The Telling (16 page)

A trio of pelicans flies at a slant overhead, and I pop up on an elbow to watch them. I love birds; always have. They can fly away; escape. My eyelids are heavy. Dusk is coming fast. The automatic dock lanterns buzz and flick on. Flying insects surge toward their burnt gold, all determined to capture the glow.

Dad calls down to me. “I'm headed in. Better come up.” His words echo along the shoreline. Hand passes over hand as I reel myself to the dock. The water is black and opaque, and I tense as I lunge over the gap between the dinghy and dock.

I make it a third of the way up the stairs, to the landing that juts out from the hillside, our fire pit at its center. A far-off laugh skips across the water like a stone. It's from a man or boy. Familiar. It brings on the sense I had last night that Ben isn't all the way gone. If I turned around, would he be there? I shake my head.
Stop.
Ben is dead. His killer is on the loose along with Maggie's, and I shouldn't be down here alone. I can't
help what I do next, though. The dusk is shimmery, full of magic. And I want to pretend a bit longer.

I close my eyes and picture the flicker of flames on Ben's face and the glow of a sky full of stars turning him silver. He loved to sit around the fire pit in the middle of the night.

A soft tap at my door and he'd open it a crack. “Are you awake?” he'd whisper, or, “Get dressed.” He'd lead me down the stairs, my hands on his shoulders because I was half-asleep. I lived for those nights. Sitting until the sun broke over the horizon, Ben's voice syrupy in my ears, spilling over my shoulders, dripping from my fingertips, puddling wonder beneath me. I wanted to drown in it. It reminded me of the old days in our blanket forts. The whole world, the looming sky and the serpentine inlets of the sound and the far reaches of Central America, had become Ben's blanket fort.

Last December we were leaning dangerously close to the spitting fire to keep warm. I jabbered on about my plans to apply for college in the fall, and Ben talked about traveling the spring away. “What do you think you'll find in college, Lana?” His voice was hungry, ravenous. It scared me sometimes, having to defend my small life when I wasn't exactly thrilled with its size. When we argued, it felt like scraping my knees along the sidewalk. I worried about what might be revealed by the scraped-away skin.

“Everything,” I said. “History and anthro and archaeology and poli sci and astronomy.”

“That's why you're studying your ass off in high school? You want to land yourself in college and study your ass off again? You don't think you can learn more from going, seeing,
doing
?” He gave me an incredulous look.

“Sure, but in college I'll be studying so that I can go to law or business school.”

He stood fast, came around the fire pit, and hit his knees at my feet. The flats of his hands covered the tops of mine. They were hot in my lap. “That's what you want? You want to bust your ass in school for more school, all so you can defend a criminal or oversee a corporate merger?”

The water stopped slapping the rocks below us, and a hush fell over the world.

It was ripe for a confession.

Actually, Ben, I only pretend to be the studious, well-behaved daughter of Cal McBrook, because I'm not brave enough for the alternative. I'm not brave enough to wear black fishnets, or flip off Carolynn Winters and those girls, or tell Ford Holland exactly what I think of him, or ask Josh Parker out, or take the chances I really want to, the chance I'm aching to.

I resolved to tell Ben all this after high school, when things were different. I'd come home the first Thanksgiving of college and I'd be myself: unafraid, bold, devil-may-care. I'd be Lana with a knitting-needle sword at her side. Even in my wildest dreams, I didn't blow off college, I went and made Dad and Diane proud. That's who I grew into being. I was wild and daring as a kid, uncontainable, then time passed and it rubbed off and other traits stuck. I became more of an earthworm than a python. Until I was jolted awake. Jolted brave again by losing Ben.

Ben was waiting for an answer, and my hands were sweating under his. I said pleadingly, “Come to college with me. We can apply to the same schools and because of your gap year, you'll only be one year ahead.”

He pulled away abruptly. “I'm tired,” was all he said. He jogged up the stairs, leaving me and the firelit night. Ben talked about escape more than I did. We both chafed at living in Gant. The island wore me smooth as a little stone on a riverbed. Ben grew more opinionated and blustery. He wanted to hitchhike through Canada, sail to the South Pacific on the
Mira
, trek through Borneo, and teach kids in a Brazilian
favela
. Everything was for after, after, after we got out of Gant. He wanted me to say,
Screw college. Let's go on an adventure.

I open my eyes. Playing memories offers temporary relief. But I am emptier for it. I circle around the fire pit and go for our secret place. It's a nook concealed by boulders that fit like jigsaw pieces on the hillside. There's a crevice below the rock shaped like a three-quarters moon. If you glide your hand in, you reach the hollow spot behind the rocks' facades.

Ben and I used to hide what we didn't want to be found there. Mostly, I stored my contraband candy stash in a jar. As a teenager Ben used it for booze and cigarettes. We'd be at the market, or the movies, or Marmalade's, and Ben would turn dollar bills, or receipts, or gum wrappers into cranes while we waited. A few times Ben left these origami animals with notes scribbled in his messy, slanting handwriting in our hiding spot for me. I haven't checked inside the hollow since Ben's been gone. Holding anything that he hid away—even soggy cigarettes I don't intend to smoke—would be better than only remembering.

My fingertips run along the cold stone interior walls and close around an object. I pull it out. There's a bracelet in my palm. Its leather cord is worn soft and its beads are smooth and round.
Familiar. My fingers roll them side to side.

It's a rosary, threaded with
rosary peas,
like those that someone might have forced into Maggie's mouth as she struggled. I hear the choking gurgle she might have made as she was gagging on them. I see them swinging from this thin strip of leather, held by her killer. I am startled by an explosion of memory. A bulky, toothless monk runs his fingers like frantic spiders over a rosary. He's the villain from one of our stories, but the details of the plot aren't more than smudges of pencil that survived an eraser in my head. The monk was crazy, escaped from somewhere, roaming the countryside killing women by forcing them to swallow rosary peas. My heroic likeness hunted him down, killed him in the same way he took victims. Although I don't recall this specific ending, this is how the stories always ended: good trumped evil.

Ben never let the villain win.

I squeeze the rosary in my hand. It's real. It's here. And I've seen its mother-of-pearl crucifix before, outside my imagination, in the jumble of pretty tokens at the bottom of my mother's hope chest.

B
en and I huddled above my mother's hope chest on a stormy afternoon. It was a few months after he and Diane moved in, and we'd been trading secrets when I confided in him my desire to see the chest's locked-away contents. This was one of my most closely guarded secrets, since I'd taken to pretending I had no interest in learning more about my mom. I had never told my father that I was curious about what was inside her chest, which lived at the foot of his bed. I could have asked, but Ben setting out for the key was more fun.

He found it on the third day of his effort, at the bottom of a folder filed away in my dad's desk under the letter
M
. I remember the way Ben's fingers lingered over a similar file in the
W
s. Wright: Diane and Ben's last name before they took McBrook. He bypassed it and we moved on with the key to the trunk.

The journals inside were how I discovered all my mother's sayings. I scanned their entries and read tidbits out loud to Ben; I'd later study their pages. He leafed through the photo albums. He only had one from before he came to live with us and never let
me look inside. I think he didn't want me to see how poor he and Diane had been—as if I would have cared. The rosary was at the bottom of the chest, a token from my mother's very Irish Catholic great-grandmother, who'd married a missionary and had lived in India before they'd immigrated and found Gant. Before Mom's death, the rosary, her only keepsake from her great-grandmother, dangled from her vanity. It was handmade and strung with rosary peas grown in India.

We replaced the chest's contents, all but the journals. So how did my great-great-grandmother's rosary end up in my secret hiding place? Did I grab it along with the journals and dump the rosary in one of my cluttered jewelry boxes? Did Ben hang on to it because he thought I'd want to keep it close? But then how did it make that final leap from our house to the hiding spot? Had Ben told me the story about the monk before we rooted through the chest? Yes—I think. I remember the rosy cast of light on Ben's face as he held the rosary up and said with a devilish wink that was too grown-up for his face,
Just like the monk's,
I think.

I see the strange link between Ben's story, this rosary, and Maggie's poisoning. But I'm the only person Ben told stories to, and however he knew rosary peas were poisonous—a comic, or a TV show, or a movie, or a book, or Wikipedia—there are probably a hundred other ways Maggie's killer could have known. It's a fluke. I could pick up the newspaper and find threads of Ben's narratives in half the articles covering knife fights, kidnappings, animal attacks, and murders.

More mysterious is how this rosary came to be in our secret place. There's no evidence that this is the rosary used to poison Maggie. There's no evidence that the rosary peas that poisoned
her even came from an antique rosary instead of directly from the plant. And our hiding spot was a secret. I am the only living person who knows about it. Ben knew and he might have placed this here before his death, but I can't see why. If he didn't, someone else must have, and I am wrong thinking that I'm the only living person who is aware of our hiding spot. The rosary didn't just appear here. Living hands hid it. Unless . . . I fling the rosary back into the hollow. This is insane. I am Lana McBrook. I have a 4.20 GPA and took anatomy last year in school, and I know that when the human body dies, there's no speck of consciousness left. There definitely isn't a murderous force. I don't believe that death has an
after
. I am sad and losing my mind, and if I didn't think I'd end up with Diane at Calm Coast, I might tell my dad that I need professional help.

I pound up the stairs, every few steps glancing over my shoulder. The sense that I'm being watched from the outcropping of rocks or the vines separating our property from the neighbor's is as maddening as the itch of a mosquito bite. Last night I wanted to stare the shadows down; today I want to run from them. Either I'm crazy and put my great-great-grandmother's rosary in the hidey-spot ages ago and forgot about it or Ben did for some inexplicable reason before he died. In both those scenarios, my rosary isn't the murder weapon.

I'm jumpy at the wind rattling against the kitchen doors as Dad and I eat dinner. My fork clatters against the plate as I drop it for the fifth time. Dad goes to his study once we finish. Upstairs I contemplate toeing Ben's door open, slipping in, running my fingers over the things he loved, and drinking up the comfort.

Not until I saw Josh's room, his walls covered in football heroes, photos of family and friends, and the blue-and-gray zigzag wallpaper did I realize how most teenage boys decorate their rooms.

Not Ben. His is full of trinkets: charcoals and sketch pads; a foot-tall wooden drawing mannequin; a bookshelf sagging with falling-apart, age-darkened books; intricately carved wooden boxes in a range of sizes from our family trip to Prague; a three-foot-long ostrich feather; a replica of a reindeer skull he ordered from Mongolia on the Internet; and a varnished bedside lamp with Sanskrit characters etched into the base.

The walls are speckled with the abandoned corners of posters. Each tear of glossy paper and masking tape is evidence of Ben changing his mind. First Che Guevara went up, followed by Karl Marx, then two German philosophers whose names I mix up. Ben liked the idea of standing for ideas. He wanted to emulate the thinkers of times when the stakes were higher. Ultimately, he was bound to find some tidbit he didn't like about them. Then down went the poster and up went someone new.

If not for these paper triangles on the wall, the room could belong to an antique dealer who drove his rickety car along the Silk Road. I spent hours sizing up Ben's new additions, a tiny framed Turkish coin or a book where the font was too faded to read, trying to decipher what Ben loved about the item. I only understood the posters. The rest remain mysteries, and this is why I haven't gone into his room since he died. Yes, I look for him everywhere. And there he would be: Ben, a version I don't understand. At times I think we were so close that there were things we couldn't see about the other. The alternative—that we weren't close enough—stings too much.

I lie on my bed and dial Willa's number. Voice mail clicks on immediately.

“It's me,” I say. “I'm going to get us out of this. I know you wouldn't have been at the spring if I hadn't made you come.
I know.
I should have said so at Josh's. Call me if you can, okay? Just don't worry, I promise I'll figure it out.”

Willa and I share real things beyond the eight-semester plan. We have secrets and memories we look back on, grinning. Only she knows I wrote
Josh Parker
in Sharpie on my leg in the seventh grade and that it took thirty showers to wash off. I was there when she broke her wrist teaching herself how to skateboard in the eighth grade and we told her mom that she fell from a stepladder in the library and I acted out the accident in the emergency room for P.O. I'll remind Willa of all this, after I've cleared her name—all of our names—and Willa and I will be better. Different but better.