Desire Lines (43 page)

Slowly, she looks around the clearing at the patchy grass and small outcroppings of rock. One corner, across from where they’re standing, is barren of trees and bushes and even grass. In the thin afternoon light, there are no shadows. The trees seem to be whispering, passing a secret around. “Jennifer is buried here, isn’t she?” Kathryn says softly.

A plane buzzes overhead, and Hunter looks up. He watches it cut through the sky, trailing a faint line of white, until it’s gone. Then he looks at Kathryn and shrugs. “She could be anywhere.”

Something snaps inside her. She backs away, shaking her head. “This is bullshit,” she says. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe she just died like that.”

“I don’t need you to believe me,” he says calmly. “Then why did you tell me that story?”

“Because you seemed to want one so badly.”

“But it’s a lie.” She can feel her heart beating in her chest. “I want to know the truth. I want to know why you killed her.”

“I told you,” he says, putting his hand up again, as if warding off her words, “you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. That gets me very upset.”

“Why did you call me and threaten me?” she asks, her voice rising in anger. “Why did you leave that stuff in my car?”

“I wanted you to leave it alone.”

She tries to look in his eyes, but they’re unreadable. All at once, she realizes how hard he’s worked to keep this a secret. Rachel’s unwillingness to say what she knows about him suddenly makes sense. “You’ve been sleeping with Rachel to keep her quiet, haven’t you? You were afraid she’d tell what she knew.”

“Rachel doesn’t know anything about this.”

“But she knows about you and Jennifer. She knows enough for it to be a problem.”

“You shouldn’t … do this,” he says, his voice laced with warning.

“What are you going to do? Make me disappear?” She stares at him, her heart pounding. Then she turns recklessly, blindly, to find a way out, hitting her forehead on a branch. The leaves in front of her are a blur of green. She breaks into a run, moving forward without sense, tearing through brambles and stumbling over bushes, the sound of her feet pounding in her ears. All she knows is that the sun is to her left, sliding down the late-afternoon sky, and the cabin, and possibly Jack’s
car, are ahead of her in the distance. Her legs are strong; when she finds her gait she feels like a deer, slipping between trees and dodging branches with instinctive ease.

Hunter is behind her. She can hear his footsteps amplified in the quiet, thudding through the underbrush. He knows this forest; he will catch her if she slows, so she picks up the pace, working her way into the densest area she can see.

Suddenly she stumbles. She feels her foot give way and then splay to the side, and she sprawls forward, her leg stuck at an awkward angle in a rut of vines. She lands, hard, on the rocky ground. For a moment she just sits there, breathing hard. Struggling to stand, she puts weight on her foot, but pain shoots up her leg, making her head swim. She leans back against a birch, gripping her ankle.

All at once Hunter’s hand is on her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. He pulls her around, and she cries out in pain and sinks to the ground. He crouches over her, his face contorted in anger, his hands rough around her throat, and she turns her head away, feeling his grip tighten on her neck. There is a way in which this, too, feels inevitable, as if her worst fears were destined to come true, as if what happened to Jennifer must also happen to her. Why should she deserve anything different? Part of her almost welcomes this, doesn’t care what happens next. It is tempting to imagine what it would be like to disappear, to escape herself, to leave everything behind. She looks up at the web of branches under a canopy of leaves, the flitting birds and specks of blue in the distance, and then turns her head, against the pressure of his hands, to look Hunter in the eye. She thinks of her mother and Jack and, strangely, randomly, something the Bass Harbor sculptor said as she pointed out the large window of her studio at the rocky Maine coastline: “This is life. This is all I need.” She thinks of Jennifer’s voice on the tape, pleading,
What do you want me to say?
She thinks of Jennifer laughing. And then, abruptly, she comes to her senses. Dying this way would be meaningless—another girl buried out here in the
woods, and for what? She owes it to Jennifer, and to herself, to get out of here alive.

“Rick,” she whispers, struggling to speak.

“No,” he says through clenched teeth.

“Wait-”

He clamps his hand under her chin.

She tries to swallow. Saliva pools in the corner of her mouth, runs in a trickle down the side of her face. “Please,” she manages. “I know … how … it happened.” A branch is digging into her back and she attempts to move, but he has her pinned. “I know … why you told me.”

“Stop,” he warns.

“I—I loved her, too,” she says.

He doesn’t shift his position, but his hands loosen slightly on her neck. Wind moves through the trees, a chorus of whispers.

“I know how she was,” Kathryn says. “How nothing you gave could ever be enough. You were only useful to her as long as you could help. And it was inevitable that sooner or later she’d figure out that you were no different from anyone else; you couldn’t help her any more than anyone else had.”

“I wanted to … help her,” he says, almost inaudibly.

She nods slightly, as much as she can.

“You know too much. I never meant to tell.”

Kathryn shakes her head. “She wanted to disappear. She would have found a way to do it. You were just the most convenient form of escape.”

The words are so easy to say—just words, after all, nothing more. But even as she speaks them, Kathryn recognizes the cowardice behind them. They’re the words of a rationalizing teenager, accurate enough in their own small way but in no sense true. Kathryn knows exactly what Hunter wants to hear because she wants to hear it, too: She wants someone to absolve her of responsibility for losing Jennifer. Blaming Jennifer for her own disappearance is easy enough, if you look at half the evidence.

He closes his eyes, and his head sinks onto her chest. Struggling against her own revulsion, she reaches up to touch his hair. It’s softer and finer than she’d imagined.

“This is between us, Rick,” Kathryn breathes. “No one else needs to know. Nobody else can understand what that means.”

“I thought I was losing her,” he says.

“You probably were.”

“I never meant…”

For a moment she thinks he’s going to say more, but he doesn’t. She touches his neck with the flat of her hand, feeling the fine sandpaper of his skin, his strong jawbone, his pulsing jugular. “I believe you,” she says. She’s not lying; she does believe him. She believes him in the moment, knowing that a split second later it might not be true.

He lifts his head to look at her, then pulls himself up to sit beside her. “This is strange,” he says. “I’m not sure what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she says.

Reaching down, he traces the side of her face with two fingers, gently brushing the hair off her cheek. “You are … like her,” he muses. “It’s not just the hair. It’s as if you had to go through the experience of losing her in order to find her in yourself—the part of her you always wanted to be.”

She turns away. It’s a grotesque justification. It may be true.
“Which one of us is going to be famous? Who’s going to be the alcoholic? Which one of you girls will ditch your husband for me when we come back for our ten-year reunion? Who’s dying young?”

“You could stay here,” he says.

She nods. “I could.”

For a few moments neither of them speaks. The afternoon light is fading quickly now, the forest floor around them becoming dense and shadowed. “We should get back,” he says finally.

Sitting up, she rubs her leg. “My ankle is killing me.”

He prods her ankle gently, touching different places. “Does that hurt?” he asks. “Does that?”

She grimaces. “It all hurts.”

“It’s swollen,” he says. “I can take a look at it at the cabin.”

“Oh. Thanks,” she says, trying to sound nonchalant, “but I need to get home. My mother is expecting me.”

“You can call her.”

“We have plans,” Kathryn says.

“So tell her something came up.” He smiles at her, a bland, steady smile, a challenge.

She shakes her head. “I can’t. It’s—it’s her birthday.” Her mother’s birthday is actually in May, but it’s the only thing Kathryn can think of.

“Really? Why didn’t you say so before?”

She starts to answer, then realizes the question is rhetorical.

He reaches for her hand and pulls her to her feet. Gingerly she puts pressure on the hurt ankle and finds that she can limp-walk well enough. “I think I can make it,” she says.

“No, let me help you.” Hunter leans his shoulder against hers, coaxing her to put her arm around his neck. It’s a high and uncomfortable angle, and Kathryn finds herself off balance, dependent on him for support.

They make their way slowly through the woods, and after a few minutes Kathryn realizes that Hunter has steered them back to a trail. It’s easier to walk two abreast now; the branches and bushes have been cleared from the path.

When they get to her car, she turns to face him. Over his shoulder she can see the faint glimmer of headlights through the trees.
Jack,
she thinks, and prays silently that Hunter doesn’t turn around.

“When will I see you again?” he asks.

“Whenever you want,” she says, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice.

“Tomorrow.” He moves closer.

Butterfly wings flitter in her stomach. “Fine,” she says, inching back.

“Tonight.”

“It is tonight.”

“Later,” he says.

“Let me go home first, see about this ankle.” She smiles apologetically. “I’ll call you.”

He looks at her as if he’s not sure whether to let her go. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “You don’t need to worry.”

“I know.”

She opens the door to her car, and then remembers the bag. Her car keys and the tape recorder are in it, and it’s sitting on his couch. “I—my bag,” she says. “I need to get it.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“No,” she says, a bit too quickly, “I know right where it is.”

He grins. “The house isn’t that big.”

Her palms are sweating. “But—”

“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

Watching him trot around to the front of the cabin, she is lightheaded with panic, as if terror has replaced the blood in her veins. She imagines him sliding open the glass door, entering the house, looking around for the bag, and spotting it on the couch, then picking it up. Curious. Looking inside. Pulling out the small black cassette player, turning it over, seeing the blank tape inside. Considering. Realizing exactly what it was intended for.

She might tell him that she is using the tape player for a story, or that she carries it everywhere she goes, or that she left it in the bag the day before and forgot about it. She could come up with all kinds of excuses, but he’d never believe her. He’d jump to conclusions; he’d assume she was planning to trap him, to get his confession on tape, and of course he’d be right.

She turns around and looks blindly at the tangle of evergreens, trying to make out shapes in the foliage. “Jack,” she stage-whispers.

Ahead of her, somewhere in the trees, she hears her name. She narrows her eyes and limps forward a few steps, pausing to listen. She sees a dark form moving in the trees and then Jack steps forward. He gives her a once-over and glances up at the house.

“Oh, God,” she breathes, relief washing over her. Looking hastily over her shoulder, she moves toward him. “We’ve got to get out of here, fast.”

“Are you all right?” he asks, coming to meet her.

“I think so,” she says. “We have to get to your car.”

“What about yours?”

“I don’t have the key.”

He puts his arm around her waist, and they move as quickly as they can down the driveway to where Jack’s car is parked. When they’ve almost reached it, they hear a yell.

“Hey!”

Kathryn turns to see Hunter’s dark form poised at the edge of the cabin. The tape recorder is clenched in his hand.

“Hey!”
He throws the tape recorder down and begins running toward them down the driveway.

Kathryn wrenches open the passenger’s side door. She heaves herself inside, locking her door and the one behind it as Jack jumps into the driver’s seat. He fumbles with the keys, dropping them on the floorboard and scrambling to retrieve them. Just as Hunter reaches the car, Jack starts the engine.