Chapter 10 #2
-six nights since you threw me onto the street
I shake my head, confused.
I keep reading.
-warm hands, squeezing my arms like a snake bite
-vein in your neck, memory of it against my lips
-porch light flickers
-rain pelts your shirt to midnight blue
Memories? It looks like a female’s penmanship, if a little wild, but there are no capital letters or periods. No sentence structure, as if she’s narrating.
-flood sirens
-blood streams down your temple
-Deacon in the attic window
-quiet in the street
-door closes
-alone
-quiet
Flood sirens… This could be recounting the night Weston flooded two decades ago.
Who pushed her out of the house? Manas? Deacon was in the attic window, so…
-walking to the river
-no tears
-alone
-hair matting my face like skin
-engine behind me
-white car
-I’m alone
For a moment, I feel wet hair sticking to my cheeks too. I’m there with her. Lost.
Her thoughts are staggered, as if she can’t form cohesive thoughts, even six days later. Watermarks dot the page, ink smeared, because she went back and wrote—and re-wrote—words in the margins.
More etchings of alone and quiet.
-cold hands, squeezing my arms like a snake bite
-more cold hands
-dark
-tires moving through water
She’s hearing things. Not seeing them. Is she blindfolded now? Tied up?
-scratching, break nails, stings
-falling, water
-no tears
-alone
-can’t breathe
-quiet
-forever, quiet forever
-six nights
-six nights, six nights, six nights…
I push my finger up the page, back to falling, water. I’d missed the comma. I thought it said falling water.
But she was falling.
Then…there’s water.
My chest rises and falls, and I let the wheels turn in my head, but I can’t believe them. This has to be a joke. Someone’s rendition of what happened that night, but it’s not the true story. Winslet MacCreary was not the origin of our urban legend about mirrors.
Or the urban legend about the bridge. I scan the murder map again, seeing mentions of Rivalry Week and the stories about the car still at the bottom of the river.
Pay to pass.
I do know that urban legend and where it came from a little more than the Carnival Tower one. A story about a girl who was packed into a car trunk that was forced over the side of the bridge between our two towns.
I hold the diary, my hands shaking.
Whenever people cross the bridge, no matter which way, they flick a coin into the water. Not for luck. Not out of remembrance.
They pay to be allowed to pass unharmed from her ghost that’s still down there.
According to Hawke, Aro, Kade, Dylan, and Hunter’s map, she died there.
Six days later… I’d read.
I lower my eyes to the pages again.
-free
-swimming
-air
I breathe out the faintest…weakest…laugh.
She didn’t die. At least not there. She made it out.
Has Hawke seen this diary?
-alone, she writes again.
-alone
-alone
-alone
I picture the girl in the photo, breaching the surface of the water. The flowing river around her, surging in the storm, the current carrying her. It’s dark, she’s alone, worried to call out for help, because those who put her in the car could still be close.
Does the one who cast her out of the house even know what just happened to her? Could he be the one who did it?
I flip through the journal, seeing pages filled with the same lists, scribble marks, some things X’d out, but more like in anger rather than scribbling out a mistake. There are words carved into the margins and some pages written with script so small, it might take me a day to read a single page.
I set it back on the island and move away for a moment.
I don’t want to be played.
There’s no way to tell for sure if the journal is hers, someone else’s, or if it was forged as part of some bullshit story this Deacon and Manas are playing with my younger family members. There’s a reason Hawke doesn’t have copies of any of its pages on the murder map. As far as I can tell anyway.
But I get an idea, all the same, and head back out the secret entrance and into my bakery. Digging out the memoir my mom gave me more than three years ago detailing her and my father’s love story, I carry it back into the tower and set it down next to Winslet’s journal.
If it moves between now and my next visit, I’ll know someone is still finding a way in here.
But mostly…Carnival Tower seems a place for stories, and it seems like it belongs here.
I sweep the rest of the hideout again, looking for any clues. Underneath beds, around exercise machines, in cabinets and bureaus… Found some handcuffs, which on my first guess might be Kade’s, but I half-suspect Aro uses them on Hawke or Dylan on Hunter. I won’t ask.
The monitors in the surveillance room all glow with the live feed of High Street, Fall Away Lane, the alley behind my shop, and the exterior of JT Racing. There’s a view of Fallstown, some old firehouse I don’t recognize, and—I squint, looking closer—the parking lot at the summer camp.
He should have a camera on Frosted’s roof. It would monitor that entrance, at least.
Searching the drawers, I don’t see the phones they were talking about, but I do find blueprints. I smile, pulling them out. As I spread them open, a memory hits me—that day at Camp Blackhawk and Lucas’s ski resort dream laid out on the kitchen worktables.
I lock my jaw together, trying not to lift my eyes to the clock on one of the computer monitors. He must be about to head to the airport.
Why do men think there’s one rule for themselves and another for everyone else?
Deacon and Manas sought revenge on Winslet for not loving their brother, and then proceeded to use her without giving her their hearts in return.
Men in my family have been cruel and uncontrollable in their passion for the women they love, but their daughters—and their sister—need leashes.
What does Lucas do in bed with women that he would think Farrow Kelly or Noah Van der Berg were deviants if they wanted to do it to me? The fucking hypocrite.
Raising my eyes, I see the time. 9:42
My heart jumps in my chest. It’s later than I thought.
He’s at the airport now.
It’s over.
I set the blueprints on Hawke’s desk, pass by the diary and my parents’ story on the kitchen counter, and walk out of Carnival Tower through the mirror in my shop. Walking out the backdoor, I lock up Frosted and head out of the alley, sliding my phone into one back pocket and my key in the other.
I’ve never walked this path. When I pass Lucas’s house, I’m always jogging. It felt less creepy, finding a way to visit something of his—some place he lived—if I did it under the guise of exercise.
But it wasn’t just a way to be close to him over the years that he was gone. It was something I had to do, like I was visiting a grave.
Lucas’s house sits a few houses down from the corner, every window dark, not even the porch light shining.
I always loved this house. The neighborhood is something my father would call ‘spotty,’ but really, it’s just old.
No HOAs to make sure people mow their lawns or keep from parking on the grass.
I start to turn onto his walkway—a blue craftsman with two massive white columns posted on either side of the wooden stairs sitting ahead—but a low rumble drifts into my ears, and I slow.
Glancing left, up the street, and then right, I don’t see the ’72 Dodge, but I swear, that’s the sound it makes. Chills crawl up my neck, the sound of its engine coming from somewhere.
Jogging up the five stairs, I hear the wood creak as I step up to the door, snatching the lockbox in my hand from where it hangs on the doorknob. There are numbers like a phone to dial in a code to retrieve the key inside. Real estate agents put them on for potential buyers.
Shit.
I drop it and take the knob, giving it an exasperated, half-assed twist, and it opens. I let my mouth fall open. “Nice…”
That was lucky. It’s unlike Lucas to be irresponsible like that.
Putting a foot inside, I peer my head in, seeing empty hardwood floors shining in the moonlight. All the furniture is gone and the faint scent of fresh paint and Lysol linger in the air.
I enter the house, closing the door behind me.
I haven’t been in here since the last time Lucas was home.
I would come with Madoc when he picked him up, or get dropped off here on the occasion Lucas took me somewhere on his own, like to a movie only I wanted to see, or shopping for Christmas presents for the family.
Drifting through the house, I take one last look at the kitchen where his mom raced around the table when we were playing tag, and the living room where he let me try on his dad’s jacket and hat.
I wander upstairs, find his room, and inhale the scent of that cologne he wore tonight. He stayed so close. Was he that worried I’d fall in love with the wrong guy in a bounce house?
I laugh to myself as I browse the room. His bed is the only piece of furniture that remains, the mattress a stark white.
I circle the bed to look out the window into the backyard, but I spot his white hoodie from the gym the other night on the floor.
Bending down, I pick it up. He must not have seen it here when he was packing up.
I lift it to my nose, inhaling, and suddenly flooded with him.
Tears spring to my eyes and a truck sits on my chest at the smell of his skin.
And his cologne and the summer air, and it reaches down into the pit of my stomach, taking me back, because he always smelled like this.
And I feel a sudden urge. Hidden in this empty room, in this empty house, in the dark of night, I stop thinking for a moment.
I strip off my shirt and my bikini top and pull the hoodie over my head. It falls halfway down my thighs just before I drop everything else I’m wearing to the floor.
Stepping out of my shorts and bikini bottoms, I pull my hair out of the sweatshirt and sit on the edge of the bed, just like Winslet.
Not naked like her, but goosebumps spread across my arms, down my legs, and into my scalp all the same. I wanted to feel something he wore on my skin.
Tears suddenly fill my eyes as my toes graze the floor. “I’ve been in love with you since I was a kid, Lucas,” I tell his memory, out loud.
The cloth of his hoodie brushes my nipples, the skin of my thighs tingles under the hem. I part my legs just a little, letting the cool air in.
“Everyone in our family has someone,” I say as a tear falls. “Madoc has Fallon, Dylan has Hunter, James has A.J., Kade has anyone he wants…” I breathe out a laugh as I swipe a tear off my face. “When I was little, you were the one I looked forward to.”
The sweatshirt is so loose on me, I feel his imaginary hands climb inside.
“You were smart and funny and kind.” I rub my lips together. “You trusted me to hear difficult things when everyone else tried to shield me. You talked to me. The only one who really talked to me.”
Everyone else lied to me. All in my best interest, of course, but Lucas couldn’t. For some reason, it didn’t sit right with him.
“When I grew up, I thought about you,” I tell imaginary Lucas. “I wondered if you’d like what you saw when we met again. And if you’d want to keep looking.”
An image of him is in front of me, leaning over and reaching up inside the hoodie, pulling me down the bed by my naked hips.
“I rushed to grow up, so you could find me before you found someone else…” I finally admit. “Finished college early, started a business… In case you came home, I’d be ready.”
My mother never knew why I was racing to a finish line nearly all my life.
I missed him when I was a kid and knew, even at thirteen, I didn’t want him to meet anyone.
And when I turned eighteen, I was happy, because even if I was still too young for him, I was old enough.
It was one barrier finally out of the way.
I’d never even wanted another guy.
I’m glad he came back. I needed to see him with adult eyes because now I know. He runs, and he’ll always run. There are better men out there.
“I’m ready.” I rub the insides of my thighs, heat pooling between my legs. “Just not for you.”
The ghost of his hand wraps around my throat and pushes me back onto the bed. I lift the hoodie over my head and open my legs.
“Never for you,” I gasp.