Courtney
I go through it in my mind as I drive back to the cottage. Kylie Matthews went missing five years ago, when she was eleven,
on the cusp of twelve. Five years ago, Daniel Clarke would have been nineteen. According to Joanna, the summer that Kylie
disappeared was the summer she first discovered boys and bras and that she had her first crush.
What if Daniel Clarke was her first crush?
I wouldn’t put it past him at age nineteen to have a thing for an almost-twelve-year-old, though it fills me with feelings
of rage and disgust. It’s not that different than seventeen and twenty-four. It’s the exact same age difference, in fact.
Seven years.
I come home empty-handed.
Elliott flings open the front door, and before I can put the car in Park, he’s outside, bounding down the steps to the drive.
“You’ve been gone for almost two hours. Is everything okay? What took you so long?” he asks, pulling my car door open for
me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, getting out.
Elliott doesn’t give me a chance to say more before he goes around to the back of the car to open the liftgate and help with
the groceries, but there are none.
“Where’s the milk?” he asks, confused. “Where are the bags?” I stand there beside the car, struggling to come up with the words to explain to him how I lied, how I never had any intention of going to the grocery store. “Courtney?” he asks.
Behind us, the cottage door is open, flies and mosquitoes getting in. Mae stands just inside the open door, staring out at
us, looking so sad my heart aches. Her hair is tangled and there are dark circles under her eyes. I wonder if, every time
I leave, she secretly hopes that I’ll come back with Reese.
“I didn’t go to the store,” I say, bringing my gaze back to Elliott.
He stands incredulous before me, crossing his arms. “What do you mean you didn’t go to the store? You were gone for hours,
Court. Where did you go?”
I step closer, keeping my voice low. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Mad about what? What did you do?”
“I met a couple yesterday while we were searching for Reese. Sam and Joanna Matthews. I went to see them.”
“You what?” he asks, upset and confused. “Why wouldn’t you have told me? Who are they?”
“Their daughter went missing five years ago when she was eleven years old. They never found her, Elliott,” I say, thinking
again of Sam searching for five years, collecting his own evidence in a shoebox, doing anything he could to find Kylie and
bring her home. I flash forward to five years from now, to a world in which we’ve never found Reese, thinking of the sad look
on Mae’s face and it never going away.
“And what do you think, that the same person who has her daughter also took Reese?”
There is cynicism in his voice. Skepticism. He’s mad that I lied. He thinks it’s improbable that the same person who took
Kylie also has Reese.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Yes. Maybe.”
“Five years is a long time, Courtney,” he says, stopping short of telling me that it’s impossible these two things could be related, though I know that’s exactly what he’s thinking.
“Thousands of people go missing every single day, and that was years ago. This girl, Kylie, is probably dead, and whoever
took her is most likely long gone. That same person didn’t take Reese.”
“How do you know? How can you be so certain?”
“It just seems unlikely. If you’re talking about some serial kidnapper, wouldn’t there be more than two missing girls over
the course of five years?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I went to Daniel Clarke’s house too,” I say, getting the words out before I can change my mind. “The
boy, the man that Reese was hanging out with here at the resort. I found his address online and I went to his house.”
Elliott is floored. His eyebrows lift, his jaw drops.
“You did what?” he asks in disbelief. “Fuck, Courtney.” He drags his hands through his hair.
“He wasn’t there,” I say quickly.
“That doesn’t matter. Dammit. What the fuck were you thinking? Do you have any idea how stupid that was? What if he’d been
home? What were you going to say to him?” Elliott isn’t upset with me, I don’t think. He’s scared that something bad could
have happened if Daniel came home when I was there. I got lucky.
Elliott’s attitude changes. He uncrosses his arms, reaching for and reeling me in. “Why didn’t you at least tell me where
you were going? I would have gone with you,” he says, holding me so close that I can feel his heart beat through his shirt.
“You and I are on the same side,” he says. “We want the same thing.”
“I know. But what would we have done with the kids? We can’t leave them alone, and if I had told you where I was going, you
wouldn’t have wanted me to go.”
“From now on,” he says, “we tell each other everything. Promise?” he asks, and I wonder what Elliott means by we. Does he mean me specifically, because I’ve been keeping secrets from him? Or does he mean we, because he’s been keeping secrets from me too?
It comes rushing back in that moment and I find myself thinking again about the blood on his shoes, about how Emily wanted
to talk to him that night, how she had something to discuss with him in private, but how Elliott doesn’t remember. I shouldn’t
doubt him. He had been drinking that night—we both had.
It is possible that he forgot about Emily leaning in, saying, Do you think I could talk to you tomorrow in private?
I have something to ask you, except that, at the time, he said yes.
And not only did he say yes, but he hesitated first, a flush of red on his neck that
I told myself was from the alcohol.
I pull free, looking Elliott in the eye. He steps back, increasing the space between us. “What?” he asks. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Forget about it.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“What do you mean by we, Elliott? What have you been keeping from me?”
Elliott’s gaze darts to the police officer. He squints in the sunlight before lowering his eyes back to mine. He says, his
voice colder than before, “Is this about the blood on my shoes again?” I don’t say, watching as he inhales, as he blows out
a noisy breath. “I told you. It was probably mine. I probably cut myself with the fishing line.”
I shift in place, trying to slow my breath.
Because he didn’t. He didn’t tell me that. The first time I asked him about the blood on his shoes, he said it was from bleeding
the fish.
His story’s changing.
Elliott steps closer, closing the gap between us. He wags his finger at me and says, “To be clear, I didn’t actually mean we, Court. I meant you. I was trying not to make you feel bad for lying to me. You told me you were going to get milk, and then you go and almost
get yourself killed. You need to start being honest with me.”
Maybe he means that.
Or maybe he’s deflecting blame.
He says, “All you had to say was yes, that you promise not to keep things from me anymore. You didn’t have to turn it into
a whole thing.”
I wonder if I did that, if I turned nothing into something.
Elliott starts to walk away, to close the liftgate. “Listen, before we go in,” I say.
“What?” he asks, his movements jerky as he jabs at the button on the back of the car. “What now?”
I hesitate at first, but then say, “There’s something else I have to tell you, something Detective Evans told me. It’s about
Wyatt. The Benadryl.”
Elliott pulls his eyes together, trenches forming between them.
“What about it?” he asks.
“He didn’t take it like he said he did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they searched the cottage. There was no Benadryl there. Not a bottle of it and not pills. I think . . .” I say, my
mouth dry. “I think that Wyatt was lying about taking Benadryl.”
“Why would he lie about that?” Elliott asks, but the answer comes to him just as soon as he does, and his posture stiffens, straightening.
Without the Benadryl, Wyatt would have heard people screaming.
He would have heard Emily and Nolan begging and fighting for their lives.
He would have heard Nolan being beaten to death just outside his bedroom door, the heavy, deadened sound of the bat striking human flesh and bone.
He would have woken up at the sound of it, maybe risen from bed and gone to the door, laid his hand on the handle, opened it.
“What do you think Wyatt is keeping from us?” I ask. “What did he see?”
“I don’t know, I—” Elliott starts to say, but he stops all of a sudden, his words evaporating into air. His eyes lift, looking
past me.
I spin around. I follow Elliott’s gaze to see Wyatt, standing in the open door beside Mae.
“Are you talking about me?”