it. Cade found it in his dad’s stuff. Just think about the facts, okay?” And he walked away.
I unfolded the piece of paper and couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It was a picture of carrots growing in a garden. The green tops spelled out two names—Davey and Lisa.
When I got home, I slammed the door so forcefully that the framed pictures rattled on the wall. Dad had already left for work, and I went upstairs to shower and change clothes.
Under the hot spray of water, I did what Tristan suggested—I thought about the facts, and there was one thing that bothered me more than anything else. Lisa had been lying to me all along.
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THINGS AT SCHOOL WENT downhill. My mind was so preoccupied with everything else that was going on that I could barely pay attention in any of my classes.
If I had thought that everybody had been avoiding me before, now it was like I had the plague. I got death-stares from most of the students for just walking down the hall. I realized what Cade’s prank had done. It had turned all attention toward me—the worst thing you could do to somebody with social anxiety.
It got so bad that I even avoided the picnic table on my lunch break. I figured it was possible that Cade could turn up any minute, and if he did, he would be out there waiting around the corner of the building just like he used to. So instead of going outside, I sat at a corner table in the cafeteria by myself.
The day trudged on like this, and I thought the final bell would never get there. Mrs. Reynolds had been right. Cade’s latest prank was a crafty one. In the classes that he and I shared, I looked at his empty desk from where I sat in the corner and thought to myself—he has the upper hand, and he’s not even here.
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I WAS ON THE SCHOOL bus when I heard that Cade was dead.
It was raining, and the bus was moving extra slow through the downpour. It seemed like it would take forever for us to reach the drop-off spot in front of my house, and I just wanted to escape.
The news had spread through the bus the way I imagined a virus would work its way across the programs on a computer, crippling each one in its path. Nobody approached me and told me personally, but I heard it from the guy sitting in front of me who was whispering the news to his friend.
Soon, everybody had their phones out, texting and reading the story on social media. A girl who was sitting several rows up from me burst into tears because of what she was learning. I wondered if she had been another one of Cade’s conquests.
Just to make sure that what I was hearing wasn’t another of Cade’s pranks, I pulled my own phone out of my jeans pocket. After connecting to the internet and searching for Cade Williston, the first thing that came up was an article from a local TV station. It had to be true if it was on the news, right? I clicked the link and began to read.
According to the reporter, around two-thirty that afternoon, Cade’s body was found in the woods about a mile from where his truck had been abandoned in the corn field. It appeared that he had been attacked with a sharp object.
I turned off my phone, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. My stomach clenched itself into a tight ball. I felt sick. It was no secret that Cade and I hadn’t been getting along, and I knew what all of this must look like.
I thought about what Tristan told the cops two nights earlier—Cade had smeared the inside of his truck with possum blood because he wanted people to think, even for the briefest of moments, that he had been murdered. After setting the prank, Cade hadn’t made it far.
The bus finally stopped in front of my house, and I stood from where I was sitting on the back row. I didn’t look at anybody as I walked down the aisle, but I could feel their eyes on me.
I pushed my umbrella open as soon as I was off the bus, and I started walking toward the house. Just a few seconds later, I heard the revving of the bus’s engine behind me. I stopped and looked over my shoulder.
From the other side of the bus windows, the other students were staring at me. I knew what they were thinking—I killed Cade.
Lisa was already at the house when I got there. She was sitting on the top step of the porch. The overhang of the tin roof shielded her from the falling rain. When she saw me approaching, she stood. I could tell by the look on her face that she already knew what happened.
“We have to get rid of all of it,” I told her. “The pictures, the hunting camera, all of the stuff you made for the billboard, everything. If the cops find out how far all of this has gone... if they see how much we hated Cade, you know what they’ll think.”
Lisa shook her head. “They’ll find out anyway, Blake. And if we hide everything, when they do find it, things will only be a thousand times worse.”
“Well then,” I said. “We tell them the truth about everything.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“No. I mean we tell them everything. I know about you and Cade. I saw pictures, Lisa. Why have you been lying to me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tristan showed me pictures of you and Cade.” I grabbed her arm. My grip was too tight. It was probably hard enough to leave a bruise. I hadn’t meant to be so forceful.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
I loosened my hold, and she jerked her arm away. She knew she had been busted. She started down the steps, but she was stopped dead in her tracks by the deputy’s car that was pulling in the driveway.
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WE TOLD THE DEPUTY about Cade and Lisa, the probability that Mayor Williston had paid off the sheriff to remain silent on his son’s night-hunting offense, the WHC, our plan for sabotaging the grand opening of the shopping center, and that we’d seen Tristan sneaking around the Williston’s barn the same day that we had been there.
But, even after all that, I suspected Charley17 may be the one to blame for Cade’s death.
“So let me get this straight,” the deputy said. “You think that this Charley person you met online is obsessed with you. He started sending you weird messages over the internet, you think he has been following you around wearing a rain jacket, and now, because you deleted your account, you think he might’ve snapped and committed murder?”
I nodded my head.
“Hell, at this point, I’m not ruling out anything. Can you show me the profile?”
“I’ll get my computer,” Dad said, and he left the room. He came back a minute later with his shiny silver laptop in both hands. He placed the computer in front of me on the table and pressed the power button.
The deputy moved around the table so that he was watching over my shoulder. I clicked on the browser search bar. After going to The Reading Buddy site, I found Charley17’s profile, but when I clicked I got the message that the it had been set to private.
“It looks like I’ll have to re-open my account and send him a new buddy request.” I clicked on the Log In tab and was able to reopen my account by entering my password. Then I clicked back to Charley17’s profile and sent him a buddy request. “Now we wait for him to take the bait.”
It was just a minute later that the computer dinged with an incoming message. The quick response time caused my skin to crawl. Charley17 had already accepted my request.
YOU AND CHARLEY17 ARE NOW BUDDIES. START READING AND SHARING.
“That is creepy,” the deputy admitted. “Go to his profile before he realizes that something might be up. Do it before he has a chance to think that he is in some kind of trap.”
I clicked on Charley17’s profile picture, the werewolf mask. “See, it’s empty,” I told him.
“Send your login info to this email.” From over my left shoulder, the deputy slapped a ripped corner from his yellow paper onto the table. “Pronto. We’ll get a cyber team that will be able to trace everything to see where Charley’s messages are coming from. Hopefully we’ll get this case solved before ya’ll move to Columbia.”
Lisa looked at me, and her mouth dropped open. I, like her, was speechless. Her finding out like this was the last thing that I wanted. She jumped up from her chair and stormed off. I followed after her, but she was already out the front door, and by the time that I was on the porch, she was halfway across the driveway.
“Lisa!” I yelled after her.
She spun around so that she was facing me. “How long have you known, Blake?”
“A few days,” I admitted. “I was going to tell you that day we were at your house, but...”
“But we started fooling around,” she said. “I see how it is. They drew you into their little games, didn’t they?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Cade and Tristan. You’re just like them. You’re only after one thing.”
“No. It’s nothing like that.”
“I’m going home,” she said.