he says.
Dad’s in the media room. I peek through the door at an old family movie playing on the projection screen. The four of us are at a ski cabin. Ben and I are hunched over a Scrabble board, with Diane laughing between sips from a ceramic mug. She comes up with whipped cream on her nose, and the camera shakes as Dad chuckles. It’s possible Dad’s watched videos like this since Ben, and I was just too wrapped up in my own grief to notice his. I toe through the door and hug his neck from behind. He smells like cologne that reminds me of being a little kid bundled up beside him when we’d go to watch downtown lit up in December.
He squeezes my arms back, and I see tears in the lines at the corners of his eyes. He clears his throat of emotion. “You headed to go get Willa?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d like to watch these with you sometime.”
He half turns, and I see a hopeful smile. “I’d like that too.”
I go to twist the front doorknob as it occurs to me that if this is really a new start, not before or even after, then I need to do something before I leave. I flip the floodlights on for the terrace and scrunch my neck deeper into my sweater’s collar.
The note I wrote Ben is waiting in my hiding place, along with the rosary Detective Sweeny never collected from me. The rosary was one of many dangling threads she and Ward left loose and flapping. I told the police that the rosary appeared shortened when I checked after Ford was found. There were frowns and under-their-breath words traded by the adults around me. Dad’s been cryptic, but I’ve gotten the impression that the detectives were under a lot of pressure to close the murder investigations. Poisonings, stabbings, and hangings aren’t great for Gant’s reputation, and everyone is determined to put these events behind them, shrug them off like the flaky, dead skin of a sunburn. No one wanted to ask why or how or even if Fitzgerald Moore used my great-great-grandmother’s rosary. It was easier to cast me as confused and unreliable.
Newspaper headlines—the ones I’ve seen on Dad’s desk—focus on a sick man and his breakdown. Some even refer to him as a vagrant, as if Skitzy-Fitzy didn’t live in Gant as much as the rest of us. I want to turn the rosary in even if I worry that my fingerprints are all they’ll find and they’ll have that much more reason to think I’m a poor, traumatized girl, manufacturing conflicting evidence. I don’t want the burden of any more secrets to keep. And I need to destroy the note I wrote Ben, toss it into the bonfire, and feel that thread between Ben and me burn.
The stone stairs are slick with mist. There’s music floating to me across the harbor. It echoes, and the notes become dissonant and jarring. At the lower level I cut around the fire pit. I keep the memories of all our nights spent here from creeping up. Being in that dream state where I can remember things so acutely it’s close to reliving them won’t help me. The Ben who I thought I knew as well as I knew myself was a figment of my imagination. All those nights we huddled around the flames would have been perfect nights for him to tell me the story of a small boy who fled his home with his mother.
My fingers jab at the cold, dry rock of my hidey-spot. A web tickles my pinkie finger just as it nudges the paper and rosary. I retrieve my hand and wipe away the spiderweb stuck to my knuckle. I unfold the note to make certain that a spider isn’t hiding inside.
You swore on summer.
My words look up at me, and under them, in Ben’s handwriting:
Come escape with me.
The clanging guitar chords are louder; the singer’s soprano is piercing. I stagger for the stairs. My legs shake, causing my right foot to miss. My left foot loses traction on the slick rock, and I grab for the banister. My weight jolts through my arm and my knees strike the stone. I veer hard to the left, my temple colliding with a boulder on the hill. I hiss at the pain. I see shimmery white stars twinkling. After one, two, three tries I replace the treads of both my shoes on the staircase.
The pain