CHAPTER EIGHT
The next twenty-four hours are a new sort of torture. I wish Mom would yell at me for losing track of Julian, but she doesn’t. She does go on and on about Saint Roxy, disregarding all the lies Roxy’s told about me.
It’s no better at the carnival. Maia gives the already-hot story her special treatment, spreading it all over Midway Beach until everybody is praising Roxy for saving my brother’s life. I’m grateful, too. Except nobody else seems to realize Roxy’s like Batman’s nemesis Two Face, half-good and half-evil.
My shift drags, without a single sighting of Max. Our make-believe romance must be on hold while he angles for an invite to Adair’s cabin.
I’m totally cool with that.
My insomnia has nothing to do with visions of Max and Adair getting naked. Neither does my lack of appetite.
“You gonna eat that?” Julian’s eyeing the pepperoni and sausage pizza on my plate like a vulture about to swoop in for road kill. Mom stopped home for lunch, surprising us with an extra-large pie from Mario’s.
I push my plate toward him. “Have at it.”
He bites into the pizza like it’s his first piece instead of his fourth.
Mom’s at the sink rinsing her plate, watching him chew. Since yesterday’s near drowning, she’s been watching him a lot.
Suri prances into the kitchen on her tiptoes, ballerina style. “Someone’s here for Jade.”
The doorbell’s broken. Since I didn’t hear anyone knock, I assume she means someone’s waiting on the front porch. Until Max follows her into the kitchen. He wears shorts, sandals and a blue T-shirt that matches his eyes. The ones my mother thinks are kind.
“I hope it’s okay that Suri let me in,” he says, the comment directed at the paranoid woman he won over even before he attempted to rescue Julian.
“Of course.” My mother’s voice softens. “You’re always welcome here, Max.”
“Thanks, Mrs. G.” He grins at my mother, then ruffles Julian’s hair. “Hey, bud.”
Julian’s mouth is stuffed with pizza. He waves.
Max laughs and crosses over to where I sit at the kitchen table. Bending at the waist, he touches his lips to mine before straightening. “Hey, gorgeous.”
Goose bumps raise on my skin. My tongue feels thicker than a bowl of oatmeal. What is it about him that renders me speechless?
“Well, well, well.” My mother abandons her usual monotone, putting a wealth of meaning into the words. “You two seem to be getting along.”
My face couldn’t feel any hotter if I were a victim of the Salem witch trials.
“Getting along great.” Max rubs a shoulder left bare by my sleeveless top. My goose bumps multiply. “We’ve both got Monday off so I came over to see if Jade wanted to hang.”
He couldn’t have texted?
“I can’t.” I shrug off his hand. “Babysitting duty.”
“Not anymore,” Mom says. “My clients cancelled.”
“Then Jade is off the hook.” Max’s warm hand squeezes my shoulder, doing nothing to rid it of the goose bumps. “Fantastic.”
“I do need you to be available tomorrow, Jade,” Mom says in a conversational style, turning on the faucet in the sink and rinsing her plate before glancing up at me. “I made arrangements for all four of us to visit your father tomorrow.”
Like hell! Choking back a spate of angry words, I spring up from the table so fast I get lightheaded. I steady myself, grab Max’s hand and practically drag him out of the kitchen. Normally I’d take the time to change clothes, maybe brush my hair, change my shoes. But today I’ve got to get out of there.
“Bye, Mrs. G. We’ll see you later, kids,” Max calls, like he’s speaking for both of us. When we’re out of the house and moving down the sidewalk, he asks, “What was all that about?”
Like I’m gonna share my family’s ugly little secrets with him. I drop his hand, head to the pickup, yank open the door and snap, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Max moves unhurriedly to the other side of the pickup and takes his time settling behind the wheel and starting the truck. While Max pulls into the street, I stare out the passenger-side window.
Two doors down from our house, the three Carmichael girls, none of them older than twelve, pile into the red convertible their dad drives. Since he bought the car, the girls are always running out of the house after him, begging him to take them along.
“I take it you refuse to visit your father in prison,” Max says after a few moments.
“Stepfather.” I turn away from the idyllic scene at the neighbors’ house to glare at Max. “What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ don’t you understand?”
“Okay, okay.” He lifts one hand off the steering wheel in a gesture of surrender. “We’ve got plenty of other things to talk about.”
“Yeah.” My deep breath feels ragged, like I swallowed a knife with serrated edges. “You haven’t told me what happened at Adair’s cabin.”
His head swivels toward me, an indentation appearing between his eyebrows. “I’m not psychic, you know.”
“What does being psychic have to do with it?”
“We didn’t get to the cabin yet,” he says.
“That’s where we’re headed?”
“Well, yeah. I told you I want to get inside and have a look around.”
“But you said...” What exactly had Max said? We’d been strategizing yesterday when we realized Julian was drowning. In all the commotion, we’d never picked up the conversation. Max had worked last night even though it was my day off. When I didn’t hear from him at closing time, I assumed he went to the cabin with Adair. “You were working on getting an invitation from Adair.”
“Not anymore.” The traffic light we’re approaching turns yellow. Instead of stomping on the gas to beat the light, like a normal teenager, Max slows down. “Not when I’m your boyfriend.”
I’m not about to analyze why relief hits me. “Fake boyfriend.”
“If I have to be a fake boyfriend,” he says with gusto, “I’m gonna be the best fake boyfriend I can be.”
I giggle. I can’t help it. He smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling. It’s crazy. Even though he’s not as good-looking as Hunter, when his eyes sparkle like they are now, resisting him is almost impossible. At the moment, there’s no reason to try.
“So, fake boyfriend, how do we get inside the cabin?”
The light turns green. Max looks both ways before gradually pressing the gas pedal and pulling into the intersection. “You’ll see.”
Thirty minutes later, Max drives down the now-familiar bumpy dirt road that cuts through the tangle of trees leading to the cabin in Wilder Woods. The road should seem less spooky in the daylight, yet only slivers of the sun shine through the leaves and branches. We finally reach the cabin in the clearing. The light does it no favors, exposing the weathered wood and making it appear almost shabby. We get out of the truck to silence broken only by the faint calls of some songbirds.
“I don’t suppose you know how to pick a lock?” Max sounds hopeful.
“That’s your plan? To break in?”
“You got a problem with that?”
I’ve seen The People Under the Stairs, so I’ve got a bit of an issue with home invasion. “Nope,” I lie. “No problem. But I can’t pick locks.”
“Me, neither.”
I follow him to the front of the house, hoping there aren’t any mutated cannibals on the other side of the door. It’s hot and humid. Whatever animals rustle through Wilder Woods when the sun goes down are quiet. The only signs of life are the mosquitoes buzzing around us. I swat at one on my arm. “Then how do we get in?”
Max scratches his head. “We can always throw a rock through the window.”
Vandalism on top of breaking and entering? Doesn’t he watch any horror movies at all? The worse the offense, the harsher the karmic punishment. We’re entering monsters peeling off our skin territory. “There must be another way.”
“Maybe there’s a key around here someplace.” Max runs his fingertips over the top of the door frame but comes up empty. Bending over, he lifts the rubber doormat to reveal nothing but dirt. He pauses, an odd expression on his face, then rummages under a bush and picks up a rock.
I jump back, out of the way of glass I expect to shatter.
Instead of throwing the rock, he twists and it comes apart. Inside one half is a key. I should have guessed it was a hide-a-key rock. I’ve seen them before, but this one wasn’t visible from where we’re standing. “How did you know to look under that bush?”
“I’m not sure.” He turns the key over. “A memory, maybe.”
He unlocks the door and pushes it open. Hot air engulfs us, along with the stale smell of a place that’s been sitting vacant. There’s no light switch, but enough natural light streams through the door and a back window that it’s possible to see.
Max does a slow three hundred sixty degree turn. The inside of the cabin is rustic and furnished with heavy wooden pieces, the focal point a brick fireplace. Max moves toward it, and I follow close behind, keeping an ear cocked for imprisoned children living in the walls. I hate Wes Craven. Mounted on one side of the fireplace is the head of an eight-point buck. On the other is a coyote, its sharp teeth bared in a snarl.
My quick intake of breath comes out as a loud gasp.
“What is it?” Max asks.
“The coyote.” I back away from it. The taxidermist has done such a good job that it seems alive. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Have you ever been inside the cabin with Adair?”
I shake my head. “I came here once with Adair, but I stayed in the car.”
“Could you have been here those days you were missing?”
“I think so.” The cabin feels familiar in a way I can’t pinpoint. Familiar and confining. My chest tightens. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
I stumble toward the door, the toe of my tennis shoe catching on the rug. Before I can go sprawling, Max grabs me and sets me upright. Together, we walk outside into the light. Despite the heat, I’m shaking.
“Are you all right?” He rubs my shoulder, concern coming off him in waves. “Did you remember something else?”
I struggle to get my lungs working again. Now that we’re outside, the panic that gripped me inside the cabin is fading. “I remembered wanting to get out of the cabin. But I couldn’t leave.”
“Like someone held you against your will?”
“That sounds right.” I’ve never been close to claustrophobic before today. “But what does that mean? That Adair or somebody in her family is involved?”
“Not necessarily,” he says. “You saw how easily we got inside the cabin. Anybody could have found the key.”
Since the hide-a-key was under the bush, I wouldn’t bet on that. But who’s to say the rock is always as well hidden as it was today? An out-of-the-way cabin certainly seems like a good place to stash someone, especially in the winter when this section of Wilder Woods would have been deserted.
“What about you?” I ask. “Was there anything inside the cabin that looked familiar?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t here.”
I knead the space between my eyebrows, trying to rub away the headache that’s blossoming. “Why can’t we remember?”
“We were both knocked out. We know you were injected with something. I probably was, too. Some kinds of narcotics can mess with memory.”
“We both have a memory of a field. While we’re out here, we should have a look around. It can’t be far from the cabin.”
“Except I already searched the woods around the cabin,” Max says. “I’m not sure where else it makes sense to look. And who knows if we’d even recognize the place.”
He makes some good points. Traipsing through the coastal forest without a clear plan wouldn’t be productive, especially since it’s unfamiliar territory. The only place I’ve heard of besides this cabin is Heron Lake and only because of Cam Stokes, the country singer whose suicide started a really creepy fad.
“You look like you’ve thought of something,” Max says.
“Somewhere,” I correct. “But it’s a long shot.”
“What do we have to lose but some ammunition?”
“Problem is I’m not exactly sure how to find it.”
“I’ve got a map of Wilder Woods in the truck,” he says. “I picked one up at the visitor’s center the last time I was out here.”
While I’m poring over the map and plotting a route to Heron Lake, Max asks, “Gonna tell me what this is all about?”
“Just playing a hunch,” I say.
He accepts my answer and silently follows my directions until we reach a parking lot on the edge of Heron Lake that’s mainly used by fishermen. “What now?”
“Now,” I say, “we search.”
Only one direction makes sense. A path of trampled leaves and twigs cuts through the woods, almost like the beginning of a trail. It’s not, though. A couple hundred feet in, the path narrows and winds through spindly pines. The shade feels refreshing, although the humidity is still thick. Mosquitoes buzz around us. I assassinate one with the palm of my hand and pick up the pace. Max walks silently beside me.
The farther we go, the brighter it becomes. And then, suddenly, we’re in a clearing. A trickle of sweat drips down my face, but I don’t bother to wipe it away. I’m paralyzed by the feeling—no, the certainty—that I’ve been here before. The configuration of the trees, the rectangular shape of the field, even the feel of the ground beneath my feet is familiar.
This is where somebody tied me to a chair and blindfolded me, where I suffered that blinding headache that still hurts to think about. The country singer who committed suicide here must be significant, but I can’t make the connection.
“I’ve been here before.” My words are soft, almost as though I’m talking to myself. That could be why Max doesn’t answer. I turn to explain myself.
He’s on his knees, his face contorted as though he’s suffering a terrible agony.
“Max,” I call, my heart jumping in my chest. “What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t answer. He probably can’t hear me. Over and over, he repeats the same word. The word is no.