Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (15 page)

CHAPTER
18

B
y the time the grease-spattered kitchen clock had wound its slim hands around to point to ten o’clock, my mind had wandered back and forth over the same territory so many times that I no longer had to think. There were well-worn grooves in my memory, paths I could walk blindly and automatically, making effortless leaps over the gaps and landing firm-footed on the other side. There was the dead girl, her eyes open, laughing and alive while a pair of narrow eyes traced with want over the curves of her body. There she was again, tangled hair and skin like rice paper, her eyes glazed milky by death, the awkward pile of her broken limbs blocked out by his bulky shadow.

She had died just as I went to sleep that night, had closed her eyes in tandem with mine.

In a way, we had been twins. I had closed my eyes on the vision of James, sitting in the cab of the truck, driving away in the wordless aftermath of breaking my heart. She had closed her eyes on the tall shadow of a killer, a hulking behemoth in long, heavy shoes, passing silently over her broken body and stepping away into the brush.

Together, I imagined, we had stared into the dark and wondered how everything could go to hell so terribly, irreversibly fast.

And then, she had died. And left me to face this trespasser—the one who had arrived on a cross-country flight, who lived in a dead woman’s house, who settled like slow poison over the town—alone.

In the dining room, the last two customers were plodding their way through the final bites of a meal. In the low light, turned down to a dim glow for the benefit of the barflies, they were two shadows punctuated by the white dab of a napkin, the slow silver arc of a fork.

“Ugh, could they be any creepier?”

Lindsay had appeared behind me, her hand cocked irritatedly on her hip. She pointed across the room. There was a group of men at the bar.
The
group, the one from Silver Lake, who’d been arrested with such fanfare and who’d been quietly let out of jail by sundown, when the man they had beaten declined to press charges. We could only guess what the cost of his silence had been.

One of the men was watching me, his small eyes gleaming like deep-set, polished steel, his pebbly teeth set in something like a smile. He leaned in close to the man next to him, muttered something. Both of them turned to look at me.

I stared back, wondering why the one with the pebbly teeth looked so familiar, then realizing that I’d seen him just hours before. He had been in the parking lot as I fled from Craig; I’d bolted past him, too scared and running too hard to think about how close he’d been standing.

Close enough to hear raised voices from the alley.

Close enough to be staring at me now, with the smug self-assurance of a man who thought he knew a secret.

“I can’t believe Tom lets them hang out in here,” she sniffed. “After what they did. That’s probably why Craig hasn’t come tonight. He hates those assholes just as much as I do.”

“Is he supposed to be here?” I asked cautiously.

She sighed. “I don’t know. I guess . . . Tom kinda asked him not to come around. Said he was bad for business.”

I nodded.

“But he’s not really so bad,” she said, her voice almost pleading.

“Lindsay . . .”

“He just acts like a jerk ’cause he likes the attention.”

Maybe, I thought. Or maybe he liked the idea of her. A woman, helpless and forced to her knees in the dirt, pinned to the ground by a man who took what he wanted and then took more, took everything.

This was what happened to girls who make plans.

“Lindsay, I think there’s something you should know.”

She looked at me, her expression a mix of confusion and suspicion. Across the room, the men at the bar were listening to our conversation with too much interest.

“Come here,” I said.

I grabbed her hand, dragging her back through the kitchen and out the door. As we stepped into the dark, gooseflesh broke out on my skin. The air was clammy—damp, heavy with the scent of earth and the threat of a storm.

“Wow!” Lindsay was saying, twirling in the orange glow of the streetlight so that her hair flew out behind her and her dress ballooned with caught air. She spread her arms wide. “I think a storm’s coming! Doesn’t it feel like it?”

“Listen.” I leaned back against the side of the building, feeling the rough ridge of brick on my back. It grabbed eagerly at the thin cotton of my shirt. A breeze had sprung up from the west, lifting the hem of Lindsay’s dress and winding its soft fingers into my hair, playing coyly with the tendrils that lay loose and damp against my neck.

It was going to rain.

Lindsay peered into the dark, her eyes suddenly lit with friendly focus.

I smiled back at her, then realized that her gaze had settled behind me. I turned.

Someone was standing in the shadows between the trees.

Someone tall and broad-shouldered, wearing heavy boots.

Somewhere far away, a door banged. The sour smell of old beer wafted into the night. There was a shout, and then another. The katydids sang louder.

And under the trees, in the sick orange glow of the streetlight, Craig Mitchell stepped forward and smiled.

AMELIA

H
e was driving angry, taking the turns too tight, overcompensating on the straightaways and allowing the car to meander from one lane to the other. The roads were empty—they had seen no one, not a single other car—but each time he swerved into the other lane, she gripped the door handle tighter and double-checked her seat belt. Beyond the fogged windows, countryside flashed by in swathes, blurs of green and white and black that she tried to follow with her eyes—trying to count the seconds, to see if she was right to be worried that the car was moving dangerously fast.

Luke had been silent, furious and stone-faced. He wouldn’t speak, only glared at her, until she felt afraid to move. The air in the car was full of invisible knives, all pointing at her, all ready to cut.

“Luke,” she said, for the fourth—fifth?—time. “If you’d just talk to me—”

“I don’t see what there is to discuss,” he snapped. His voice was taut and angry, but she sighed with relief anyway. He was talking, at least. Anything was better than the barbed silence.

“Well,
us
, for one,” she said. He eased off the accelerator, and she relaxed. Under her nervousness, there was still the sense of endless patience. Whatever he could dish out, she would be fine—she understood him, after all, and this wasn’t really about her. He was scared.

And maybe, she thought, I just don’t care.

There had been a time when she might have—early on, when she knew less about Luke’s moods and believed that every snappish moment must be somehow her fault, she had been hurt by his willingness to lash out. To take his stress and irritation out on whatever, or whoever, happened to be closest, especially when the closest thing was so often
her
. But then, as the months had passed, she had come to see it as something else. A cycle. Unstoppable, like the seasons, like the tides. Luke’s snappishness had no cause; like the weather turning cold or the slow decay of fallen leaves, it just happened.

And so she had stopped caring—or, at least, stopped worrying over it. Had stopped investing herself, had stopped trying to fix it, had simply stepped aside and waited for the storm to pass. But as he glared at her and struggled to speak, she found herself thinking that things had changed. Only a little. She had seen something better and bolder, had taken a step down an untested road and found something beautiful waiting for her. Luke, still on his own unquestioned track, seemed further away than he ever had before. She felt the sense of distance, felt that she was looking at him from a different perspective.

Tolerance might not be enough, she thought. Not any- more. He was being left behind. And he knew it.

“What do you want to talk about ‘us’ for,” he snapped, biting the words off as though each one was a punch to the gut. “I think you’ve talked enough for both of us, right? Just going off and applying to some . . . some ridiculous shit in Boston, without even telling me?!”

“I didn’t think you’d understand,” she said quietly. “And it seemed stupid to try, when I never thought I would get in. If Jacob—”

He cut her off.

“Didn’t think I’d understand?” he yelled. “I’ve been nothing but understanding! Jesus Christ, Amelia! You go off and drop your freaking classes, load up on all that crazy stuff taught by people nobody has ever even
heard
of, and then you start hanging around with those people all the time—”

“Those people?”

“—and I was nothing
but
supportive of you! I let you go off and do whatever the hell you wanted! Even when you started to change, I never said a godda—”

“Started to change?” she shouted, her voice so loud that the windows seemed to rattle.

Luke’s mouth dropped open, the rest of the words he’d intended to fling at her lost in the face of her anger.

She took a deep breath and looked out the window, watching the countryside pass, the yellow flash of a mile marker. She waited until it had disappeared, fading into the darkness behind them, before turning back.

“Wow, Luke. You really don’t understand me at all, do you,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

She forced herself not to scream, looking back out the window instead as she said, “Don’t you get it? If I changed, it’s because I found something that matters to me. This is my life, don’t you see that? Before I found this—before the stage, before Jacob showed me that I had this inside of me—it was like nothing was real. I was just floating with the tide, doing what I was supposed to do, doing what everyone expected of me, because there was
nothing else
. Nothing that lit me up, nothing that made me feel alive like this. I thought you’d be happy for me!”

He scoffed. “So I was just something you were supposed to do, is that it?”

“No, Luke,” she said evenly. “I loved you.” She paused, realizing that she had used the past tense. He didn’t seem to notice. She cleared her throat. “You know I care about you. But I can’t be counting on another person to create a life for me. I have to do that, I have to find what makes me happy and do it, and this . . .”

“It’s a pipe dream,” he snapped.

Incredibly, she laughed. Lightly, like she was genuinely amused, like she had just never realized how funny he really was.

“Now you’re joking,” she said. He glared back at her, and she returned the look with a smile. “This is a serious program, for serious people. The fact that I got in, it means . . . Christ, do you think I’d commit to something like this if I didn’t think it was real? If I didn’t have anything less than a great chance of making it happen?” She shook her head, and began laughing even harder. “I majored in business! Business!”

He pushed the accelerator to the floor again, furious in the face of her flippancy, and the motor roared. Feeling the surge of the car as it began to speed, fifty miles per hour, then sixty, then seventy, she swallowed her laughter and turned back to him with her mouth set in a grim line.

“I love you, Luke,” she said. “I do. But I won’t give this up.”

Minutes passed. Outside, the darkened countryside flew past them, the stars becoming a blur overhead. She stopped waiting for an answer, cracked the window and listened as the wind howled its way in, drawing her hair away from her neck and making it dance in the slipstream overhead. The car barreled between a copse of trees, faster now, around a long curve and met with the merging Y of a new road. A green rectangular sign that read
128
flashed momentarily in the darkness and then was lost behind them. The trees overhead thinned, then disappeared entirely, giving way to a wide-open blackness that must be a field. The harsh whipping of the tall grasses that lined the road rose and fell, like urgent whispers.

She opened the window farther, pressed her face into the gaping space, opening her mouth to taste the air and wondering whether she should just ask him to pull over now, to let her out. She could find her own way back, and anything was better than this—the car full of angry silence, bitterness sitting thickly between them, Luke’s infuriating inability to see her as anything but a vessel for his own banal dreams of a yuppie future.

“I can’t help noticing that you keep mentioning Jacob.”

She lifted her head away from the window and looked at him carefully.

His voice was different, hollower, with none of the previous whining petulance of a scorned little boy. He took another turn too fast, and the wheel touched dangerously close to the grit that lay at the roadside, spinning briefly before finding purchase again on the asphalt.

“Luke, please slow down.”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” he said, and pressed the accelerator harder. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before. So obvious, right? I mean, you and Jacob—”

“What? That’s ridiculous! He’s my professor!”

“I didn’t call any of my professors by their first names,” he sneered.

She stared at him.

“But maybe I should have,” he said, and the cruelty in his voice shocked her. “Maybe if I did, I’d be on my way to some sort of
masters
program instead of an entry-level job pushing papers, right?”

“You’re being disgusting,” she spat. “You know better than that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,
Amelia
,” he retorted, and the snide tone began to drip with ugly bitterness, and she wondered how she could have missed this. This petty, sneering, self-involved brat, who she had thought—had actually thought!—could be part of her future. He was looking at her.

He was looking at her too long.

“Luke, please watch the road.”

“What, you’re not going to answer my question?”

He was toying with her now. The motor roared louder as he pushed the pedal harder, watching her get scared,
liking
how she looked with worry and fear painted so openly across her face.

“Luke—”

“C’mon, why don’t you tell me? Just tell me! What’ve you got to hide?”

“Luke, please—”

“Is that why you like it rough now, huh? Is that how
he
likes it?”

Her voice was growing panicked now, and she looked frantically down the road, and her hands began to shake, and—

“Luke,
please
—OH MY GOD!”

He looked up and his eyes widened.

Ahead, so close, too close, were two copper-colored disks. The blazing eyes of a tawny doe, a four-legged ghost standing dead center in the road.

He wrenched the wheel, and the tires squealed, and the road disappeared behind them as the car veered into the yawning blackness.