KAT
LAST YEAR
MAY
There was no way around it; if my family knew I’d run away with Jesse, they would move heaven and earth to find us and punish us. The idea of me being with Jesse was so distasteful that my grandmother had threatened to take away my education—what would she do to me if I threw my entire carefully planned future away to escape with him?
The only way to ensure that they stopped looking, eventually, was for everyone to think we were dead.
We spent the next several days planning our mysterious deaths. Obviously there would be no bodies, only the grimmest of discoveries that left little hope we’d ever be found. Jesse suggested pushing my car down an embankment, somewhere heavily wooded and far from home. Upstate New York, maybe, near my grandmother’s lake house. How many people have crashed their cars and, unable to find cell service, wandered into the woods only to succumb to the elements?
But I wasn’t comfortable hoping everyone would just forget about us, accept that Jesse and I were a pile of bones waiting to be uncovered in a few years by some backwoods morel hunter. Captain Johnathan Marcotte himself would comb every inch of every mile of the Catskill woods to find me until he brought me home to rest.
So, then, one of the only ways to truly disappear a human body: water.
My father, of all people, had given me the idea.
He’d brought my sister and me to Blackstone Quarry as children, on one of our family trips to the lake house. He’d bored us with the details about how many miles deep and wide it was. The punch line of his story? A couple of fool teenagers went cliff diving at the quarry when he was young; the water was too dark, too cold, too filled with crevices, and two of the kids drowned, their bodies lost to the quarry forever. Emma and I had better never acquire that taste for danger, lest we succumbed to a similar fate.
Kat Marcotte and her boyfriend jumping to their deaths at Blackstone Quarry would shock everyone who knew us, might even warrant a People magazine cover with why? splashed above our faces.
Marian and my father would know exactly why. They would know they were responsible for sending me to the bottom of the quarry; they would have to live with the fact that even the Marcotte money could not change that dredging Blackstone Quarry, searching every corner for our bodies, was an impossible task.
It was almost foolproof. Except for, of course, money.
Jesse and I had a combined twenty-five hundred dollars to our names. All of the cash Jesse had saved working over the years had gone to buying his piece of crap car.
I’ve had a bank account since I turned ten. All of my money—birthday checks, babysitting earnings—went right in so I could earn a pathetic interest rate and feel like a big girl.
But I wouldn’t be able to withdraw it all, or even a large chunk, without setting off alarm bells. I imagined investigators jumping to check my bank account, maybe having a chuckle that Marian Sullivan-Marcotte’s granddaughter had six hundred and sixty-seven dollars in her personal checking.
We needed money to escape. We’d need a car, for one thing, and a place to stay. We’d need enough cash in reserve to tide us over until it was safe enough to look for work as new people, in a town hundreds of miles from here.
The lack of money threatened to cripple the entire plan. And even if we had the money to buy a car off Craigslist, to find an apartment online, how could we do any of that without leaving a trail?
Maybe even more than money, we needed someone we could trust.
The next afternoon, a Saturday, Amos agreed to meet me outside the coffee and pastry shop in the village. Summer had arrived violently and without warning; most of the tables inside the air-conditioned café were filled. We opted for one of the patio tables out front.
I kept one eye trained on the sidewalk for any stragglers passing by who might overhear us. Amos listened to my plea, fingers steepled below his lips, ignoring the croissant and glass of iced tea in front of him.
“I could find a way to pay you back, eventually,” I said, my voice faltering at the look on his face.
“I’d give you everything I had, if I could,” Amos said. “But I’m completely broke.”
“What?” There had been murmurings, of course, about Amos’s father not sending my aunt Erin money once Amos turned eighteen. But despite her not working since Amos was born, she was still a Marcotte. “Are you serious? What about your mom?”
Amos sipped his iced tea. “The Audi is leased, her credit cards are maxed out, and Marian pays the mortgage.”
My fingers found my lips, now prickly with panic. Amos, who was wearing a $250 pair of Ray-Bans, was telling me he was broke. “What about all the money you make, you know? Dealing.”
“Kat, I’ve got a few hundred bucks under my mattress. And I owe a supplier a grand for some shit the village rent-a-cops confiscated from me when they pulled me over last month.”
We fell quiet as a woman walking two boxers passed by. One tugged at its leash, sniffed the potted geranium in the planter by our table. When she was gone, Amos said, “How serious are you about this? You know how much it would hurt your mother? Emma?”
“I can’t do it.” I pulled my gauzy cardigan around my body. “You know Grandma won’t just let me walk away from this family.”
“How much do you hate her?”
“Even more than my father.”
“Then,” Amos said, squeezing the lemon perched at the rim of his iced tea glass, “I think I have an idea.”
My pulse went still as he reached into his pocket. He pulled out a cell phone; on old Motorola flip phone that Amos Fornier wouldn’t be caught dead using.
He covered the phone with his hand and pushed it toward me. “From here on, I’ll contact you through this. Hide it well. There are people in this phone you don’t ever want to be associated with.”
I swallowed, looked up at Amos.
“What’s your idea?” I asked.
Amos smiled; my heartbeat moved into my ears. I didn’t dare breathe.
He took a sip from his iced tea, tilted his head back toward the late-day sun. “Cash in on what she owes us.”