As Rebecca returned to cleaning out the kitchen drawers, I dug through my school supplies, searching for the journal entries. I’d been rethinking everything Theo had written or said to me. The words on the phone, the vaguely threatening remarks in his emails. Do you ever wonder who else sees you? he had written.
And now I wondered what else I had misinterpreted, filtering through a different person or a different context. I flipped through Theo’s journal to the entry he made in the weeks before Bethany was found at the side of the lake. I read the words again, as I had read them to Kyle earlier:
The boy sees her and he knows what she has done.
The boy imagines twisted limbs and the color red.
What if he wasn’t talking about an imaginary person? I had briefly thought back then that his journal entry was referring to me, thought he was implying that he knew about my past—because I was looking for it. I was waiting for it. Imagined he could’ve been talking about the terrible thing people thought I had done: lying in a story that led to the death of Aaron Hampton. But what if he had been talking about something else?
What if he was trying to tell me something right then?
I needed him to explain. He had to be on the computer right now.
I’m listening, I wrote.
The computer dinged in response.
Meet me there in 30 minutes.
I looked at Rebecca, looked at the clock, looked back at the screen.
Meet you where? I wrote.
I waited. I waited. I refreshed my inbox. Ten minutes passed and he still hadn’t responded. If he hadn’t by now, he wasn’t going to. There were twenty minutes left.
I grabbed my keys. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Hey, wait. Where are you going?” Rebecca took a step closer, and I worried she would insist on coming with me.
“One hour, Rebecca,” I called as I walked through the door. “I’ll come back.” I raced out the door, strode to my car, and hoped that was true.
There were only so many places he could mean. I knew where he lived, and I knew where the man in the car had been found.
Ten minutes later, I pulled into the empty lot in front of Lakeside Tavern. The lights were off inside, too early for the lunch shift, and the flag whipped on top of the pole. I walked around to the back, to the packed gravel incline where they had pulled Emmy’s car from the lake.
I stepped in a pocket of mud, the cold wind whipping up off the water, and wished I’d remembered my jacket. I was alone. I checked my watch, stood at the water’s edge, and scanned the trees around me.
“Close enough, I guess.” His voice came from down the shoreline, and I stepped closer to the trees. I put my hand on the nearest trunk to keep myself steady, and I saw him sitting on a felled log near the waterline around the bend. He wore a brown shirt, dark track pants, mud-streaked sneakers. If he hadn’t spoken, I might’ve looked right past him—right through him.
“What are we doing here, Theo,” I said.
He tipped his head to the side. “Weird that you don’t remember. I could’ve sworn it was you . . .”
“What was me,” I said. I walked closer toward him, rubbing the sides of my arms.
“The girl that night. The girl dragging the body to the lake . . .”
I sucked in a breath. “You saw it?”
“I see a lot of things,” he answered.
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
He stood then, and I remembered he was so much taller than I was. “No,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t know the man. I thought maybe he did something to the girl first. Maybe he deserved it. None of my business, right. The girls were both so much smaller.” He looked me over again.
“Girls? More than one?” And I had this awful hope, even as he was telling me this. Emmy. Maybe he had seen her.
“Not at first. First there was just the one.”
“What did she look like?”
“Well, like I said, the girl dragging the body, she looked just like you.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his lips thinning as he smiled.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“When was this, Theo.” And when he didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t you think you at least owe me that?” But I knew better than to think that the world was fair, that for every take there would be a give.
He laughed then. “By the way, there are no cameras in the library,” he said. “Most you could get is an IP address. Which would be the same for any teacher, student, or employee of the school. Including Coach Cobb.”
“How do you know that?”
“God, do you have any clue what happens in that library after hours?” He laughed again. “No, I’m sure there are no cameras.”
“I have the phone number,” I said. “Of the burner phone. I know it was you.”
He tipped his head, just faintly. Neither confirming nor denying. “You don’t have anything, Leah,” he said.
I turned around, walked away. I wouldn’t get anywhere, but I would not be in Theo Burton’s debt.
“It was a Monday night,” he called after me, and I froze. “Or Tuesday morning. Couple weeks ago, maybe a month. I can’t remember exactly. I was on my way back from JT’s trailer. Cuts right by your place, you know. I like to walk through the woods. Nobody notices.” I turned to face him and saw that he was smiling. I follow you, Leah. I watch. “Anyway, I saw that girl, holding him under the arms, in the woods on my way back home. I followed them here. His limbs were all twisted, and the front of his shirt was covered in red. I knew he was dead. He was already dead.”
“You didn’t do anything?”
“And risk my own life? Anyway, she seemed to be waiting for something. And that’s when the car pulls up.” He pointed to the gravel behind us where I’d been waiting for him, as if I already knew all this. “And that’s when the other girl gets out, and she’s freaking out. I mean, I’m surprised nobody heard them—I was so sure she was going to call the police.”
The breeze blew in off the water, but my skin felt numb. I couldn’t possibly feel any colder.
“What did she look like, this other girl?”
“Tiny little thing, short hair, skinny. But it was dark.”
“What did she say, Theo. When she was freaking out. What did she say.” I needed to know whether the police were right about Emmy after all. That she was not a victim but a perpetrator. Or if she had merely stumbled too close to the danger, not realizing what lurked just inside. Those angry letters I’d found at Bethany’s, the hidden rage, undelivered, festering for years. I wanted so desperately to believe that I had not been blinded by her, too.
“I don’t remember. I wasn’t really paying attention to her.” Implying that he was watching Bethany closely. The girl who could’ve been me. “Like I said, she was kind of freaking out, but the other girl, she was so calm. Said, He showed up at my place, asking for more. He had to go. You know he did. We have to do this.” He licked his lips. “I tried to get closer, to hear. But I think they heard me instead, because they both stopped talking—and then I left. I don’t know what happened next. But I’m guessing they put him in the car, didn’t they?” He kept saying they as if he meant something else—that it was really me.
“Okay,” I said. I could not bring myself to thank him.
“Hey, Leah? This is only between you and me.” A promise, or a threat, that he would not say the same to the police. That I was now his only confidante, and he mine. “I’m only telling you because we’re the same, I can tell.”
He made my skin crawl, but there was something to it. We were both drawn to this, if for different reasons. We were each seeing just a piece of the puzzle, letting the story fill in around it. Bethany and I were not identical, but in the dark . . . Theo had seen what he wanted to see.
There had been a few different sequences of events, depending on whom you asked at first. For Theo, I was the suspect. For Izzy, it had been Theo. For the police, a man named Davis Cobb. And now, for me, there was a different lead. We forced the pieces until they fit what we thought we knew.
Question witnesses and they’ll say: It all happened so fast.
They misremember.
They pull on pieces, let their minds fill in the rest. We crave logical cause and effect, the beginning, middle, and end.
Theo had given me something: Bethany Jarvitz pulling the body of James Finley through the woods. Not such an innocent victim. Not such a victim at all.
THE BAD GUY, THE one we could only imagine in the mask, in the shadows—it was always closer than we liked to imagine. A man living in the same apartment. A professor in front of your class. There was a time, for some, when it was even closer—an unfamiliar stirring, a spark, like I imagined inside Theo. I tried to remember that age, that moment. To go back to that time in my life when I saw it head-on for the first time. When we flirted with danger and strangers. When we tested our boundaries, the wild calling to us. When we called it closer to see how close we could get. We crossed the line to find it.
And then, for most, the danger became something else, separate and unapproachable. A monster.
But there was a moment first, before we categorized it and filed it away, when it wasn’t so unapproachable just yet. When it brushed up against you and you had to decide.
Theo, watching the woman he thought was me, dragging a man soaked in blood. Watching and wanting.
I STUMBLED BACK TO my place in a daze. The facts re-sorting themselves. Bethany had dragged a dead James Finley through the woods to Lakeside Tavern, where they’d disposed of him in Emmy’s car. And then what? And then Emmy had disappeared and Bethany had turned up near-dead.
I was breathing too heavily when I slid open the glass doors—I felt everything too strong, too sharp. I had answers, and yet what did I really have? An unreliable witness. An unreliable witness who believed it had been me. Everything back to me.
“Leah?” Rebecca had a hand on my arm, suggesting she’d already said my name once. “Are you okay?” She led me to a chair at the table. “Sit,” she said, and she placed her fingers at the base of my neck as if taking my pulse.
I wanted to sink into her, into Rebecca the doctor who could help the ones who could still be helped. “Rebecca?” I said, and I was asking her for something. Really asking this time.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
I could tell her. She was my sister, and we were alone in the woods, and her fingers were on my pulse point, the most vulnerable spot. “I wrote an article,” I said. “I wrote an article about a girl who committed suicide, implicating a professor in her death.”
She wordlessly pulled up a chair, sat across from me. And I told her all of it.
“So Aaron killed himself after the article,” she said—the first words she had spoken since I began.
“Yes.”
“Aaron killed himself, and the paper found out you couldn’t prove the statement. That you made it up. That there wasn’t a source who could back it up.”
“That’s what they thought.”
“Could you be charged legally?”
“It’s complicated. The paper won’t say that’s why I was fired—actually, they won’t say I was fired at all. And, I mean, there are connections between Aaron and this girl, if they really want to play that game. The pills were his. I’d bet anything on it. I knew him, Rebecca. He wasn’t a good man. Nobody wants it to come out.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Paige. Paige is the problem. She could file a civil suit against me, basically take me for all I’m worth, and ruin my name forever. Not that she’d need to, she has plenty of money on her own. But she could. She had a restraining order against me—”
“A restraining order?”
“I was trying to warn her. Over and over, I told her. I told her I was going to print it, that she could get out, and she twisted it all around that I was verbally assaulting her, that I was stalking her . . .”
Rebecca’s brows drew together. “That’s a big leap, from calling to stalking.”
“When she wouldn’t pick up the phone, I went to her house.”
“Jesus, Leah.”
“I know. I know. But it was Paige.”
Paige, who always saw the good in people. Who saw the good in me. She’d changed, or I had—I wasn’t sure which anymore.
“You’re sure it was him?” Rebecca asked, and I didn’t hesitate, I said yes, like I always did. To let in doubt at this stage would be fatal. The darkest corner, from which there would be no coming back.
“How are you so sure?”
I couldn’t tell her this part, like I’d told Emmy. Rebecca was not going anywhere. She was not a secret. She had ties to everyone else in my life. And it wasn’t that I was ashamed it had happened. Not anymore. I was ashamed I had left it alone.
Who does the truth belong to? I thought back then that it was mine. That it was enough for me to know. I didn’t tell Paige. The words had simmered up, and I had stifled them back down. Your boyfriend—Aaron—he—
Didn’t tell the police, even though that was what I would’ve told someone else to do. I didn’t want to be exposed, to get dragged into a case of he said, she said, the most difficult to make stick, I knew from experience. He tried to kill me. I never said it. And I’d left Paige with him, unaware of the danger. Ignored it, let them get married, have a baby.
And by not telling the police, I was ultimately responsible for all that followed. He could not have gone eight years before trying again. He could not have made the leap so seamlessly. There had to be more of us. And this was the part I was ashamed of: that there might be one less square on the grid of that newspaper article had I done something years earlier. It was my wrong to right.
“I knew him, Rebecca. I know what he’s like. What he does.”
Rebecca must’ve sensed something in the silence, something from which there would be no going back. “So,” she said, cutting it off, looking the other way, letting us continue, “you can’t go back, then.”
“No, Rebecca. I really can’t.”
She looked around the house again, sniffed at the dust lingering in the streams of sunlight. “I mean, there is something charming about it all. Nature, I guess.”
I laughed, a pained sound, and Rebecca laughed, too.