B00B9FX0F2 EBOK (15 page)

She followed him out the front door, calling for him, but all he could hear over the blood rushing in his ears was the roar of the engine as he peeled away from the curb. A block later, his phone started ringing. He pressed ignore but she kept calling, and it was only when he looked in his rearview mirror that he realized the persistent honking he heard was coming from her car behind him. She was chasing him. When he sped up, she did, too, waving wildly for him to stop. He hit a red light, and watched her frantically dialing him. She unbuckled her seat belt and started to get out of the car. Why wasn’t the light changing? He looked left, looked right, and then floored it across the intersection, narrowly avoiding getting hit by an approaching truck, its horn drowning out the sound of his tires squealing. When the truck passed, he could see Jenna jump back in her car. Another car passed before the light turned green, obstructing the view between them, and Jason took the opportunity to hang a quick right into a crowded supermarket parking lot. He popped out of the driver’s seat just in time to see the Toyota sail by, Jenna unaware of his diversion.

He was shaking when he got back in the car, and he drove home on side streets, still half expecting Jenna to appear behind him at any time. His phone kept ringing until he turned it off. At least he wasn’t thinking about his throbbing eye or battered chest. He was thinking about Lacey and the deafening silence he’d been met with when he asked Jenna if she was still alive. How had he been so blind?

O
n a deserted stretch of road, he pulled over. The nausea had been building since he’d seen the profile on Jenna’s computer. Steadying himself against the side door, he retched, watching the cereal he’d eaten for breakfast come up. He took deep breaths when he finished, the fresh air and his empty stomach helping to clear his head.

It was sharpening into focus now. The cruel, horrible truth that Lacey was gone crystallized in his brain. More than ever, he felt like Hamlet. Hamlet thought he had it bad, he thought things couldn’t get any worse, and then he learned that Ophelia was dead. Lacey was his Ophelia, and she was dead. For real this time. It had been Jenna all along. Every personal story he’d told, every intimate detail he’d shared, he’d been talking to Jenna, who had lied to him over and over again, online and to his face. He felt like he’d been betrayed by not one but two different people he cared about. The song lyrics he’d labored over lay crumpled on the floor of his car. Why had Jenna stolen them? Why had she done any of the things she did?

An answer was forming in his mind, but it was too ugly — too impossible. Something Jenna had said was bouncing around his skull like a pinball.
It’s just … I’ve been on Roxy Choi’s balcony, and you have to be pretty clumsy to fall off it backward
. He gagged again, but only bile was left in his throat. Maybe the real Lacey
had
been in danger. And maybe the
danger came from her best friend. But it still didn’t make sense. If Jenna had been responsible for Lacey’s death, she’d want to conceal her involvement, not use a fake identity to invite a stranger to come sniffing around. Plus, Jenna might be off her rocker, but she wasn’t violent. Jason was certain of that. But Jason’s track record for certainty hadn’t been very good lately.

The whirlwind events of the last week kept swirling around and tangling themselves up in knots. First there was Troy, who had hidden his rocky romantic relationship with Lacey from even his closest friend. Troy prostrate and weeping at Lacey’s grave, apologizing over and over again. But the secrets Troy had been keeping weren’t secret at all — Jason had found the video of Troy with Lacey in Luke’s possession, which meant Luke knew they’d been together. Had he found out before or after Roxy Choi’s party? Judging from his reaction to Max in the video, he’d known about Lacey’s dalliances for a lot longer than anyone gave him credit for. And based on the fury Jason had been on the receiving end of at Lacey’s grave, Luke was capable of some extreme violence. Jenna had defended him, blaming his rage on his sister’s death, but Jenna was the least reliable of them all.

Despite that fact, Jason kept replaying the scene at her house, and her pleas to listen were tugging at him. He was struck with an inexplicable desire to turn his phone back on and call her. He wanted the truth — it was the only thing he wanted anymore — and she could give it to him. But she wouldn’t. She was a liar. Jenna and Troy and Luke, all of them knowing more than they were letting on, all of them hiding their secrets behind their love of Lacey.

Lacey, who Jason had loved, too — or at least thought he could love — turned out to be the biggest lie of them all. And
he had fallen for it. He felt disgusted with himself. How could he have been so stupid? He straightened out the song he’d been writing for Lacey and read it to himself silently one last time. The lyrics, once full of all the hope and happiness Jason possessed in the world, were hollow now. He ripped the paper again and again until it resembled nothing so much as confetti. Then he threw the tiny pieces by the side of the road and watched the wind whip them away.

He drove back to Oakdale like a zombie, and by the time he arrived at his house, he was so numb that he barely even noticed the station wagon parked outside. Until he saw Troy Palmer, clad in his garish Brighton High varsity jacket, leaning against the hood, that is. Then his attention perked right up. Troy didn’t
look
like a murderer, but Jason knew that’s what everyone said about serial killers.

Jason looked around the car for a weapon just in case. Rakesh had left food wrappers strewn about the passenger seat, and there were binders full of CDs everywhere. He’d never needed to defend himself against a six-foot-tall lacrosse-playing monster before yesterday, and not twenty-four hours later he was going to have to do it again. Lacking better options, he grabbed the plastic snow scraper he saw on the floor of the backseat. It hadn’t done much in January when his windshield was coated in ice, but who knew, maybe it was waiting to fulfill its true destiny as an instrument of pain. When he stepped out of the car, Troy was approaching.

“What are you doing here?” Jason called out, looking around the street for neighbors. No one else was around.

“We need to talk about the necklace.” Jason’s shoulders stiffened. Troy was almost upon him now.

“How do you know about that?” Jason demanded. He gripped the snow scraper tightly in his right hand and tried to look as sure of himself as possible.

“It’s Jason, right?” Troy stopped a few feet short of Jason, and put his hands up. “I’m not here to fight you, dude.” Troy gestured to the scraper and smiled; his face was kinder than Jason expected. “Besides, if I were, that thing wouldn’t do you much good. C’mon, let’s go inside.”

It was a command more than anything else, but Jason flexed his knuckles around the scraper’s handle. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me how you know my name and where I live.”

“Should I call you Keith McKeller, guitar teacher to the stars?”

At the mocking reference to the pseudonym he’d used with Mr. Gray, Jason froze. Had he forgotten to block his number? How could he have been so careless?

As if reading his mind, Troy added, “You know
everyone
has caller ID, right? After you called Luke’s house, it wasn’t hard to track you down. We found you at the bridge that night.”

So it had been Luke and Troy in the woods, Luke and Troy speeding off into the night. Were they working with Jenna? It didn’t make sense, but
nothing
made sense anymore.

“I’m sorry about texting you like that,” Troy said. Once again, Jason was surprised at the genuine note of apology in his voice. “It was Luke’s idea.”

Jason’s brain was reeling. As he stood there speechless, Troy placed a hand on his shoulder. “So that’s how I know who you are and where you live. Now it’s my turn to ask a couple questions. How about you put this thing down, and we go inside.”

More obediently than he would have liked, Jason lowered his arm and led Troy to a chair at his kitchen table. Perching on a stool at the counter, Jason’s eyes darted around for blunt objects that could do more damage than the plastic snow scraper in a pinch.

“So …” Jason said awkwardly. By now, he was about 85 percent sure Troy hadn’t come to harm him, but it wasn’t much comfort. It was the type of thing you wanted 100 percent certainty on. While his visit to Jenna’s house had thrown everything he knew about Lacey into doubt, it still seemed entirely plausible that Troy had been as dangerous to Lacey before she died as “Lacey” had led him to believe. The thought of the text messages wasn’t helping.

“How did you know about me and Lacey?” Troy blurted out. “Who told you?”

“No one told me,” Jason said. It was the truth.

“Then how did you know about the necklace? Luke told me you were digging up something at her grave. And I see he wasn’t lying about kicking your butt.” He nodded toward Jason’s bruise.

“Why did you bury it?”

“I don’t want to answer that until I know who you are. How were you connected to Lacey?”

Troy was watching him carefully. Jason mentally calculated the distance to the drawer where his mom kept the knives. He was closer, but Troy was in better shape. He thought he could make it there first, but he didn’t want to test the theory. He’d stick to the truth in the hopes that it would help him avoid unnecessarily enraging the beast. “I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, I thought I was. But I was wrong.”

“Okay, but you must have known her. How?”

It was still sinking in that he really hadn’t known her. Not even a little bit. It was Jenna the whole time. Jenna was the one he’d IM’d with so easily, the one who’d sent him the sweet and funny messages, the one convincing him he was the only one who could help “Lacey.” Jason had been so foolish for ever having believed otherwise. Troy looked at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“It’s complicated.”

Troy rolled his eyes. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

Maybe Jason should tell him everything. After all, it would be a relief to get all of the secrets and the lies off his chest. If he couldn’t just walk away from the situation, at least he could unload. His whole relationship with Lacey had been a sham; he no longer owed her any sort of discretion. But the idea of spilling his guts to a complete stranger didn’t exactly appeal, especially since, Jason reminded himself, that stranger might be a violent psychopath.

“I talked to Lacey online.”

“On Facebook?”

“Yeah.”

“When did it start?”

There was an urgency to the question, and at first Jason was shocked that Troy understood the strange nature of his relationship with Lacey, but then he realized the question rose from his insecurities about whether or not Lacey had been faithful to him. “It wasn’t while you were with her,” Jason said with a hollow laugh.

“Did she tell you that we were together?”

“Not exactly. Why did you insist on keeping it a secret?” It
was one of many questions Jason couldn’t figure out, but it bothered him more than the others. If he’d been dating Lacey, he would have screamed it from the rooftops. Though, he supposed, he sort of had been dating Lacey, or believed he had, and he’d kept silent about it. At her request. Jenna’s request. The thoughts were swirling in his head, making it difficult for him to focus on what Troy was saying; he was going to have to shut off his inner monologue unless he wanted to lose his mind.

“Um, do I need to remind you what Luke is like when he’s mad? Besides, it wasn’t just me. Lacey didn’t want to tell him, either. She was afraid he’d kill me. We came up with, like, all these codes and stuff.” He smiled slightly, as if recollecting a memory. “We called the tree house in my backyard the Kissing Club. KC for short.” It explained the random letters on the necklace, the Casey phone call Max had witnessed. But there were still more important questions to answer. “Don’t you think it’s kind of weird? What difference did it make to him who she dated?” His pitch kept going up at the end of his questions, making him sound like a whiny child. To make matters worse, Troy had an authoritative deep bass. That night in Jenna’s room, when they’d originally agreed to begin following Troy, Jason had pictured their sleuthing ending in an interrogation in which he masterfully outsmarted Troy, forcing him to own up to everything he had done. This was a far cry from the scene he had imagined.

Troy looked at him like he was crazy. “You really must not have known Lacey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“For someone so smart, she could be all kinds of stupid. She’d trust anyone and everyone. There was no one else
looking out for her — people see a pretty girl with a big heart, and they think they can get anything they want from her. Luke protected her from them. Sometimes I think …”

Troy began to choke up. Jason had watched him cry the other night, heaving sobs at the base of the memorial, and he sensed if he kept Troy talking, he was going to get an encore performance. Still, Jason pressed him. “Sometimes you think what?”

“If he did find out about me and Lacey, if he put a stop to it, maybe things would have been different.”

Jason’s heart was pounding. Troy was about to confess to the murder. Maybe this had been Jenna’s plan all along. “Different how?” He asked the question as steadily as he could, but his eyes once again went to the knife drawer. On the verge of tears, he had the effect of a gentle giant, but if he’d killed Lacey, whom he’d apparently loved, there was no telling what he might do to Jason after revealing his darkest secret.

“Maybe she’d still be here.” Now he was full-on crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks. “Maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself.”