What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,22

her lips.

One by one, quiet as kittens, we descended the metal stairwell and alighted soundlessly on the gravel. Rob’s car was nearly hidden on Lakeshore Drive in a little grove of pine trees, off the road, in case anyone chanced to come by.

I don’t know why I kept silent. Did Juliet have that much power over me?

There is a moment in everyone’s life—and I guess I’d never had one—when everything stops. Time stops. Motion stops. That was the first time it happened to me. The journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but the sprint to Rob’s Jeep might as well have been a million single steps through quicksand. I thought I’d fall. I thought I was being punished. For what? A life that wasn’t long enough to have piled up any serious sins, unless you counted the champagne and Mike’s Hard Ice Tea and the weed (only six times and once, respectively)? Then again, stuff happens to innocent people all the time. Just look at anyone with XP.

Rob later said I’d sprinted like an Olympian.

NONE OF US wanted to go home, Juliet included. Rob decided to take us up the old fire road to Ghost Lake—to our old hangout spot, down the shore from where we’d borrowed Mr. Callahan’s boat. I hadn’t been there in years. There was our phony metal sign, posted when we still had to bike everywhere; it claimed the property was protected by Sirocco Security. It cost us thirty bucks to make. But people stayed away, even kids drinking or screwing, figuring the alarm was connected directly to the police.

If somebody peeked through one of the boarded windows, they would think slobs lived there instead of nobody. Not all the windows were even broken. Stacks of bottled water blocked most of the view, anyway. We could always stay overnight, not that I had. I’d like to think Rob and Juliet hadn’t, either. Nicola Burns once told me that some kids at Iron Harbor High still believed that this part of Ghost Lake really was haunted.

We sat in the car, Juliet up front, me in the back.

“Where did he go?” Rob asked over his shoulder. “That night you saw him?”

“If I knew, I’d know,” I told him, exasperated. “He just disappeared.”

“Maybe he ran to where we hid the car,” he said.

“He ran in the other direction, toward the beach,” I stated.

“He must have had a car hidden,” Juliet chimed in. “It would be easy to hide a sports car.”

Had I told Juliet about the little red car that nearly creamed my mom’s mini-van? I couldn’t even remember, I was so freaked out.

Rob suddenly burst out, “What are we doing? We’re sitting here chatting and that girl could still be alive!”

“She’s not alive,” I said.

“Lots of people who are in trauma recover,” Rob said. “People shot through the head recover. It’s been twenty five minutes now.”

“How about we make something up,” Juliet suggested. “But I have to figure out how my call to 911 won’t be from me.”

Rob glared at her in a way that made me think he knew she was lying. “That’s easy. You dial 5-5 before and it blocks your number.”

I poked my head through the front seats. Of course Juliet would have known that, but she hadn’t shared it with us. “I didn’t know that,” I said purposefully.

“I read it somewhere, and not on the Internet,” he said, his eyes still on Juliet. “You know, reading? Books? It can be useful. You didn’t know that, either?”

Juliet didn’t respond. We sat silently as Rob, cussing under his breath, dialed 5-5 and then 911 on Juliet’s phone. In a phony voice, he reported a woman who was injured in the penthouse of Tabor Oaks Condominiums on Lakeshore Road. No, he said, he wasn’t interested in leaving his name. No, he said, he wasn’t interested in any reward money. No, he couldn’t leave a number.

He shut the phone and we waited. My skin writhed, as if my body were coated with stinging ants. We sat in the silence of his Jeep. We sat and sat.…

Then we heard the sirens. Had it only been a couple of minutes since Rob had made the call? First a police car, and after that, an ambulance.…

More than one car had been dispatched. The sirens blended in the kind of alternating shrieks and whoops that woke my mother up at night, making her cross herself in panicked prayer: Lord, I beg that medics aren’t scraping my daughter