6. Otis
Chapter 6
Otis
I stared out Benji’s windshield and watched as the sun rose behind the mountains. The old-fashioned streetlamps shut off all at once, and little by little, lights came on in the shops as Blackwell Falls woke up.
In a few hours, Main Street would be crowded with expensive cars and SUVs. The leaves on the trees were a riot of red, yellow, and orange, and every weekend tourists arrived by the hundreds, driving up from the city to drink disgusting pumpkin drinks and take pictures with sunflowers and pumpkins for their social media.
I didn’t get it. Didn’t the city have sunflowers and pumpkins? Didn’t the leaves change color there? Why bother with the long drive?
Normally I’d ask Daisy. She knew all about that kind of stuff, and in the months that we’d been living with her at the house on top of the falls, she’d become a third resource — after Wolf and Jace — for all my questions about why people did the things they did.
Now there were just two, Daisy and Wolf, which felt all kinds of weird, and I’d stopped asking Daisy stuff back in July when it became pretty obvious she was in no condition to clarify the behavior of the human race.
“How long does it take?” I asked without looking at Wolf.
He shifted in the driver’s seat. “How long does what take?”
“This… thing that Daisy is going through.”
“Grief?” Wolf asked. “Mourning?”
“I guess,” I said.
It took a minute for Wolf to answer. “It’s different for everyone, I think.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Me either,” Wolf said.
I wasn’t embarrassed to admit part of it was selfish. I fucking missed her. I missed her smile and the way she laughed. I missed the way the house — and anywhere really — seemed to crackle when she was in it, like she made it come alive. I missed fucking her without having her cry after she came, or worse, turning away from us like we were just another reminder of Jace.
But I was also… worried? I’d been trying to identify the feeling in my chest, the way it felt heavy and tight even when I wasn’t with Daisy. That was new for me.
I was an in-the-moment guy.
Except now it felt like there was a dark cloud hanging over my head every fucking day, and I knew it had to do with Daisy and the way it felt like we were losing her.
The only time I didn’t feel like I was wearing a lead vest was when I was working on one of the cars. Then my mind went back to work, overriding this worry about Daisy or whatever it was.
And it wasn’t like we didn’t have other things to think about. Wolf and I were stuck when it came to who was behind the girls’ disappearances. We’d tried connecting the missing girls, combing through their backgrounds to see if they had something — or someone — in common, but it had been pointless. They were all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one but there were no other common denominators.
We’d gone through Calvin’s phone with a fine-tooth comb, but there was nothing pointing to Mr. X except the messages themselves, cryptic enough to be about anything if you didn’t know better, and one mention of the dive bar.
Our one hope was Blake’s phone. Other than his messages with us the night we’d killed him, there wasn’t anything overly incriminating on it, but we’d given the phone to Aloha, hoping he could find something on the people Blake had been texting, websites he’d visited before wiping the history from his phone.
The fact that the phone was old, that Blake had been using it five years earlier, worked in our favor. Aloha had taken one look at it and nodded, then set it next to his bank of computers at the lab in the old warehouse in town.
“Think Aloha will be able to get in?” I asked Wolf, breaking our long silence.
“I think he’s already in,” Wolf said. “He would have contacted us if he couldn’t crack it.”
That made sense. If Aloha had hit a roadblock, he would have told us.
“So what do we do?” I asked. “About Daisy?”
I wasn’t exactly confident in the relationship management department. There were too many nuances, too much subtlety.
“What we’re doing. Try to get her out of it.” Wolf was staring out the windshield, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Try to wake her up.”