Nearly Found (18 page)

“You should go, before you’re too cold to ride.”

“I was there. At Emily’s. Earlier tonight.”

I pulled out of his grip. “What are you saying?”

“I needed time with her. Time alone. To get her to confide in me. Without the cameras and bugs. Without . . . everyone hearing us.” He said “everyone,” but he was focused on me.

“You were with her? Alone in her room?”

“No.” He shook his head. “She was gone. The tracker wasn’t on her bed when I was there. I figured she was just downstairs with her family, having dinner or watching TV. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know . . .” He wiped a shaking hand across his lips.

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to. It was stupid. I shouldn’t have done it. But I need you to know, because someone might figure out I was there. In her room. Before someone did this to her.”

He wanted me to cover for him. He wanted me to cover for the fact that he was in another girl’s bedroom before she was murdered. He reached for my face, taking my cheek in his hand, choking me with his emotions.

“Oh, Reece.” His prints and fibers and hair. It was all there, a latent trail leading back to him. How could we have been so stupid?

He looked down at the ground. Kicked the bike off its stand and flipped on the headlights. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he tore off, and all I could do was stare at the invisible trail he left behind him.

I
RAN TO CATCH UP
with the others. When I got to Jeremy’s car, they were crouched inside in the dark with the heater blasting. Vince rested his head on Jeremy’s seatback with his arms wrapped around his knees. After a moment, he cracked open his door, and was quietly sick.

“Can we go now?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

Jeremy put the car in gear and pulled out onto the parkway, heading home.

“Thank you,” I said to Vince, “for coming after me back there. The water . . . it was deeper than I thought. I wasn’t thinking.” He didn’t move. I touched his arm, and recoiled. He tasted guilty, and reeked so badly of it that I felt nauseated too.

“I didn’t do anything,” he whispered.

We drove in silence for several miles.

The car slowed to a stop. Brake lights in front of us illuminated Jeremy’s face red in the rearview mirror. He swore to himself.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked.

“Looks like an accident.” Eric sat up taller in his seat, straining to look over the cars.

We moved forward at a crawl. Sirens wailed in the distance.

“Get us out of here!” Vince snapped.

“I can’t. We’re boxed in.” Jeremy’s knuckles were white where they gripped the wheel. The tension in the car was palpable. So thick and pungent I could practically taste it.

I opened my door.

“What are you doing?” Jeremy shouted. “Get back in the car!”

“I’ll go see what’s blocking the road. Maybe there’s a way around it.”

I jogged past the long rows of idling cars. Blue lights flashed so brightly, I almost didn’t see the motorcycle, flat against the black pavement. Or the dark silhouette of the body in the road.

“Reece.” I ran toward the lights. “Reece!”

Paramedics knelt around him, blocking my view.

“Reece!” I scrambled toward him. Someone grabbed me, holding me back.

There was blood on his face, but his eyes were open and alert. He lifted his head at the sound of my voice. “It’s just road rash!” he told the paramedics. “I can walk. Let me up!” One paramedic held his shoulder to the pavement, while another cut open the shredded remains of his jeans. I never should have let him drive. “Leigh,” he shouted. “It was the brakes. Check the brakes! Then get out of here! I’ll be okay.”

The brakes. I jerked loose of the person holding me and ran toward Reece’s bike where it lay scraped up and dented a few yards away.

Brakes. I wouldn’t even know where to look, except for the hand lever he used to slow down.

“Leigh, we have to go.” Eric tugged at my sleeve. He looked anxiously over his shoulder toward the Civic.

“Give me your flashlight.” I knelt down by the front tire and studied the handlebars, though I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. Eric handed me his light.

“What are you doing?” he asked impatiently. “Everyone’s freaking out back there. We should go back.”

The brake lever seemed fine, as far as I could tell. “Where’s the brake line on this thing?”

“No clue,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

I shined the light down, following the narrow cable connecting the handlebars to the front tire, looking for anything out of place. But with fluid and metal everywhere, everything seemed out of place. I pulled my wet hair from my face and stared at the wreckage.

Eric put a hand on my shoulder. “Just leave it. We need to go!”

I shook him off and reached to unbuckle Reece’s leather saddlebag from the bike. I tucked it under my arm. If there was anything of value in it, he’d want to know it was safe. And if there was anything incriminating in it . . . well, I didn’t want to think about that.

Reluctantly, with one last look at Reece, I let Eric pull me away. As we ran, Eric bent to snatch Reece’s helmet off the ground and shoved it into my hands. It was scraped up, but salvageable.

We dropped into the Civic, breathing hard.

“What happened?” Jeremy asked, looking for a way out of the traffic.

“It was Reece. He’s okay.”

Cradling his helmet in my lap, I traced a finger over the scratches in the black enamel, reading it like a relief map of his accident. One side of the helmet had dragged against the road, but the rest of it was perfect and smooth. Or rather, it should have been. But it wasn’t. My fingernail caught on a deep scratch. I held the helmet up against the headlights of the cars behind me, and a chill raced through my veins.

“What is it?” Vince asked, leaning over to see.

“An object at rest remains at rest, but an object in motion . . .” I whispered.

It was the brakes.

This wasn’t an accident. Someone wanted him dead.

I looked down at the saddlebag between my feet and peeled the buckles open, rifling through the contents—Reece’s favorite wool cap and spare set of riding gloves, a bag of beef jerky, a small set of lock picks and pocket tools . . .

And a plastic garbage bag, rolled into a cold, tight bundle.

I pulled it into my lap. It felt all wrong.

Reece never kept trash on his bike.

I handed the helmet to Vince without taking my eyes off the bag.

Unrolled it.

Switched on the flashlight and aimed it inside.

I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. It was Emily Reinnert’s foot.

• • •

Jeremy pulled to a stop in front of my trailer, but left the car running. My body was stiff with marsh mud and my hair was matted and thick. Beside me, Vince’s teeth chattered from shock and the cold. The air in the car smelled like vomit, and something else I couldn’t place, but probably tasted like fear.

“Why would Reggie do this?” Jeremy’s voice was shaky. “I mean, taking house keys and leaving messages in our bedroom is one thing. And digging up a body to use as a note pad is pretty freaking crazy. But Emily was alive! And he cut off her foot, Leigh! Who’s doing this? What does he want?”

I wasn’t sure anymore. I’d been certain it was Reggie. “It made sense that he would want revenge against our families. Because of the club. But . . .” I looked at the helmet in Vince’s lap. At the bag in my hands.

Jeremy smacked the steering wheel. “Reece isn’t in the poker kids’ club and that wreck was no accident! So why’s someone trying to kill him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to hurt me?”

“If that was the case, why not just kill you?” Vince asked.

“I don’t know.” I pressed my fingers to my temples, but I was too rattled to think. “None of this makes any sense.” Everything about this reeked of TJ, but there was no possible way he could have done these things. Unless he was working with someone. He had only wanted to communicate with one other person while he was in prison, and that person was his father.

Bad people don’t stop doing bad things.

“I still think Reggie is behind this. The timing is too conspicuous. All of this started when he was released.”

“We all know when it started. But when does it end?” Eric asked. “Who’s next?”

We all fell silent.

“What do you mean?” asked Vince.

“First Emily, then Reece . . .” Eric said, letting us all fill in the blanks.

“He means this is far from over,” I said.

Vince, Jeremy, and Eric . . . they all looked to me. “So what do we do?” Vince asked.

I took a breath. “First thing we do is find a safe place for Emily’s foot.”

“We should bury it,” Vince said, rocking slightly with his hands around his knees.

I thought about Karl Miller’s body in the golf course green, how it had gone undetected and undisturbed for five full years before someone dug it up. Maybe, if we buried the foot carefully, no one would ever find it. But that’s what a guilty person would do. Destroy evidence. Try to cover a trail.

We were not guilty.

“Does anyone have a freezer?” I asked. “Someplace where we can keep it cold for a while where no one would look?”

Jeremy paled like he might be sick. Vince just looked angry. “We should get rid of it.”

“I’ll take it,” Eric said, craning around in his seat. “We have a chest freezer in our basement.”

“What if your mom finds it?” Jeremy asked. “Maybe Vince is right.”

Eric reached for the bag. “My mom doesn’t cook. She’s the take-out queen. It’s full of Lean Cuisines that expired in the late 90s, because she’s too lazy to clean it out. It’ll be fine.”

I handed him the bag, relieved to be rid of it. “Fine. It’s settled. Eric will hide the foot until we can figure this out. Obviously someone is trying to frame Reece for Emily’s murder. Which means they know he was in her room.” I thought back to the twig that snapped in the woods behind her house. The feeling of being watched, like we weren’t alone. Someone had been there. Which meant they knew we were recording those meetings. “Jeremy, we need to destroy the recordings.”

He nodded. “They’re on my laptop. I’ll delete them when I get home.”

“High tide should still be a few hours away. I’ll wait until then to call the tip line about Emily. I’ll go to the lab tomorrow morning and watch the investigation from that end. Reece didn’t kill her, but he was in her room, and it won’t take them long to figure that out.” The thought of Reece behind bars for murder turned my stomach. I couldn’t let him go to jail for this. “Go home. Try to get some sleep. I need time to figure out what to do.”

Jeremy and Eric waited in the car with the headlights aimed at my door. Vince walked me up the steps and hovered, shivering, while I unlocked the deadbolt. I reached for the knob, but he stopped me. Cautiously, he pushed the door open and poked his head around it before letting me inside.

“I didn’t know you played ball.” Vince gestured to the baseball bat as he shut the door.

“I don’t. It’s my mom’s.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“High-tech home security system,” I explained, feeling my cheeks warm with embarrassment.

Vince stood on the small square of curling linoleum by the door. His nose wrinkled up when I flipped on the living room light. “This is your house?”

I wiped tangles of hair from my eyes. I was spent. Too exhausted to throw around insults with him. “Sorry,” I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “It’s not exactly Belle Green or anything.”

He looked around, at our thin throw pillows and worn-out carpets. At the lamp in the corner with the yellowing shade. “It’s not so bad.”

It was a lie. But I didn’t know if he was lying about my house, or the implication that he’d never seen it. One thing was certain. He was hiding something. Something to do with Emily.

“It’s after two.” I nodded to the door. “My mother will be home from work soon, and we all need some rest. Tell Eric and Jeremy we’ll meet in front of the school tomorrow afternoon at four.”

Vince looked down at his shoes. He nodded once, then left without a word.

I locked the door and pulled out my phone to call Reece. He answered on the first ring.

“Where are you? Are you okay?” He sounded frantic.

“I’m home. I’m safe.” I heard him sigh with relief. “What about you?”

“I’m okay. Just a couple scrapes and bruises, but they dragged me to the ER anyway. They’re working on my discharge papers and Gena’s on her way to pick me up.”

I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor, exhausted. Good. He’d be safe with Gena. “What are you going to tell her?”

“As little as possible.”

That wouldn’t be easy for him. It would be better to wait and tell him about the foot in his saddlebag tomorrow. And even though I still had doubts and questions—about him and Emily and why he’d hidden his visit from me—for now, he was safe. And that was all that mattered.

“Okay, I told the others to meet tomorrow at four in front of the school. And Reece,” I said through a lump in my throat. “You were right. It wasn’t an accident.”

“I know,” he said softly. “Try to get some sleep.”