Truly, Madly, Deadly (3 page)

Biggs thrust out a hand to Sawyer’s father and stepmom. “Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. and Mrs. Dodd.” He nodded at Sawyer. “You have a very smart daughter there.”

Sawyer watched her father and Tara shake Biggs’s hand, frustration prickling her spine when no one corrected Biggs, no one reminded him that Tara wasn’t her mother. When the detective offered his hand to Sawyer, she shook it woodenly, saying nothing. Once the door closed and he was gone, Sawyer blinked.

“I’m going to go take a shower.”

“Don’t you want to eat something first?” Tara asked.

Sawyer shook her head, feeling the dead weight of…something…sitting in the pit of her stomach. “No, I’m not very hungry.”

She turned her back on Tara’s and her father’s expectant stares and pulled her backpack over her shoulder. Once she got to her room, she shut the door, dumped the pack, and stashed the note where no one would find it. Then she turned on the shower as hot as she could get it, as if the water could wash away the last year of her life.

***

Sawyer was in her pajamas, hair wrapped in a towel turban, and stretched out on her bed when there was a knock on her doorframe. She looked up from her Spanish homework and blinked at her father.

“Hey,” he said softly.

“Hey.”

He walked in, sitting on the edge of Sawyer’s bed, one hand fanned out on her bedspread. “She’s trying, you know.”

Sawyer didn’t say anything. She kept her pencil moving even though she had ceased conjugating verbs and was now doodling circles on her notebook paper. “I know.”

“It’s not easy for her.”

Sawyer looked up, betrayal flashing in her eyes. “It’s not easy for me, either.”

“I know. And Tara understands that. But this is all new to her. New husband, new house. New teenage daughter. It’s a lot to take in. She just wants to make this work. She wants us all to be a family. Can you give her a break?”

Sawyer felt the tears stinging behind her eyes. She gritted her teeth, digging deep into her molars until her jaw hurt. “It’s a little new for me too. Remember? When she was getting a new husband, I was getting a new stepmom. And a new house.” She swallowed hard, trying to wash down the thick lump in her throat.
And
losing
my
real
mom
, she wanted to say.

Andrew rubbed his palm over his mouth and sighed. “But you’re strong, sweetheart. Tara’s not like you. She needs a little more help.”

Sawyer caught on that word,
strong.
When her parent’s marriage fell apart, people started calling her
strong
just because she didn’t start cutting herself or bring a gun to school. But she wasn’t strong. She was weak and small and afraid, and she felt safe when Kevin opened his arms to her, tucked her forehead under his chin. She remembered the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, the first time they had had sex, the first time in so long that she didn’t have to be strong. Back then, Kevin protected her.

“Sawyer?”

The lines of her binder paper blurred in front of her, but she refused to cry. She sniffed instead and nodded. “Sure, Dad. I’ll try.”

Sawyer flopped down in her bed at half past eleven, her body heavy with exhaustion. But sleep wouldn’t come. The words of the note hung heavy on her periphery, like if she just read a little more into them, gave them a little more thought, they would reveal her mysterious admirer. At close to 1:00 a.m., Sawyer finally kicked off her covers, frustrated, and retrieved the note from her underwear drawer where she had stashed it. She read it, turned it over and over again in her hands, but nothing was shaken loose, no memory or insight. She was smashing the letter back between a pair of boy shorts and a sequined thong Chloe had given her as a gag gift when light flooded the room. It came in a smooth, blue-white arc, pouring over her open bathroom door, her computer desk, her bulletin board, until it shifted over Sawyer. She was paralyzed under the bright light. When it had washed over her, plunging her back into blackness, her eyes burned and the adrenaline rushed through her, working her already aching muscles.

“Oh God.” Sawyer grabbed at her chest, feeling the spastic thud of her heart under her hand. “Now I’m scared of light.”

She felt the giggle twitter through her as she crawled back into her bed, sinking into her pooled covers. When the arc of light came one more time, she talked herself out of her nerves, out of the niggling feeling in the back of her mind that something was wrong.

“Headlights, freakazoid,” Sawyer said out loud, keeping her voice throaty and low. “Nothing weird about—” She sat bolt upright and kicked out of bed, falling to her knees on the carpet. She pressed her palms against the windowsill and sunk down so only her eyes and the top of her head were showing.

She swept the street.

“Who the hell is driving out here now?” she mumbled in the darkness. She had no neighbors, no guests, and civilization—anything other than cows and model homes—was at least a twenty-minute drive from her housing tract.

Sawyer poked her head up another half-inch and craned her neck, trying to see down the connecting streets. But it was dead silent outside. There was no wind rattling what remained of the leaves this autumn, no neighbors with lights still on or TVs blaring. Sawyer hated the empty housing development. During the day, the houses looked cheery and welcoming, like some apron-wearing mom was in the model kitchen baking cookies, her perfect kids ready to spill out of the front door at any moment. But in the dark, the same houses seemed to boast their emptiness, and the windows that looked like they hid the perfect American families by day were gaping, menacing, and black at night. There was no sound and no movement—until Sawyer caught a beady red eye out of the corner of her eye. It was the taillight of a car—the other must have been broken—and it sailed down the street, a leisurely coast. Had it been daylight, a lone car on the street wouldn’t have piqued Sawyer’s interest—people were always cruising through, pretending they were heading to their new homes, she guessed. But tonight was an unusually dark night, starless, and without streetlights, there was nothing to see—unless you knew what you were looking for.

Sawyer shuddered and pulled her curtains closed. She slipped slowly back into bed, pulling the covers to her chin, her eyes wide, focused on the ceiling. She willed them to shut but then her mind kept spinning. She rolled over onto her side. Her eyes—suddenly very used to the darkness—flicked over her nightstand, the stack of books lying there, and settled on the prescription bottle shoved behind this week’s
US
magazine. Sawyer sighed and rolled over, clamping her eyes shut.

And then she rolled back.

“No, I hate that stuff,” she muttered. “It makes me feel freaking crazy.” She flopped back hard against her pillow and pulled another one over her face.

As her parents leveled their “news”—divorce, split homes, a move for Dad to the outer regions of housing tract hell, the “chance of a lifetime” for Mom that moved her across country, they doted on Sawyer and looked at her with troubled expressions. And when a new car and promises of a “good, new start” didn’t make her smile—or sleep at night—it was Dr. Johnson, one hour a week of “and how does that make you feel?” and finally, the Trazadone.

After tossing and turning for another twenty minutes, Sawyer was in the bathroom, filling up a glass of cold water and popping a dose of the medication.

“Just so I can get some sleep,” she mumbled to her sallow, sunken-eyed reflection. Then she crawled into bed and fell into a restless, heavy slumber.

Chloe fell into step with Sawyer as they walked down the junior hall the following morning. “So I didn’t hear from you last night.”

Sawyer worked the straps on her backpack, her eyes on her shoes. “Sorry. I got busy.”

“Were your dad and Tara howling at the moon or something equally metaphysically odd?”

Sawyer thought about the lone shoe, about Detective Biggs perched on the edge of her couch. “Did a detective come to your house?”

Chloe stopped cold, spinning to face Sawyer. “Huh?”

“Never mind.”

“A detective? No. Never. But the DEA came out to bust my neighbor’s pharmaceutical business once.” She wagged her head. “Leave it to the Feds. Always trying to take down the small businessman. Hey.” She reached out and pinched Sawyer hard on the arm.

“Hey! Ow!”

“You’re zoning out on me.”

“I know, DEA.”

“It was funny. You didn’t laugh.”

Sawyer forced a smile as big as she could muster. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“So unload.” The final bell rang and Chloe shrugged, her hand on the door to her English class. “Later.”

***

It was dark by the time Sawyer made the turnoff to Blackwood Hills Estates. The days were getting shorter, and though Sawyer usually liked the crisp, cozy days of fall, the impending darkness now felt like sheets of doom across the empty housing development. Her father kept promising that the streetlights that now reached out like cold, stiff hands toward the sky would be lit soon.
Soon,
Sawyer figured, probably meant when another family moved into the housing tract.

Now Sawyer’s headlights made only dim slits in the blackness, obscured even more by the bales of fog rolling over the brand new blacktop. That was the thing about living in a town that billed itself as “oceanside adjacent.” No real ocean views but all the ocean fog and the occasional brackish scent of filthy bay water.

Sawyer zipped through the blackened streets, sighing as she passed empty house after empty house. The Dodd house was the first to be populated, though it sat at the very back of the housing tract. It rested on a gentle slope, and once the rest of the neighborhood was full, the house would have an excellent view of twinkling lights before the miles of cypress trees beyond. The brochures called Blackwood Hills a “forested oasis.” Sawyer called it an annoyingly long distance from civilization and creepy in the dark.

The porch light glimmered at the front door of the Dodd house, and Sawyer picked her way through rocky dirt and a maze of landscape flags and spray-painted future walkways. She sunk her key into the lock, kicked open the front door, and dropped her backpack on the marble foyer floor.

“I’m home.” Her voice echoed in the empty house, ricocheting off the sixteen-foot ceilings and through the new drywall. “Dad? Tara?” Sawyer expected a massive spray of pink or blue balloons or—God forbid—one of each, but there was nothing save for the boxed remains of her old life butting up against her parents’ wedding gifts and cheery stuff for the baby. She toed a floppy giraffe and stepped over the boxes, flipping on the lights in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

Sawyer sucked in a sharp breath, hearing the racing double-thump of her heart when she saw the note on the kitchen table, propped up against a bottle of sparkling cider. She clawed at her chest and laughed a weird, maniacal giggle when she recognized her father’s precise writing on the note.

“It’s a girl!” she read out loud. “Just think of all the things you can teach your new baby sister. Tara and I have gone out to celebrate. There’s pizza in the freezer. Love, your always proud, Papa. Papa?” Sawyer snorted, flicked the note, and eyed the cider.

“Brilliant.” Sawyer flicked on her cell phone and walked to each corner of the professional-grade kitchen, eyes glued to her cell screen. She balanced on one foot near the bay window and then hopped up on the granite countertop, looking for a cell-phone signal. She let out something halfway between a groan and a growl and snatched the landline phone from the wall.

“What kind of place doesn’t have cell service?” Chloe said the second Sawyer picked up.

“Hell, Calcutta, and Blackwood Hills Estates. Scratch that. I think Calcutta’s gone fiber-optic now.”

“So, convo—wait, what did you call it?”

“Convocation.” Sawyer smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be the smart one?”

“No, I’m the scrappy bootstrap one who will win a scholarship for her writing prowess, making everyone in the trailer park titter.”

Sawyer jutted out one hip. “Titter?”

“It’s a TP thing. You tract home chicks wouldn’t understand. So, are we hanging out or not?”

Sawyer’s lower lip pushed out. “Doubtful. I’ve got sparkling apple cider and an apparent baby sister.”

“Cider?” Chloe sputtered into the phone.

“And a baby sister on the way.”

“And they expect you to toast the mutant spawn with sparkling cider?”

“I don’t think she’ll be a mutant. Tara’s gorgeous.” Sawyer looked around the eco-green kitchen. “And so very environmentally correct.”

“Whatever,” Chloe said, rattling cellophane on her end of the phone. “You know what goes well with sparkling cider?”

“What’s that?” Sawyer asked, pouring herself a mammoth bowl of cereal and rearranging herself on the glazed granite countertop.

“Beer.”

Sawyer wrinkled her nose, crunching her cereal. “That sounds gross.”

“You want me to head over? If I leave now I can be there by next Tuesday.”

Sawyer frowned. “No, thanks. I’m not feeling company-worthy right now. Can we convocate next week?”

“Wow, convocate?”

“I think I just made it up. Anyway, I think I’m just going to eat my celebratory pizza chaser after my cereal, take a bath, and resign myself to failing Spanish.”

“
Que
bueno
. Have a great night in the graveyard of American dreams.”

“Try not to let your Airstream rust.”

Sawyer set her bowl in the sink and changed into her pajama pants, turning on every light in the house as she went. Though a new build, the Dodd house still settled and creaked in ways that made the hair on the back of Sawyer’s neck stand up. She turned on the television and cranked the volume, letting the canned laughter and faux family’s voices fill her empty house.

***

The rest of the week passed uneventfully with no new notes and Sawyer burying herself under a mountain of college applications and midterm prep. So when the door of her Spanish class opened the following Friday afternoon, Sawyer was knee-deep in Spanish verb conjugation hell and didn’t look up.

“Flower-grams!”

Sawyer’s heart ached, remembering last year’s onslaught of fundraising carnations. She and Kevin had just started dating and he had showered her—a dozen per class—in pink and white beribboned flowers, each bearing a special message:
I
love
you, You’re beautiful.
Those flowers were pressed in a cardboard box marked “Sawyer’s Room” now, right next to the note she thought was her favorite—a fuzzy bunny rabbit drawn on binder paper with the words
I’ll never hurt you
printed across it. Sawyer swallowed back a lump, hid her moist eyes behind her book.

Maggie was the head of the flower fundraising forum, and she marched into the classroom now, beaming in a waft of carnation-scented air, her minions flanking her, arms laden with blooms.

“Mr. Hanson, members of the junior class. As you know, our flower-gram program not only raises school and personal spirit—”

“I think I feel my lunch being raised,” someone muttered.

Maggie shot daggers. “As I was saying, these flower-grams raise spirit and cash for our junior prom. So, if you’re one of the few who don’t receive a flower today, there are still three more days to get yours.” Maggie donned a dazzling, pageant-worthy grin and narrowed her eyes at Sawyer. “Or consider sending one to yourself. No one but you and I will know, and it’s for a good cause.”

Sawyer rolled her eyes and went back to the verb
to
play
.

“Now, without further ado, your flower-grams.”

Maggie cleared her throat and started reading off names as her minions zigzagged through the classroom, depositing single stems, sentiment cards tied with ribbons and fluttering like leaves.

Maggie paused, seeming to choke on the next name. “Sawyer Dodd.” She said it with a curled lip, no attempt to mask the disdain in her voice. “Two flowers.”

Maggie’s minion deposited two flowers on Sawyer’s desk without making eye contact. Sawyer lowered her Spanish book. It seemed as though the room dropped into a curious—and accusatory—silence. If Sawyer’s boyfriend was dead, their stares seemed to say, who was sending her flowers?

Sawyer unfurled the first note with trembling fingers. Would her admirer reveal himself—clear up the mystery message?

“To Tom Sawyer—Goin’ up river. All my love, Huck Finn.”

Sawyer felt her blood start to pump again and she grinned. Chloe was Sawyer’s Huck Finn—and Sawyer had painted more than a few fences for her—and although the “up the river” joke wasn’t original or new, it never failed to bring a smile to her lips.

Confident now, Sawyer reached for the second note and smoothed it against her desktop.

Her smile dropped.

Dear Sawyer—

You’ve got a great smile, but I don’t get to see it enough. Maybe I could change that if you’d let me take you out.

—Cooper

Sawyer swung her head to the right, her glance just catching Cooper Grey’s flushed cheek as he picked up a pen, started doodling, and focused hard on his notebook.

Cooper was new to Hawthorne High—a transplant from Kentucky or Kansas with a soft, sexy drawl, a well-muscled body, and a shy smile that Sawyer had often seen from the corner of her eye. He and Sawyer sat next to each other but never really spoke.

Sawyer swallowed hard and reached for Cooper’s arm just as the bell rang. The aisle flooded with students pushing their way out the door.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Mr. Hanson shouted, flapping his hands like broken moths. “Tests. Come pick them up on the way out.”

Sawyer was deliberately slow putting her things away. Though Cooper seemed sweet, dating was the last thing on her mind. She wanted to let him down easily, privately, but once she turned around, the classroom had emptied, and he was gone.

Sawyer hiked her backpack over her shoulder and was stopped at the head of the class by Mr. Hanson, what she supposed was her Spanish test tubed in his hands. He thumped it against his palm once, then held it out to her.

“Your test.” It was almost a question, and Sawyer was suddenly unsure whether or not she wanted to reach for it. Mr. Hanson was handsome, with dark hair that backed away from his forehead and eyebrows that rose expectantly. Sawyer wasn’t sure why, but the raised eyebrows paired with Mr. Hanson’s narrowed, leather-brown eyes unnerved her. She steadied her backpack and felt her eyes dart to the back of the classroom to the door, to the rows of abandoned desks behind her. Finally, they flitted over the page in Mr. Hanson’s hand.

“This is mine?”

“You know, Sawyer, I’m worried about you.” Mr. Hanson handed her her test, and she swallowed hard.

“Forty-seven percent?”

He offered her a sympathetic smile, set his hand on her shoulder, and squeezed gently. The motion sent something warm through Sawyer, and she wondered if she could slip away without seeming rude.

But then she thought of Dr. Johnson.

Dr. Johnson was her father’s go-to shrink for all things teenage trauma–related. Getting a divorce? Drop your kid at the shrink. Kid’s boyfriend dies? Shrink. Grades dropping, kid not coping, possibly cutting? Shrink, shrink, shrink.

“I’m sorry about this.” She shook the test. “I’ll try harder. I know I’ll do better next time. But maybe I can do some extra credit or something? I really do want to boost my grade.”

“Extra credit?” Mr. Hanson’s eyebrows went up. “I suppose we could work something out.”

“Thank you. I just—I just really need to end up with at least a B in this class.”

Mr. Hanson moved his hand to her upper arm, his thumb rubbing a small circle on her bare skin. His touch sent a cold, electric shock through her—Sawyer thought of a wet, serpentine eel darting through rocks—and her skin pricked out with gooseflesh.

“Ooh,” Mr. Hanson said, rubbing both of Sawyer’s arms now. “You’re freezing.”

“No,” Sawyer said, stumbling backward. “I’m okay.” She swung her backpack from one shoulder, putting it between herself and Mr. Hanson. He took a step closer anyway.

“I should get going.”

“You know, Sawyer, your grade is dropping like a stone. That’s not like you.”

“I know, I—”

“I know you’ve had a really rough month.”

Sawyer nodded, a rush of tears forming behind her lashes. She was angry; she was terrified; she wasn’t even sure at what. But she would not cry, she told herself. She had already spent too many embarrassing hours bursting into tears at inopportune moments. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, nails digging half-moons into her palms.

“I’m not trying to be the bad guy. I know you’re probably really sad and confused.”

Mr. Hanson’s eyes were dark, an intense shade of brown. When he moved to touch Sawyer’s cheek, she tried to dodge him—in her mind, at least. Her body was rigid, her feet rooted to the floor.

“Probably even a little lonely.” Mr. Hanson smiled softly. “That’s normal. I lost someone too, so I understand.” He slipped the test from her stony fingers. “But a college might not be as understanding. They’re strangers. Those people won’t know what a smart, talented girl you are.”

Sawyer’s spine stiffened. “Mr. Hanson, I—”

“I want to help you.” He laid the test aside on his desk, peeled the backpack from Sawyer’s stiff fingers, and set that aside too.

“I think I can probably get my grade up if I just work a little harder.” She took a microstep backward. “I’ll do that. I mean, I know I can…if I just…work harder.”

Mr. Hanson’s hand fell from her elbow, his fingertips trailing just slightly over the bare skin of her forearm, giving her goose bumps. Mr. Hanson smiled. “You don’t need to be afraid of me. I help out a lot of my students.”