Sadie Walker Is Stranded (30 page)

“I’m sorry, Noah.”

“What now? Are you going to tell them?”

I didn’t appreciate his looming or the way his spit was splattering across my forehead.

“Yes, but you’ll be with me. Tell them what you told me.”

I know, extremely lame given the stakes, but what else was I supposed to do? I had no proof other than a few weird notes in a margin, notes that Noah had known I would see. It was all just a little too flimsy. The others had to know, but not without Noah there to defend himself.

“I promise, Sadie. It wasn’t me.” His eyes were pleading, his hands were clasped and knuckles white as he repeated it over and over again until his voice rasped. “It wasn’t me…”

Too young. Too young to be mixed up in this shit.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, knowing he would never forgive me. “I really am.”

It wasn’t fair, but what was I supposed to do? Not jump to conclusions, asshole, that’s what. Still, this was too big to keep secret. The walk back to the cabins went by with my eyes flicking from the ground to the trees. I was growing seriously sick of the word
dread
, but a dreary, pervasive sickness had settled in my stomach, a constant jumpiness. They could come from all sides and at any moment, in droves or one at a time, but that was only one half of my unease. We had all caught it, like a plague, the tightness in your gut that tells you to be alert, be on your guard, the tension that doesn’t let you eat without wanting to vomit, that doesn’t let you sleep without jolting you awake every few hours.

The commotion from camp drifted toward me on a salt-scented wind. Noah followed at a distance, taking his time, but I heard his footsteps quicken as the voices carried. At first I thought maybe someone else had died, but no, it was Stefano, very much alive, and storming toward us with something tucked against his side. A book. Noah’s book.

Heart, meet toes.

“What is this?” Stefano demanded. His delicate features weren’t made for scowling, and he looked positively possessed as he threw
The Big Sleep
down in the sand at my feet. Then his arms were crossed and his gaze shifted over my shoulder to Noah.

“I’m taking care of it,” I said.

More bodies and faces, Whelan’s prominent among them as he shouldered by to join us.

“Good,” Stefano said, nodding once. “So how do we do it? It can be fast. I’m not barbaric.”

“What?” I crouched, gathering up the book and brushing the sand from its bent cover. “No, I mean, I talked to Noah. He didn’t do anything wrong. At least listen to what he has to say.”

Noah stood silently aloof, watching us with his mouth clamped shut, his arms mimicking Stefano’s defensive posture.

“Sadie…” Whelan stepped forward and took the book out of my hands, pulling hard until I relinquished it. How? How had Stefano found it? “Honestly … It doesn’t look good.”

“Good? Yeah, it looks very, very bad.” Stefano didn’t seem keen on letting Noah out of his sight. “His pretty-boy looks can’t help him now.”

“Noah deserves a voice here too,” I cut in. “The book thing is suspicious, I admit, but there’s nothing else. We should look at his clothes. There’s no way he could drag Danielle through the forest without getting some of her blood on his sleeves.”

“He could wash them, no?” Stefano replied.

“Or destroy them.” Damn it, Whelan, be on my side.

“We have to believe each other. If we start throwing accusations around without actually listening to one another then we’re already screwed.” Whelan tore his eyes away to search the sand. At least he was a little bit ashamed for ganging up on Noah like this. “You’re a cop, Whelan. Doesn’t someone need means, opportunity
and
motive? What’s Noah’s motive?”

“He doesn’t need one!” Stefano grabbed the book and opened it, shoving the water-stained pages in my face. “He’s fucking bat shit. He did it.”

“You’re not making a real strong case for yourself by staying silent, Noah,” Whelan murmured.

“He said he didn’t do it.” I was starting to feel like a broken record. “And I believe him.”

“Whelan, do something.” Stefano drew himself up. Oh, nice, so he wouldn’t actually take responsibility for punishing Noah, just ask that someone else do it. Pathetic. “Maybe she’s in on it. We can’t be sure.”

Hold the fucking phone.

“Me? Are you kidding? I’m the one who confronted him!”

“Which would make you look real innocent, no?” Stefano smiled but there was absolutely no joy in it. The urge to punch him in the throat or toss him down onto the sand reared almost too fast for me to curb. “Just sayin’.”

“You’re a real class act, Stefano,” I muttered, shaking my head in disbelief. “Why don’t you just point the finger at everyone to be sure? Cover all your bases, man. Don’t be shy.”

“Enough.” Whelan didn’t need to shout, not when a whisper like that did twice the work with half the volume. “You’re both out of line. I’ll talk to Noah; the two of you cool off. We’re on the same side here.”

Stefano marched away with his nose in the air and a little huff that quite clearly said: this isn’t over.

Meanwhile I felt like a dirtbag, hovering there trying to think of the right thing to say to both Whelan and Noah. He just couldn’t have done it, and the more I thought about it the surer I became and the worse I felt for bringing it up at all. I had only wanted to do the right thing and now I had started a shit storm that could easily build into a shit hurricane.

“How did Stefano find out?” I asked, grabbing Whelan’s elbow before he could walk away with Noah. His blue eyes looked duller, muted, as if the weight of dealing with this intertribal bullshit was sapping the energy right out of his body. I sympathized. “He didn’t just randomly go through Noah’s stuff…”

“We should talk about this later,” Whelan whispered.

“Tell me now, Whelan.”

He sighed, that heaviness in his eyes seeping out to his shoulders, dragging them down into a hunch. “Shane showed us.”

“
What?
”

“I’m sorry, Sadie.”

“Shane … but he…” Had been right there in the bed with me when I read Noah’s book. He must not have been asleep. “This isn’t what I wanted to happen.”

“Go easy on Shane. I think he just wanted to help.” Whelan left then, walking back down the beach with Noah. Why wouldn’t Noah fight? Speak up? Maintaining that stubborn silence would only make him look guiltier than he already did. Clearly, in Stefano’s eyes, he was the culprit and of any of us, Stefano had lost the most—first his cousins and then his closest friend. He was out for blood and I couldn’t blame him.

And Shane … He just
had
to pick today to come out of his shell.

*   *   *

I found the little tattletale sitting at the fire picking apart a blackened piece of fish. He ate in tiny, precise bites, wiping his char-stained fingers off on his pants after every mouthful. Moritz and Andrea fell silent at my approach, giving me the classic big-eyed, straight-mouthed, deer-in-headlights expression, the one that meant they knew Shane was in for a tongue-lashing.

“Come with me please, Shane.”

He shook his head no. Did he actually
want
me to turn into Momzilla?

“You’re not in trouble.” Okay, maybe not entirely true. “I just want to talk.”

It was like coaxing a rabbit out of its warren. Eventually Shane stood, setting down his plate on the log bench and taking my hand, casting a forlorn, helpless look over his shoulder at Andrea and Moritz. I had seen that look many, many times. It no longer fooled me.

Shane dug his feet in stubbornly as I led him away, halting us every few seconds as he tried to drag to a stop. Discipline really isn’t my strong suit, but something like this had to be addressed. It was time to put on the mommy pants, whether I enjoyed it or not.

We stopped near the edge of the water, out of earshot of both the fire pit and the huts. I spied Banana on the docks fishing with Nate. Whelan and Noah were having their little heart-to-heart farther down the beach. Stefano stewed by the tied up canoe. Maybe he was thinking of leaving, I don’t know. Good riddance. Andrea and Moritz sat eating at the fire. That meant everyone was accounted for. I found myself doing that a lot now, taking a quick head-check every once in a while just to make sure dinner wouldn’t be interrupted with screams as another of us met an untimely end.

The tide, still low, had deposited a number of new shells and blobs of seaweed on the sand. A wet stripe ran along the beach, darker than the rest, marking where the water would creep up as the tide came in. Another windy day. The waves chopped, rising in jagged peaks as they rushed toward us, stopping just shy of already damp shoes. And for once Shane looked up at me, facing me squarely, not studying the myriad marine treasures still slick and foamy on the ground.

“I’m not upset, Shane,” I said. Also a half-truth, but I didn’t want to frighten the poor kid. Scared straight wasn’t really my style. “I’m just confused. Why didn’t you talk to me before going to the others?”

He shrugged.

“Not good enough, little man. Gonna need some words. So out with it.”

Shane regarded me quietly for a moment, canting his head this way and that, reminding me of a bird that’s sure you want to communicate, but can’t understand you or know how to talk back.

“This is serious, Shane. I’m not mad, okay? I just want you to explain yourself.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Not much, but we could build on that.

“Noah stays in our cabin. I thought I … should show someone.”

“But I thought … He carved you that Pink Bear. Don’t you think he’s too nice to hurt someone?”

“I … guess.” Shane toed the ground. “It’s just a pig.”

“Were you
afraid
of him?” Oh, great. The damage had been done. Now, no matter what, Noah would carry the taint of that book and its fucking scribbles for the rest of his life. Even if he was guilty of nothing but poor judgment, he would be treated like a psycho.

“Yes,” Shane answered. “I thought I could show Whelan because he’s a policeman.”

That … was actually pretty logical.

“Next time come to me first, because now Noah is in trouble with everyone and that makes it much more complicated.”
Clusterfuck
probably wasn’t the right sort of language to use around him. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

“Yes. Show you first when I find weird things.”

“Right. I know Whelan is a policeman and that’s nice, but I’ll pass something on to him if I think it’s important, okay?”

Shane nodded.

“Go finish your food.”

I thought of making him apologize. But for what? For finding something that frightened him and showing a cop? That was
positive
behavior. That was the sort of thing you wanted to enforce, not chastise. It was almost heartening to think that, even if he was sort of strange and mute, Shane had his head screwed on right. I watched him trundle back to the fire, almost completely spherical in the number of coats Andrea had piled onto him. A cheerful cry went up from the docks—Banana and Nate had caught something. We might actually eat, then. Shane probably didn’t know it, but food was becoming scarce. Without the canned goods and cache of the food storage, we were almost entirely reliant on the food we caught each day. Scavenging for clams and mussels was becoming less and less viable as the temperature dropped and the water became icy. Whelan could no longer safely stay out in the sea for long periods of time. Fishing off the dock still yielded decent amounts of edibles, but we would need to diversify our diet. Plant life in the forest was a possibility, and insects, but foraging was dangerous, even just inside the tree line.

But whatever we had was divvied up and the first round of it went to Shane. The rest of us ate what we could, though my appetite was apparently inversely proportional to my fear level. Everything turned my stomach, even water. My guts were lined in razor wire and I couldn’t rightly say when the slicing would stop.

NINETEEN

“Shane is a good boy.”

I
wanted
to trust everybody, really I did, but ever since finding Noah’s margin notes, I’d become a suspicious, twitchy wreck. The good boy in question had just left, toddling into the cabin under his usual superhuman weight of coats and blankets. I’d swear the kid was cold-blooded.

“Thanks, Moritz.” Fish for dinner again. What kind of fish, you ask? It didn’t matter. It all tasted the same once it’d been in our cast-iron pan, a cooking implement that really should no longer have been called a pan but an instrument of destruction. It actively de-flavored things. All you could taste when you bit into fish that’d been in that pan were all the burned fishy brethren that came before. Once upon a time I liked food. I had what overbearing type-A soccer moms in Crocs called “a passion.” You couldn’t live in the Northwest and not be some type of foodie. Sometimes I thought I still had that passion, but since I hadn’t eaten anything that qualified as food in weeks, it was hard to say.

“I feel like we never talk,” I said. The others had split off, pairing off for cards or sleeping or battling horrific indigestion.

“We don’t,” Moritz replied simply. “You and Officer Cabral have grown quite close.”

I wasn’t sure if that was an observation or a question. Why he couldn’t call Whelan by his first name, I couldn’t guess. Well, I could, but I didn’t.

“Officer…? Right, Whelan. You don’t have to call him that.”

Moritz’s greyhound face sharpened in the firelight, the darkness around us and the hot glow of the flames igniting the raised edges of his nose and cheekbones. He smiled, shrugging, the haggard remains of his tweed suit clinging to him like flayed strips of tree bark to a trunk.

“Do you think Noah is innocent?” I asked. Of all of us, Moritz probably knew Noah best. They spent a lot of time together, though I couldn’t imagine what a rustic Canadian teenager and a former art critic had in common. His expression softened again, almost melting like wax from the heat, his mouth drifting down into a ponderous frown.

“Art informs us that we all have monsters inside … hidden evils. A civilized man, a family man, can paint his demons and shock the world.”