All Unquiet Things (26 page)

Junior Year—Fall Semester

I
had always known that Cass’s reputation was important to him; my mistake was in believing that I was more important. I honestly don’t know how his parents felt about me before Carly’s death, because after that first encounter I only spoke to them a handful of times and I never cared much about impressing them because I knew what terrible people they were, at least as far as Cass was concerned. We didn’t talk about his parents and I assume he didn’t talk about me at home. It took some maneuvering to ignore the issue, but no more than it takes to avoid a pothole in the road. To me, Cass’s parents were practically nonentities, to the point where I sometimes forgot he had them. The shock I felt when I realized they had pressured him into breaking up with me was indescribable.

“What do you mean you can’t be with me anymore?” I asked, utterly bewildered. After avoiding me for days, Cass had called and asked me to meet him at the overlook. He didn’t seem to have gotten much sleep the night before and I could just hear Mr. Irving’s voice in my ear:
You had better break up with that girl, Cass. I won’t have
my
son dating the daughter of a murderer! I don’t want you to have anything to do with that family, do you hear me?

Cass took a deep breath and hung his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Aud. It’s not me. It’s my family. They think—well, I’m sure you know what they think.”

“But … I
need
you, Cass,” I pleaded, reaching for his hand. “I need you now more than I ever have. I love you so much. You still love me, right?”

He nodded at the ground, unwilling to look at me. His fingers were limp in mine.

“Then we should be together, no matter what anybody says,” I insisted. “We can keep it a secret, we don’t have to tell anybody.”

“We both have enough secrets,” Cass told me, swallowing hard. “You have to concentrate on yourself right now. I can’t help you through this. I just can’t.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? I need
you,”
I repeated. “All you have to do is be there.”

“I’m sorry, Audrey,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.” He took his hand out of mine and walked away, back toward the life he’d built to cover the bruises. I couldn’t watch him leave, so I turned and looked at the valley sprawled out beneath my feet.

I waited until he was gone to cry.

Senior Year

I
let myself into the house using my key and headed upstairs to clean out the rest of Carly’s drawers. When I was finished, I ran my hand over the back of each drawer to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Checking the last one, my fingers sent something rolling. It was a tiny hand-painted wooden doll, one that
I recognized as belonging to a set of
matryoshka
dolls Miranda and Paul had brought back for Carly from a trip they took to Saint Petersburg when she was nine years old. The set still sat atop Carly’s bureau, next to the packet of pictures I had insisted Neily keep but that he had left behind.

The nesting dolls were fashioned in the rough outline of a woman’s figure and painted robin’s-egg blue. A girl’s face, with big, expressive blue eyes and long black eyelashes, had been painted on, and the dolls were adorned with white polka dots and black and yellow pansies. I shook them, expecting to hear the clatter of something inside, but there was no sound. I opened them up, extracting doll after doll until I got to the very last. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper to muffle the sound, was a dull brass key engraved with the number forty-two.

As I stood holding the key, I finally figured out a way to get to the safe-deposit box. It would be tricky, but if I was a good enough liar I could probably pull it off. I left Paul’s house immediately and drove home, where I pulled the box of Carly’s things I had decided to keep out from under my bed. Inside, buried under photo albums and stuffed animals and a shoebox full of gently worn notes we’d passed to each other in class, was a plastic folder containing an assortment of official documents I couldn’t throw away. One was the authorization letter for the safe-deposit box that I’d found earlier in Carly’s desk; maybe I should’ve given it back to Paul, but I hadn’t wanted to give away anything that might come in handy. Another was Carly’s driver’s license.

As I drove into the valley, I remembered the promise I’d made to Neily:
No lies, no tricks, no secrets
. I kept thinking I should call him, that he should be there when I opened the box, but every time I considered this possibility I rejected it. I
would share the contents of the box with Neily if I found anything relevant, but until then it was mine alone.

It was almost closing time when I arrived at the bank. I strode up to the counter as confidently as possible and handed over the key and the letter.

“I’d like to open a safe-deposit box,” I told the clerk. “It belongs to my parents, but my dad authorized me to access it.”

The clerk read the letter carefully. “Do you have identification, Miss Ribelli?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.” I took out my wallet and handed her Carly’s driver’s license. Now, objectively Carly and I look nothing alike. She was short with brown hair and blue eyes; I’m tall with blond hair and green eyes. But if you strip that all away, our faces are pretty similar, and when Carly’s driver’s license picture was taken she’d just had her hair highlighted, and with the flash and the crappy quality of the photo it looks blond. When she’d shown it to us all, several people commented on how much she looked like me in it, and I was sure that as long as the clerk didn’t get the sense that I was lying she would think the same thing.

I stood at a distance that was neither suspicious nor close enough for the clerk to note the exact color of my eyes. Still, she looked unconvinced.

“It says here you’re five-four,” the clerk said.

“I know, right?” I smiled and shrugged. “Growth spurt.”

After a few more seconds, the clerk handed back the license and the letter and led me into a small room with a table. She opened and removed box 42 and left me alone with it, instructing me to buzz her on the intercom when I was ready to pack it in.

I lifted the lid of the box and peered inside. Slowly, I pulled
things out. Miranda’s passport was in there, and so was Carly’s, along with three birth certificates—one for each of them, including Paul. All of Mams’s jewelry was there, too, each piece kept in a separate velvet pouch.

I worked my way to the bottom, examining family photos and glancing at various uninteresting legal documents until I came to a thick manila envelope sealed with packing tape. There was nothing written on the package, and it wasn’t very heavy. I ripped it open with the edge of my car key and took out a stack of letters, all addressed to Carly.

There was a plastic chair in the corner of the room, and I sat down to read. I felt weightless, like the floor had dropped out from under me. None of the letters were very long, and they were all typed, but the person who wrote them didn’t feel the need to use capital letters or punctuation. The sentences blurred together, rage-filled rants at Carly’s frigidness, interspersed with violent, staccato declarations of love.

I read each of the letters several times. They repeated the same sentiments over and over, making veiled threats. It seemed as if the writer was completely out of control, even delusional. I wondered how these letters had affected Carly, whether she had been scared or moved to pity. When I reached the end of the pile, a small square note in Carly’s handwriting slipped to the ground.

Neily
,

I’m returning these letters to you because I know you would not want anybody else to see them. I think you should destroy them. I want you to get over what happened—our breakup was less than ideal, but I didn’t think you would understand any other way. We’re different
people—I have accepted this, and you should, too. I can’t believe you would do anything to hurt me, because I know how deeply you still care for me. But please don’t send me any more letters. They make me too sad
.

Carly

I put the letters back into the envelope and buried it at the bottom of my bag. I left everything else and drove to the Calamity Diner, where I ordered myself dinner before reading the letters again. My food came, but I couldn’t eat. I tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table, grabbed the letters, and fled the diner.

Neily called later, and so did Cass, but I ignored both of their calls and spent the rest of the evening in my room. Carly had thought that Neily was her anonymous correspondent, which was why she hadn’t shown anyone the letters or told anybody she was being stalked. She was trying to be kind. I couldn’t believe what she believed, that Neily had written them, that he was following her and feeling the kind of anger that exploded onto those pages. Even though he had never been able to shake the pain of what had happened between them, Neily was capable of restraint. Still, I didn’t relish the thought of having to show him the letters, of having to see his face when he realized just what sort of person Carly had understood him to be.

The next day at school Neily and I didn’t get a chance to talk in private, so I asked him to meet me at the Calamity Diner around four, when there would be few people around. He sat down and grabbed a menu from the edge of the table.

“Is it too late for brunch?” he asked.

“You look well rested,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

“Yeah, well, Harriet prescribed me sleeping pills and last night I decided to give one a try.” He closed his menu and looked at me. “No offense, but you
don’t
look well rested. Have you been crying?”

I shook my head. “Not in the past ten hours.”

“What happened?”

“Awkward confrontation with the ex-boyfriend, he kissed me, blah blah blah.” I waved my hand dismissively and popped open a menu.

“Blah blah blah?”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“He kissed you?”

“Just once.”

“Audrey, come on.”

“I told him that I didn’t want to be with him, but it was so hard.”

“I get it,” Neily said.

“I’m sure you do,” I said.

“I do,” he insisted. “You can talk to me about stuff, you know.”

I let out a deep breath. “Yeah, well, I don’t really want to talk, so just drop it.”

The waitress came then and took our order. When she was gone, Neily asked, “So what’s up? I mean, besides Cass’s heart rate.” When I didn’t smile at the joke, he turned serious. “Okay, what’s going on?”

I reached into my bag and brought out the packet of letters. “I found the key to Carly’s safe-deposit box. And this was in
there.” I slid the letters across the table and he took them. “I’ll give you some time. Just let me know when you’re done.”

It took him almost a half hour to go through the letters. He pored over them, reading each several times, tracing the words with his fingers. Finally, when he was finished, he passed them to me and took a deep breath.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“No kidding.” I handed him Carly’s note. “There’s more.”

He read the note, shaking his head. “This is—this is—”

“I know.”

“This is—you know what? I’m
offended
. I really am. I’m not upset, just totally insulted.” He crumpled up the note and tossed it away.

“You can’t blame her—”

“The hell I can’t! When she broke up with me I thought it was because of her own issues, but it turns out that she didn’t even understand me. I never would have done something like this. Follow her around, send her creepy unsigned letters-threaten her? What did she think I was, some kind of psycho?”

“Did you read the letter? She didn’t think you were a psycho.”

“No, that’s right, she pitied me. She
pitied
me, Audrey.” He put his hand to his forehead. “That might be worse.”

“You need to calm down. You can’t let this freak you out—you have to think rationally. If you didn’t write these letters, somebody else did, and that person is obviously unstable. We have to figure out how Carly’s assault in June, these letters, and her death two months later are connected. Do you think you can put aside your incredulity for maybe an hour so that we can make some headway? Huh?”

He hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Great.” I chewed my lip. “I have a theory. I think that the person who attacked Carly at Cass’s party is the same person who wrote these letters.”

“And what led you to that conclusion?” he asked. “Just to play devil’s advocate.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

“So you’re psychic now?”

I shook my head. “That’s not it. It just seems like the kind of person who would write those letters would also trick a girl and rape her.”

“But the assault happened first.”

“We don’t know that. The letters don’t have dates on them, and Carly didn’t keep track of when she got them. I checked the diary again—there’s no other mention of them.”