Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two Weeks Later
Agraphite sky settled over Devil’s Peak hours ago.
I watch him pull up beneath the gnarled and wrinkled branches of a wet oak tree.
The night wind tears at my still damp hair, dragging it across my sunken and bare cheekbones and into my watery eyes. I reach for each strand, tucking them away, cupping my neck.
The streetlights are dull, most had blown and never been replaced, serving as a reminder that this town belonged to nothing more than the darkness.
A light shines inside the cabin and I only see Harlen. When I search for him, a gust of wind forces me to squint, and I squeeze my eyes closed.
He wasn’t with him. I knew he wouldn’t be, and I exhale my disappointment, like I’d been holding that same breath for the past two weeks.
It had stopped raining thirty minutes ago and it left the air more humid than it had found it.
Sweat sticks to my skin, I drag my hands over my thighs, palming, then squeezing twitchy, jolting knees.
I’m sitting, perched on the concrete step at the front of Nan’s house beneath the white arch.
My arms now looped around my still black and blue shins, and even though it is far from cold, I am shivering.
Nan had long fallen asleep in front of her favorite cooking program. After moving in two weeks ago, I had come to learn that it was seldom that she’d made it to her bed for a night of rest, often waking in the same leather recliner with her same crochet blanket tucked around her frail bones.
She had known I was heading out after the storm passed. She had also known that I hadn’t seen or heard from him since I watched him walk out of my hospital room.
It had been fourteen days.
Every phone call had been left unanswered, my text messages remained unread, my cries for Chase muted, cast aside, dead.
My throat feels like a funnel, and my chest like it’s caught in a vise.
I hadn’t spoken to Harlen about it, wasn’t sure I would. I could sense that the three times he’d been to visit, he had tried his best to avoid any conversation that involved his best friend.
That bothered me, and made me sick to my stomach.
A squishy, wet noise, then the crunch of gravel comes from in front of me. Harlen sits beside me, pulls me under his arm, and it’s on instinct that my arms curl his waist, and the side of my face presses to his chest.
When I let go, he glances furtively down the street. Finally, empty and silent.
“You still want to do this?” he asks, voice low.
I nod.
Harlen was taking me to Quiet Grove Cemetery, to the place beneath the dirt where my best friend was forced to rest. A bunch of bright pink roses lay beside me, two bicolor pink dahlias too, that Nan had cut from her bountiful garden earlier in the day.
Pink because it was Jade’s favorite color.
Each petal is dewy now, on the edge of wilting, serving as a reminder that dawn was nearly here.
I take them in the palm of my hand, push to stand, and when I start moving, the only sound around me coming from the brush of my shoes across the damp asphalt, I turn over my shoulder, see Harlen pressing his chin to his chest.
“You coming?” I ask, my voice breaking, and he is quick to let go of a breath, even quicker to find his feet, his large calloused hands brushing across his light denim jeans.
“Yeah,” he croaks, though unbalanced. “I’m coming.”
And I squeeze my eyes closed when I notice the subtle tones of corrosion. The cracks in which he tries his best to keep from spilling open.
It has me thinking of Chase again and what the past two weeks may have looked like for him.
Has me pondering the things I don’t know, the things I was no longer privy to.
Then it has me wondering not for the first time, if the loss of his parents was truly an accident, or an accidental tragedy, or something far worse.
These questions, along with my thoughts and worries for him, had consumed me and made me sick. Disquiet seeps into my stomach, I try to ignore it as I move across the street, hauling myself into the truck.
Today was the first time we were visiting Jade’s resting place, and at the fringes of dawn, and two weeks after her murder, it was the only time it felt safe to do so, even though the darkness was what scared me most.
I struggle to draw in breath, to take hold of the emotions swirling like a tsunami in my chest.
In the week following Jade’s death, there had been no funeral, just a direct burial for three of the four members of the Keller family.
The school had held a memorial though, which I’d chosen not to attend, and the town had remained a swarming entourage of poison through it all, lacking any regard for the joint grief and debilitating loss that both Chase and I now shared.
It frustrated me and pissed me off.
Devil’s Peak was hungry for a story—hungry for my story—salivating for details, anything they could sink their teeth into. And I was fucking furious that their hunger had forced me to withdraw from society.
I wondered if Chase’s radio silence toward me had anything to do with that, that maybe he didn’t want to draw any more attention to us than what our grief already had. But I knew deep down that was bullshit, because he would have told me.
Chase didn’t leave the people he cared most about.
Especially not when we were suffering from the same wound, cut from the very same blade.
So, what was he running from?
I lick my dry and cracked lips.
I was going to find out.
The scent of wet dirt fills my nose, and cakes itself across my knees. A maelstrom of emotions burns inside of my chest, my nose, my eyes, and I swipe at them, but tears continue to stream down my cheeks.
A bright blue moon glows over Quiet Grove Cemetery, catching on the dark, damp tombstones.
Stone plinths topped with angels stand tall, their wings dripping from what rain we’d been fortunate enough to have.
The oak trees that form a majestic canopy overhead are tall and ropey, a rooted organism that had been living for decades, still growing and thriving even surrounded by death.
I wanted to believe that maybe I could be like a tree, dig roots the way they had, grow and thrive the way they did. However, I wasn’t sure my life exhibited the same purpose. I couldn’t shed my trauma the way they did their leaves, without feeling naked and stripped raw.
A rigidness clamps my throat, following behind a shiver.
There was so much dirt, but no headstone yet.
I didn't know where to place the flowers. I’d chosen to poke them into the dirt and hoped Jade could reach for them.
I’d done the same for Heather’s—Jade and Chase’s mother—but chose to leave their fathers bare.
“H-h-has,” I suck back a resigned breath, looking over my shoulder to see Harlen resting against a tree, the sole of one shoe pushing against the wrinkled trunk. “Has Chase been here?” I ask, my voice raspy.
Harlen swipes the back of his hand across his nose, sniffs. He shakes his head once.
More tears flood my eyes. “It’s…” I choke, shake my head, cry harder. “She shouldn’t be here, Harlen.” My knees give way beneath me, and I land in the wet mud. “She just…she shouldn’t be here.”
Harlen can’t look at me, and when I see his chest jolt, his throat carving a path for a whimper, I turn away, giving him the same privacy he gave me.
I wrap my hand around my throat, feel my carotid tap off rhythm against my fingertips, whispering, “Hurts, man.”
Harlen chokes on a cry, then coughs it down. His hands are through his shoulder-length curls, he’s shaking his head, pacing back and forth, his Chucks squelching in the mud.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, returning to my knees, then to my feet. I take one step toward him.
“Chase had said that exact same thing.”
A cold chill shrivels me. I wrap my arms around my torso, hold onto myself, whispering, “It feels like I lost him, too.”
And when Harlen doesn’t reply, I speak again.
“At least tell me he’s okay.”
He looks at me and I know by the grim look on his face, he couldn’t, if he valued being truthful.
In the silence that stretches between us, I nod, wet my lips. “Lie to me if you have to.”
A tear rolls down my cheek at the same time rain begins to spit from the sky.
“I can’t do that, Laik,” he says, reaching for me, pulling me into his chest so tight that I can barely breathe.
In the rain, I cry, soaking the fabric of Harlen’s shirt through to his chest. He doesn’t let go of me, until I slip back from him.
I raise my chin, lock eyes with the blue-eyed boy that had also become one of my best friends. “I miss him. I miss her. I miss us,” I breathe.
The sky turns angry, thunder rumbles over our heads, a fork of lightning following closely behind it.
I breathe heavier now. “Can you tell him that? Please, Harlen.” I drop my chin, squeeze my eyes. “Please tell him that I miss him.”
It was my final cry.