| |
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT that things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
The day after Cade’s body was found, Mrs. Reynolds decided that it would be best for me to withdraw from school. The plan was for me to resume my education once I got to Columbia. Dad’s job allowed him to take the rest of the month off so that he could prepare for the move.
With both of us being at home, the process of packing up the house was kicked into high gear. By the time that mid-afternoon rolled around, most of the living room and dining room was finished. I was pulling the roll of tape across the top of a box when the doorbell rang. Dad was already on his feet, and he went to the door.
From where I was sitting on the floor in the other room, I could hear the voices. Dad was talking to Deputy Roper. “Is Blake around?” The deputy wanted to know.
“Yes,” Dad answered, “Is something wrong?”
“Well, Mr. Thomas, there’s something I need to talk to both of you about.”
Then there was the sound of the door shutting, followed by heavy steps across the floor. “Blake,” Dad called. “Deputy Roper’s here. He needs to see you.”
By then I was already standing, and I went into the foyer where I leaned against the doorframe with my arms crossed.
Deputy Roper looked at me and nodded his head before he started speaking. “We found Charley,” he said. My heart skipped at the mention of my Reading Buddy, who I suspected of stalking me and killing Cade. “But here’s the thing,” the deputy continued. “There is no way Charley had anything to do with what happened to Cade Williston.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad glance in my direction. “You were right about one thing though. Charley is in Columbia, but here’s the kicker—he’s been in a mental hospital the whole time. They’ve had him on suicide watch for the past eight months. It’s impossible that he would be anywhere but there.”
On the day that Charley had sent me the creepy message about wanting to live together, he’d said that he thought that the apartment he picked out would be a big step up from the crazy house. Now I knew that he hadn’t been talking about my time in the mental hospital. He had been referring to his own.
“The guy has a long history of being abused by both of his guardians,” Mr. Roper continued. “It really messed him up. His therapist thought it would be a good idea for him to join The Reading Buddy site. He thought it would be a good way for Charley to begin to interact with others.”
That made sense. After all, it was that line of reasoning that Mrs. Reynolds had pushed me to do the same thing.
Dad spoke up. “So what do we do now?”
“Well, we have to look at all of this from a different angle. The fact is that Cade Williston was murdered, and somebody, most likely a local, knows the answer.” Deputy Roper was still looking at me, and I tore my eyes away from his stare. “If either of you think of anything else, don’t hesitate to give me a call.” The deputy went to the door, opened it, and looked over his shoulder before stepping outside. “I have a feeling that all of us will be talking again real soon.” And then he left.
As soon as the door was shut, I let myself slide down the wall so that I was sitting on the floor. Both Wolf and Zee came over and crawled onto my lap. They were pawing at my arms and licking my face. Dad looked at me and said, “We’ll get through this. One way or another, everything will be okay.”
Eventually, I got to my feet and went upstairs to my room where I let myself fall backward onto the bed. I stared at the ceiling and let everything begin to sink in. All of us—me, Lisa, Davey, and Cade—had been linked together our entire lives. A long time ago, Lisa and Davey were assigned to be together. Lisa had lied about messing around with Cade. Now, Davey and Cade were dead. All rationality pointed to either me or Lisa killing Cade, and I knew I didn’t do it.
Until then, the darkest moment of my life had been when I’d been trapped underneath the overturned pool with my dying stepdad. Now I felt like I had lost everything. Lisa, college, all of the progress that I had made—none of that mattered any more. I was done. I got up and yanked the progress chart off the wall, wadded it into a tight ball, and threw it across the room.
I went back to the bed where I eventually fell asleep and dreamed that I was dead. I was in a closed casket and could hear the dirt being thrown on top of me. Eventually, my eyes shot open, and I knew that I wasn’t ready to be buried underneath all of this. I reached into my shirt and wrapped my hand around the pendant that Riley had given me. The oak tree was a symbol of strength. It was time to set things right. I clawed at the lid of the casket until it splintered into pieces, and I dug my way through the soft dirt, finally emerging zombie-like under the glowing moon.
When I woke it was dusk, and I was filled with hope. Back on the night that my stepdad had been running behind me with an axe, I had been sure that the keys in my hand would be my salvation.
I stood from the bed and went to the closet. The door was standing open, and I reached inside to the top shelf where there was an old, raggedy shoe box that I picked up. With the box in my hand, I lifted the top and dropped it to the floor. I reached inside and dug around the loose change and trinkets until I found what I was looking for—Morris’s key ring.
There were at least a couple dozen keys on the thing. In addition to the ones for things around the household, there were also the keys for the pool store. I searched through them all until I found what I was looking for. It was a small skeleton key with a round end. On the opposite side of the room, Mom’s memory box was sitting on top of the desk. That was where I went next.
With the metal box in my lap, I sat on the floor and leaned my back against the bed. Mom always said that only happy memories were allowed inside. Defining moments, she called them. After she died, I would often look through the contents to remind myself that those things had in fact happened. For the first time in nearly a year, I put the key into the latch. The hinges squeaked when I opened the lid.
Inside were snapshots of Mom and Dad, her and Morris, and several of me at various ages. One picture in particular caught my attention—I must have been four or five. I was standing in front of a shabby picket fence where I was feeding a carrot to a little black and white goat. Amid all of this, there was something that I had not seen inside the box before, and the sight of it now broke my heart—it was the paper groundhog that Morris had drawn for me. I picked it up and traced my thumb over its surface.
After Davey was killed, people often asked how it was possible that someone could go from making paper groundhogs to committing murder. They, like me, wanted to know why he would have done it. Even though there seemed to be no motive, there was proof. There was video footage taken from the nearby bank’s ATM camera of him running across the road with the axe in his hands. They found a loaded pistol next to his body under the pool.
I felt tears pooling in my eyes. It was a punch to the gut to realize that Morris had been sentimental enough to add the paper groundhog to the box of Mom’s most cherished memories. I placed the cutout back on top of everything else and took a look at the pile. Despite all the lies and secrets that had shaped most of my life, everything inside that box represented a simple truth.
And at that moment in time, the truth was exactly what I needed.
The wadded progress chart was next to me on the floor. I picked it up and tried to flatten it out, but it was a crumpled mess. Regardless, I peeled the last sticker off its backing and stuck it to the final step—termination.