THE BACK DOOR on the moving truck parked outside Christopher and Celeste Brindle’s town house is open, and as I pull up behind it, I can see that it’s almost completely full. Furniture and lamps jockey for space with boxes and bins, and clear plastic bags stuffed full of blankets and clothes and plush toys have been shoved into every available inch of free space. All the bits and pieces of a life—three lives—are crammed into a cube on wheels, ready to hit the road.
It gives me a small thrill of excitement at my own upcoming move, and I sit for a moment, allowing myself to savor the feeling. It’s nice to look forward to something for a change, instead of always looking backward.
I get out of the car and walk around to the sidewalk, just as Chris Brindle steps out the front door of his town house, carrying a suitcase down the walk. He stops when he sees me and puts the suitcase down, then reaches out to shake my hand as I approach.
“I was wondering if I’d run into you again before we left,” he says.
“I heard through the grapevine that you guys were moving away,” I say. “I wanted to stop and say good-bye. And good luck, I guess.”
He grins. “Probably the same grapevine that’s convincing us to leave,” he says. “Not that it matters. It’s just that this town knows too much, if you know what I mean.”
“Believe me,” I say. “I understand better than anyone.”
“I know you do,” he says, and his face turns serious. “You’re a good kid, Mac. I hope you’re able to find a way past things, to get on with your life.”
I smile. “You know what? I think I’m going to get there.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “You were friends with him, weren’t you?”
I nod. “We grew up together.”
“The sick bastard,” he says. “You never saw anything in him? Any indication that he was a psychopath?”
“No,” I say. “But I think maybe some people did. It’s hard to say.”
It’s been a couple of weeks since the news broke that Connor Williams, the golden boy of Camera Cove, was the Catalog Killer. The story went international in the blink of an eye, and I found my own face spreading across the Internet like a virus. The teen who discovered the truth about his childhood best friend. The kid who cracked the case that stumped the cops.
Of course other stories have since taken over, and things have already started to die down. Still, I’ve received several offers to give interviews, and even a literary agent was in touch, asking if she could represent my story. So far, I’ve turned them all down. It’s not really a story I want to stay alive.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” says Chris. “I’m glad that he’s gone and that people don’t have to worry anymore. I’m glad that I know what happened to Maria, and I’m glad that Celeste and Ashleigh and I can start to move on. But it will piss me off until the day I die that he didn’t face justice for what he did. He didn’t give us the chance.”
I glance at the ground, wishing I could tell him the truth, but I know that’s not an option. Instead, I tell him the closest thing to it.
“I don’t know why,” I say, “but I think that in the end, Connor was forced to face the consequences of his actions.” I consider my next words carefully. “I think that’s why things ended the way they did.”
Brindle looks at me curiously, cocking his head slightly to the side.
“I hope you’re right, Mac.”
He looks like he wants to ask me more, but the screen door behind him opens and shuts with a slam. We both watch as Celeste walks toward us, Ashleigh balanced on her hip. She squints as she approaches, trying to register who I am, then smiles curiously as she places me.
“Hello,” she says, the What brings you here? hanging unsaid in the air.
“Hi,” I say. “I heard you guys were moving, so I wanted to bring you this.” I hold out the small envelope I’ve been gripping since I got out of the car. Celeste hands Ashleigh to Chris and takes the envelope, opens it, and pulls out a small card.
“It’s just a thank-you card from all of us at the library,” I say. “We really appreciated your donation to our sale.”
“Well aren’t you sweet?” she says as she reads the short note I scrawled inside. “I’m just glad we were able to help.”
“You helped more than you know,” I say. “Anyway, I should be going. I’ve got some more people to thank. Have a safe trip.”
I glance over at them as I climb into my car, and Ashleigh, still in her father’s arms, waves at me. I wave back at the three of them as they watch me drive away.
When I pull back into my driveway, I’m surprised to see Quill sitting outside with my parents, sipping on iced tea.
“I didn’t expect you this early,” I say, as I step up onto the porch.
“We were delighted to have some time to get to know Quill,” says my mother, with an enormous smile.
“He’s a real catch, Mac,” says my dad, reaching over to punch Quill in the arm.
“Thank you!” says Quill. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him!”
“Oh my God,” I say. “Can we go already?”
“I thought we were early,” he says. I shoot him a dirty look, and he stands, laughing. “Okay, let’s go.” He turns to my parents. “It was nice to get to know you guys.”
“You’ll have to come for a barbecue sometime in the next few weeks,” says my mother. “And we’ll be having a going-away dinner for Mac before he leaves for school. You should come to that too! His grandparents will be here.”
“Why don’t you just invite him to move in?” I ask.
“That’s fine with us,” says my father. “Separate bedrooms though, at least until you’re married.”
“If we don’t leave right now, I’m going to set this house on fire,” I say to Quill.
“Okay, okay,” he says, still laughing.
I whistle for Hobo, and we walk down my driveway to the road, turning toward the bluff. As we reach the end of Anderson Lane, I hear someone call my name, and I turn to see Mr. Anderson standing up from his garden patch, walking to the fence with a full basket of tomatoes.
“Hey, Mr. Anderson,” I say. “Nice evening to get some work done.”
“No rest for the wicked,” he says with a wink. He smiles at Quill, pulls off a glove, and reaches out his hand. “John Anderson,” he says.
“Quill Daye,” says Quill, giving Mr. Anderson the kind of firm handshake that old men like.
“Quill’s my boyfriend,” I tell Mr. Anderson, who beams.
“Well, you couldn’t have done better than Mac, here,” he says. “A good guy if ever I met one.”
“Thank you!” I say. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” says Quill, “I knew that the minute I met you.”
A flush runs from my neck up to my face, a combination of embarrassment at the mushy talk in front of Mr. Anderson, and the fact that I couldn’t be happier if I tried.
“I’ll see you on Tuesday with your parents?” Mr. Anderson asks.
“You bet,” I say. “Wouldn’t miss it.” Over the past couple of weeks, at my suggestion, my family has been having a weekly supper with Mr. Anderson. We swap houses, and so far it’s been really nice. Maybe someday I’ll ask Quill if he wants to come, but for now, he’s invited to enough family gatherings.
It’s another beautiful night, and I’m happy we’re a bit early getting to the bluff. For a while, we sit and talk, just enjoying each other’s company. But before long, Carrie and Ant show up, hands raised in greeting, hopping up to join us on the ledge.
“It’s weird being here,” says Carrie. “It’s been a long time.”
“A lot has changed,” I say.
She nods, and her face darkens. “I still can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe Connor really did those things. How is it possible, Mac?”
“I guess we’ll never really know,” I say.
“Well, it’s over now,” she says. “We can start to move on with our lives. I still can’t believe you guys will be gone in less than a month.”
I nod. “It’s kind of crazy.”
“I think it’s exciting,” she says. “You’re going to have a new town, new friends, new everything.”
“Not everything,” I say, and Quill shimmies back to sit up against me. I wrap my arms around him.
Carrie smiles. “I think it’s good. I think moving on is a good thing, after what happened.”
I feel a twinge of guilt that what Carrie thinks happened isn’t the real story, but just like almost everyone else in the world, she knows enough, and I have to be satisfied with that.
It was Parnatsky who came up with the plan. She’d been tipped off by my message. The sound of my voice, faint and straining to be heard over the sound of the hurricane, had sent her to the caves on a hunch. After Doris’s confession, she took us back to her office, letting her battery operated emergency lights dimly illuminate the empty police station. Sitting around her desk, drenched with saltwater, the wind whipping outside the empty police station, we’d told her everything. My contribution to the story was minor, just an explanation of what my investigation had uncovered. It was Doris and Ben who did most of the talking. They held back no details, and it was clear they’d been waiting to unburden themselves all year.
At the end of our story, Parnatsky sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking. Then she started talking. It turned out she’d been suspicious of Doris for a while, ever since her phony breakdown in the police station. “It never sat right with me,” she said. “You were hiding something. I could see it in your eyes.”
“Are you going to arrest us?” Doris asked.
There was a long, dense pause, and the eerie, distant echo of the storm outside the police station was the only sound.
“No,” said Parnatsky finally. “As far as I can see, Connor got what he deserved, and there’s nothing to be gained from bringing you two before the courts. He’s dead. There’s no more punishment to be handed out. The only question I have is, Will the three of you be able to keep the story straight?”
The story was sketched out by the four of us in Parnatsky’s office and committed to memory by the time the hurricane had worn itself out and the sun had begun to rise on the storm-battered streets of Camera Cove. Between us, we assembled the pieces of the puzzle into a picture satisfying enough so that nobody would question whether there was a different way to put them together.
According to the account we ultimately gave to the authorities, the three of us had privately suspected Connor, but none of us had been willing to fully believe he was responsible. After Ben’s breakdown at the parade, I confronted him, and our suspicions came tumbling out. We approached Doris, hoping she would talk us out of our theory, but she had only confirmed that she’d been wondering the exact same thing. It was at this point that the three of us had decided to join forces and search for evidence of Connor’s guilt. It was my break-in to Connor’s house, and my discovery of the sketchbook, that gave us enough evidence to go to Parnatsky with our theory.
There was enough truth in our story to make it believable and easy to remember. But it was different enough from what had really happened to keep Doris and Ben safe from suspicion and prosecution…and prison.
Most important of all, it worked. With the drugs removed from the cabin and returned to Junior Merlin, Ben was free to tell the story of his secret relationship with Joey and their meetings at the Wandering Surf Cottages. The watch that Doris had removed from Connor and planted at the Abernathy house was enough to suggest that Connor had used the house as a place to plan his crimes.
The final, most important piece of the puzzle was Connor’s own death, and this solution, when Parnatsky suggested it, had made as much sense as anything: Connor had been his own final victim. He’d staged it to look like a murder, to keep the world guessing, to keep Camera Cove frightened and suspicious. In a way, it was true; after all, he’d brought himself to the point of no return.
The feds needed to talk to us, of course, but these interviews were little more than a formality. There was no denying the truth, as Connor himself had presented it: his perfect hand had sketched the murder scenes so clearly, unambiguously. After more than a year without a break in the case, the authorities were happy to finally put it to rest, and the people of Camera Cove were beyond relieved to finally put the case of the Catalog Killer behind them.
I squeeze Quill a bit tighter, and he twists around to kiss me on the cheek. He knows everything. Parnatsky agreed that we needed to tell him as well; he was too deeply invested in our investigation. It’s been a huge relief to have someone to talk to about it, and he’s just glad that it’s over, that I’m safe, and that he finally knows what happened to Joey.
Together, we stare out at the water. It is calm and sparkling, vastly different from the storm-tossed waves on the night of the hurricane. But even today, as serene as it seems, there’s a whole unseen world beneath the surface…and somewhere, a shark circles, looking for prey.
“Hello, friends.”
We turn as Doris and Ben step down from the path into the clearing. It’s been a couple of weeks since the hurricane, since the night the truth cracked open in front of me, and I haven’t seen much of them since.
I’d assumed they felt the same way I did, that they’d needed space away from everything we shared, but from the way they’ve arrived together, the comfortable way they move into the space almost in unison, I wonder if I might have read things wrong. I wonder if they’ve found comfort and solace in each other, the way Quill and I have.
Ben stops in front of me, more centered and at ease than I remember him looking in a very long time. “How’s it going man?” he asks, reaching up to slap my leg.
“I’m good,” I tell him. “You?”
He nods, smiling. “I’m okay.”
I glance past him and catch Doris looking at me. She doesn’t drop her gaze, and we stare at each other like that for a few seconds. She looks as calm as ever, but I have to wonder if it’s more authentic now—if the release of her most horrible secret has allowed her the space to breathe, after a year of holding it in.
I’ll never really know how far Doris was willing to go to keep her secret. All that matters to me is our embrace in the caves—the moment I forgave her for the awful choice she was forced to make. There might be two versions of this story, but there’s only one villain, and he’s the same in each one.
“Are we ready?” I ask her.
She nods. “You bet we are.”
I reach for my backpack and hop down from the ledge. I reach up to give Carrie a hand, and she jumps down after me. Quill and Ant stay on the ledge. I’m glad that they’re here to be witnesses, but this moment is for Ben and Carrie and Doris and me.
We gather at the tree, and I pull the thermos out of my bag.
When we buried it those years ago, I remember feeling like everything about it was epic. A time capsule. I remember all of us, even skeptical Doris, squinting toward the future, trying to imagine how much would change between that day and now.
I’m sure none of us could have imagined it, even if we’d tried.
I unscrew the top and turn it upside down, shaking it to make sure there’s nothing inside. I hesitate for a moment, then I spit into the thermos. I hand it to Ben, who does the same and passes it on to Carrie, who follows our lead. The thermos ends with Doris. She holds it for a long time, her eyes closed. Finally she spits and reaches out for the lid. I hand it to her, and she screws it back on.
“Good riddance,” she says. “Let’s do this.”
This time, I’ve remembered to bring a trowel. I bend down and quickly dig out the hole. The dirt is still loose from a few months ago, so the job is easy. I reach back, and Carrie hands me the time capsule, now empty. I press it down into the hole, then fill it back in.
When I stand, I step on the spot a few times to press the dirt down, and Carrie, Ben, and Doris follow suit.
We stay by the tree for a few moments, each of us staring at the freshly churned ground beneath it. I know we’re all thinking the same thing.