I look down as I drop the phone. It seems to fall in slow motion as I bend to catch it. It disappears into the murky water.
I sink into the muck as I drop to my knees to search. My hands are in the muddy water and I’m crying now, crying hard, as Jeff Ferris appears, dragging a sled. Something a kid would use on a snowy day, flat on the bottom, curled in front. A coil of rope is slung around his shoulder. He’s carrying a shovel.
He looks surprised and dismayed to see me. “Is that you, Gracie? What are you doing here?”
“I’m here…looking,” I say, stammering, “with Shay and Joe.”
His eyes shift. “Where are they? I didn’t see a car.”
“No? Oh, they’re around,” I say. “Shay wanted to do a few things before tomorrow… You know, the last draining will take place…”
I can feel something shift. He narrows his eyes, and he smiles. “You’re lying.” He takes a step closer to me. “Why are you lying, Gracie?”
“I’m not,” I say, taking a step back. I can’t help it.
“You look afraid. If one were paranoid, one might think that you suspected me of something.”
I search for something to say, but there is nothing to say. He knows I suspect him. He knows Shay and Joe aren’t here.
“It’s really a drag, having a psychic girl around,” Jeff says, hitching the rope higher on his arm. “You gave me some sleepless nights, especially after I caught you at my house.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“Yeah, you do.”
“It was you,” I say. “You’re the one who broke into Shay’s house.”
“I didn’t break in. The door was open. Get your facts straight.” Jeff’s face turns nasty for a minute. “I wasn’t going to hurt you. I just wanted to scare you off, that’s all. And make you think it was Mason.”
“The shoes…”
“I got them from Mason’s locker—he always leaves it open. Beewick is such a friendly place. That’s one of the reasons I like it.”
“You wore his shoes. And then you threw them away at school so the police would find them.”
“So you see, I didn’t want to kill you.” Jeff looks at me sadly. “And now it looks like I have to. I don’t want to, mind you. But I just want you to know—I can. I turned this corner when I killed Billy. I didn’t know it at the time. At the time, I just thought, oh boy, I’ll never do this again. Have I learned my lesson. Hoo boy. But then, when I killed Hank Hobbs, it wasn’t so hard. Gets easier all the time.”
I’m so cold. I’m so very cold.
“Hate to do it to Shay. She’s a nice lady. But you haven’t been here very long. It’s not like you’re her kid or anything.”
Is he crazy? He’s saying these things in a totally normal tone of voice. Yet he means them. I know he’s capable of killing me. I can see it in the odd, glassy way he’s looking at me. His bland features are suddenly ugly. I wish I could go back to teasing him behind his back with Diego. I wish he’d ask me “How’s the house?”
I wish I hadn’t been so stupid.
I wish I wasn’t here.
“And this is great, in a way, because you can help me move Billy’s body.”
“What?”
“I’ve got the place all picked out. Nobody will find it. Up on the north end of the island, where the tides will take him all the way to Canada. That was my mistake last time—I didn’t know the island well enough. The whole thing will be real quick, I promise.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, I’m not. I just have a job to do.”
I have to do what they do in the movies. Get him talking.
“Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why did you kill Billy?”
He looks annoyed. “Well, I didn’t mean to. That’s the whole point.”
“What happened?”
It’s getting darker by the second, but I can read his sneer. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the one who’s psychic.”
“I don’t know. It has something to do with that Monvor file.”
“Gold star. Of course it does. Shay and Nate and Billy and their crowd—they were so cool. I just wanted to hang out with them. We went swimming, played softball, I sneaked them into the country club… They liked me! And I agreed with what they were doing, too. I mean, what Monvor was doing was destroying real estate values. Of course my dad couldn’t see that. He was too busy selling houses to the executives.”
He pronounces the word ex-EC-yoo-tives in a deep, prissy voice, just like Franklin Ferris would. He hates his father, I realize. He had vandalized his own office. That peanut butter on his father’s desk was personal.
“I wanted to help them. Why not? So in August, when they were getting set to maybe leave, I told Billy I could find him evidence. And I broke into Hank’s house. I knew his code—he told me it was the day he met his fiancée, and I knew it, I was there at that party, I remembered. I got Nate into that party. That’s where he met Hank. Hank hardly noticed us, so when he told me how he picked his code, he had no idea I knew it was July fourteenth. It was so easy.”
“So you were friends with Nate and Billy.”
“I was friends with all of them! Now Shay treats me like I’m only the person who sold her the house. She forgets.” Jeff scowls.
“So what happened next?” I ask.
“I thought I did a great thing. Look at what Monvor was doing back then—destroying the land, lying about it—they deserved it. And Hank Hobbs deserved it, too. What a snob. He looked down on my dad and me, treated us like rubes who didn’t know anything. He didn’t care about Beewick. He’d just work here and use it for what he could, then move on to somewhere else.”
“But what happened, Jeff?” I ask. “After you stole the file and gave it to Billy?”
“My dad guessed who stole it,” Jeff said. His mouth became a thin line. “He told me I was stupid. That I couldn’t alienate Monvor, it was half our business—what if they found out? He practically kicked me down the stairs. He said”—and again, Jeff uses that same deep, caricature of a voice—“‘Get it back, boy! Or I’ll turn you in myself, and you’ll go to jail!’ So I went back to Billy and said, hey, sorry, I need it back. And he said no.”
“No, I expected that. So I offered him money. Some of the money I’d saved for college, because my old man didn’t believe in college—it’s like, you need a diploma to sell houses?—and Billy just laughed at me. He said, ‘Who do you think I am? I’m not going to sell out my friends.’”
“So you found someone who would sell out his friends. Nate.”
“Not only did he take the money, he negotiated a better price.” Jeff laughs hollowly. “All my college money. And he uses it for the down payment. And he says to me, ‘At least you’ll make your commission, Jeff.’ Ha. And I never did go to college, thank you very much.”
“And Billy suspected.”
“Yeah. He didn’t know who sold him out, but he called me, threatened to go to the papers, tell them what was in the file and let the chips fall. Well, I couldn’t let that happen. I told him to meet me at the house. I knew it would be empty. I still had the keys, and Shay hadn’t changed the locks yet. So we talked, and he made me so mad. I tried to explain about my father, about jail, and he told me I had no commitment, I was a hypocrite. ‘You pretend to love this place and then the first chance you get, you sell out…’ And I hit him, and he came after me, so I hit him with a log from the fireplace, and he cracked his head on the mantel. Wow, he was tall. I still remember his head hitting—crack—and the way he went down. And the blood.”
“You wrapped him in the shower curtain and dragged him out. And then you tore up the carpet. You pretended you did it as a favor.” And Nate took the credit. He told Shay he’d done it. It was typical of him.
“It took me a long time to be able to sleep at night,” Jeff said. His voice was close to a whine. “I’m not a monster.”
“What happened with Hank Hobbs? Did he know you killed Billy?”
“He walks into the realty office twenty years later and doesn’t remember me. But he’s looking for a major property, so I show him the house I bought for an investment. He flips for it. Has to have it. Everything is going great, and then, that last day…” Jeff shakes his head. “I do such a stupid thing. We go out to the house together for a last walk-through, and my hands are full of papers and my briefcase and my cell, and so I say to him, just punch in my code, and I tell him the numbers, and he punches it in, and I see him looking at me, and I realize that he knows that I have the same code as he does, and how could that be?”
“But why would you use it, too, all those years later?”
“To remind myself of what I’m fighting for.” Jeff’s face is harsh. “I’m not content to be a townie. I want to be bigger than that. Every single day I punch in my code, my password, I remember that I can do the hard stuff. I can win.”
“What did he do?”
“Yeah, Hank. He’s just looking at me, and I see that something clicks for him. Maybe he’s already living in the past, seeing the girl again, that Betsy. I know he’s thinking—Here’s the guy who broke into my house, all those years ago. And I even see the moment when he makes the leap—And what happened to that kid, that Billy Applegate? Could that be connected? And meanwhile we’re going through the house, talking about this and that, and I’m being totally cool, but I can read him like a book. So here’s what I do. I think of the plan right on the spot. I say, ‘Hey, you need to see the house from the water,’ and he’s not that interested, but I push it, in a nice way, and he says, ‘Okay, yeah, we can go on my boat.’ I manipulate him, see, so that he’d be hurting my feelings if he put me off. And then, once we’re on the boat, the rest is easy.”
The rest is easy? Murdering someone, watching them drown, that’s easy?
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re disgusted, right? But listen to me, Hobbs wasn’t a nice man. He cheated on his wife. He covered up what his company did, and then he tried to pay blood money to fix it, just because he wanted to retire here. And he tried to get your aunt fired, don’t forget that!”
I feel the edge of my cell phone with my foot. I nudge it, trying to get it closer to the surface. I only succeed in pushing it deeper. But at least I know where it is.
“Yeah, old Hank wasn’t a great loss to anyone. Whereas I’m a part of the island’s history. I buy houses and renovate them. I run the annual Chamber of Commerce drive to help needy kids. I coach the high school swim team for free…”
“The andro,” I say. “That was yours.”
“I only give them what they ask for,” Jeff says. “You don’t think the other kids are doing it, the kids from the rich communities on the mainland? Come on! And it’s not a steroid, you know. It’s a precursor. There’s a difference.” Jeff looks annoyed now. “You know, we’re wasting time. It’s dark now, I don’t have to wait anymore. You can help me load Billy onto the sled.”
“No.”
“It’s not far. I pulled up real close. I have a four-wheel drive.”
“I’m not helping you.”
Jeff laughs. “What, you think you have a choice?”
I can’t feel the cell phone with my foot anymore. It doesn’t matter—he’d never give me a chance to call anyone. But I’ve noticed something else. He’s dropped his hand, the one holding the coiled rope. The rope has uncoiled, and his foot is tangled in it.
“Okay,” he says, handing over the shovel. “You dig, I’ll haul.”
He’s not kidding. I am not the strongest person. But I have my surprise on my side and, if I’m lucky, a certain lack of balance going on with him.
I grab the shovel and push it right back at him, hard, in the stomach. He is surprised. It wouldn’t work, except he has to step back, and his foot gets caught in the rope. I give the shovel another push, and he goes over.