Dead Girls Don't Lie (4 page)

She washed her foot and wrapped it in a bandage. She threw her clothes into the washer. She cleaned every speck of blood off the floor with a washcloth, threw that into the washer, and added a ton of bleach. She washed her hands over and over again, and when she saw the paint she made me wash mine too.

I rub my hand against my cutoff shorts, trying to erase the paint stain from my memory. I have to swallow back a gag because I can almost smell paint now. I look sideways through the window. I can’t get the right angle to see if the circle or any of the other markings are still there, so I go to the other side of the porch and look through the window framed by the tattered drapes.

My face reflects back to me from a dusty mirror on the other side of the room. It’s a distorted, ghostly image. The mirror is cracked and missing pieces. The shattered glass on the
floor is reflecting chunks of light on to the ceiling. I turn my head, wondering if the symbol on the wall is still there, wondering if Rachel’s blood is still soaked into the wood on the stairs, like in my dream. I wonder if there’s blood on the floor upstairs.

Mom picked me up the next morning for our end-of-summer visit, one of the few that didn’t have to be rescheduled. I found out after school started that a Mexican kid had been murdered in the upstairs bedroom of the old house. The notice that grief counselors were available for anyone who had known him was tucked in with the emergency information cards, club info, and picture order forms we got at the beginning of the school year. I asked a dumb question about it when someone brought it up in advisory, and Claire looked at me like I was a moron. “You really have been living under a rock, haven’t you?” She was ruder back then, before we became friends again.

I didn’t know very much about the boy who was murdered. Just that he was from L.A. and living with relatives here. It didn’t seem like anyone knew him. He had moved to Lake Ridge sometime during the summer. I looked up the news story on the school’s computer. It said he was killed because he was part of a gang. It also said his body was found two days after Rachel and I went into the old house.

When I finally got brave enough to ask Rachel about it, if she had seen anything when we were in the house, her eyes went wide with fear, but she said, “I didn’t go all the way upstairs. I got scared because I saw a mouse, and I cut my foot
on the stairs when I was running away.” I knew she was lying. Rachel wasn’t scared of mice or anything else. When I pushed her, mentioning the kid who was murdered, her voice got cold and expressionless. She said, “He was a gangbanger. He got what he deserved.”

Around the left side of the house there’s a broken window, maybe big enough for me to climb through. The urge to get inside the old house is so strong that I’m already thinking about how I’ll put my towel across the glass so I can climb in without getting cut. I don’t know what I’ll find inside the house, or if there’s anything there I want to find. I only know I have to. I should have gone to the police and told them what I saw that night. I should have made Rachel go too.

At the window I pause. There’s something tucked behind an overturned couch, a backpack or a duffel bag maybe. It looks too new to have been there long. I lean forward, trying to see it better—

“Hey!” A guy’s voice startles me so badly that I scream and spin around.

“I, I—” My heart pounds and my voice cracks. I turn to face the voice, momentarily blinded by the sun coming through the trees behind him.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was just—” My eyes adjust to the light, and I recognize the guy standing in front of me.

Evan Cross.

Chapter 4

I stumble back and try to say something, but I can’t.

His voice softens. “I mean, this isn’t the safest place for you to be. There’s broken glass all over, and druggies sometimes hang out here. What are you doing, anyway?”

“I was on my way to the lake,” I manage to reply. I think this is the first time Evan has ever talked to me.

He looks at me with suspicion. “The lake? You seem to be a little lost.”

The truth sounds completely insane. I go with, “I took a detour. I was on my way to my friend’s house to see if—” I remember Rachel’s dead and bite off “to see if she could come with me,” and finish, “I just wanted to check on her mom, to see if she’s doing okay.”

“Oh.” Evan looks down. “You mean the girl who lives on the other side of the woods. The one who …” He trails off and his face twists. I hate how he says “the girl” like Rachel meant nothing to him. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe I lost Rachel’s
friendship over a stupid rumor. He takes a breath. “I just went by there. Her mom isn’t home.”

“You went to Rachel’s house? Why?” Curiosity completely overcomes my fear, and I look up enough to make eye contact with him.

“Oh.” He crosses his arms and avoids my eyes, like now he’s the one who was doing something wrong. “I went to tell her mom that my uncle is willing to fix her window. For free.”

“Oh.” Evan’s uncle owns Cross Landscape and Construction, the biggest, actually the only, landscape/construction company in town. “That’s really nice of him.”

He smiles a sad smile. “Considering everything her mom’s been through, it’s the least we could do.” Something about the way he says it, something about his smile, makes me think there’s more to it than that. “Anyway, nobody’s home, and it’s still kind of a mess. I don’t think you want to go there.”

When he stops talking I realize I’m still looking into his eyes, the clear blue eyes I memorized from his yearbook photo. Eyes that look like Skyler’s. I drop my gaze and neither of us says anything for a long moment. Finally he says, “Hey, I know you. Jaime, right?”

“Jaycee,” I correct him. I know I’m blushing all the way up to my red hair. Blushing, another bad look for someone as pale as I am.

“Right. I didn’t recognize you at first. You look different, older or something.” He smiles, but the fact that he doesn’t even know my name makes me realize how invisible I’ve been to him. He fidgets for a second, playing with the strap to his
helmet. “Well,
Jaycee
. It’s getting hot and you’re a long way from the lake. How about I give you a ride?”

I look up at him, startled. “Me?” I touch my hair, wishing it was curly blond like Taylor’s or stick straight and shiny black like Rachel’s used to be. Instead, I’m not wearing makeup, I didn’t shower this morning, and my hair is in an “unflattering” ponytail. There’s nothing about me that would make Evan remember my name.

“Unless you’re afraid of motorcycles.”

“Um.” I hesitate, not daring to look above the level of his lips now. I can almost hear Claire’s voice screaming at me that I’m an idiot if I don’t go with him. But I can also see my dad, shaking his head with disapproval. I’m not allowed to accept rides from guys, especially not on motorcycles. “I’m not sure.”

“Not sure it’s safe?” He pats the helmet under his arm. “I’ll let you wear this. Trust me. I’ve ridden these trails since I was younger than you.” I get it, a jab about my age, even though I’m only two years younger than he is, but he’s still being really, really nice and his lips have formed into a grin that threatens to melt me.

Besides, Evan might be the only person who could tell me what really happened between him and Rachel on New Year’s Eve. Not that I’m brave enough to ask. I glance at the dark windows on the old house. They feel dead and hollow. Like eyes, watching me. The empty, creepy feeling of death settles into my chest. I need to get away from this place as soon as I can.

“Okay.” A nervous laugh bubbles out of my throat. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

“Cool.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, propelling me away from the house to the edge of the path where his yellow dirt bike is parked. He settles the helmet on my head and then buckles the strap under my chin. It smells like sweat and guy, a smell that reminds me of Skyler. I wonder what he would think about me riding his brother’s bike.

Evan looks beyond the woods toward Rachel’s house. “I’m sorry about your friend.” The sympathy in his voice makes me remember that everything isn’t okay. “Eric says this is a lot like the other one, the kid who was killed last summer, but he’s not sure how the two cases are connected.”

Evan and Skyler’s older brother, Eric, is the sheriff. He was elected last fall, even though he’s only about thirty. If I’m not brave enough to ask about the date with Rachel, at least I can ask about that. “How are they the same?”

Evan sets his hand on the seat of the motorcycle. “Eric says they’re still investigating, but it looks like a gang thing, like before. Rachel’s house was tagged.”

“Tagged?”

“Gang symbols. Graffiti. Like that.” He points to a faded red symbol on the side of the house, a leftover from the last time gangs visited Lake Ridge. I shiver despite the heat. It matches the dripping red symbol I saw last summer—a circle with an eye inside and a dot above the eye.

“He said they questioned all the Mexicans who have ties to gangs, but they clam up whenever he tries to talk to them about anything.” He shakes his head like he’s disgusted. “You’d think they’d want to help. She was one of them.”

“No, she wasn’t.” The words come out before I can stop them. “She lived here her whole life, and her dad was white. She wasn’t like them.” As soon as I say it, I know it sounds awful, racist, and stupid. I shrink farther into his helmet.

Evan just shrugs. “Scary that this kind of stuff is coming here. Eric says Yakima has major gang stuff, and Moses Lake, even some other smaller towns, but Lake Ridge always felt safe.”

“Yeah,” I answer.

“Anyway, somebody from the gang task force in Spokane is coming to take over the case. That’s what they did the last time.”

He straddles the motorcycle and waits while I climb on awkwardly behind him. “Hold on tight; this road is pretty rough.” I wrap my arms around his waist, thinking about how many times I’ve dreamed of riding on Evan Cross’s motorcycle. I didn’t imagine looking this bad or being this scared. He kick-starts it. The bike lurches forward in a cloud of smoke and rocks. I lean into Evan’s back, but I can’t help but look behind us at the broken window and the faded graffiti on the side of the house.

Chapter 5

“Ev-an Cross.” Claire repeats his name again, slowly, in disbelief.

“And you look like that.” Taylor indicates my ponytail, my face, my outfit. Maybe she doesn’t mean it as rude as it sounds. She’s just more concerned about appearances than the rest of the world. She shakes her bleach-blond curls that will never touch lake water and takes a sip from her Diet Pepsi.

There was no way Claire or Taylor or any of the other kids lounging around the edge of the lake could have missed me showing up with Evan. His motorcycle blasted the announcement from a mile away. Then he helped me take off the helmet and said good-bye in front of the gawking crowd. “I have some stuff to do for my uncle,” he said like he had to explain why he wasn’t staying. “But I might be back later. I kind of miss hanging out at this place.”

“He saw me walking here and offered me a ride.” All the attention is making me feel dumb, and showing up at the lake
on Evan’s bike feels like cheating on Skyler, or Rachel’s memory, or maybe both. And what if my dad finds out? One way or another, everything I do seems to get back to him.

“Next time I’m walking,” Taylor says, “if he’s willing to pick
you
up—”

“At least you’re keeping it all in the family.” A nasty edge creeps into Claire’s voice, an edge I heard all the time before she started being nice again.

I cringe, thinking about how bad that sounds. “I don’t, I didn’t—”

“Oh, come on,” Taylor says. “Skyler is a good starter boyfriend. An okay first kiss, but Evan is eighteen and totally drool-worthy.”

Claire and Taylor keep talking, analyzing my ride with Evan, strategizing the next step in our relationship. Arguing about whether I should let Skyler down easily, so there’s no bad blood between brothers, or if I should hold on to him until I’m sure about Evan. The conversation is getting to me, like my ride with Evan is the most important thing in the world. Like Rachel isn’t dead. Lying between them on my beach towel is making me claustrophobic.

“Are you, like, having the best summer or what?” Taylor says, spinning her sunglasses around in her fingers. “I mean, first Skyler and now Evan. Wow. Just wow.”

“Yeah,” I throw back at her. “If it weren’t for Rachel getting herself killed, this would be, like, the perfect summer.”

Taylor freezes, her mouth wide open. “Jaycee, I’m sorry. I just—”

“Forget it, okay, just forget it. I need to cool off.” I stalk across the beach to the end of the dock and dive in, deep. I stay submerged, opening my eyes to the green-gray world that surrounds me, pushing myself forward until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst. When I finally have to surface I keep swimming, ignoring Claire and Taylor yelling at me from the shore. I’m nearly to the middle of the lake and beyond any of the other kids before I realize it. I catch my breath and dive under again. I’ve never swum across the entire lake before. I’m not allowed to, even though it’s probably less than a half mile across. Now I feel like I have to. Like making it across will erase Taylor’s stupid comment, or the text, or even the last six months.

Like it will bring Rachel back.

I’m almost to the far side when my fingertips meet something dark and stringy. It feels like hair. It looks like hair too, long, dark, silky hair. Rachel’s hair. I’m surrounded by a sea of dark hair, waving back and forth, accusing me, pulling me under. It tangles around my wrists and ankles, dragging me down. I strike out against it and get more tangled. I picture Rachel’s face in the water in front of me, her eyes closed like they were at the funeral. Her hair swirling, swirling around me, holding my arms down so I can’t move. I gasp for breath and take in water. I’m freaking out. Drowning.

Something grabs my shoulders, pulling me up instead of down. I’m fighting against the pull, too panicked to realize what’s happening. Strong arms wrap around my waist and jerk me upward. My face breaks the surface. I choke out lake water, my chest heaves with relief, but I’m still freaking out.
His skin against mine feels cold, like a dead body. I fight to get away, but he’s holding me tight with one arm and untangling the lake weeds from my wrists with the other.