SIX
Still wearing her bathrobe, Karen sat at the kitchen table, staring at her phone, willing it to ring. After a minute of silence, she tapped the screen a few times and brought up Joshua’s number. Called it. Got the same result as she had with the previous three calls she’d placed to him over the past fifteen minutes: a few rings, then voice mail.
This is Joshua. Leave a message.
“It’s me,” Karen said. “Again. Just . . . call me when you get this. Let me know you’re okay.”
She set the phone on the table. Paced around the kitchen. Filled a glass with water and took a drink. Stared out the window. Anything to distract herself from the unease eating away inside her.
Calm down, she told herself.
Fifteen minutes ago, just before four in the morning, she woke up to go to the bathroom and found the door to Joshua’s room open a crack. When she went to close it, she saw that his bed was empty. She started to worry after she couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. Started to panic once she got no response to a call and a text. And now, after a few more calls and texts had gone unanswered, her panic had escalated to something more. Something close to hysteria.
She walked down the hallway, back into Joshua’s room. Checked in his closet—nothing but clothes. Checked under his bed—an old golf bag with no clubs in it, some plastic storage bins, a few random socks. He wasn’t here, not that she expected to find him. Did she really think he’d be hiding in his room like he did when they played hide-and-go-seek when he was young?
Karen went back to the kitchen. Paced. She sat down again and ran her hands through her hair. She remembered how distant Joshua had acted yesterday. Was there something more to it than normal teenager problems? Was the story about the damage to his—
She tensed up in her chair. His car. She hadn’t checked to see if his car was still there.
She hurried out to the garage. Her Chevy Malibu was inside. His Altima wasn’t. So he’d gone somewhere—where? Why didn’t he leave her a message? And why wasn’t he answering his phone?
She went back to the kitchen. Called Joshua again. Sent another text. No response to either.
Call his friends—that was her next step. Maybe he’d sneaked out of the house to meet up with them. It was a Friday night, after all—well, Saturday morning now. But something still felt off. Instinct, intuition, whatever you wanted to call it.
Maybe Teddy knew something. He and Joshua were supposed to watch some golf tournament on TV together this weekend. Maybe Joshua couldn’t sleep, went over to his father’s house early. That didn’t make much sense, but there was always a chance.
She grabbed her phone to call Teddy—and then it hit her.
The phone. Not her phone. Joshua’s phone.
She could check the location.
Last year, when Joshua’s grades started to drop, she’d given him an ultimatum: he couldn’t do anything until he finished his homework—no hanging out with his girlfriend at the time, no golfing, no going to his friends’ houses. To make sure he stuck to it, she installed a tracking program on his phone so she could check his location on her computer. The whole thing felt a little weird to her—it was so invasive—and when his grades improved almost immediately, she stopped using the program.
But she hadn’t deleted it.
Right now, she could see where he was.
She sprang up from the couch and hurried to her bedroom. She sat down at the small computer desk in the corner. Opened her laptop and entered her password. Practically broke the mouse button as she clicked around to access the phone tracker app.
The program opened. A map appeared onscreen. Right in the middle, there it was: a red dot.
Joshua’s phone.
The dot was about fifteen miles south of Cedar Rapids, down in the middle of Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area.
What was he doing all the way out there? A party? Doubtful. It was freezing. And he always said something to her if he had late-night plans; that was their agreement.
She looked at the dot onscreen. She didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t know if he was safe. Didn’t know anything, only that she was too nervous and worried to sit still.
She printed out the map, then threw off her bathrobe, changed into a sweatshirt and jeans, and hurried out to the garage.
She backed down the driveway and started driving along the gravel road, heading toward the red dot.
Joshua scanned the ground, his eyes following the flashlight beam as it swept back and forth across the terrain. The hand holding the flashlight was trembling. The longer he searched, the less likely it seemed that the glove was out here. It was a horrifying thought. He had no idea where else the glove could be.
He’d been searching throughout the forest for twenty minutes—Thirty? Forty? He had no concept of time—sweeping the flashlight back and forth, back and forth, all across the ground. He’d almost given up but had continued on.
It was so spooky and isolated here. The forest was quiet and still, but he’d heard noises as he searched. An animal howling in the distance. Branches rustling in the wind. At one point, he thought he’d heard a noise coming from inside his car. Sounded like a ringing or beeping—his phone, maybe? He searched his pockets and realized he’d left it in the car. He’d check it later; his phone wasn’t his focus now. Didn’t make sense that someone would be calling him this late at night, anyway.
He kept searching, focused on the ground, feeling more and more worried with every passing second—and then finally, unbelievably, there it was.
The glove.
It was a good fifty feet from the body, right beside a cluster of pine needles and small shrubs, which partially camouflaged it. He had no idea how it had gotten so far from the body. He didn’t remember walking in this area after the accident—but then again, he’d been so overwhelmed that he didn’t remember much of anything that happened that night.
He picked the glove up off the ground and stuffed it in his coat pocket. He walked over to his car. Grabbed the door handle.
And then he stopped. He shone his flashlight down and looked at the body. He couldn’t resist. It was like he didn’t have a choice, like he was being pulled to it by an invisible force.
For the first time since he arrived, he got a good look at it. The body was facedown, so he could see only the back of the dead man’s head. Dark hair. Black coat and pants. One arm was splayed out at an awkward angle. A pair of earbuds dangled by a thin white wire from his jacket pocket. He’d been listening to music right before the accident. Probably hadn’t heard the car approaching.
Joshua walked over and looked down at the body. Close-up, he could just barely see the blood covering the ground, soaked into the dirt around the body.
He nudged the body with his foot, flopping it onto its back, and got a close-up look at the aftermath of Thursday night.
The cold weather had slowed decomposition, but the body was still grotesque, nothing more than a bloated, decaying corpse. Dried blood everywhere. His expression was frozen, mouth open, empty, unblinking eyes staring up at the sky. His nose was a crooked mess and there was a nasty gash on the right side of his head, just above an area where his skull was partially caved in.
The sight of the body brought back every memory from Thursday night. The crunch of the car hitting the man, the thud of the body smashing into the windshield, the frantic moments after the accident, when he’d realized the man wasn’t dead and—
Joshua’s stomach turned as he thought back to what happened then. A wave of emotion nearly knocked him over. In some ways, this moment right now was worse than the accident. After the accident, everything had happened so quickly that it had felt like an out-of-body experience. Like it wasn’t real. But not tonight. Right now, he was calm. Composed. Everything was slowed down, not going a million miles an hour.
Looking at the body, he thought about going to the police. This instant, calling them up and telling them everything. Doing the right thing. He hadn’t been thinking straight Thursday night; everything had been so frantic. But right now, he could go to the police. Clear his conscience. Maybe he—
A light glinted in the corner of his eye. He snapped his head toward it. Every muscle in his body froze.
A pair of headlights was approaching on the road, heading straight toward him. The car pulled behind his and stopped. This close, he recognized the car instantly.
It was his mom’s car.
Karen saw Joshua’s car, parked on the side of the road, then saw Joshua a few feet away, holding a flashlight, standing over something on the ground. A dark, shadowy shape.
She pulled her car up behind his and killed the engine.
“What in the world are you doing out here?” she said, stepping out of the car. She walked toward him.
“Mom, I—”
“It’s the middle of the night and—”
She stopped. Up close, even in the darkness, she could see the object Joshua was standing over. The shadowy shape was . . . a person.
Face a ghostly white.
Covered in blood.
Not moving.
“What . . .” she said. “What . . . happened?”
Joshua stared back, silent.
“Is he . . . dead?”
Joshua nodded. “Yeah. I hit him with my car and . . .” He shook his head. “It’s complicated.”
She looked at his car. Glanced back down at the body. Looked back at Joshua.
“You hit him . . . and killed him?”
“Yeah. But there’s more to it than that.”
“How? What?”
“It happened on—”
“Hold on,” she said. Karen felt a low, throbbing pressure behind her eyes. She walked over to Joshua’s car and sat down on the hood. She didn’t know if her legs could support her much longer.
“It happened the other night, on Thursday,” Joshua said, speaking slowly, his voice so low she could barely hear it. “Me and Dad were out here. There’s this ledge we come to sometimes to hit golf balls. It’s high above this long field of bushes and trees. A friend gave him some range balls and he called me to see if I wanted to come out and hit them.”
The throbbing behind Karen’s eyes was deepening, becoming an insistent pounding. Teddy was involved in this, too?
“So I picked him up and we drove out here. It was fun, cold but not too cold, hitting the balls and watching them soar. When we went through the entire bucket, I started driving back, through the forest. And then it happened. I drove over this small hill and a man was on the other side of it. He was just . . . there in the middle of the road, all of a sudden. I hit the brakes but it was too late. The car slammed into the guy. Sent him into the windshield and over the roof.”
Karen lifted her hand to her mouth.
“We both jumped out of the car and ran over to him,” Joshua continued. “It was . . . bad. The guy’s face was all smashed up. Blood was pouring out of his nose, everywhere. But he wasn’t dead. He was only hurt.”
Joshua slowly shook his head. His eyes had started to water and he wiped away a tear. He sniffled.
“We were about to call an ambulance and then the guy just snapped. He stood up and started screaming at me. He shoved me a few times, kept cursing and yelling. Dad tried to get the guy to calm down and they started yelling back and forth. The guy tackled him and pinned Dad to the ground. Dad tried to fight back but the guy was big and strong, way stronger than either of us. He had his hands around Dad’s throat. Dad was making this choking noise like he couldn’t breathe. I thought the guy was going to kill him. There wasn’t time to think or anything. I grabbed this big rock off the ground and smashed it against the side of the guy’s head. He flopped to the ground. Stopped moving. He wasn’t breathing. I ran over and started pounding on his chest, trying to . . . I don’t know . . . save him or something. His blood was splattering all over me. But it was no use. He was dead.”
Karen stared down at her hands. Her son had killed a man. She understood and comprehended every word Joshua had said, but it wouldn’t sink in. The words slipped straight off the surface of her mind.
She tried to talk. Didn’t have a voice. Finally found it.
“Teddy? You were with your dad?”
Joshua nodded. “After we realized the guy was dead, we just stood there. Barely able to move. Both of us were in shock.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Dad was worried how the police would look at things. Or how a jury would. I could’ve tackled the guy, or shoved him. Instead I hit him with a rock and killed him. Maybe they would look at the rock as a deadly weapon or something. Dad kept talking about a case from a few years ago that was similar to this. Some politician’s son.”
She remembered the case. Pretty big story at the time. The son of a city council member had been out with friends, they had an argument with some people, and a fight broke out. A video camera captured him grabbing a beer bottle and striking someone over the head. A fatal blow. He’d pled self-defense at his trial but the jury hadn’t bought it. They’d charged him with involuntary manslaughter. Ten years in jail.
“Dad kept saying he didn’t want that to be me,” Joshua said. “Said he didn’t want me to spend the next few years in jail. It sounded crazy, but he thought we should just leave. Not report what happened. Not take the risk that I could get in trouble.”
“And you agreed to this? You thought it was a good idea to leave the scene?”
“No. I don’t know. Everything was happening so quickly. It’s like I wasn’t myself. I could barely think.”
“What happened next?”
“We took the rock I hit the guy with and threw it deep into the woods. Far away from the body. Then I dropped Dad off at his place and went home.”
She thought she was going to be sick. Or start crying. Or scream at the top of her lungs. She looked down at the body and, as gruesome as it was, stared without blinking for a long moment.
“This took place the other night?” she asked.
Joshua nodded.
“Why are you here now, then?”
“I lost a glove out here. I came back to get it.”
She took a breath. A slow-boil anger was starting to break through her confusion. Teddy. How could he possibly think it was a good idea to leave the body out here? Had he really thought that not reporting something so awful was the right thing to do? She couldn’t believe that he had done something so stupid. She was furious with him—but she was angry at Joshua, too. He was eighteen years old. He wasn’t a kid. He knew the difference between right and wrong.
“We have to go to the police,” she said.
Joshua blankly stared back. Nodded.
“Right now, we’ll call them. Tell them you made a mistake. Explain that you were in shock—”
She stopped. Squinted. Focused on something in the distance.
“Oh my God,” she said.
About one hundred feet away was the beam of a flashlight, headed straight toward them.
Amber and Ross walked on. She felt so tired that she could barely continue. Her feet were dragging. Her eyelids were starting to close. Her stomach was growling. She struggled to keep up with Ross; his movements were so jumpy and sped up.
She looked up ahead at Ross, trudging along, grumbling to himself. The longer they were out here, the more he’d started cursing and complaining about how angry he was, how hungry he was. He kept popping pills, too. They made him even more short-tempered and irritable. Earlier, he’d gotten so mad that he yanked open the backpack and started sifting through everything frantically. Not much was inside—the money, the Star Wars masks, and her gun, which she’d put in the backpack after the robbery. Whatever Ross was looking for inside, he hadn’t found it. He grumbled a curse word and yanked the zipper shut with such a forceful motion that he broke the zipper. Since then he’d carried the bag in one hand instead of strapping it onto his back. Occasionally, a loose bill would flutter out of the opening in the backpack and be swept away in the light breeze.
Amber honestly didn’t know how much more she could take. She was just too tired. She didn’t know how much more Ross could take, either. He seemed like he was going to overheat or something soon. It was—
Ross stopped walking. It was so dark she nearly walked right into him.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, staring ahead. “People. And they got a couple cars with them.”
She saw it all. Roughly a quarter mile in front of them was a car with its interior light on. Two people were barely visible outside the car. A second car was parked a few feet away.
For the first time in hours, Ross smiled.
“Might be our lucky day,” he said.