The Telling (19 page)

Her brow furrows. “You told me that you guys used to explore the spring. I bet he found the cave with her.” She licks her bottom lip. “Guys love doing it in kinky places.”

I frown. I can't help frowning while imagining Ben and Maggie there. Carolynn tips her head to the side and adds in a throaty rasp, “I know what you're thinking.”

I start to protest.

“You don't think Ben would have fit through the tunnel to get inside. Maybe not,” she says. Her eyes run the length of the ceiling before settling back on me. “And yes, even Josh is into kinky stuff like outside hookups.”

I watch her lips curl into a pouty smile. It might be that we're breathing the same air or that there's a remaining trace of a baby-bond we formed in the playpen, but I can see that like me, Carolynn's lying about who she is. Maybe no one ever looks long enough to spot the cracks in her snow-queen facade because they're afraid of what she may do. Despite all the teasing, Carolynn came after me when she thought I was in trouble. “Why do you do that?” I ask.

She glares at me like I'm exhausting her more than the treading water is.

“All this ‘boys and girls are different' crap. All this ‘pussies are pussy' stuff. The other day you said girls weren't made for stunts like guys are. But here you are”—I splash water in the direction of the cave's opening—“gutsier than any of them. Why pretend you aren't?”

Her eyes open a little wider before she regains control. “Look,” she says in her grown-up voice she uses to tell Duncan's little brothers to get lost, “you're obviously used to hanging out with Willa, who is probably the only girl on the planet who knows less about boys than you do, and it's little wonder your life is PG, so let me give you some advice. Woman to woman.” She paddles nearer and says in a confidential tone, “Guys don't like girls to show them up.”

A bolt of anger goes through me. I'm sick of Carolynn thinking she can do or say whatever she wants. I'm not the same Lana I used to be. I won't keep my head down or let myself be stomped on. “Josh didn't seem to mind the other day when I jumped,” I say.

She sniffs at my attitude. “Josh is freakishly nice. He's the exception, not the rule.”

“And you don't like nice guys?” I ask, thinking of whatever there is between Carolynn and Duncan.

Her fingers flick water in my face, and I cough.

“Nice? I want someone who is
good
but can act . . .” She sighs through her teeth.

“Mean?”

She gives a jaded eye roll. “People aren't that simple, Lana. Good or bad. I want a guy who's interesting. I want a guy who knows where to put his hands. Josh is the nicest. Nice isn't always enough.”

If Carolynn were Willa, I'd ask what she meant about a guy's hands. I try to look blasé, like her words don't set my mind spinning.

“You aren't going to tell Duncan what I said last night about not wanting to watch Bethany J. all over him, are you?” she asks abruptly.

“No,” I reply. “That was a private conversation.”

She opens her mouth, closes it, and shakes her head. “So why would Maggie swim all the way down here, alone?” she asks. The subject of Duncan and boys who know what to do with their hands is closed.

I swim in a tight circle. “To hide,” I say. “The tunnel's narrow, and no one who doesn't know it's here would be able to follow her. No one bigger could fit.” I bob my head. “But hide from who? Not us. All she had to do was swim out and we would have helped her.” I say it and know it's true by the way it threatens to drag me under like an anchor. I would have helped save Maggie's life despite what she took from my family. Others might be reassured by such an epiphany. I'm disappointed. Ben deserves blind, cold revenge.

Carolynn floats on her back and twirls the tiny opal stud in her earlobe. “We can't hear anything from the surface. Maggie wouldn't have known us from the perv who poisoned her. She was hiding and waiting until he gave up and left. Maybe she didn't even know that the poison was deadly? I mean, who knows what she thought or knew?”

“The poison must have set in while she was waiting,” I say.

Carolynn pushes a few tiny pebbles loose from a crack. They rain down on the water.

I try to imagine Maggie paddling for hours under here. My legs and arms feel as if I'm in hardening cement, and it hasn't been more than five minutes. Maggie was fighting for her life, though, and people do impossible things to stay alive. “You think she drowned getting caught on her way out, slowed or made sick by the poison?” I ask.

Her head sways. “Could be.”

I nod. “This is the proof we needed. This is where Maggie was. The police will have to believe us.” I hear Willa's voice of reason in my mind: an alternative theory isn't enough to disprove another. But it's more than we arrived with.

Carolynn murmurs assent and takes a deep breath. She dives down; her butt, then her heels rear above the surface. I take one last look at the eerie space—it has the feel of being a thousand feet under a jade lagoon on the other side of the globe.

I swim to the mouth of the tunnel and return through the narrow passage. Sediment drifts like stardust, catching the bright light of the surface. Carolynn grabs Maggie's pink sneaker. She coils her legs and shoots off the spring floor, sending wrinkles through the water. I swim from the tunnel and am about to follow when I notice a brown heap. I swim to the shapeless form.

It's a backpack, wedged between the spring's wall and the rocks that appeared to be dislodged from masking the passage's entry. It might have gotten stuck in Maggie's rush to hide.

One of the backpack's straps is under the weight of a rock as big as my head, and the other is a torn stripe reaching for the sun like a weed.

I push against the rock, but another is pinning it in place. After a lot of shoving and leveraging, the top stone tumbles away. I'm able to free the backpack from under the bottom rock. Its contents could be important. I picture Maggie, hooked on the backpack's strap, unable to free herself. Or maybe she refused to surface without it? If Maggie was panicked, the deadly poison setting in, she might have believed she had more time than she did.

Burdened by the pack and my expectations, I swim for the light.

I
t takes Carolynn's help, our cold arms together, hooked in the remaining loop of the pack, to get it to shore. Josh hoists it from the water, showering us below. Duncan catches its waterlogged weight as it begins to slip from Josh's clenched fingers. Carolynn and I boost ourselves over the rocky lip of the spring and collapse like beached oarfish.

My hair is a blindfold. “I hate you both,” Becca yells. “I'm going to murder you for making me think . . . I thought . . .” Her voice goes soft and mushy. I push the hair away and prop myself up on my elbows. Becca's slumped to the ground, crying pitifully, with Carolynn's arm wrapped around her. Little nips of jealousy needle my ribs. Willa should be here, for me.

Carolynn details the cave, and the others settle on the same conclusion we did. This is the alternative explanation we need. Moods turn lighter with relief. Josh and Duncan's argument has been forgotten, and they're fist-bumping. I roll onto my knees and crawl toward the pack.

“Nice ass.” Duncan's behind me. “Is that Maggie's?” he adds as an afterthought.

I touch the zipper of the pack as I say, “Don't know yet.”

“Fingerprints,” Josh warns, sinking into a crouch opposite me. The zipper's already pinched between my finger pads.

“Too late for that,” Rusty snorts, squatting to my left. In the pale light his freckles are more intense against his sun-pinkened skin.

“Don't worry,” Josh says. His hand moves mine gently to the side, and he continues with the zipper where I left off. A glut of water rushes from the inner pocket.

Duncan groans impatiently and claps his hands. “C'mon, c'mon. Whose is it?”

Josh removes wadded up articles of clothing from the sack. Becca unfurls and holds up a black T-shirt with a tattered hem. Carolynn scowls at a pair of plaid shorts. Safety pins with no apparent purpose dangle from the pockets. Duncan pokes what appears to be a fishing net but turns out to be a pair of tights.

“Why did Maggie have a backpack with clothes in it?” Becca asks.

“She was on the run and she had to wear something,” Carolynn says as she tosses the recovered pink sneaker onto the pile. “Ironic, since she would have looked better in a trash bag than in these rejects.”

Becca nudges the cloth heap. “It's only one outfit. Don't tell me she went seven whole weeks wearing one hideous outfit.”

“Two outfits,” I say. “She had the clothes we found her in.”

“Still,” Becca says with disgust.

Josh continues to search through the contents. There are a few travel-size toiletries—a mini toothbrush, toothpaste, wet wipes, and a tiny stick of deodorant—and a spongy glob of what used to be paper. The fibers sag on either side of Josh's cupped hands, rivulets of water dribbling off them until they shred apart. “Shit,” Josh says under his breath.

“There goes our evidence,” Becca murmurs. Someone snorts.

I rock onto my heels. Anything in the backpack spent the better part of three days submerged. Anything delicate is ruined. Fingerprints are washed away. “Maybe we should have left this stuff where we found it? Let the police come and collect it?” I say.

Carolynn looks up from the backpack. “Too late now.”

“Is Maggie's wallet or phone in there?” I ask as Josh searches the smaller pockets.

“Jackpot,” he says, grinning.

He's removed an envelope from the bag. It's folded in half and sturdier than the individual sheets that turned to mush. The two halves are fused together. There's only a faint gray shadow where ink used to be on one side of the envelope. The shadow is a formless blot. On the flip side, drawn in thick black Sharpie, is a bird.

“It's a dove,” Becca says. “How romantic. There's a little heart at its feet.” She claps her hands at her chest. “I don't even remember my last sober kiss, and Maggie was writing a love letter with doves and hearts.”

“There's a date in the heart,” Josh says. “Three seventeen. March seventeenth.” He lifts the bird for me to see clearly. I recognize it. I see Ben hunched over the patio table on the upper terrace, six long feathers arranged parallel to one another and to the top of a sketch pad. “Birds are the most challenging subjects to draw,” he said. He was thirteen, fourteen at most. “The aerodynamics and the individual plumes are complicated.” He spun his sketch pad around so I could see. He'd drawn four feathers in black and white and a fifth with a scarlet quill.

“Why do you draw them, then? Diane says birds are so dirty they're basically flying rats,”
I said in the know-it-all tone I was experimenting with at eleven.

Ben put his charcoal down and met my eyes. I smiled uncertainly, then flattened my lips and tried to match his intensity. He blinked and laughed. “You win,” he said. I always beat him at staring contests. He loved to make me compete and fight to win. “I draw birds because they're your favorite animal
and
they have wings.”

“Oh,” I whispered. And maybe I blathered on about fairy wings or the Pegasus stickers I'd stuck to my school binder. Who knows? I was a day-dreamy kid, infatuated with everything that wasn't real.

This depiction of a bird is unmistakably Ben's. The light reflected in its eyes makes the bird look smart, as if it's paying attention. The date is in Ben's handwriting also. The now disintegrated letter must have been written by Ben on March 17, while he was in Central America, and then delivered somehow to Maggie, either sent in the mail, though I don't see a stamp, or handed to her when he returned. But this doesn't make sense because Ben told me they didn't speak or write the entire time he was gone. He told me it was over with her once he returned. He lied. To me.

I twist around and grab for my hoodie. I tug my arms into the sleeves and zip it to my chin. There's a slight tremble to Josh's hands as he searches the rest of the pockets. Sweat glistens along his hairline. Carolynn combs his feathery hair from his forehead with her fingers. He looks up a beat to smile at her. “You know what I think? Maggie's death was an accident,” she says in a way meant to comfort Josh. “All we've proven this morning is that no one held her under. She hid in the cave for hours and when she thought she was in the clear, she swam out. It was shit luck that she got stuck and killed herself.”

Carolynn's theory is believable, if not for one inconvenient fact: Maggie was poisoned with a deadly neurotoxin. “How do you explain her ingesting rosary peas?” I ask. “Was she munching on antique prayer beads while she hid from us? She wasn't a closeted Catholic schoolgirl.”

Duncan sniggers but thinks better of commenting.

“And
why
was she hiding from us?” I add.

Carolynn's lips move, and I know it's only a nanosecond until she has a comeback.

Josh cuts in first. “Okay, so someone
tried
to kill her at the least, and at the most, the poison is why she drowned. Maybe they meant to feed her enough poison to kill her immediately. She managed to escape and ran to the spring to hide.”

“Why bring Maggie out here to poison her, though?” Carolynn presses.

I wriggle my legs into my jeans. I do this awkward half-kneeling thing to pull the waistband over my butt. “These woods are a good place to hide a body,” I say, concentrating too much on the jeans maneuver to filter. All eyes are on me as I fasten my button. “They are. Think about it. No one's allowed to build around here, so you could bury someone and no one would dig them up. Parts of the forest used to be mined, so there are old mine shafts. Ben and I used to hike here, and we found a few deserted cabins that anyone could hide anything in. The preserve runs along open coastline, where you could dump a body into the sound.”