Chapter 66
nicky
Nicky watched his aunt go back down the beach to find his dad, her flashlight bobbing as she moved.
He couldn’t believe Finn had told her. It’d nearly killed him not to come clean to his own mom about what they’d done, and now Finn had blown the lid on everything, just like that. Aunt Iris was cool, but there’s no way she’d keep something like this to herself.
He couldn’t believe how fucked his life was. A week ago, he’d thought things were bad, but he’d had no idea then what bad really meant.
Maggie was dead. He knew it in his bones.
They hadn’t rescued her yet, and she’d gone into the water before any of the others, before the boat had even sunk; he was sure of it.
His beautiful, perfect Maggie. They’d found Mac and Rose and CJ alive; they’d found other survivors, like Ashley’s mom, Jenna, and Maggie’s mom, Kate. But not Maggie.
And now the only people they were bringing back ashore were dead.
Raylan was dead. Conrad. Bella. God knows how many of his other friends, too. Maybe even all of them.
His mom had just watched it happen. She hadn’t lifted a finger to save them.
Everything he thought he’d known about her had been turned on its head.
She wasn’t the hero he’d always believed her to be.
She hadn’t done anything to save Maggie from being bullied even when she’d begged for help.
She’d chosen Finn over him – her own son – in those last desperate minutes when the boat had turned over on itself for the final time.
She’d let his friends die. Who even was she?
She wasn’t his mom, not anymore.
He couldn’t stay on the beach. He had to disappear, before his aunt spilled her guts and the cops came looking for him. If he left now, he could get a head start; everyone was so busy with the rescue, it’d be hours before they even noticed he was missing.
He stood up, feeling suddenly light-headed. His legs were wobbly as he stumbled into the brush behind the beach, threading his way up past the marina, into the woods.
He had to find his grandfather. Though he hated to admit it, Colt would know what to do.
He always did.
Nicky stopped for breath, clutching his side, and looked back down the mountain. Lights were moving around the headland towards the nearby cove, and he felt a wash of nausea pass through him. He’d seen them bringing his friends ashore, shrouded in cold, stiff plastic.
First one, and then another, and another.
If only he’d been the one who’d drowned tonight, not Raylan, or Cassie, or Conrad. His wonderful Maggie. It would’ve been such a . . . relief.
That night a week ago, the night of Raylan’s party, he’d been so frantic to get to Raylan’s cabin, to score something stronger than weed to take the edge off his anxieties about Maggie, about what she was planning, he hadn’t been concentrating on the trail.
He’d hit a tree root and come off his bike and sat on the trail, winded, trying to get his bearings, to right-size things, while his ears were still ringing and the world was still spinning.
And that’s when he’d seen a figure hidden in the shadow of the dense pines way up the slope above him, bent low over a body on the ground.
It was only when the figure had stood up and turned that Nicky had seen his face clearly in the moonlight.
Finn.
His cousin had spotted him as he’d scrambled to his feet.
‘Fuck, bro, you gotta help me,’ Finn had called.
Even then, Nicky hadn’t understood. He’d assumed the body on the ground was a kid from their class: drunk, or stoned, maybe.
He’d climbed up the slope towards Finn, still a little dizzy from his fall.
‘C’mon, man,’ Finn had said, crouching down. ‘Help me wake him up before someone else comes.’
Nicky had had no idea who the man was. He wasn’t a kid in their class; he was much older than that, mid-thirties, maybe.
But Nicky had been able to tell the dude wasn’t waking up in this lifetime just by looking at him. There was a stillness to him, an absence. There’d been no mistaking it.
He’d never seen a dead body before.
‘Bro, we can’t help him,’ Nicky said.
‘What d’you mean? We can’t just leave him—’
‘We gotta get out of here.’ Nicky pulled Finn’s arm. ‘C’mon, man. Let someone else find him.’
‘I’m not leaving him out here—’
‘Finn! He’s dead.’
‘He can’t be dead,’ Finn said. ‘I barely touched him. He can’t be dead.’
Nicky felt the bile rise in his throat and swallowed hard to keep it down. They could trace DNA in vomit, couldn’t they?
Finn started shaking the man’s shoulders. ‘C’mon, dude. Wake up!’
‘Stop it, bro. He’s gone.’
Finn rocked back on his heels, falling on his ass in the mud and pine needles. He made no effort to get up. ‘It was one punch.’
He sounded dazed, as if he’d just woken up.
‘Talk to me, Finn. What happened?’
‘We got in a fight,’ Finn said, his voice hoarse.
‘He said some shit about my dad. Something about him letting Colt Smith dump toxic waste into the lake.’ He looked up at Nicky, his eyes wide with disbelief.
‘He was going to report your grandfather to the EPA. They’d have shut down the brewery.
My dad might even have gone to prison for covering up what Colt was doing. ’
‘A fight?’
‘I just – it was one punch,’ Finn said again. ‘I swear to God, bro. He just went down. I think maybe he hit his head on a rock or something.’
‘Jesus,’ Nicky said, collapsing on the ground beside his cousin.
They both stared into the darkness. In the distance, the lights at Raylan’s cabin flickered and flared as more cars arrived. They could hear the sound of voices and laughter over the deep bass thump of music.
‘What were you even doing out here anyway?’ Nicky said.
‘He – this guy,’ Finn added, looking down at the body, ‘sent me a text. Said he had something important to give me. Like, I didn’t know who he was.
I thought he was one of Raylan’s buddies.
I’d asked that kid, you know, the one they call FedEx, to hook me up with someone who could get hold of some shit for the party. I just figured that’s what it was.’
‘You agreed to meet some dude you didn’t even know in the middle of the woods at night to buy drugs?’
‘Yeah, I know how it sounds,’ Finn said.
‘But I was expecting a text, and then this dude messages me. It’s, like, the perfect coincidence.
And then I got here, and he said his name was Luke something, and he had all these reports and shit, and he wanted me to read them and then go through my dad’s office, like I was gonna blow Dad in!
He said people were gonna get sick because of the stuff Colt was dumping, and I needed to stand up and do the right thing, or I’d be just as bad as my dad.
He said he was appealing to my “better nature”.
And I said, like, no way, man, I’m not a fucking snitch, and that’s when he called my dad a criminal and said all this shit about him. And I lost it, bro.’
‘You hit him?’
‘One time,’ Finn said. ‘He just went down.’
Nicky knew instinctively the dude was right about Colt. His grandfather didn’t give a shit about the environment, or making people sick.
The only thing he cared about was money.
He didn’t know how Uncle Jesse had got himself caught up in Colt’s shit, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out it had something to do with being mayor.
If it’d just been Colt in the firing line, maybe Finn would’ve helped Luke, but expecting him to rat out his own dad was just dumb. Finn and Jesse were tight.
‘We gotta get out of here,’ Nicky said, scrambling to his feet. ‘Before anyone realises you’re not at the party.’
‘We should call the police,’ Finn said.
‘Sure, if you wanna go to jail. You think anyone’s gonna believe you didn’t mean to kill him? Even if they do, Finn, you’ll still do time. You killed him.’
‘They’ll find out I was here anyway,’ Finn said, not moving. ‘My number will be in his phone. And there’s gonna be DNA everywhere, right? From us fighting. They’ll trace it all straight back to me.’
Finn was right. He was screwed.
And then Nicky realised there was a way out. But once he said the words, there’d be no going back. He’d be in this as deep as his cousin.
Finn was his brother. He wasn’t going to hang him out to dry.
‘Not if they don’t know he’s dead,’ Nicky said.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Look at him,’ Nicky said. ‘He’s, like, middle-aged.
If he disappears, maybe no one will notice.
Or they’ll think he just left town, or ran off with his sidepiece or something.
Even if he’s reported as a missing person, he’s not gonna be high priority, is he?
And without a body, they’ll have no evidence to connect you to him. ’
‘They’ll check his phone. They’ll find out I’m, like, the last person he talked to.’
Nicky started to rifle through the man’s pockets, carefully averting his gaze from his face. He found the man’s phone and opened it.
‘Give me his finger,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I need his finger to unlock the phone,’ Nicky said impatiently. ‘I’m gonna erase the text he sent you. They might not bother to check his cell records. The phone companies don’t keep texts for more than a few months anyway.’
Finn looked like he was going to hurl as he picked up the man’s hand. Nicky opened the screen and quickly scrolled through his messages, erasing the text string between Luke and Finn before pocketing the phone.
‘What you gonna do with it now?’ Finn asked.
‘Anyone at the party live in Boston?’
Finn thought for a minute. ‘Yeah. Rob Grimes. He’s driving back tomorrow.’
‘Perfect. We’ll wedge the phone in the grille on his car. It’ll come off somewhere on the interstate between here and Boston. It’ll make it look like this guy went out of town. I saw someone do it on TV once.’
‘You sure it’ll work?’
‘I haven’t got a fucking clue,’ Nicky said shortly. ‘I haven’t done this before. You got any better ideas?’
‘What about the . . . his body?’
‘We’ll take him where it’d look like he fell if someone does find him. Like the bottom of a cliff? It’d be the perfect accident.’
‘There’s a few places beyond that ridge,’ Finn said. ‘I’ve skied out here before. There’s, like, warning signs not to go too close to the edge.’
Nicky looked where Finn was pointing. It was hard to judge distance in the dark, but it was clearly their closest option.
‘Take his arms,’ Nicky said. ‘I’ll take his legs. And check we haven’t left anything behind, like his wallet.’
Finn scanned the ground near them using the flashlight on his phone, and then they hefted the man between them.
He was heavier than Nicky had imagined: literally a dead weight.
They couldn’t see where they were going in the darkness, and the steep slope and dense pines made it almost impossible to stagger more than a few steps at a time.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ Nicky panted after a few minutes. ‘We’re going to leave way too much evidence if we keep picking him up and putting him down. We need help.’
‘I’ll go get Raylan—’
‘No. It has to be someone who knows what they’re doing,’ Nicky said, hating everything about what he was going to suggest. ‘Someone we can trust. Someone who’s already up to their neck in this.’
‘Who?’
‘My grandfather,’ Nicky said. ‘It’s his fault Luke was out here asking questions. Colt got you into this mess. He can get you out.’