34 Joey
Joey
“Jesus, what happened to you two?” Elena slides a beer toward Joey and a margarita with a half-salted rim toward Sophie.
“Brunch with Marissa Berg,” says Sophie, who is visibly flustered. Her hair is sticking out on one side of her head where she keeps running her fingers through it.
“Oh god, I forgot. How was it?”
The Strike is busy again, although the atmosphere is different than the last time they were here. The rowdy, excited film crew is now subdued, perhaps worn down by the monotony of getting a job done. It’s dim and dull and perfect for the way Joey feels right now.
Sophie leans in, casting a confirming look at Joey. “She thinks we’re up to something. I think she threatened us.” Then she takes a long pull of her drink.
“I’m guessing you didn’t find the book,” Joey says to Elena.
Elena shakes her head and twists up her mouth. “It’s not at Barbara’s.”
Joey hesitates. Then she steels herself. “Me neither. But I did find…something else.”
They blink at her, rapt. “You didn’t tell me that,” complains Sophie.
Joey shrugs. She wanted them all to be together. She needed Elena’s natural-born skepticism so she wouldn’t write this off as nothing. Elena, she knows, will see the bald truth, no matter what it is.
“Just warning you,” she says, “it’s a little weird.” Joey feels a gallop of anticipation inside her chest. “I found a deer antler in River’s closet…covered in old blood.”
“Oh,” says Sophie.
Elena presses her palms against the table as if to push herself away, disgusted.
“And I found this stuck to it.” Joey unfolds the small pink note and smooths it out on the table.
Sophie squirms in her chair while Elena reads aloud. “Ask Joey about bloodspell.”
They all go silent. Joey wonders if her heartbeat is audible to them because it is a concert inside her own head.
“Okay, you’re right. That is weird as hell,” says Elena.
Joey folds and unfolds the corner of the sticky note, relieved to have the words out but not sure what will happen next.
“Matching notes,” Sophie says carefully.
She reaches into her bag and sets the journal on the table between them.
She runs her fingers over the pink sticky note on the top.
Read me. There’s a small silence, then she sits up suddenly, grabbing onto the table and almost tipping their drinks over.
“Remember, under the deck, next to bloodspell, the heart with the letters inside?” She glances at Joey, who knows what is coming.
She feels it like a pressure drop before a storm.
She claws around the bottle in front of her like it’s a rip cord.
Sophie says, “Quinn plus River.”
Joey tries with everything she has to remain stoic.
“Are we thinking River could have…?” Elena makes a stabbing motion with her hand. “With the antler thing?”
Sophie runs a finger over the rim of her glass. “He cared about her though. Why would he hurt her?”
“Hmm,” says Elena.
“And who would keep a murder weapon in their house for fifteen years with the blood still on it? Pretty risky.” An ice cube slides between Sophie’s teeth. She crunches down.
Joey does not feel capable of participating in this conversation. It’s all she can do not to stand up and run out of here.
Oblivious, Elena takes a pensive sip. “Maybe it wasn’t risky. Maybe it was confident. All River had to do was ask his cop daddy to cover up a murder for him.”
Joey hides her face in her hands to mask her immediate reaction. She doesn’t want to think about this. She can’t think about this. Then she fills her lungs and straightens her back. “We are going to ask him,” she says. “I told him to meet us here.”
“Wait, what?” says Elena. “Tonight?”
Joey checks the time on her phone. “Now,” she says.
Her mind is scrambled. She doesn’t know what to believe.
It strikes her as strange that, instead of Tom, who she was so sure about twenty-four hours ago, everything is now pointing toward River.
She knows he wasn’t out that night. He was with her.
But maybe after she left his house, he could have gone out…
But what about the trees? They whispered about Tom Winter, and Joey was sure it was him.
Could she have misheard? Confused Dad with some other word?
It is possible. It’s all possible, she realizes.
She understands with clarity now, as the bar hums around her and two of her oldest friends sit across the table from her, that justice for Quinn is all that matters. Not her happiness, not her allegiances, not even her own beating heart. She cannot choose River over Quinn. Not again.
Elena sits up suddenly. She looks past their heads toward the front of the bar. “He’s here,” she says through clenched teeth. And Joey feels the floor drop out beneath her.
He approaches the table, and Joey avoids his eyes, trying to focus on her breath.
“You started without me, I see,” he says.
She can’t bear to hear his deep, unassuming voice.
There’s an awkward silence during which, under normal circumstances, Elena and Sophie would say a few polite how-are-yous and you-look-wells.
But it quickly becomes obvious that these are not normal circumstances.
“How about I get the next round?” he says. She still can’t meet his eye, and she feels his touch on her back, but she wiggles away. There’s a moment of confusion, hurt, even, but then he slides his wallet out of his pocket and makes his way to the bar.
When he comes back with more drinks, Joey’s throat is dry, and she takes a swig of beer. Then another, and then a third. Then she sputters a cough because it’s gone down the wrong pipe. She knows the moment she opens her mouth, her whole life will change.
“What’s going on?” River asks with a self-conscious smile.
“Why was that antler at your house?” she asks quickly, letting the words spill out before she can stop them.
He laughs, as though she just told a joke that he doesn’t quite get. He looks from Joey to Elena and Sophie, who are both watching him carefully.
His smile disappears, and it begins to dawn on him that this is not, in fact, a friendly gathering. This is an ambush. “Joey, come on. I told you, I never saw it before yesterday.”
She is quick with her response. “Whose blood was on it?”
He’s silent, and Joey notices that Sophie and Elena are also quiet. Everything hinges on what he says next. Only, he says nothing, just stares back at her, the disbelief and hurt written there as if on paper.
Her hand shakes as she fumbles with her phone.
“This was Quinn’s,” she says, and she pushes it toward him.
The image of the sweatshirt is already pulled up on the screen.
She trails her finger along it, stopping when she gets to the bloodstain that covers the front of it.
She pinches and expands it until it fills the screen.
River glances from the image to Joey and back again.
Against her better judgment, she lets her eyes connect with his, and there’s something there.
A plea, maybe. Or fear. Or maybe just plain confusion.
She looks away and jabs at the screen. Her esophagus is pulsing.
She is forced to swallow before she speaks. “Was it you?”
It takes him a second to register her question, but once he does, his reaction is instant. His hands fly to his hairline and peel through his hair. Still, he says nothing.
Joey can feel Sophie and Elena like a forest of support around her, propelling her, encouraging her to keep going and find the truth, no matter what. “Did you do this to her?” Joey keeps her voice devoid of emotion. Robotic. It’s all she can manage.
River, on the other hand—he is full of emotion.
So much so that tears are starting to fill his eyes.
This takes Joey by surprise, and suddenly she is speechless.
An inner voice is screaming at her to stop.
His hurt looks real. But she steels herself.
She cannot crack, not even for him. She has to know the truth.
His voice is thick when he finally speaks. He looks directly at Joey when he asks, “You think I hurt Quinn?”
Joey is hot, so hot. And her mouth is a desert.
She wants to reach out and down the rest of her beer, but she can’t get her arms to move.
She forces herself to stare back at his face.
She has come to know it so well. There looks to be some vulnerability there, but she can’t tell if it implicates him for lying or if it implicates her for accusing him.
If there’s a lie, she knows he will betray himself.
And when he does, it’s going to hurt like hell, but that’s what happens.
People lie. They leave, and you move on.
“Wait,” he says, leaning backward in his chair, which looks like a toy beneath his six-foot-six frame.
“You don’t just think I hurt her. You think I killed her.
” He turns to Sophie, then Elena. “Do you think this too, or is it just Joey?” He laughs sharply when they don’t reply.
“I’m such an idiot. I thought this was a reunion.
It’s been fifteen years. I didn’t realize this was…
whatever this is. I honestly can’t believe you think I’d do something like that.
Joey, come on. You of all people. I know it’s been a long time, but Quinn and I were… I cared about her too.”
Elena, who is inclined toward confrontation, looks about to respond, but Joey stands abruptly, hearing nothing but her pulse thumping in her eardrums. “Just tell me you didn’t,” she says.
They stare each other down like this for a second or a minute—it’s hard to tell how long. And then, exactly what she feared would happen happens. River says nothing. He throws her a look of such profound disappointment, she feels it beneath her skin, beneath her bones, in her very soul.
Then, he is gone.