Nearly Found (25 page)

Lonny crossed himself, then leaped from the window, thudding to the ground with a loud curse. He scrambled to his feet, limping a little while he trained his eyes on TJ’s uncle, already halfway across the practice fields. He took off after him.

Reece looked back at me. At the bucket by the door.

“Go,” Vince said. “I’ll make sure they get out!”

Reece leaned in, kissed the top of my head fast, then threw himself out the window. The bushes rustled and then he emerged, gripping one leg before he took off after Lonny, who was quickly closing in on Billy Wiles’s diminishing shadow.

Jeremy, Anh, Vince, and I breathed in the chilled fresh air, heads stuck as far out the window as we dared. One at a time, Jeremy and I climbed onto the narrow brick ledge. Then we helped Vince through. Anh stayed stubbornly inside, her eyes pinched shut with tears.

“Come on, Anh.” I reached for her with one hand, gripping the bricks with the other as I balanced on the ledge. I was trembling. My knees felt watery. I made myself steady. Made my voice strong. “It’s not that far. They both made it down fine. We can too.”

“No,” she whimpered. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

“She’s afraid of heights. We’ll never get her out here,” Jeremy said. “What do we do?”

A drawer slid closed in the lab. Where was Eric? I ducked my head and shoulders back inside, seized by a cold dread. Eric stood in the middle of the lab, holding something behind his back. His eyes were pleading.

“What are you doing?” I asked, as calmly as I could manage.

He walked sideways toward the door, hands concealed. “We can’t get out that way.” He stood beside the overturned trash can, his eyes watering and clear streams of mucous sliding down his lip.

“Eric, please! Come to the window. The others jumped and they were just fine. We’ll be fine too. It’ll all be okay.”

He shook his head, wiped furiously at his eyes. “Nothing will be okay. I’m going to jail. I don’t want to go to jail.”

Anh hugged her knees under the window and sobbed. Jeremy and Vince gripped the sills and watched through the glass, their knuckles white.

My eyes began to water. My throat burned. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You were manipulated. Just like Emily . . .” It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it the second it crossed my lips. The second Eric tipped his head to the side, his face smoothing over, like he’d come to some resolution. Like he’d let go of something.

Eric pulled his hand from behind his back. He clutched a striker, the kind we used to light Bunsen burners in chemistry class. His thumb poised over the trigger. He kicked the bucket over, letting the invisible gas spill into the room. He looked up at us then. His eyes wet and swollen, they found Jeremy’s face pressed against the glass. Eric’s lip trembled. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He held up the striker.

Vince shouted and grabbed Anh’s hand, pulling her through the open window in one swift motion, barely letting her feet catch the bricks before he pushed her over the ledge. She screamed, and he shoved Jeremy after her.

“Jump!” he shouted, taking my hand. Searing cold peppermint flooded my cheeks and rushed through my veins. We were falling. Then we hit the ground hard. Vince scurried to his feet, pulling me with him. We ran after Jeremy and Anh, hand in hand, until I was drunk on adrenaline and the rush of our fear. Across the field, Reece and Lonny closed in on Billy Wiles. They dove, catching him across the back and slamming him to the ground.

Finally, when we reached a safe distance, I skidded to a stop. The lights were still on in the chemistry lab.

I braced myself for the explosion, huddled under Vince’s shoulder, but the blast never came.

The windows were all shut. Eric had closed himself inside.

T
HERE HAD NEVER BEEN BLOOD
on Jason Fowler’s golf club. Only bleach. I stood across the gravel street and watched as the real murder weapon, Mr. Miller’s own blood-crusted nine iron, was found and removed from under a floorboard in TJ’s uncle’s trailer, which is how TJ had first come to learn about the murder at all. TJ had found it by accident sometime last year, and his uncle, drunk and loose-tongued, had told him too much.

The search was still on for Reggie Wiles. His roommate in the halfway house said he’d gotten a call late last night, warning him to leave town. Police traced the call to Powell Ridge, to a phone TJ had been granted permission to use, around the same time Eric had gone downstairs to the vending machines. Reggie had fled before an arrest warrant could be issued for the murder of Karl Miller on the Belle Green golf course five years ago.

According to Billy Wiles’s statement to the police, my father had warned Reggie five years ago that Karl was a mole. When my father refused to reveal how or why he knew, Reggie was reluctant to flee with him.

But on some level, Reggie must have believed his claim.

In the late afternoon on the day Karl Miller was murdered, Reggie and Billy Wiles parked down the street from Karl’s house. They watched Karl argue with his wife in the driveway. She was angry because he was going to miss dinner. He was obviously distraught, and said he just needed time alone to think. Reggie and Billy watched Karl load his clubs and a small athletic bag into his car just before dusk. They watched him carry his clubs to the driving range. He hit balls until the country club was dark and most everyone had gone home.

Sometime after sunset, Billy and Reggie followed Karl to a dimly lit veranda behind the clubhouse. Listening from a close distance, they were the only witnesses when Karl placed the anonymous call to the police and told them everything. They listened as he named names. Reggie’s name. And my father’s.

Reggie was furious. When Karl hung up the phone, Reggie and Billy dragged him out onto the green and killed him with Karl’s nine iron.

They buried him that night. Billy drove Reggie’s car back to Sunny View and hid the bloody club in his trailer. Reggie drove Karl’s, and left it in the parking lot of a cheap motel. He booked a room with Karl’s credit card. Then left a forged note for Karl’s wife beside the bed. After that, they returned Karl’s golf clubs to his garage, but the set was conspicuously incomplete. So they took the nine iron from Jason Fowler’s matching set, doused it in bleach, and left it in place of the murder weapon in Karl’s golf bag, creating the perfect setup in case the body should ever be found.

But the whole thing had taken too long, and when Reggie returned home later that day, the police were in his driveway, waiting to arrest him for the crimes Karl Miller had reported in the moments before he died.

Now, just four days after we’d all jumped out a window together, we stood side by side in Respite Meadows cemetery, at the foot of Eric Miller’s grave. His mother had held a small, private ceremony a few hours earlier. And even though we hadn’t been invited, paying our respects—forgiving him for the things he couldn’t forgive in himself—seemed like the right thing to do.

Jeremy slipped his hand in mine. Anh held his other. The taste of his sadness was hard to place. The kind that changes the more you chew on it. On one hand, his father wasn’t a killer. And there was a small relief in knowing that. But on the other hand, Jason Fowler was no less a monster. He’d just been feeding it slowly, in smaller bites. I had to wonder if Jeremy’s bittersweetness came from the burning wish I knew he held inside, that the bloody club had been his father’s. That it was his father being taken away in cuffs, instead of Billy Wiles.

In the end, none of the faces of the men I’d seen had belonged to Reggie Wiles. He had never left the halfway house when he wasn’t supposed to, and had never come to Sunny View. I had let fear tunnel my vision, making it hard to see anything beyond the scope of my own suspicion. Making it impossible to see who was really behind the crimes.

The police found Emily’s foot in Eric’s freezer, and Jeremy’s laptop under Eric’s bed. In hindsight, I could see it all so clearly. All the little things I’d missed. Things as small as the dirty shovel in his garage or the mud on his shoes the day I’d taken the ring to his house. Small things that meant nothing, until you understood them in the context of his pristine home. Then the bigger things. The fact that Eric had been the one to pick up Reece’s helmet, making sure I received the message carved in it. Eric had been the one to take the foot when none of the rest of us wanted it. That Eric had been quietly planting seeds, tossing out ideas, nudging us in the direction TJ wanted us to go.

He had been the perfect mole. Someone we’d all been too sympathetic of to suspect. He’d followed TJ’s instructions to the letter: delivering the notes, sending me e-mail messages, and updating TJ and Billy about our meetings and our plans. But in the end, he hadn’t only been a messenger.

After TJ was arrested, Billy was terrified. The only money they had had coming in for the last five years were the funds from a small trust account in TJ’s name that paid their rent and food and clothing. But when TJ went to prison, that account became useless to him, and Billy wasn’t allowed to draw a dime. After Eric’s death, investigators found Eric’s savings account bled almost dry. He’d been cashing it out in small increments and making payments to Billy as part of his agreement with TJ. In exchange for the money, Billy did TJ’s dirty work. He was the one who lured Emily from her room with the promise of a message from TJ. And once he had her in the trees, he’d killed her. The same way he’d killed Adrienne.

And killing Adrienne had been easy. Billy was her neighbor—a familiar fixture in her own backyard. Close enough to abduct her without drawing attention. Close enough to steal a lighter and a phone, and to plant evidence in Lonny’s car and in his trash can without being noticed. Familiar enough that no one would remember his presence as anything out of the ordinary when he crossed Route 1 to buy his beer. He’d planted the corked bottle in the walk-in cooler, and left a pack of cigarettes stuffed with a book of smoldering matches by the rubbing alcohol in Bao’s store. No one had thought much of it when he set the popcorn to cook too long to cover the smell and walked out. The same way I’d never thought to look behind me in chemistry class at TJ. The way I never imagined TJ could be behind any of this.

But he had been. He’d followed the rules in Powell Ridge. Earned his small freedoms. He’d sent a letter to his uncle, and included one for Eric with the promise of information about his missing father. They’d video-conferenced a few times a week under the guise of unsupervised GED study sessions, Eric telling TJ everything—everything we talked about, everything we did. And TJ telling Eric what to do next. What notes to plant, and how much to pay, and what information to pass to Billy, who didn’t have a computer of his own. He’d written to Billy in the beginning, warning him not to write or try to visit. Telling him to wait for Eric’s call. They’d spent the first installment on a car that wouldn’t look too suspicious, with a large enough trunk to move a body.

It had been a gamble on a long game, but in the end, the only one who had anything left to lose was Eric.

I stood over his fresh grave, Reece at my back with his hands on my shoulders and Anh and Jeremy to my right. Lonny knelt at the edge of the dirt. Vince stood beside him, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his slacks.

A cool October breeze tumbled brightly colored leaves across the dying grass, piling them at the foot of Eric’s temporary head marker. In the end, he could have taken us all with him. He had the striker in his hand, and he made a choice to save us. I wished he’d made the choice to face his demons and save himself. In the end, maybe he saw too much of himself in TJ and Reggie, believing their demons were too much like his own. Maybe he believed he was beyond saving.

Vince patted Reece on the shoulder and headed toward Emily’s grave. He walked with his head down, changed somehow. We all had changed. TJ had taken something from all of us. But I think maybe we had all found something too. The courage to face the pieces of ourselves that frighten us the most. And the power to realize those demons inside only control us if we let them.

Bad people don’t stop doing bad things,
TJ had told me. And maybe he was right.

But maybe we weren’t all bad. Sometimes, good people just make mistakes. Like Reece and Lonny and Emily. Like Eric and me. But maybe we aren’t the sum of our mistakes or our genes or our circumstances or our fears. Maybe, in the end, we’re the product of our choices. And maybe it’s when we hold someone’s life in our hands—the choices we make in those moments—when we get a taste of what we’re truly made of.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
I stood on my pillow, plucking the pushpins from my wall. Los Angeles, Vegas, New Orleans, Jersey City. No sense patching over the holes. The universe and I would always know they’d been there. But no sense dwelling on them either.

The last pin put up a fight, and I lost my balance when it finally let go of the map. Reece reached up to steady me. Then pulled me down beside him on the bed. I curled into him, and laid my head on his chest.

His hand found my hip, then my waist. Climbed up my side and stroked its way down my arm, his fingers trailing lightly over my sleeve.

I held the pins over the side of the bed, opened my hand, and let them fall, one by one into the wastebasket. Reece slid his fingers between mine and laced them together. I wrapped my legs around his and held on to him tight.

My bedroom door was open and I wished I could shut it. Reece would have to leave in a few hours, and I didn’t want him to go. But it was Sunday night, and Mona was home, playing Scrabble with Butch, and she never let Reece stay past ten on a school night.

“What are you doing next Saturday?” I sighed, already thinking ahead to the next time we could be together like this.

Reece looked at the ceiling. “I probably have to work.”

I bit my lip, trying not to look disappointed. “Doing anything special?”

A thoughtful crinkle appeared between his eyes as he traced my pendant with a finger. “Gena and Alex want me to put a little time in with this girl.”

“A girl? What’s she like?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.

The corner of his mouth twitched, like he was holding back a smile. “She can’t seem to stay out of trouble.”

“Oh, yeah? What else?”

“She’s smart.”

“How smart?”

“Crazy smart. I hear she can solve a Rubik’s cube in like . . . a minute and twelve seconds.” The hard, serious angles of his face melted away, and I shoved him playfully in the gut.

When our eyes met, Reece tenderly brushed the hair back from my face.

“What else?” I asked.

“She’s fearless, and beautiful,” he said softly. “I can’t stop thinking about her.”

He dipped his head to mine. I closed my eyes.

A throat cleared in the hallway.

My heart skipped and Reece and I scrambled to sit up. Mona leaned into my room, tapping her long nails on the doorframe. Butch stood behind her, silently assessing the bed.

“What? The door was open!” I snapped, heat creeping up my chest. I narrowed my eyes at Butch. “We’re completely dressed and on top of the blankets!”

I was scared they would ask Reece to go. That our time would be cut short and I’d have to wait until next week to taste that moment again.

They both cracked a smile, and then Butch retreated to the living room, his shoulders bobbing with laughter.

“Butch and I are going out for a while,” my mom said, smoothing her hair. She looked beautiful, in a pretty new dress and soft makeup, and her curls pulled back in a twist. “He’s taking me to dinner and a movie, and . . .” My mother’s voice trailed off as her eyes found the smooth surface of my wall where the pushpins used to be.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I want you to have a good time.”

When she looked at me, her eyes were misted over with unshed tears. She smiled and blinked them away. “I will.”

She turned to go. On her way out, she closed the door.

For a moment, all I could do was stare at the space where she’d stood. So much had changed in the last few months. We used to live by such hard, fast rules, each of us holding on to rigid expectations of each other. All this time, I had thought it was because neither of us trusted the other to make the right choices. Looking back, maybe we had just been too afraid to lose each other. But lately, each time my mother nearly lost me, instead of holding on, she’d loosened her grip. The door she had just closed didn’t feel like a barrier between us. Maybe, instead of trusting me less, she believed in me more.

I eased back down into the bed beside Reece. I was quiet for a long time.

“You know that girl you were telling me about?” I asked.

He wrapped himself around me, dotting kisses behind my ear. “You mean the smart, sexy one that completely rocks my world?”

“What if she isn’t as fearless as you think?”

Reece stopped kissing. “What do you mean?”

“What if . . .” I pulled myself up on my elbow to look at him. “What if all this time, when you thought she didn’t trust you, she was really just scared?”

“Of what?”

“Losing you.”

Reece folded me into his arms and pressed his forehead to mine. “Then I’d tell her she’s got nothing to worry about. Never did.”

When he kissed me, I tasted everything we were inside—all our bitter insecurities and the lingering bite of past mistakes. But surrounding it all, there was something more. Something sweet and hopeful. Something courageous and confident. It was the overpowering promise of everything we could be.