Bethany Tanner, the team captain of the Bisonettes and Dylan Whitley’s erstwhile ride-or-die, awoke beneath stars and a hard sliver of moon. She was stretched in the dirt, her hair in her face, her shorts riding high in her crotch. When she pushed her hair aside, she saw the body beside her.
She recoiled, scrambling to her feet, but some cold survival instinct stopped her as she turned to run. There was no ground behind her. She stumbled, screamed and very nearly pitched herself over the edge of a great black pit: a perfect circle of nothing, a wound in the earth. Past the circle, all around her, there was only the countryside: flat night sky, inky empty prairie.
No escape. No safety.
With a shush of falling dirt, the pit opened wider. Her head turned over her shoulder, Bethany took a few clumsy steps away but found she could go no farther. She was paralyzed by the sight. Her throat prickled with cold. She heard a distant, high screech from deep inside the dark and realized that something was moving down there, watching her.
The pit crept open wider and Bethany realized that what she’d heard was not falling dirt but a voice—a real voice, an old voice—whispering words that wound their way up her mouth and down her ears and around the inside of her skull, oily and almandine as the coiled meats that spilled from the stomach of a deer when the knife did its work.
bosheth
the voice said, and the wall around Bethany’s mind collapsed.
The faceless body slipped into the pit without a sound. A joyous smell of rot rose up to greet it.
The ground beneath her feet disappeared.
“Bethany? Bethany? Jesus Christ, girl, breathe.”
Bethany awoke with a gasp, scrambled away from the body in her bed and got tangled in her sodden sheets. Her heart beat so hard she thought her veins would burst.
“Bethany, it’s me. It’s Jasmine.”
Jasmine. Not a faceless corpse but Jasmine Lopez, the second-prettiest girl on the squad.
Bethany breathed. The panic faded. Her bedroom seemed to form itself around her: her massive bed, her tall dresser, the frilly lounging sofa she’d taken from her mother’s room after the divorce. Sunlight prodded at the curtains. In the distance Bethany could hear the cows lowing on the ranch behind her property.
The whispering voice—the old voice—went silent in her head.
“Fuck my cunt,” Bethany said with a sigh. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
Bethany caught something on Jasmine’s face in the dim light, a hesitation.
“How about you? Did you sleep okay?”
Jasmine sat up and stretched, fluffed out her hair. “I can’t believe any of this is real.”
Bethany’s phone began to chime its alarm. She reached over Jasmine to silence it, checked her messages, felt a dull ache of loss replacing the fear around her heart. Dylan was dead. Finally, after everything they’d been through, Dylan was dead.
And Jasmine hadn’t answered her question.
Before she could press her friend, Bethany caught the rattle of the garage door rising beneath her. She scrambled for a shirt, for eyeliner.
“Is that your dad?” Jasmine asked, her nails clicking on her phone.
Bethany fumbled with the light in her bathroom. “I can’t let him see me like this.”
Russ Tanner had just steered his suitcase into their sprawling kitchen when Bethany and Jasmine reached the foot of the stairs. Her father was like many men around town, a towering former lineman who’d gone to seed. The last five years had added several inches to his waist and a jiggle to his chest. His embrace had grown no weaker, however. Bethany felt the air deflate from her lungs as he wrapped his arms around her, squeezing like he wanted to break her back.
“Oh, Spud,” he murmured into Bethany’s hair. “You must be a wreck.”
“I was yesterday,” Bethany replied in her calmest voice.
“I came back as soon as I heard.” He ignored Jasmine completely. “Have you talked to the police yet?”
“They were at school yesterday but I left early. Why?”
Her father dropped a coffee pod into their gleaming new Keurig machine, dug a bottle of bourbon from behind the cereal—it was never too early for Russ Tanner. “You just tell me when the cops come to see you,” he said. “I don’t want you talking to them alone.”
“I wouldn’t have anything to say. I was sick in bed all weekend.”
Her father appraised her. “It took the fried chicken off your legs.”
Bethany felt Jasmine hold in a shudder.
“We’ve got to run,” Bethany said.
Her father spiked his coffee and took a long sip. “You won’t talk to the police alone,” he repeated.
“I’ll call you if they come for me.” She kissed her father on the cheek. “Which they won’t.”
She and Jasmine were halfway up the stairs when he stopped her. “You were in bed all weekend.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I’m just wondering,” he continued. “You had the strength to clean the garage when you were sick?”
Oh fuck. Oh fuck.
“I told Maria to hose it out yesterday,” Bethany said, praying her voice didn’t betray the panic in her chest. “Some mud got under the door in the storm.”
From the stairs she watched her father take another long slurp of his coffee. He nodded at her, pulled loose his phone. “I heard that rain was wild.”