Chapter 45
Forty-Five
By one in the afternoon, neither of us has found Nate’s burial spot, and I’m starting to doubt we ever will. Miles and I have
both gone quiet, exhausted and borderline dehydrated. Our only saving grace is that the sky is gloomy and overcast, with rain
in the forecast for this evening.
Miles is taking a break, leaning on his shovel and looking at the blisters on his hands.
“Maybe he buried Nate a little farther into the island?” he offers.
I shake my head. “He brought me here. He was definitely flaunting his crime in front of me.”
Miles doesn’t seem all that convinced; he continues trying to reason with me. “Let’s go over the timeline.”
His shovel falls to the ground with a clang. He approaches me, holding up a blistered finger.
“Marcus leaves around noon to go to the grocery store. Within twenty minutes or so, Valencia goes upstairs to take a nap.”
He holds up another finger. “They call the police around four p.m. If Easton brought Nate out here, he had a three-ish-hour
window to kill him and hide the body.”
“Right,” I say, still digging, refusing to give up.
“We’ve been out here for three hours, and look how far we’ve gotten.
” He gestures to the holes around us. He’s dug two in addition to the one we started together.
I’ve moved on to my third, which is right at the entrance to the clearing.
My hands burn with blisters of my own, several of which have popped and are now turning crusty with pus.
“What if the tree fell on the grave?” He gestures toward the fallen tree.
But I shake my head and pull up another shovelful of dirt. “They built the fort around the tree, so it was like that when
they found this place.”
Miles holds out a hand. “Stop digging for a second and listen to me.” I do as he says, looking into his pitying eyes. “The
police have ways of doing this faster. Cadaver-sniffing dogs, radar, sometimes even psychic mediums.”
“He’s here. He has to be!”
Unless Marcus or Valencia really did help Easton hide the body, and we’ll never be able to convince the police of the truth.
I’ll be the liar who stole their missing kid’s identity.
Miles frowns. He doesn’t look frustrated or annoyed, just sad. Like he knows it’s all hopeless and thinks I haven’t already
realized that he might be right. But then he flinches, as if struck by a thought.
“How did Easton get the shovel out here?” he asks. “Wouldn’t Nate think it was weird?”
“He’d have a story prepared. Like he was expanding the fort or something.” Miles looks disappointed. I wince as another blister
pops, this one sloughing off a layer of skin.
“Let me see.” Miles steps forward and takes my hand. He curses when he sees the blisters, then snatches the shovel away. “Okay, enough. We need to regroup, figure out our next steps, and wrap these blisters.”
I sigh. “Fine.” If Easton doesn’t notice us paddling back from the island, we might be able to come back out here to keep
looking.
Miles still holds my hand in his. Then he looks up at me, again with that spark of an idea. “Wouldn’t Easton have had blisters
on his hands? If a ten-year-old was out here digging for around three hours, wouldn’t he be messed up like we are? And wouldn’t
his parents ask him why? Even if he said he was playing tug-of-war with JT, the police would wonder about it, right?”
Shit. He is right. “Which means he didn’t bury him out here.”
Hopeless. This was all hopeless.
“I’m sorry,” Miles says. “I should have thought of it before.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think I’d get the blisters to begin with. Otherwise I would have brought gloves.” Which maybe Easton
was smart enough to do. But even if he was, I’m not willing to bring it up to Miles because I do want to stop. I’m tired.
My hands hurt. I was hoping I could outsmart Easton, but I can’t.
No one can.
“Come on,” Miles says. “Let’s head back and maybe get something to eat. Figure out our next steps.” He picks up the shovels
and I stare at the ruins of the fort. The branches, the towel, the blankets, the fallen tree.
I wonder how old the tree is. It’s almost as wide as I am tall, though I guess since it’s lying horizontally, this is how tall it is now. I follow the thick, rugged bark into the woods where the roots of the tree have been ripped up from the ground.
“Nate?” Miles still uses his name to call after me.
But I don’t turn around because now I’m wondering if maybe Easton didn’t want to be bothered burying his brother. I walk toward
the bottom of the uprooted tree. The ground divots where the tree once grew. Grass and ivy spill over the top of the hole
into the ground.
As I move around the roots, I see the basin of broken earth. At the bottom is a tattered blue sneaker.
And there he is. The body is small and withered with time. The T-shirt and shorts Nate wore when he died are dirty and threadbare.
“What is it?” Miles joins me, but before he can look, I turn away from Nate’s body and stop him. Nate was his best friend,
and only a few hours ago he was saying he wasn’t prepared to find the body. Shit. He’s also been trying to get me to give
up on this. He might have even felt relieved not to find it.
“No,” I say. “Don’t.”
“Did you . . .” Something changes on his face. Panic or fear.
I nod. The boy I’ve been pretending to be for the past few weeks. His life cut short by his heartless, psychotic brother.
“No.” Miles pushes me out of the way. I call after him but he stops short at the roots of the tree.
Miles falls to his knees. I leap forward to catch him, worried he’ll fall into the open grave that Easton was so sure no one
would find that he didn’t bother to cover it. But Miles leans back on his heels instead.
His body shudders under my grip and at first I think he’s laughing. Like the ridiculousness of this day has caught up with him. But then the silence-shattering sob he releases sounds like a dying animal. It sets my skin on fire and my heart rate quickens. I don’t know what to do so I let him cry.
He falls into me, reaching for my arms to pull them around him. He tries to speak through his sobs and he looks at me with
wide, horrified eyes. His face wet with fat tears.
“It’s really h-him,” he manages before falling into another round of sobs. It hurts, watching him realize this. That his friend,
after all these years, really is dead. Not only that he’s dead and has been, but that his brother murdered him and left him
here to literally rot.
Because, yes, everyone who knew Nate may have believed he was dead, but this is the proof. Now it’s all real. Miles spent
the last ten years hypothesizing and maybe even fantasizing. Finding ways for his best friend to still be alive. But he’s
not.
He’s been here all along. A short row across the bay.
As suddenly as Miles started crying, he stops, wiping his cheeks violently and steeling his face.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go back.”
He gets to his feet and goes back to the fort to grab our shovels. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” he says in a way that means he absolutely isn’t. “But I want to get this over with.”
I follow him out to the kayak and he places it at the edge of the water, climbing in the front without looking back. I push
it into the bay and climb in the rear as he hands my shovel back to me. He doesn’t speak the whole way to the Beaumonts’ dock
and I’m afraid to ask him again if he’s okay.
He definitely isn’t. I honestly have no clue what to do.
When we reach the dock, Miles stands quickly and the kayak rocks as he jumps onto the dock. I cry out, but Miles is already
halfway to the backyard when he drops to his knees and throws up in the bay. I toss the shovels on the dock and jump up to
follow him. I remember to pull the kayak up so it doesn’t float away. But when I reach Miles, he’s sobbing again.
There’s nothing I can say to make him feel better, so I sit down next to him and rub his back.
His sobs continue but they grow quieter. Soon, it’s just sniffles. And when he speaks, I startle at the sudden sound.
“We used to play house.” He sniffs and wipes at his nose. “When we were little, in daycare together. It was innocent stuff—we
pretended to have kids and played with this Fisher-Price kitchen set. And then sometimes we’d play The Wizard of Oz.” He laughs and turns to me. “He found this pair of sparkly pink jellies that fit him in one of the toy boxes and he said
they were the ruby slippers. So he was Dorothy and I was Toto. Which, by the way, kinda fucked that I had to be the dog. I would have totally killed it as Tin Man.”
“Not Scarecrow?” I try with a smile.
He shakes his head. “I’m too smart for Scarecrow.”
“Oh, so you’re heartless.”
“Clearly.” His voice sounds snotty and sad.
“Well, I think that’s all kind of adorable.”
Miles points back at me. “Big Scarecrow energy.” We laugh but it doesn’t feel like our hearts are totally in it. His smirk
drops and he suddenly looks lost. “He’s really dead.”
The boy he played house with. The boy he probably loved. Even at that age, they saw something in each other. Kindred spirits who played house and knew they could play The Wizard of Oz together without judgment. Nate knew he could wear a pair of pink jellies and his friend wouldn’t make fun of him.
And maybe it was love. Because even kids that age know what love is. Sure, it was different from the warmth I feel when I look at Miles—the
attraction when I want to run my fingers through his strawberry-blond hair, how I want to kiss his tearstained, freckled cheeks—but
almost there. Undiscovered. And now something that won’t ever be discovered because Nate is gone.
There’s a part of me that might be a little jealous Nate and Miles got to share that even for a short time. Because that was
never my experience. Even at that age I knew to hide those tiny slivers of who I really was. After being scolded by my father
or teased by other boys, I knew what was considered effeminate, and I learned quickly how to bury it.
I’ve been pretending to be someone else a lot longer than a few weeks.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
“I lied to you before,” I say.
“Yeah, no shit, Nate.” He says it teasingly but I shake my head so he knows I’m not joking.
“The other night you asked what I wanted to be. When I’m older, what I wanted to do with my life.
I said I wanted to be myself again. And I guess it’s not entirely a lie, but I mean I want to do something better with my life.
When I ran away, I went to a couple of queer youth shelters but got turned away.
They were understaffed and didn’t have the room.
I want to become a social worker so I can help kids like me.
Or like you and Nate. People who need love and support because they don’t get it anywhere else.
I’m not excusing what I did, lying, but if there were more people out there who could show that, I might not be here. ”
Miles watches me. “But then you wouldn’t be here.”
I nod. I wouldn’t have found Nate. Honestly, finding his body might not be enough to get Easton arrested, but maybe it’s at
least enough to jump-start the investigation.
“We should get the police out there,” I say.
“Yeah.” Miles reaches into his pocket and takes out a small white rectangle. He hands it to me. Agent Grant’s business card.
“Make the call.”
He’s right. We should call Grant first, tell him everything and see what we should do. Because we have to make sure we do
this right. Easton is always a few steps ahead of us, but for now, we have the jump.
I dial the number, and he picks up on the third ring.
“Agent Grant, this is Nathaniel Beaumont. I need to speak with you.”