Chapter 4 Above #2
I raise an eyebrow. “You’re forgetting the part where she takes a liking to some girls, and they’re never seen again.”
Dev looks considering. “That’s the nature of vengeance, isn’t it? Sometimes you’re the one who gets burned,” he says.
“I bet you’re a good teacher,” I tell him, chin propped on my hand.
“How else would I have earned my way to these vaunted halls?” He cleans his fingers on a napkin and folds his hands, elbows on the arms of his chair as he examines me. “So, what, you think that Meghan Vale was a devotee of Jenny Red--Hands?” Skepticism and curiosity mingle in his voice.
“I’m not sure. I don’t have anything to suggest it, it’s just . . .” I almost tell him about the beads I found, but on the verge of saying it aloud, it all sounds ridiculous.
He hmms. “What about you? Ever wander out into the Franklin Nature Preserve with a string of beads?” he asks.
“Never had cause,” I say with a thin smile. “But I know someone who did.” I don’t elaborate, and he doesn’t press. Instead, he clears his throat and looks serious.
“So. About that bribe I mentioned,” he says.
“Yes?” I prompt.
“Today. Is Friday,” he says with some difficulty.
“I’d heard that,” I say gravely.
“Tomorrow, therefore, would be Saturday,” he goes on. “And I was thinking perhaps you might want to get coffee. Or tea, if you don’t drink coffee. Or a beer, if you’d rather do an evening thing, or if you’re free midday, then . . . sandwiches?” The last word stretches out uncertainly.
I lean back in my chair, battling back a wave of panic and trying for a friendly tone. “Dev, are you asking me to hang out, or are you asking me on a date?”
“Either. Both? I would genuinely be delighted to have you as a friend but also, yes, if you are so inclined, I would be similarly, you know, inclined,” he says. He runs a hand through his hair.
“Dev, I . . .” I trail off helplessly.
“Like I said, genuinely happy with the friendship--hang option. Eager, even. Forget the other thing.” He shakes his hands in a never mind gesture.
“It’s not that.” I swallow against a too--dry mouth.
What am I supposed to say? Yes, I’d love to, but I always manage to screw things up, so it’s a terrible idea?
Dev is attractive. Gorgeous, if we’re being honest, and funny, and easy to be around, and if I were anywhere near functional, I would be an idiot to turn him down. But I know how this goes.
I say no, and it’s awkward. We stop talking so often.
The friendship fades, and it’s uncomfortable, sure, but it doesn’t reach the level of pain.
Or I say yes, and down the line, sooner or later, I screw things up.
And then it isn’t an awkward fade; it’s a break, a wound, a snapped bone improperly set.
“I’m not . . . not interested,” I say. “It’s just . . .”
“You have a lot going on,” he supplies. “Bad timing. I get it. No worries.”
I like you too much to go out with you, I don’t say, because it sounds like one of those ridiculous lines people come up with to try to make rejection sting less. But it’s true. I don’t have enough friendships to risk destroying this one. “Maybe another time,” I say.
When? When is the right time? Len asks me, and I don’t want to tell him the answer is When I find her.
“Another time,” Dev agrees. “I’ll hold you to that. For the hangout. Not . . .”
I smile, try to make it genuine. “I really would like that.”
“I’m taking you at your word,” Dev says. He slaps the arms of his chair. “Now I have to go convince twenty--five teenagers that the 1950s are relevant to their lives.”
“Sounds daunting.”
“Actually, it’s one of the easier ones. The problem is wading through all the essays on ‘Joe McCarthy: American Canceler,’ ” he tells me. “See you Monday, Audrey.”
I clear the remains of our lunch from the desk, wrapping up the leftovers for dinner.
I’m done with my calls, at least the ones that have any chance of being productive.
I chew my lip. And then, before I can think better of it, I pull up Chloe Brittain’s schedule and dial the number for her next--period classroom.
Fifteen minutes later, Chloe is hunched in the chair across from me, her ankles crossed awkwardly under. She looks up at me from under dark bangs—-they look like she cut them herself. “Am I in trouble or something?” she asks.
I fold my hands on the table. “Not at all, Chloe,” I say. “I just wanted to check in with you. I know that it’s been a difficult few months.”
She blinks slowly, uncomprehending. “It has?”
“Because of Meghan.”
“Oh.” She looks down. Her hands grip the sides of the chair. She wants to be anywhere but here, but that’s hardly unusual for my visitors. “Yeah. I guess.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Good,” she says, and then her face draws together like she’s realized this isn’t the best answer when your friend is missing. “Okay, I guess? Um, I mean . . .”
It strikes me that Chloe may not be the brightest girl in the world.
Her gaze flops nervously around the room, and she releases her death grip on the chair, only to tug on her lower lip, which sports a piercing, the hole ringed with scaly dry skin.
I look over at her records, displayed on my screen.
B student, barely, but her attendance is solid.
No real extracurriculars. I picked her of the three because, in all the photos that included Meghan, she was standing next to Chloe, and Chloe was the only one who ever responded to Meghan’s comments on her posts.
“Were you two very close?” I ask, my voice free of judgment.
“N--not really,” she says, guilt rusting at the edge of her words. “We were friends? But not, like, really good friends? We hung out sometimes.”
“Can you tell me what she was—-what she’s like?” I ask, catching my slipup just in time. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“She’s weird, I guess? Not in, like, a bad way,” she hastens to add. “But she’s into really morbid stuff? And she’s like . . .” She drops her voice. “A witch. I think. Like, it’s called Wicca?”
“I’m familiar,” I say, smiling. “What do her parents think of that?”
“Her dad does not like it. But I don’t think he likes anything she does. She’s always complaining about him,” Chloe says. Now that she’s talking more, she’s lodged solidly in present tense. I decide that’s a good sign. Chloe, at least, doesn’t think her friend is dead.
No mention of the mom, I note. Dead or absent? “Did she tell you she wanted to run away?”
Chloe’s shoulders go up in the first half of a shrug and can’t seem to find their way back down. “She said she was going to run away to live in a bog.”
I stifle a small laugh, and I think suddenly of Janie crooking her fingers at a classmate, telling him she was going to put a curse on him to make his dick fall off. We got detention for that one.
“But no specific plans? Real ones, I mean, not bog--related.”
“No? Not that she mentioned, but we didn’t usually talk about that kind of thing. We mostly talked about TV and stuff. There’s this old show we were really into? Teen Wolf?”
I consider whether it’s time to start looking into retirement homes and applying for AARP membership. “I heard she was artistic. She liked photography?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, nodding. “Her Insta is really, like, dark but pretty, you know?”
“Could you show me?” I ask, hoping I sound casual.
The guileless Chloe doesn’t ask why I would possibly need to see a missing girl’s Instagram account—-she just pulls her phone out, then freezes. “Wait. Am I going to get in trouble for taking my phone out during school hours?”
“You have my permission,” I assure her. She visibly relaxes, taps away at the screen, and then hands the phone over.
Meghan Vale’s Instagram is a marked departure from her friends’.
No personal photos here at all, no tortured poetry—-just black--and--white photos, the contrast pumped up until the shadows devour any nuance of gray.
There are photos of flowers, candles, what looks like a cat’s skull balanced on the top of a fence post, branches framing an empty sky.
And then more branches, but these ones are closer together. They’re cast in darkness, making the pale shapes that dangle from them almost glow.
It’s the same tree. The same beads hanging from its branch.
She was there.
I click through. The date is January 5—-roughly two weeks before she was last seen. I took a walk through the woods. It felt like someone was watching me. I think I know who it was.
My mouth is dry. My mind’s eye fills with the deep black of the photographs, skewed into the shape of a pit—-a hole—-the barrel of a gun. She was out there, in a place she shouldn’t have been. Land that belonged to a man adamant that it not be searched, not even to save the life of a little boy.
“Um, Ms. Dixon? Can I have my phone back?” Chloe asks.
“Of course.” I hand it over. “Chloe, let me know if you need anything, okay? Anything at all. Or if you just want to talk.”
“About Meghan?” she asks, that brow--crumpling confusion back.
“About anything you like.”
“Yeah, okay,” she says. She gathers her backpack, pulling it against her protectively. At the doorway, she pauses. “She wasn’t happy. And she said she was going to run away, but I didn’t think she meant it. And . . . she would have said goodbye.”
She’s gone then, leaving me with the afterimage of branches and bare sky.
She would have said goodbye. The words echo in my mind.
They don’t always, I want to tell her. Or they say it so many times that it stops being real.
They leave so many times that you stop believing they might not come back, until one day you realize how long it’s been, and how quiet.
By then, it’s too late. The last day you could have done something is already a fading memory, and you’re left grasping at the empty space where the person you loved once stood, and only then, for a fleeting moment, will you suddenly know the words that would have made them stay.