could both get the answers we were looking for. The other? To tell him to go home and be with his family. He didn’t belong in the investigation. I considered how he’d cornered Carl Shipley, and how easily Mullins’ emotions could tip him over the edge.
“The doc’s right, Jeff,” I said. “We don’t want speculation. We need to hear the truth about how Myles died. The morning will come soon enough.”
“Tomorrow morning, first thing,” Doc said. “Chief Jefferies will get back to me, and I’ll have answers for her then.”
Thirty-Three
I lay in bed for what felt like hours, awake, going over the evidence, thinking it all through and coming up with no new answers. When I finally closed my eyes, I was in the woods at night, running, from what, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure who chased me, but as I glanced back, I saw the flames from their torches bright against the darkness, the way the protesters’ candles had rippled in the breeze. Why I was running, that I understood: someone chased me. I had to escape, to flee as fast as I was able. I needed to get away, because if I failed, if they caught me, I would die.
In my dream, I left the woods and fell into the river. The water rushed up around me, pulling me down. I flailed around underwater, unable to breathe, unable to swim back up to the surface. Suddenly, Myles Thompkins floated beside me, his unseeing eyes locked on me. I tried to grab for him, but he slipped through my hands. Then, his head dropped, and when he looked up again, my heart beat like a base drum in my chest. Instead of Myles staring at me, it was Max. I reached out again, and again I couldn’t grab him. Max slipped past my fingers and drifted farther and farther down until he disappeared.
Total darkness. And then I stood at the window in Laurel Johansson’s bedroom. The blue drapes were gone from when we removed them to find the letters. Below me, outside near the clothesline, Anna and the children swirled like dancers on a stage. They appeared happy and playful, but they wore white nightshirts stained with patches of red like the sheet had been. Benjamin saw me in the window and told his mother and sister. Soon, all three stared up at me, their hands waving as if to make sure I saw them. The bison in the field filled the air with mournful groans, and my pulse raced. I shouted that I was trying, that I was doing all I could for them, but they couldn’t hear me. I stepped away from the window and Laurel sat up in the bed, that hideous ring of red surrounding her mouth dripping like fresh blood.
Her eyes opened. She saw me and screamed.
The dream rushed through me the next morning while I pulled on a clean uniform. I thought about Myles, about Max. Our stories were becoming interconnected. In the dream, Max had taken Myles’s place. I wondered if my subconscious was trying to tell me that could have been us. That my fate and Max’s could have been as dark and final. I thought of the day I’d heard that Max had been driven from Alber. Father came into my room to tell me.
“You are never to see him again, ever. And you will make no attempt to ever seek him out. You will keep your thoughts pure. From now until the day you die, Clara, Max Anderson is not to enter your mind,” Father had said, a stern look in his eyes. I’d been on house arrest for months, ever since the river kiss. After school, I went to my room and studied, and I only came out to help prepare dinners or tend to the younger children. My brothers and sisters looked at me warily. They had all understood that our parents were unhappy with me. Mother rarely looked at me, except for those moments when I glanced over and caught her staring at me with a visceral disappointment.
I rarely talked back to Father; none of us children dared. It wasn’t that he was mean or violent in any way, but that his manner welcomed no dissent. This time, I had no choice. I needed him to understand that Max and I hadn’t sinned, that there was no reason for Max to be forced out of town or banned