18 Joey
Joey
Tom’s house is tucked into the woods.
It’s deathly silent here, his old white truck nowhere in sight. The surrounding trees seem to be sick with trunk rot, their branches shrouded in caterpillar webbing. The front step is home to a sunken lawn chair and a littering of cigarette butts.
Joey unclicks her seat belt and lifts herself out of the car. Sophie follows, closing the door carefully behind her. Elena clomps out of the back seat in her combat boots.
Joey knocks on the front door. The sound is like three gunshots in the silent woods. On the third knock, the door slowly peels open. She and Sophie look at each other suddenly; then Joey leans in. The latch where the door should close is broken.
Joey is about to push it farther, but Sophie snaps a warning arm across her middle. She calls out, “Mr. Winter?” Her voice is too high, like they’re kids, and she’s asking if Quinn can come out to play. Joey’s hands have begun to sweat.
There is no answer from within, though they wait a minute in silence to make sure. Joey reaches out for the door again, and she jumps as Sophie’s hand lands on top of hers. “Don’t,” she says in a whisper.
“He’s obviously not here,” calls Elena from behind them, sounding impatient.
Her shoes crunch on the uneven earth as she disappears around the corner of the house.
There is no sign of him, but Joey knows that, if he’s out, it means he’s probably just stocking up on booze or frozen dinners and could be back any minute. They should hurry.
Joey ignores them both and uses her fingertips to push the door. It’s featherlight—probably made of plywood—and gives way easily.
“Joey!”
The shout comes from around the house, sending Joey’s heart into her mouth. It takes her a second to register that it’s Elena.
“Soph!” Elena shouts again, louder this time. Joey thunders down the two front steps and around the corner, imagining Tom is back there. Imagining Elena at knifepoint.
Soon she sees Elena forty yards away, at the edge of a down slope. She’s turned away from them, staring out at the woods. Tom is nowhere in sight.
“What is it?” Joey calls out as she runs toward her, feeling an itch at the back of her neck.
Sophie runs up alongside them, panting, and they follow Elena’s gaze out toward the woods.
It’s getting dark, and there’s not much to see.
But something catches Joey’s eye. It’s the glass house at the top of the hill in the distance.
A long-abandoned ultra-eighties eyesore they dared each other to break into when they were young but never actually did.
She didn’t realize it was visible from here.
“Did you know?” asks Elena, and Joey is confused. Know what? And then she turns to see that Elena is not pointing up the hill, but down.
Two hundred yards in the distance, the way the trees clear out in a wide opening—the woods take on a familiar shape.
The itch on the back of Joey’s neck suddenly feels like an insect burrowing under her skin.
Sophie gasps. “Look.” She doesn’t have to say anything else because Joey sees it now. It’s suddenly there, as if trees had been cleared just for this view.
Straight through the woods, hauntingly close, is a circle of rocks surrounded by a ring of aspen trees. Tom Winter has a clear view of the spell circle.
***
Minutes later, Elena shoves a shoulder into the back door, and it gives with a snapping sound that can’t be good. She tosses Joey a toothy grimace as if to say, “Oops.”
The smell of stale smoke hits Joey first. Then, it’s the faint dampness of mildew.
Sawdust and dried mud crackle under her shoes as she steps into the kitchen.
A skylight casts a murky glow from above, illuminating the scratched-up table in the center.
On the table is an empty vodka bottle next to a shot glass, smudged from recent use.
The tabletop is peppered with black crumbs, old ringed coffee cups, upturned fly carcasses.
A sharp professional-grade kitchen knife gleams from the corner, the only clean dish Joey can see.
Back by the door, Joey spots the dustiest minifridge she has ever seen. She crouches down, careful not to touch the floor with her hands or knees. Just breathing the air in here makes her feel like she needs a shower.
It takes an effort to open the minifridge door with the sleeve of her shirt.
Once she tugs it open, she sees a flimsy shoebox that contains small white tubes that look, at first, like Styrofoam.
She leans closer. No, not foam. They seem to be…
bones. Tiny animal bones. There are dozens of them. What the hell are they? Birds? Rats?
“Guys.” The urgent whisper comes from a distant room. Joey jumps. She kicks the fridge closed and hurries from the kitchen.
She passes through the living room. An old floral couch is faded and torn. Yellow stuffing herniates out the middle.
“Oh, good,” says Sophie as Joey and Elena come down the hall. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t leave me here.”
There is no door on the hinges of what appears to be Tom’s room. Inside, there’s a mattress in the corner with a blanket on top of it and a ratty pillow. Next to the makeshift bed is a half-empty bottle of whiskey and a small collection of empty beer bottles.
Sophie picks up something that looks like an old DVD. She finds a remote and clicks on the small TV. It reminds Joey of the TV that used to sit in the corner of Quinn’s room, on top of her bookshelf.
Joey can’t help but wonder what Tom would do if he came home now. If he saw them in his room. Looking through his things.
Behind her, Sophie yelps. “Oh my god, how do I turn it off?”
Joey turns. It’s hard to tell what is happening, but the screen is showing lots of skin and black leather, and then a loud moan reverberates around the room.
“Turn it off,” shouts Elena, over the din.
“I’m trying.” Sophie fumbles with the buttons and drops the remote. When she takes a step toward it, she accidentally kicks it, and it goes sliding across the room.
Elena puts her head in her hands, and Joey goes after the remote.
She has to crawl under the TV stand. She reaches, wondering when the last time this floor was cleaned.
Finally, her fingers find it. She stands and jabs at the power button.
The TV snaps off in a staticky click, and they’re left in the silent aftermath.
Sophie rushes out of the room.
“So he’s into bondage porn,” Elena says, following. “That’s a choice.”
Joey rubs her arms. She takes a few steps out of the room and stops at the end of the hallway, before a closed door.
Fearing the worst, she turns the handle and nudges it open.
An involuntary sharp breath fills her lungs.
The floor is so clean, it shines. The hardwood, preserved in this way, looks like it belongs in another house altogether.
She uses her hip to push her way in, and that’s when she sees it.
A photo resting in a gold-plated frame. A photo of Quinn.
Her hair is tinged green at the tips and in streaks around her face, and she’s smiling a broad smile that makes Joey’s chest flood with sudden, unexpected sadness.
Of all the pictures she has ever seen of Quinn, she has never seen this one.
It seems to perfectly capture her essence.
A few steps inside the room reveal more photographs, all framed, resting on a polished oak table.
Every image is of Quinn. Quinn running. Quinn eating ice cream.
Quinn as a little girl, grumpily hugging a stuffed bunny.
Scattered around are candles melted down to various heights, there’s a rosary, and what she recognizes as tiny animal bones, arranged like offerings.
Then, she sees a piece of dirty string. Only, on closer inspection, it’s not a string.
It’s a shoelace. Mud-stained and stiff, as if it hasn’t been touched for years.
Next to it is a floppy stuffed bunny with fur that might have once been soft but is now matted and rough.
It’s the bunny from the photo of Quinn as a girl, only it’s missing an eye, and stuffing protrudes grotesquely out of its ear.
There is nothing else in this room. No chair. No bed. Importantly, no book. Only the table and two black curtains, parted down the middle, allowing a slice of dying daylight into the room.
“I was not anticipating a shrine,” Sophie says quietly from behind her.
She brushes past and lifts a photograph of Quinn.
The frame is delicate, covered in curled gray aspen bark.
Gently, she replaces the photograph and spots the bones.
“Are those—” But she doesn’t finish the thought.
Instead, she rubs her hands over her eyes. “This is heartbreaking.”
“Heartbreaking?” Elena stands next to them now. She pokes a finger into the bunny’s missing eye and makes a disgusted sound. “This is some serious serial killer shit. What’s with the candles and the rosary? Is he religious?”
Sophie picks up a small laminated card and shows it to them. On the front is a picture of a horned satanic beast.
“Not discerning about his worship then,” Elena says.
As Sophie replaces the card, Joey notices a lumpy bit of clothing, faded pink, just behind the stuffed bunny.
It’s soft between her fingers as she picks it up.
Thin. It’s not immediately recognizable, but when she unfolds it, her pulse pounds.
Quinn’s pink hoodie. Her favorite pink hoodie—the one she was wearing beneath the raincoat the day they found her body.
Opening it up, she sees that the front side is completely discolored.
A deep brown, nearly black, stain covers almost the entire thing.
She lays it on the floor, and as she does, Sophie and Elena peer over her shoulder.
Joey kneels, frantically scanning the entire thing.
Her focus snags on a little rip in the fabric, just to the right of the zipper.
She uses two fingers to gently peel the rip open.
It’s two to three inches across, like someone stabbed a blade through it.
“Oh my god,” says Sophie breathlessly.
Joey notices more of the little rips all over the front of the sweatshirt. There are six, no, seven of them. Her fingers are pulsing with her heartbeat. She can barely hear anything.
Elena kneels next to Joey. “I’m going to take a risk and say that’s not coffee spilled on the front?”
“Right,” says Sophie. “I think I’m ready to leave now.”
“We should take it with us,” says Joey. “Find out if it’s Quinn’s blood.”
“Absolutely not.” Elena extends her arm, blocking Joey from grabbing it.
“Why not?” We should take the evidence, Joey thinks, prove that it’s a match with Quinn. She knows it will be.
Elena doesn’t relent. “If Tom comes back, which he’s likely to do any minute, and sees this sweatshirt missing, don’t you think he’ll be wondering where it is?
No offense, but your little sleuthing hobby seems to have earned you a reputation around town.
You’re the first person he’d suspect. And I’m not risking your life or mine for some child-killing psycho. ”
“I think what Elena is trying to say,” says Sophie with a gentleness that only she could muster at a time like this, “is that this is insanely suspicious. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you, or the whispering trees, were right about Tom.
” She gestures in the direction of the table as if to prove her point.
Elena says, “Whether the trees really whispered to Joey is irrelevant. It does seem, though, that our friend Tom is trying to hide evidence in plain sight. And look at these holes. They’re so exact.
Is it just me, or does this sweatshirt look less like she fell and more like…
” She takes a breath. “Like someone stabbed her six times.”
“Seven,” says Joey. “There are seven holes.”
They all flinch, even Elena.
Sophie says, “If the sweatshirt looked like this when she died, imagine what her body looked like underneath. Oh god. I can’t imagine the pain.
” She buries her face in her hands. When she looks up again, her eyes are red.
She sniffles. “Is it at all possible that, when she fell, she actually did land on her front? That these slashes are from rocks?”
“No.” Joey is quick to reply. “I know she was on her back when we found her. If she died on impact like they said, she couldn’t have just rolled over.”
“You’re right,” says Elena. “Look where they are. They’re clean. Intentional.” She points to the left side of the sweatshirt, right where Quinn’s heart would have been.
Joey closes her eyes. She’s tried to imagine what happened to Quinn so many times over the years, but for some reason seeing her actual clothes, this real piece of her, is so much harder.
“She was wearing a raincoat too,” says Sophie. “Remember? It could be the reason we didn’t see the blood then. It must have been covering it.”
“But the police would have seen it,” says Joey. “Why didn’t they say anything? How did we not know about this?”
Sophie shrugs. “Maybe Tom took it off her before they got there?”
“We should take this to the police,” Joey says, “test the blood—”
Elena grabs her arm. Her eyes are clear and determined as she slowly shakes her head.
“We were never here.” Then she stands to take out her phone.
She snaps several pictures. A series of vibrations from Joey’s pocket signals that she’s just sent the images to the group text.
She snatches up the sweatshirt, bunches it up, and shoves it back behind the stuffed bunny.
“We have to go now.”
Sophie is nodding so much that stray hairs fall loose from her hair clip and swing over her face. “We’ve already been here too long.”
Joey takes a fraction of a second to decide, and then she nods too.
They run.