Georgie’s breathing had returned to normal by the time they got back downtown. She no longer felt like she might punch the accelerator through the floor. At first the urge to get away from the house had been like a needle at the base of her skull. Now she started to relax, but glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the cop who’d been following them turn off, leaving them alone. Matthew faced her across the bench seat, still holding the folded piece of notebook paper with Dorne’s message printed on it.
“We need to find Scottie,” he said. His eyes were deep black pools.
“I think we need to get you somewhere you can rest awhile,” she said.
“You’d want to be in on it if it was your dad we were talking about, wouldn’t you?”
“In on what?” she asked. “What are you planning?”
He turned away and the sight of the cut behind his ear nearly made her gasp. Voelker had told her to try to keep him awake. You shouldn’t go to sleep if you had a concussion, he’d said. As if any of them were going to sleep at all, anyway. She stopped herself now from telling him again he needed to go to the hospital, knowing he wouldn’t listen. Instead, she turned down a side street and headed for Scott Dorne’s house. She hoped he still lived in the same place.
Scott answered fast enough for her to know he was still up. The TV was on in the front room, playing some action movie she knew but couldn’t recall the name of. He smiled at first when he saw them on his porch, but got confused when he noticed the blood on Matthew’s shirt. He waved them inside. “What’s happening?” he asked.
There was no good way to start, so together they explained everything they knew. Matthew told the story more or less straight, with Georgie stepping in to correct him when he fumbled the details. She watched Scott’s face—his smile widening at first, thinking it was a joke. Soon a hard knot formed in the middle of his forehead. He kept tensing the muscles in his arms, ropes fluttering in his jaw. Matthew couldn’t stop touching the back of his head as he talked, but already his eyes didn’t look as odd as before. Each moment he was growing more and more sure of himself. The note Chris Dorne had left on Georgie’s truck sat on the coffee table, the paper open like the wings of a bird. The message—CALL ME PLEASE—staring up at them. When they finished the story, Scott stared at his knees.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You guys have completely fucking lost it.”
“It’s hard to accept, I know,” she said. Even as they had recounted the story, she found herself trying to explain it away. She kept searching for some other explanation, some misunderstanding that could make it all okay. “I was in his house. I saw the wig. I saw the coat.”
“My old coat in his garage?” Scott said. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“He had gas cans,” she said. “You should have seen his face before he knew I was watching him. Like a person I’d never met before.”
“He told me everything,” Matthew said. “Just before he tried to kill me.”
“Says you,” Scott said, “but you’ve been out of your mind the whole time you’ve been back. We hung out, remember? You were off in your own little dreamland.”
“He didn’t imagine the old car parked in that storage unit,” she said. “He didn’t whack himself on the head and lock himself in a freezer.”
“Yeah? Whose car is it?” Scott asked. “His dad’s? Whose name is on the lease? His dad’s? Maybe he’s trying to cover up for stuff his dad did, not mine.”
“Scottie—”
“You’re calling my dad a murderer. You know that, right? You just expect me to sit here and take it?”
“My dad, too,” Matthew said. “My dad was in the car when they hit the kid. They were both drunk, high, whatever. He helped cover it up. For years they kept it quiet. That’s what this whole thing has been about from the start.”
Scott looked at him like he was a circus seal trying to balance a beach ball on its nose. “No,” he said. “That’s not possible. Just listen to yourself. How can you sit there and say it with no expression on your face? Like it doesn’t even bother you.”
“Because I’ve known it all along,” Matthew said.
Now she turned to look at him. “What?” she said.
“I saw them,” Matthew said. “In the garage when I was twelve years old, right after it happened. I saw Carson Ward’s body in there.” He hadn’t told the cops this part. When Georgie heard it she almost came out of her seat. Her pulse ticked. She willed herself to be still. “Maybe something about getting hit with that golf club?” Matthew said. “Or maybe just being in the storage space with the car and pieces of his old bicycle? I don’t know. Something brought it back. That whole day. I remember it now.”
“You remember it now?” Scott asked. “That’s convenient, isn’t it? That’s really fucking convenient.”
Matthew took a moment to gather himself, then told the two of them another story. He recounted the better part of that whole summer—when he and Georgie were twelve and Scott was fifteen—and as he talked, she realized she remembered it, too. The Rose family car going missing. Chris and Dave always being gone, sneaking off on their secret missions. At the time they all thought it was something to do with the neighborhood association. It was the summer Matthew changed, becoming withdrawn and sullen almost overnight. Then the fire at the candy store. The stories about Carson Ward going missing were fresh in her mind because she’d just read them at the newspaper office. She remembered Chris Dorne inserting himself into the investigation, becoming a neighborhood spokesman and using it to start his political career. Matthew had it all exactly right. Every detail, every feeling just as it had happened. She looked at Scott, seeing a hard acceptance dawn in his face. He knew now this wasn’t a delusion. He knew Matthew was telling the truth.
Georgie listened to him talk with a growing sense of dread in her chest, knowing they couldn’t run from it anymore. Matthew said the memory ended with him running from the garage, being chased by Dorne and his dad, but he already knew the rest. He knew he ran to the woods and tried to hide under a big spruce tree, a place Georgie knew as a favorite hideout when they were kids. The men found him and dragged him out, lectured him, scared him, swore him to secrecy. Matthew said he remembered the fear reaching into every part of him the way vines spread, the way bacteria multiplied. In the coming days, months, and years, the fear was all he knew. The fear clutched him every time he saw his dad or Dorne. Their knowing looks, their pleading eyes. He didn’t know what to do besides keep running. He spent long days anywhere but home. He quit swimming. He quit everything. The fear spread until he thought he would burst. His head rattled like the top of a boiling pot, but still he kept their secret.
He said he just kept waiting. Waiting for it to get out, for his dad and Dorne to get dragged off in handcuffs. There was a time when he expected every knock at the door to be the cops. Kept expecting Child & Family Services to show up and take the kids away. The tension was unbearable, but he decided he would wait it out. He would withdraw like a turtle in its shell until someone came to make the feeling stop. But then that never happened. Nobody came for them. Nobody came at all. The fear dissolved into the buried-alive feeling of making himself forget. It cocooned inside him, and when it emerged it had been remade as guilt and anger.
He didn’t think it was possible, but eventually that anger cooled, too. After that, he started making excuses. He told himself he couldn’t have seen what he thought he saw. It was just a dream, he thought, a nightmare, even though he couldn’t bury it all the way. The parts he couldn’t forget—the cold of the woods, the look on his dad’s face in the garage—he buried with other things. Happy, druggy things. It only sort of worked. Underneath it was all still there, lurking like a boulder beneath the rush of his thoughts. So, he did what they did. He kept it hidden and went on with his life.
“I don’t understand how this works,” Scott said. “So, you’re saying you just now remember all this? This night in the garage is the one that came back to you? This night of all nights?”
“I can’t explain it either,” Matthew said. “I don’t understand it. Are you guys sure I never said anything? Never mentioned it to you? Ever?”
“No,” Georgie said. “You never did.”
“I think we would remember something like that,” Scott said.
Matthew leaned forward in his chair, pressing his face into his knees. He groaned, the sound reminding her of an injured animal. The worst thing he could imagine was true, she realized. It had shaped his whole life. Scott stared, motionless. She knelt by Matthew, wrapping him in her arms, feeling the hot nape of his neck. After a minute he said something, the words muffled by their bodies, and she had to pull away. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”
But when he spoke it wasn’t to her.
“You still need proof?” he asked Scott. His face was wet with tears but his voice was steady. “Then let’s call him. He wants us to call him. Let’s see what he has to say.”
They decided Georgie should make the call. Dorne had left the note on her truck, asking her to reach out to him. The phone was sweaty and slick in her hand. He answered before she was ready, picking up after the very first ring. She pulled the phone away from her ear and switched on its external speaker. The breezy sound she heard on the line reminded her of her first call with Donna Green. She knew Dorne was somewhere outside.
“I didn’t think you were going to call,” he said, a bad connection distorting his voice. Wherever he was, it sounded far away.
“I’ve got Matthew here with me now,” she said, voice flat, “and Scott.” She glanced at the two of them, but they stared only at the phone. Scott’s jaw was clenched so tight it looked like he might crack all his teeth.
She could hear Dorne breathing on the other end of the line, knowing he was processing everything. She had been trying to get herself ready for how he would play it. She had a hard time picturing him now without thinking of the hungry look she’d seen on his face when he came into his house that evening. It made her think back on every conversation they’d had since Abbie Green died. Anger flared in her chest. Of course, Dorne had just been using her for information. Now the news that Matthew was alive, that Scott was there and they all knew what he’d done, took him aback. “Can they hear me?” he asked. “Am I on speaker?”
“We’re here,” Matthew said.
“Dad,” Scott said. “What’s going on?”
Dorne’s voice had gone lifeless. Georgie felt like she was hearing him—really hearing him—for the first time. “So, this is it?” he said. “This is how it ends? I spent a long time imagining this moment. I always thought it would be different.”
“Chris,” she said. “Tell us where you are. We’ll come get you and bring you in.”
He sighed or maybe laughed. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I won’t be ‘coming in.’ I just wanted to talk to you. To say good-bye.”
Their eyes all met. That sounded final. In the silence, she heard a faint clanking sound on the line, like a hammer striking metal, then the far-off blare of a horn. “Where are you going?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”
“Dad,” Scott said. “You need to talk to us.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Dorne said. “I want you guys to know—”
A low roar filled the line, distant but coming on fast. The sound broke apart, too much for the phone’s tiny speaker to handle. It blotted out Dorne’s voice. Then the line went dead.
“Wait,” she said. The strange sound on the phone pinched out as the call ended. “Fuck,” she said, “he’s gone. We lost him.”
Scott picked at the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “No,” he said. “I know where he is.”
“What?” she said. “Where?”
“That sound,” Matthew said. “It was a train. He hung up before it got too close.”
The two of them exchanged a look. “He’s at the tunnel,” Scott said. “By the old dam.”
“The police, then,” she said. “We call Voelker. They’ll go arrest him.”
Scott shook his head. “It might take them hours to mobilize. That call could’ve spooked him. He might be bugging out right now. We can make it in forty-five minutes.”
“You’re talking about going after him?” she said. “Are you nuts?”
“I have to talk to him,” Scott said. “I want to see his face when he says all this shit.”
“I’m going with you,” Matthew said.
“The hell you are,” she said. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m going.”
She looked around the room and saw she wasn’t going to win this one. The two of them were together in it, just like old times. “We’ll all go, then,” she said.
She stood up too fast and had to press her palms against the couch for balance. She said she felt sick to her stomach, needed to use the restroom. She knew this apartment, had been here a hundred times before. She had spent bored nights slumped on the couch watching TV, emptied takeout boxes in the cramped kitchen. It had been a long time but nothing had changed.
The bathroom still stank of urine. The inside of the tub was flecked with grime, the bulb in one wall sconce burned out. She shut the door and leaned against the bathroom vanity, her phone still in her hand. She looked at the call log, noting that their call with Dorne had taken less than three minutes. The bathroom fan screeched an offbeat rhythm and she shut it off. She could hear the two of them out in the living room still talking. Just quiet enough that she couldn’t make out the words. It made her want to storm out, walk straight past them and out the door. She could go home and pull the covers over her head, sleep until Dorne was either caught or disappeared forever. Instead, she turned on the sink to cover their talk. She switched the phone on again and sent a text message to Voelker.