“But be reasonable, Allie. How could he get hold of them or hurt either of them without anyone suspecting …?”
“You know that. Remember Nicola? Remember my friend? No one even knew there was another car on the road the night she went off the bridge. And her only crime was seeing me see him with Juliet at the Fire Festival.”
Rob gave me a cold glare. “Why didn’t you tell me about these pictures he sent?”
“I would have! It was while you weren’t speaking to me, dummy! I tried to call you eight times one day.”
Rob shrugged. He pulled me close to him, his mouth tasting of rum and cinnamon. For the next hour or so, we even managed to forget about Garrett Tabor.
WHEN I SAT up, it was after eleven. Wesley might still be out west with his “lady,” but I was responsible for that boat. “Drive me to my house,” I said to Rob. “Come on. Hurry.”
When we got downstairs, we were puzzled about why it was so difficult to open the door to the driveway from the stairs. It was as though someone had wedged a weight against it. Finally, using our combined strength we pushed it open and saw that a foot of snow had already fallen. From the way it was coming down, we were in for the kind of epic Minnesota blizzard that makes people believe in vengeful deities. I wouldn’t be getting any boat tonight.
Fretting, I called Gideon at the restaurant.
He chuckled. “Oh, you mean the little rubber inflatable. I already brought the rubber dinghy up to shore. I put it in a circle of rocks and covered it with a tarp. I saw your fins washed up, and there was a plastic box in it with your phone in it.” He paused, and I heard the tinkling of ice in a glass. “Allie, the fins are okay but I think your phone has had it.”
“Gid, how did you even know I was going after a boat?”
“What else would you be going out on a lake for? And why would you need a boat as big as mine?”
“Gid, thank you.” I thought of him patiently hauling up the anchors and putting the Odyssey back to shore, probably having to pole through a crust of ice at the edges of the beach to bring it up, then standing in the freezing cold, hatless, winching his own boat out of the water. “You saw my fins? On the rocks?”
“I saw your buddy, on the rocks.” The spark went out of his voice. There was another tinkle. “I yelled for him, but he was looking for something. When I got over there, I saw one of those extra long blue fins, and the other was already washed up on the beach.”
“My buddy,” I spat. “Well, he lives there, in that penthouse.”
“It’s for sale.”
“Gideon?” I said. I walked back up to Rob’s door, as he struggled to shovel out his Jeep, and closed it lightly behind me. “Could I still use your truck?”
“I’ll leave it in your driveway,” he said. “Be careful. Driving, I mean.”
“I will.”
Months ago, Rob and I had speculated: Was it remotely possible that Dr. Stephen knew about Garrett Tabor? How could you know such things and protect the person, even if he was your child? I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering my best friend. How could you protect that person if he was your lover? Juliet was afraid he would hurt me or Angela if she didn’t do what he said. Yet until the very end, that night at the bridge, I know that a part of Juliet had still trusted Garrett Tabor, despite everything.
People could believe any version they wanted to, if they wanted to badly enough.
DESPITE ROB’S DILIGENCE at trying to get the car out, no one was going anywhere in snow that was now two feet deep. Snow always stops everything—even the bad stuff of life—and it’s like a small psychological vacation. I couldn’t leave Rob’s. This made us feel entirely adult. Rob’s parents left us scrupulously alone when we were in his garage-top quarters. But we’d never been as truly alone as we were tonight. So we snuggled in to watch the Arctic blast through the huge glass panel Rob’s dad had installed across one whole peak of the roof. Letting nature have sway was fun. However, I’d forgotten, until I glanced at the clock on the TV, that Rob had obligations. It was after midnight. His parents were supposed be in Minneapolis at 6 A.M. He would need to gear up and let his father take over once he got there, because the roads were going to be slow.
“Maybe I’m missing something. Do you think your parents know about this storm?” I asked him.
“You’re kidding, right?” Rob said. “All my dad does is travel. He has a chip in his head.”
“What?”
“My dad checks the weather like it was his heartbeat. My parents already called. And they have no idea when the airport out there will open, and the airport here sure isn’t going to be open tomorrow. Everything’s shut down.”
I said, “I love you.”
He said, “Well, Allie. I love you, too.”
21
DREAD RECKONING
It was two days before the semester began, and he was certainly harried, but Dr. Yashida not only answered my email promptly, he answered with a phone call.
“I have been thinking about you and your welfare,” he said. “You are an original student already.”
I didn’t know whether to thank him or be embarrassed. But I told him that there was another favor I needed to ask of him.
“Can someone tell what someone is saying by just seeing him talk instead of hearing him?”
“Most of the time, the machine really is hearing the person. You can enhance it.”
“Is there any way you could try with a file I have? It’s very important, and I’m sorry to intrude.”
“That’s okay. Is this urgent?” he asked.
I said it was, extremely.
Curiously, Dr. Yashida didn’t seem surprised, almost as if he’d been waiting for me to enlist his services. It was one of those moments I once had when I was stoned with Juliet, when you think you’re part of the steering column of some BMW driven by Venusians, when it seems possible that everything is a mirror and everything is a replica of a replica.
HALF AN HOUR later, Dr. Yashida wrote to ask if he had permission to pass along our video to two analysts. One of them would enhance the quality of the recording and take out any accidental noise. Another could glean what Dr. Stephen was saying by reading his lips, a criminal forensic specialist—like the kind I would be one day. The analyst was deaf. Lip-reading was both her job skill and her life skill. It was the worst sort of reverse prejudice, but her disability made me feel more confident in her.
It was helpful, Dr. Yashida wrote, that our subject was a clear speaker. It was possible for the analyst to see most of what he said. He asked for a name. I said it was Dr. Stephen. No last name.
Later that day, a message came in, with the transcript.
Dr. Stephen: No! No, I can’t.
Other speaker: (Unintelligible) oh problems.
(Long period of street noise, as a plow or some other maintenance vehicle passes)
Dr. Stephen: (Unintelligible) a felony. A state crime. And a federal crime. (Unintelligble) I believe you. I don’t believe (Unintelligible) you did, Gary. It could (unintelligible) anyone (unintelligible) good life. A good life.
Other speaker: Eye or I (Unintelligible) … wrong way or day.
Dr. Stephen: Of course. Yes, I am guilty.
Other speaker: (Unintelligible) … win no hope … who she is.
Dr. Stephen: I’m not sure what to do. (Unintelligible) water in her lungs. She did drown.
Other speaker. Accidents do (Unintelligible). This was … accident. No one …
Dr. Stephen: I can’t do that. No. No! No. That much I can do, and I should, Gary. I did what I did.
Other speaker. Sorry you feel that way. You think that I did (Unintelligible).
Dr. Stephen: No. I’m not saying that. Of course I do. She was a kid.
Other speaker. All ways. You. You all ways … do?
Dr. Stephen. I am not sure what to do. (Unintelligible) Your team. Yes, I would. No! No. It’s not possible.
(Long period of garble, as other diners take a table, talk among
themselves, meet the server and then move to a larger table.)
Other speaker: Impossible (Unintelligible) no hope for me. (Unintelligible).
Dr. Stephen: I’m not sure, Gary. You have a good night. I will see you … Gary?
A note from Dr. Yashida arrived after I thanked him.
He asked me to let him know if there was more news about this incident or my friend, and he urged me to take these messages and the report of the voice analysis immediately to the nearest office of the Minnesota Bureau of Investigation. He was a close friend of an agent named Molly Eldredge whose specialty was serious crime.
Fear can’t be your motivation here, Allie, he wrote. As you’re learning, fear among individuals is what the bad guys count on.
If I would give him permission, he would share everything with her now, and someone would have a conversation with Tabor.
Rob and I read the transcript again and again. We were stunned.
We watched the video.
“He’s talking about Juliet, isn’t he?” Rob finally said. “Could he be?”
“He has to be. He’s saying he covered up that she died from drowning.”
“I’m not sure he’s saying that.”
“He seems to be.”
Rob shook his head. “I don’t think I can make myself believe that he would do that. Does it mean he knows about Garrett Tabor and Juliet?”
I thought of what Tommy had once said to me and Juliet: if you can think of it, someone has already done it.
“This town is their empire, Rob. It’s like they are the barons who live on the hill and we are the serfs. I can’t believe someone would cover up anything like that. But what if she was already dead and he didn’t want his son implicated in her death?”
We thought back to the night that Juliet jumped from the bridge, how urgent she was and how unprepared. I remembered how Rob and I, in the center of the bridge, both believed we had heard her land on the bank of the creek bed. Only then did we hear a scream and a splash. A few days after her funeral—for reasons we now recognized more as needing proof than needing closure—we had done the jump ourselves. Even though it was long, and diagonal, both of us had landed with room to spare.
“Juliet wouldn’t have drowned,” Rob said.
“If she was hurt, she would have.”
“Is that … was what they cremated … even her body?” he asked. His voice shook. “That girl? This doesn’t answer any questions. It brings up more questions.”
“It was her body. It was a tissue match. Maybe she drowned, but not then,” I said, suddenly and acutely sick and miserable. If I’d had to lose her, if Tommy and Ginny had to lose her, at least it should have been quick.
“I don’t even want to think about that,” Rob said. “I guess I knew that she suffered, but every day, we have to know all over again. Does this ever end?” He got up and looked out at the snow, which had begun to drift and settle. “This is why I didn’t want to go here anymore, Allie. It isn’t that I don’t care. It’s that … is this what our lives get to be?”
I didn’t know. And I didn’t answer. Until just then, there had been some kind of thrill, or kick, or high from thinking I could take down Garrett Tabor—little pale Allie Kim with her razor-sharp deductive skills. Now, I heard again Juliet’s voice as I had in those fragmentary messages from months ago. I smelled Juliet rushing into my house in her purple Uggs, in clouds of Cartier del Lune cologne. I watched her pull off her ridiculous rabbit fur hat with the knitted bobbles on it, holding a bottle of ginger ale like a microphone, and singing old Gavin DeGraw songs with Angela.
She was just a kid.
She was just a kid, and so was the girl called Sky, and so was my friend Nicola Burns, and Garrett Tabor’s little baby sister, Rachel. No match for a skilled and determined madman who felt only that their deaths were inconvenient, that they were obstacles in the enjoyment of his life.
They were kids.
And so was I.
22
CLOSING IN
Taking Rob’s Jeep, I ran home to get some clothes. The forecast was for snow, but the forecast is always for snow in the North Woods, from Labor Day onward. In all those nights outside, I’d tried to train myself to smell snow coming, and sometimes I could. I brought a toothbrush in case. With Rob back in my arms, and with the new evidence to ponder, I didn’t want to leave his side. I rifled through my drawers as Angela pouted in the doorway.
“I do not want the babysitter,” she said.
“But I have to go out.”
“You didn’t go out for two weeks! That was better. It’s boring when you go out. Kissing, kissing, kissing. Doesn’t your mouth get sore?” In fact, it was sore. “Can’t you stay home just tonight?”
“I can’t tonight. I’ll be home more when I’m in college. I’ll have to be here all the time at night because I have classes on Skype.”
“I hate Mrs. Staples,” Angie said.
“You don’t really. You hate that she’s not Mom or me.”
“My life is so awful! I just come home and do homework and eat some disgusting stuff and go to bed. That’s all my life is.”
“You’re starting dance class,” I offered.
“Big deal. Who wants to come home, do homework, eat some disgusting stuff, and go to boring dance class and go to bed while you never see your only mother and sister?”
She did have a point.
“What do you want to do, Angie?”
“I want to be a skier. Like Juliet. I decided at Christmas. Something happened this year, and I became a very good skier.”
On the plus side, she couldn’t have gotten much worse. Our videos of Angie falling off the rails last year were mandatory sharing with mom’s family. Her rear end had personally wiped most of Torch Mountain.
“I want to learn to jump,” she said. “And Coach Gary will teach me.”
I had been folding up some pretty underwear Mom had given me as a Christmas gift. I froze. I had to look at my hands and say to them, Open your fingers. Lay the clothes down.
“How do you know Coach Gary?”
“He came to our school. He showed videos of Juliet, and he had me come up and talk about her because she was my best friend who was practically grown up. And he showed videos of Barrett and Ben.” These were the Ebersol twins, who now skied for the Canadian team. “He told me that it was better that I was shorter, like Juliet, and that he could teach me. I can sign up for classes.”
I stared at her. “You can’t go around Garrett Tabor, Angela.”
“Thanks! You don’t like him because he thinks I would be good at something and you want me to come home from school, do my homework, eat some disgusting …”
“No,” I nearly shouted. “You can’t talk to him because he’s a bad man.”
“How’s he bad?”
There was no truth like the real truth. I took a deep breath.
“Rob and I think that he hurt Juliet once. We think he forced her to have sex when she was just in freshman year. Do you know what forcing someone to have sex means?”
Angela nodded furiously, her eyes deep and wide. Of course she did: Jackie Kim would not have neglected good and bad touching with a nine-and-a-half-year-old fashionista who favored bikinis with boyshorts.
“We think he may have hurt Juliet when she disappeared,” I added.
“But he’s, like, Mom’s age.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s bad.”
Angela’s eyes went full saucer. “He killed Juliet?”
“I don’t know. But if you hurt someone, unless you’re trying to protect your child or your sister or something, that means you broke the law, or you are crazy. And he knows I know this. So he sends me things that prove he could hurt you. Like bad teasing.”
She leaned against the door frame, her face twisting in a scowl. “He acts so nice!”
“You can’t tell Keely.”
“I know,” Angela said, quietly. “Because he might hurt Keely, too.” It touched
me that it didn’t occur to her for a moment to doubt me.
“Does he do things like hanging a doll in a tree?”
What shit was this?
My head spun dizzily. “Yes, like that. Did you ever see a doll hanging in a tree?”
“Yes.”
“Where, Angie?” I gasped. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t supposed to see it.”
“But you have to tell me, anytime you see something weird or scary like that. You have to tell Mom or me right away.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be watching the show.”
Never had I felt greater relief over my sister’s clandestine wish to avail herself of inappropriate entertainment choices. Neither Jackie nor I could figure out how to install the parental controls that the satellite dish said was a snap to use. (Without a dish, TV in Iron Harbor was like good radio). Three hours into trying to make it work, with a pleasant-faced spokesguy telling us the whole time that anyone could navigate this system, Jackie threw the monitor at the screen, which cost her thirty bucks for a new monitor. At the time, she muttered, “I don’t care if she watches Real Showgirls of Las Vegas live.”
A few moments later, Angie said, “I taught Mrs. Staples to make ice cream.”
“Good,” I said. “Listen to me. I won’t leave you too many more nights.”
He really was supernatural. He was everywhere. He was the chess master. He owned the board.
Grabbing up my things was the moment I later realized that I’d set my course. He might have owned the board, but I would checkmate him. He had to be stopped, and no one would do that except me.
23
DARK STARS
Rob dropped me off before eleven that night.
Neither of us felt like doing much talking.
Rob didn’t even make the pretense.
Either he didn’t notice Gideon’s truck parked in the shadows of our driveway, or he didn’t care. He seemed distant, preoccupied. What Gideon called a “thaw wind” was blowing off the lake—and that lovely, isolating, pristine snow was sliding off roofs in great heaps. In the darkness, I could barely see Rob’s face, but he looked tired, as though we hadn’t spent most of the past two days lying in bed, resting and dozing.