The Darkest Corners (4 page)

“Have you even heard from her, Nick?” she asks the guy. He shrugs.

“Her pops banged on my door this morning asking if she was staying with me,” he says. “I guess she took off.”

Emily frowns. “Took off
where
?”

“The fuck would I know?” Nick cracks open another beer and leans back in his Adirondack chair. It occurs to me that this is probably his farm, and I feel even more like an intruder now.

He catches me staring at him, and my face burns so hot, I feel as if I could disintegrate. I avert my eyes and look to the fire.

“I hope she's okay,” Sabrina says quietly. Callie is still looking at the ground, bending the front part of her flip-flop. She lets it go, and the rubber thwacks against her foot.

“You know how she's always talking.” Nick takes his hat off and mashes it between his hands. “Saying she's gonna leave and get her own place.”

Ariel is the second oldest of five kids. Her sister Katie is only ten months younger than her; they were always fighting. Once, Callie and I went over to see the mutt that had followed their father home from work at a construction site. Ari and Katie fought until they were both in tears over what to name him. When Mr. Kouchinsky heard them screaming at each other, he got his shotgun off the mantel and went out back where the dog was tied up. Ari grabbed his pants leg and screamed until Mrs. Kouchinsky had to come downstairs and rip her off him.

When her father came back inside, he said it was a mercy because the dog had been badly starved and infested with mites and fleas. We all clung to each other on the couch, crying hysterically, while Mr. Kouchinsky walked by as if he hadn't even seen us.

I don't blame Ariel for wanting to run away. Sometimes I think I would have too, maybe, if I'd had to stay in Fayette. Followed in my sister's footsteps. But I'd be kidding myself if I thought I could survive on my own like Jos did.

My sister was the one who could weasel an invite to someone's house for dinner, while I whined through my chapped lips about how I was hungry and wanted macaroni and cheese. Joslin was the one who would fall off her bike and get right back up, while I wailed over a scraped knee. To this day I'd sooner go hungry or subsist on potato chips than work up the balls to go through the drive-through, out of fear I'll do it wrong.

Ari will never make it on her own,
I think. She was even needier than I was, always breaking into tears because she forgot her lunch bag on the bus. Our first-grade teacher had to leave a box of tissues on Ari's desk because she would forget to wipe her nose, snot dripping down her face as she traced the letters in our handwriting books.

There's an ache in my chest. I wish she were here right now, clinging to me with her bony fingers and nails bit down to the cuticle.

“Ari would have told me if she was leaving.” Emily plucks the tab off her beer, wincing and slipping her torn thumb nail between her lips.

Ryan speaks up, and I notice that he's not drinking his beer either. “My uncle hasn't said anything. If it was serious, her parents would have reported her missing.”

An image surfaces in my mind: a photo on the front page of the county newspaper. Officer Jason Elwood, in full uniform, as one of the pallbearers at Harvey Elwood's funeral. Ryan's father. He'd been a firefighter; four other men had died with him. It had been a three-alarm at an abandoned warehouse. Almost half of Fayette's fire department had been gone in less than an hour. Ryan had been five years old.

His uncle Jay wasn't assigned to Lori Cawley's murder, but he came to the trial to support the officers who had to testify. The entire police department did.

Ryan's gaze flicks toward Callie. Something about the way he looks at her makes the smallest sliver of jealousy move through me. Danny, Joslin's boyfriend, used to look at Jos the same way.

“You love him more than you love me,” I whined one night when Jos slipped under the covers after being out late, smelling of sweat and cigarette smoke and something else I couldn't place. I expected her to pinch me and say she'd always love me the most, but instead she hissed, “Knock it off. You sound like Mom,” and rolled to face the wall.

I'd always thought that was the first crack, the beginning of the chasm between us. But now I think it must have started earlier—when my father was taken away and I suddenly couldn't sleep alone without waking in hysterics. Jos probably thought it was pathetic that I had to sleep in the bed with her.

Just like Callie resents being stuck with me now.

Around the bonfire, everyone slips back into their private conversations. Next to me, Callie whispers to Sabrina, “I can't believe Ari would just run away.”

“Well, wouldn't you? If we weren't going to college, and had to stay here for the rest of our lives?”

Callie pulls her knees up to her chest. “I don't want to think about that.”

“You don't have to,” Sabrina says. “Less than two months, babes. And we can leave this place behind forever.”

Callie finally looks up. She looks right at
me.
And I know exactly what she's thinking.

As long as Tessa doesn't screw everything up.

Maggie is washing dishes as I pad quietly down the stairs in the morning. She looks up at me and sets her sponge down. My stomach dips. She and Rick were asleep when we got back last night. Did she figure out that I drove her minivan home because Callie got obliterated?

But she smiles. “You girls—I'm so glad you finally spent some time alone together. You have fun?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “Do you mind if I take a walk? There's a couple people I want to catch up with.”

“Of course not.” She wipes her hands on a dishrag and turns the faucet off. “Can I drive you?”

“No, thanks,” I say. “I kind of need to be alone, if that's okay.”

Maggie nods absently. Everything would be so much easier if I could just ask to use the damn computer. I know I need to work on that.

It's not even that I'm afraid Maggie would say no. Of course she wouldn't. It's just that I've always found it especially difficult to accept things from the people who would give me anything.

The
person,
I correct myself.

The library is a twenty-minute walk from the Greenwoods' house, and I don't have a card to get on the computers there anyway. Much closer is a printing shop on Main Street that advertised web access, so I head there.

I use my shoulder to push open the door. A bell tinkles at the back of the store. There's a computer at the front, and a laminated sign overhead that says
FOR PRINTER USE ONLY
!!! Underline, underline, bold. Well, that's obnoxious. It only makes me want to ignore the sign more.

I hop onto Google and get two hits for Brandy Butler. One is a Facebook page for a middle-aged woman in Delaware who is most definitely not my sister. Jos would be twenty-six now.

The other hit is a public record for a car loan. Someone named Brandy Butler applied for it four years ago, in a town called Catasauqua. I search for
Catasauqua to Fayette,
my stomach sinking when I see that Catasauqua is just outside Allentown—about five hours from here by car. An even longer trip on the Greyhound bus. I pull up the schedule as a hairy arm drapes over the top of the computer. Its owner, a stocky man in a sweat-stained polo shirt, peers at me.

“Computer's for printing,” he grunts.

I swallow and eyeball the search results. The last Greyhound to Allentown leaves in fifteen minutes, from a truck stop half an hour from here.

“Sorry.” I click out of the windows and scramble off the stool.

“Hey!” The man doesn't pursue me, but I keep running anyway.

He looked familiar. It's not until there are several blocks between the print shop and me that I decide I don't know him. Everyone here just looks the same.

Now that I have less than a day left in Pennsylvania, I know that my sister is most likely in the state. After years of thinking she was nestled in the mountains of Colorado or in a straw hut in Maui, she's
here.

It feels as if the universe were screwing with me—until I remind myself that even if I'd made it onto the Greyhound, I'd still have to be back in Fayette by five o'clock tomorrow morning. That's almost as impossible as tracking down one woman in a town of more than five thousand. Almost.

I head down the alley between the pizzeria and a smoke shop that wasn't there ten years ago, my thoughts returning to my sister. No one in town was surprised when Jos left. She was a
Sports Illustrated
model in a sea of girls with crooked teeth and flat chests. No women wanted Jos around their sons. Or their husbands. She dropped out of school her senior year, a few months before she ran away. There were rumors that she was pregnant, that our mother threw her out, or both.

And now she's back. It doesn't matter if she doesn't want to see me. She has the answers I need, and this is the closest I'll ever be to her again. I can't let her get away this time.

I can't get on that plane.

Maggie said I could stay as long as I needed. But with Callie around, it doesn't seem like a viable option. The bonfire last night showed me that I definitely don't belong here. I'm surrounded by strangers, looking for Joslin, the one person who could already be long gone.

I cut across Main Street, skidding to a halt on the sidewalk when I see them.

Cop cars. Three of them, in front of a blue town house with a crumbling brown porch. There's a Razor scooter and a soccer ball lying on the lawn.

I know that house. Sometimes when I see a stray dog, I can hear the gunshot and Ariel's wails.

A group of teenage boys has gathered on the corner across from the Kouchinskys' house. I can't get a good look at their faces, so I don't know if I know them.
Knew
them.

“Shut up, man,” one of the guys is saying.

Another one—a redhead—leans against his bike. “I'm telling you, it's her.”

“What's her?”

The guys turn around, stare at me as if I were an alien. The guy with the black hair, who told the redhead to shut up, is Decker Lucas. I always got stuck next to him in elementary school because he was right behind me in the alphabet. Decker was always getting yelled at for something—forgetting his gym sneakers at home, leaving a bologna sandwich in his desk over the weekend.

Not much has changed about him, except for his face. Something is missing.
Glasses.
He blinks at me with wide blue eyes, his mouth parting. He looks like a comic book character come to life. “Whoa. Tessa Lowell.”

“What happened at the Kouchinskys'?” I claw at the hole on my thigh for something to do. If I keep at it, I'm going to shred it big enough to flash everyone. But I can't stop myself. The sight of all those cops is making me anxious.

“Ariel's been missing.” The redhead spits on the sidewalk, his beady eyes looking me up and down. “Cops in Mason found a body this morning.”

“They don't know
whose
body,” Decker cuts in. “Could be anyone. Like an old person or something.”

My breath catches in my chest. I see her clinging to her father's leg again.

I see the princess stickers on the purple envelopes.
Write back!!!

“Where in Mason was the body?” I squeak out. “Not off I-70, right?”

Decker's friend—the redhead—shrugs and hops onto his skateboard. He stands on it, wobbling back and forth as we stare at the Kouchinsky house, silent.

A beat later, there's movement on their porch. A uniformed officer escorts a gray wisp of a woman onto the porch swing—Ariel's mother. She's so much shorter, thinner than when I last saw her, as if time had eaten away at her.

She collapses into the officer's arms and lets out a splintering cry. Behind her, two small faces look out the window.

The redheaded guy spits again, maneuvering his skateboard so he doesn't roll over the wet spot. “Don't sound like it's anyone.”