Chapter 35 After
After
I text Dev when I get home. He doesn’t respond. It doesn’t surprise me. I doubt he’ll be swinging by my office anymore. I should never have let him get involved.
The first order of business is calling in sick. No one wants me dispensing advice to teens today. Maybe not ever. I can only hope that I get to keep my job. Local school counselor fired for uncovering serial--killer plot, I think. The podcasters will love it.
One long shower and a bowl of desultory Cheerios later, I’m draped on the couch in my living room, feeling a blend of sorry for myself and too numb to feel anything at all.
There are bodies out there, and I found them, and there’s more to do.
The glade of the lost is waiting, and no amount of telling myself that it’s foolish and irresponsible and irrational will stop me from feeling its presence.
The doorbell rings, followed by an eager boof. Barry’s blocky head appears at the window, and Kenny leans in to wave. I scurry over to let them in, and then stand still to let Barry do a thorough and somewhat intrusive olfactory examination of me.
“Oh, my disaster child,” Kenny says with a sigh, gathering me up in a hug. Kenny isn’t tall, but he’s big, and a hug from him is an enveloping and nourishing experience. He pats me gently on the top of my head as I rest it against his shoulder. “You beautiful little idiot.”
“Hello to you, too, Kenny,” I say. He releases me, but takes hold of my arms to give me a good once--over.
“Where are we on the spectrum of breakdowns?”
“Are you asking me if it’s safe to leave me alone?” I ask wryly.
“Yes. Precisely.” For all his joking tone, he’s dead serious.
“I am not a danger to myself or others at the present moment,” I say. “Though my dating life may be DOA. Dev is never calling me back, is he?”
“Probably not,” he says delicately. And then, “Have you eaten?”
“Cereal.”
“What are we going to do with you?” He wanders into the kitchen, and for the second time in a week, I have a man cooking breakfast for me. This time around, it’s less fun.
We eat together, and I pretend I don’t notice Kenny sneaking Barry bites of egg. “So. Len tells me you’ve promised to leave well enough alone.”
“I have.”
“Right, so you’re either lying to him or yourself,” Kenny says knowingly.
“I can’t interfere with a police investigation,” I say with a shrug. “I’m not going to go get myself arrested again.” It’s going to make my skin feel like it’s crawling off my body, but I don’t see how I have a choice other than to stay out of it.
“I’m not suggesting that you do. But you’re going to do something, and so I feel it’s better to direct your energy in a productive direction.
Otherwise, that pressure is going to build up until you do something truly unwise.
” Kenny’s look is a little too pointed for comfort.
I shift in my seat. The cheap IKEA chair squeaks under me.
“What would you do?” I ask.
He considers the question as he eats. “Your problem is that you’re looking for answers, but you don’t have the right questions,” he says. “So you’re running headlong at the problem. Digging up bodies.” He looks toward the ceiling with a god help us expression.
“I know what question I’m asking.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
I spread my hands. “What happened out there? Who are those girls? Who killed them? Where is Meghan Vale? Where’s—-” I stop myself.
“Where’s Janie,” he finishes for me. I nod, not meeting his eyes. He sits back in his chair. “Nope.”
“What do you mean, ‘nope’?”
“I mean, none of those are the question.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t know. You figure it out,” he says around a bite of breakfast sausage.
He wipes his fingers on his napkin and rises.
“It’s not your job to find Meghan. And Janie—-you’re not looking for her, not really.
She’s not part of this as far as you know, so figure out what it is you’re actually looking for. ”
“I don’t know what that means,” I say.
“Eh, maybe it’s bullshit,” he says with a dismissive wave.
“But if you get arrested again, Len’s going to kill you and then he’s going to go to prison and I can’t afford the rent on my own, so.
Work it out. Find the part in this you’re supposed to play.
Hint: it does not involve sneaking anywhere at midnight. ”
He leaves me, offering Barry a final dollop of praise and pets before he heads out the door.
I sit staring at the wall, my coffee going cold in the mug.
Barry takes advantage of my inattention to snag the corner of a piece of bacon from Kenny’s abandoned plate.
He locks eyes with me as he slowly, delicately, gently pulls it off the plate and lowers himself out of view.
With stealthy gobbling noises, he devours it.
I decide he’s earned it.
I clear up the rest of breakfast, Kenny’s words pinging around in my head. Am I asking the wrong questions? What other questions might there be? Missing girls, dead girls. They’re at the heart of this, aren’t they?
I need to get out of here. Clear my head.
I get dressed, whistle to Barry, and head for the car. Twenty minutes later, I’m parked at the bottom of Eden Crest. It’s broad daylight, but with darkness gnawing at the edge of my mind, I still pull up my email and schedule my usual message to Len.
It’s a clear day, so Barry forgoes his fetching jacket. Not many people are out on a weekday, and I get up to the viewing point without seeing a soul. The climb hasn’t ordered my thoughts any better. I take a seat on the broad, flat boulder where hundreds of people have sat before me.
Rock band, I think. International jewel heist. Australian sheep farm. We imagined so many futures here, Janie and I. So many ways to vanish and be remade.
In her stories, we were always together. Sometimes, it felt like that was a promise and a pledge. Other times, it felt like a leash. Come along, Oddity. Keep up. Not that way. We’re such good friends. Prove it to me. Tell me all the ways we’re friends.
She loved nothing more than to be told how loved she was.
She needed someone to cling to. It’s hard now to hate her for it, like I did once. She was only a child. A child who wanted to escape only slightly less than she wanted a reason to stay.
I couldn’t be that reason for her. She made sure of it.
My pack sits on the boulder beside me. With Barry leaning his impossible weight against my shins, I rummage inside and pull out Meghan Vale’s journal. I know I should give it to the police, but they aren’t looking for her—-not yet. Giving it up feels like giving up on it, and her.
I flip it open and page to the back, blank pages. It has an elastic loop through which a pen is stuck. I pull it free and uncap it.
Where is Meghan Vale? I write. Kenny says it’s the wrong question, but I can’t imagine a more worthy one.
Where is Janie?
They’re the wrong questions because I can’t answer them—-not yet, at least. I don’t exactly have the money to hire a PI, and I don’t have the skills to track down a runaway on my own. Much less a victim of murder or abduction.
Saw Emily Hill, I write idly. The Hills are in the middle of all of this.
What did they know? I write. It’s closer, I think.
I flip back to those final pages of writing. Once again, I read the entries about the witch in the woods, Meghan circling around the truth of what she saw and learned without ever writing it down. As if she knew it was too dangerous even for a private diary.
And once again, I read that poem. It’s the sort of deeply felt mediocrity that makes teenage poetry truly precious.
It’s one thing to pour your heart out in verse when you have the skill to do it in a way that you know will be beautiful.
The poems of adolescence are a machete hacking away at undergrowth in the dark, desperate and unlovely and glorious in their imperfection.
My name is Stranger. She’s built the poem around those borrowed words. The kind of girl who’d write a thing like that is the kind whose self had been battered, obliterated.
It reminds me of the stories Janie used to tell.
Her strange and half--real myths of terrifying fairies—-fae, she’d call them, of course—-and the power of names.
How you had to keep them hidden. She claimed that was why she always used nicknames for people.
Because otherwise, her words would be too powerful. You wouldn’t be able to resist me.
After I’d refused to call her January, I’d only ever called her Janie.
Except.
Except.
My breath catches in my throat as a long--discarded memory bubbles to the surface. It was after that first disappearance. My summer alone, abandoned, confused. And then Janie sweeping in like the whole thing was a laugh.
I wanted her to think I was as cool as she was. So I’d feigned indifference at first. Hey, stranger, I’d said. Where have you been?
When she shrugged and laughed and told me what a fabulous summer she’d had, I knew I couldn’t mope and complain. She’d only mock me for it. So I played along and hid my hurt. Except that it kept needling at me, so I kept needling at her.
Hey, stranger, I kept saying, every time I saw her. Thought you might have disappeared again. I said it so much it became more than a stock phrase. I started calling her that in conversation. Where are you going today, Stranger?
Oh, Stranger. I didn’t see you there.
Where have you been, Stranger?
Each time, it was a jab. Each time, I saw the flicker of annoyance in her eyes, and that was why I kept doing it.
If I had to be Oddity, she could be Stranger, because she’d left me, she’d gone away, she’d changed where I couldn’t see her, and how could I be sure I knew her at all? I wanted her to hurt, like I had.
I kept waiting for her to snap and tell me to stop, but she never did. And eventually, the nickname dropped out of use. I can’t remember now how long it was. A long time in my memory, but now that I try to fit events around it, probably a couple of weeks.
I trace my finger over those last words.
My name is Stranger.
“It was you,” I whisper.
She was there. She had to be. And I know, I know, that means she never left.
I’ve mourned her a hundred times. I’ll mourn her again, but not in this moment.
Because Meghan Vale saw Emily Hill in those woods. And Janie dated Andrew Hill. It’s more than a coincidence.
I turn to the last page. Look at what I’ve written.
What did they know?
I cross it out and try again.
What are they hiding?