The Telling (32 page)

“Doubtful,” I say as she gets up to search the bookshelves. I drop to the floor and look under the bed. I open Ben's nightstand
drawers. I balance on the shoe rack in his closet to get a look at the dusty top shelf. I remove the open desk drawer and dump its contents onto the bed. I pick through them and then yank the remaining drawers free. I press my wrist to my forehead as I survey the pile of sketch pads, art supplies, notebooks, trinkets, and wadded-up sheets of binder paper.

“Maggie left the note right where the album was usually hidden,” I say finally. “Ben only looked through it when he thought no one was around. He treated it like
contraband
.” Willa twists and peers expectantly at me. “When they first moved in, I used to spy on him. They were strangers and I was curious. Then he found the key to my mom's hope chest. He said he only had one album full of pictures when he saw how many Mom had saved. I asked to see his. He told me he couldn't remember where he put it. But see, I'd already watched him pull it out of his desk when I was spying. So I tiptoed in here one day, and after I'd seen a page or two of baby photos, Ben found me. He was furious.” I hug myself, remembering his mad, glowing eyes. “Just weirdly protective over it. He didn't talk to me for two days. It was the only thing he had from being a kid.”

“You don't think he moved it so you wouldn't find it again?”

I toe the corner of the Persian rug with my bare foot. “I wanted to know if Ben trusted me not to go snooping again. I looked one final time, a few days later, and found it in the same spot. While they were dating, I walked in on Maggie riffling through his desk a bunch of times. She was the queen of nosy. She must have discovered it.
He
, whoever he is, wanted the only proof Ben had of his identity.”

“You think Ben had his picture?” Willa asks.

“Probably. The album is from his childhood, like the stories, like whoever was after him.”

She thumbs her chin and surveys the bedroom with greater attention. “And you're a hundred percent sure that it's the only thing Ben saved? He didn't have a baby blanket? No action figures loved until their limbs fell off? No raccoon stuffed toy named Lancelot with mismatched button eyes and a torn bushy tail?”

I smile weakly at Willa; Lancelot is currently nestled between the throw pillows on my window seat in my bedroom. “He didn't have anything like that,” I say, a pang of sadness deep in my chest. “When Diane and Ben arrived in Gant, they were driving this van with a smoking engine. No furniture and only a few suitcases.” To me, Ben had seemed like a refugee from a storybook. His clothing had been slightly old-fashioned; he didn't own jeans or sneakers; he and Diane's suitcases were vividly embroidered carpet bags.

“You know what I don't get,” Willa says. “There's this man who meant Ben and Diane harm all these years ago and he finally finds them. Why hurt Ben? Diane's the adult who's been running.”

“
He
is making Diane pay.” I lower my voice. “He killed her son and now he's circling.”

“Circling by killing Maggie, who helped him initially and knows who he is, so that jells. But why Ford Holland and Becca Atherton? It isn't adding up, unless he's . . .” Her tongue nervously flicks the space between her front teeth.

I pick up Ben's pillow and hug it to my chest. “Unless he's what?”

Her expression is grim. “Ford was at the same party you were the night he died.”

“Every upperclassman was at the party.
You
were at the party.”

“Becca was with you last night. What if this person is following you now? Circling you, and eventually he plans to hurt you or your dad to continue tormenting Diane.”

I grip the pillow tighter. “Biding his time until she comes back home.”

“And that's why he's sticking around, risking being found out.” Willa thumbs her nose thoughtfully. “He's on the island, and somehow he knew when Maggie returned. Maggie must have given an indication that she wasn't going to keep her mouth shut much longer. That's what set off this second rash of murders.”

“Why didn't she stay gone?” I ask. “Returning meant putting herself in danger again.”

Willa shrugs a shoulder.

Sweeny was on the right track; she sensed that Ben's death wasn't what it appeared to be. His killer wasn't a shadow man who haunted the highway. He's been circling Ben and Diane forever. And while I've been breathless and giddy over
belonging
this summer, and playing a sick game of make-believe that Ben still exists, Ben's killer has been here, on my island, under my nose. I was just too distracted by the sun glinting off the core to see.

Hands on her hips, Willa appraises the rest of the books. Dad could never swallow why someone who read as much as Ben squeaked by with Cs. Dad suspected what I knew: Ben wanted to be average. Being average is hard work when you're anything but. Ben was bright and intense, and he was hungry to ask why and to take things apart to see how they worked. I thought he refused to perform in school as part of his rebellion against Gant. Now I wonder if there was another reason. Did he need to be average to go unnoticed? Was
he avoiding being printed up in the biannual issue of the
Gant Island's Times
that features the names of honor students?

“How did
he
know about the photo album?” Willa wonders aloud.

“He might have pressed Maggie for details. She might have volunteered the information to win his trust or at least get him to leave her alone.”

Willa chews her bottom lip for a spell, pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and frowns. “But why wouldn't Maggie just run from this guy? Why would she run his twisted errands?”

This is what Willa does; she figures things out. But right now, I don't want to wonder about this psycho's methods. I don't want to imagine the detached cogs in his head that turned him into Ben's sinister shadow; that allowed him to spread Ben's blood across the highway.

“Maybe he got her to come back to Gant with a threat? ‘If you leave for good, I'll find you.' He'd hunted Ben for years.” I see the timid, cowering boy who moved to Gant seven years ago more clearly. A tremble works its way into my voice. “It was smart of Maggie to fear that the same thing might happen to her.”

Willa grimaces, dissatisfied. She starts organizing the supplies back into their drawers. “So either Maggie came back to Gant because he made her or else she never left and she was on Gant, hiding somewhere that no one spotted her, until this lunatic needed her again.”

I watch a line of police cars coast down the street through the window. Their sirens are off and they're driving away from Becca's. “Maggie died near the spring.” My voice is froggy, newly sad and sympathetic thinking of her. “Which isn't just a random isolated spot for
a killer to dump a body but a place Maggie was familiar with. Maybe she was staying out there. It's out of the way. No tourists. Kids stick mostly to the spring to swim. Rangers don't patrol the preserve anymore.”

“Maggie was camping?” Willa asks.

“She wouldn't need to. There are abandoned cabins in the preserve. When Ben and I explored them, there were old bottles and graffiti on the walls. Josh said that the stoner kids used to hang out in them.”

“So Maggie might have known about the cabins from Ben or from other kids at school.”

“Exactly. She might have been staying there for weeks or she might have only arranged the meet for the album out there, because she knew where she could run and hide if things went bad.”

“What if Maggie realized the value of what she had in the photo album? She could have hidden it for leverage. ‘I'll call and tell you where it is once I'm safe and long gone.' ” There are twin squiggles between Willa's brows. “Maybe that's why she ended up dead? She was trying to get the upper hand. He found her, attacked her, and the album might be right where she left it.” She's staring at me expectantly. Her shoe is tapping an impatient rhythm against one of the desk chair's legs. She bites the inside of her cheek and then sighs, exasperated. “I have to ask: When you started putting together that the murders were echoing Ben's stories, what did you think was happening?”

I focus on setting the pillows right on Ben's bed. “I thought that Ben was here, not entirely dead,” I admit in a whisper. “Gant was this in-between place where it was possible.”

It takes Willa a long, uncomfortable moment to say, “You believed that Ben had risen from the dead and was killing people?”

A tear escapes the corner of my eyes and runs to my jaw. “When you say it like that, I sound crazy.”

“Is there a way to say it so you don't?”

I frown. “I'm not sure. It was more complicated in my head.”

“Of course it was complicated. You lost someone. You've been in a hyperemotional state . . . sorry.” She holds her hands up. “Just something else I read about PTSD.”

A heavy gloom drops over me; my knees want to move like a magnet to my chest, my heels to my butt. I want to be small. Willa reasoning everything out takes me further away from when I believed something of Ben remained. “Can we stop talking about this now?” I whisper.

“Sure, Lan.
We'll
figure out what to do with all this information in the morning. I'll help you. Everyone's safe for now with their parents, and we're together.”

With the mention of parents, it occurs to me how glaring P.O.'s absence is. “Is your mom angry that you're here?”

Willa slouches against the wall. “No. I don't know. I got Josh's call. He was on his way to Becca's and you weren't answering. Mom told me I couldn't go. She said that I've let
losers
compromise me enough. She said, ‘Becca runs with a fast crowd.' I said, ‘How does her going to parties explain her winding up dead?' She kept shouting about this being your influence. Then she went into my room and came out with the reading list for AP English Lit. I couldn't believe it. Two of her students have died and I'm supposed to read
Major Barbara
.”

“You left?”

“At first she tried running after the car. I called her, after I tried your dad. She was . . . chilly. I told her I'm sleeping over here. It isn't for nothing, the Latin, studying, and stressing over every score, I mean. I want to leave Gant. At college I won't be Principal Owen's robotically engineered spawn.”

I look at my friend. How didn't I realize how brave Willa is? She's never needed a fictional self. She's unapologetic about what she wants and how hard she works to get it. She doesn't need to point at another girl and say,
Look over there at her problems
to distract you from seeing her own. Willa isn't small. She's expansive and every bit as brave as I wish I could be.

Dad spent the day in a meeting with his cell turned off. He climbed into his car as the sky was turning moody at dusk and saw he had seventeen missed calls from me, Willa, the police, and Josh's moms. Sweeny recounts events to him over the phone as Willa and I are glaze-eyed zombies eating the pizza Dad ordered. Shortly after, he closes himself in his office. People wear sadness like they wear hats, I remind myself. People cope with fear in different ways, too. I try to keep mine under control.

He knows who we are.
He watched as seven clueless kids drank beers, sunbathed, swam, and pulled Maggie's body from the bottom of Swisher Spring almost a week ago. Did he recognize me as Ben's stepsister then? Did he follow me to Josh's party? Was he in the woods, listening to my conversation with Ford? Did he watch Josh kiss me for the first time on the gallery deck of the lighthouse?

Willa and I sit on the sofa as a documentary on Mayan civilization plays on TV. This is how Willa deals with fear and grief. She
keeps her brain occupied. She lets long-dead civilizations drown out the static. Willa watches and I stare out the window at our empty terrace and the night sky. The world isn't any emptier than it was this morning, and yet I feel the pull of a giant, sucking hole. Ben is gone and I only tricked myself into believing it wasn't true.

I speak with Josh over the phone. It's an awkward few minutes of taking turns asking the other if they're okay. “I'll text you in the morning. Don't be afraid. The police are going to find out who did this. We just have to trust our parents and the detectives.” Josh holds fast to the belief that all will work out.

I leave Willa on the couch with the documentary's footage of Mayan pyramids in the background. She'll take the guest room down the hall from mine like always. I move wearily up the stairs and fling myself onto my bed.

I hadn't counted on any last words from Ben, and the idea of never hearing what he thought again was what broke me that first month. Then the impossible happened.

Willa left after delivering one of her you're-not-dead-too pep talks. I reached for my journal to squeeze out my first entry since he died. I wouldn't have gotten further than staring at the blank page and letting tears dot the paper. But there, tucked between the first page and the cover, was an origami crane. On the outside it was identical to those Ben had folded for me, the ones I'd tossed out, figuring that Ben was a never-ending supply of paper tokens of affection. He was all stories, origami, opinions, and belief in me.

I hadn't written in my journal since the night before Ben arrived home from Guatemala. He had five days to stow the crane there. That explained the expectant look he met me with in the hallway when I
left my room. The way his brows tugged up and he smiled at me as if I scared him. There will be no more last words; no secret messages; no sailboats drawn on the sweating windows; no origami cranes.

A lot later, hours even, I reach for the journal under my mattress. My bones have settled and my muscles have sagged to fit the indents and grooves of the springs. I blink less, eyelids slowing, and my heart beats sluggishly. It would be so easy to lie here until I sink back where nothing and no one can reach me, where the only sensation is me stuck, missing Ben.