Hanging by a Thread (21 page)

“Okay,” Rachel said in a small voice, folding the note back up and putting it in her pocket. “Just, if I wind up dead, maybe you could tell the police to check out the Grangers, okay?”

A
N HOUR LATER
I
WAS HOME
. Mom had gotten up from the couch at some point and gone to bed, probably never noticing I was gone. I got a glass of water from the kitchen, sat down in front of my computer, and Googled Mr. Granger.

Everything Rachel had said about him was true. Not only had he been barred from attending any game in the local league, the man he hit had filed suit against him. Later, when Dillon died, the charges were dropped.

So he was every bit as violent as Rachel had suggested. Still, it was a stretch from hitting an adult at a baseball game to killing his own son.

My phone chimed to signal a new text.

Jack
. My breath caught—he was the last person I expected to hear from.

As soon as I typed
YES
I regretted it. The last time I’d
seen him, earlier tonight, he’d just hit someone so hard he was crawling on the ground. And oh, yeah, he refused to stop and talk to me—there was that, too. Why should I respond to him now?

Maybe because of the electric thrill I felt whenever I thought about him. Maybe because, among everyone who was anyone gathered at Kane’s house tonight, there was still no other guy I was interested in.

And I wanted to talk to someone. Needed to, really, after all the things that had happened today.

I kept going through the possibilities—someone had killed both Dillon and Amanda; or there were two different killers at work; or Amanda wasn’t dead at all, but either being held captive somewhere, or she’d run away for reasons of her own. As bad as Jack made her home life sound, though, it didn’t seem like enough to make her leave, especially since she had been happy at school.

I couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that Amanda was no longer alive but wasn’t at peace: she wanted justice and she was using me to get it, using my gift to talk to me through her clothes. And everyone else in Winston, with the exception of Mom and Nana—Rachel, Jack, the Grangers, Mrs. Stavros—seemed like they were hiding things or not telling the truth.

It had gotten chilly, even with Lincoln’s old sweatshirt zipped up to my neck. I wrapped my arms around my bare legs and watched my screen saver change images. It was too much to sort out right now.

My phone buzzed and I almost dropped it.

I felt a surge of excitement and … something else. Anticipation. Fear. Uncertainty. I wanted to talk about what was happening to me, but what was I doing considering involving Jack, someone I barely knew? I’d been so careful with my gift. None of my teachers knew. Not my dad, my friends from Blake. No one but Mom and Nana.

But I didn’t have to tell him everything. We could just talk.…

While I was staring at the screen a second text came in.

That sealed it for me—Jack had barely spoken more than a sentence at a time the whole time I had known him. Maybe this was my chance to find out something about him. I typed quickly.

I put the phone back in my pocket, my hands shaking. Adrenaline, fear, cold … It didn’t matter. I quickly combed my hair and washed my face and exchanged Lincoln’s sweatshirt for a sweater decorated with sequins at the neck and sleeves. Then I went out on the porch to wait, shivering as I watched clouds float across the moon, narrow wispy ones that barely dimmed its yellow glow.

I heard the engine from a block away, a powerful, low
humming sound. A moment later Jack pulled up in front of the house, leaning across to crank down the window.

“Want to go for a ride?” he called softly.

I got in the truck. Jack didn’t look at me as he pulled away from the curb, driving slowly uphill.

“There’s a place I know,” he said.

So much for my hopes he’d have a lot to say.

I thought I knew every road in town, but it turned out there was a little gravel alley behind where San Benito Road ended at Third Street. Except it wasn’t really an alley at all, but a winding road that went up and around the rocky slope that led to Nana’s street. Instead of joining up with Ridge Avenue, it took a jog at a rock outcropping—my heart caught in my throat when I looked out the window over the steep drop as Jack took the turn—and continued up the hill, the road turning into a pair of rutted tracks surrounded by overgrown bramble.

“What is this?”

“Fire road,” Jack said. “Dad used to bring me up here when …”

His voice faded and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to finish the thought. And then he spoke softly, a hint of humor in his voice. “Dad always said that some rules deserve to be broken—but if you didn’t know which then you weren’t qualified to break any.”

I smiled in the dark despite myself. “So, you know the difference?”

“Took me a while, and I made a few mistakes, but yeah … I think I do.”

The bumpy road flattened out and suddenly, spread out below us, was the entire town of Winston, a million sparkling lights with the serene black ocean beyond reflecting the yellow moon on its surface. “Oh … wow,” I said, unable to come up with anything better.

Jack cut the engine, pulling the truck over so that the view from the windshield was straight ahead. “So, look,” he said. “About Luke.”

“Yeah, what was that?” I asked. “Do you just go around taking swings at everyone who pisses you off?”

Jack glared at me. If I was hoping for an apology, it looked like I wasn’t going to get one. “Just the ones who call you a slut.”

I blinked. Not what I had expected, and I was hit hard by the unfairness of it. “But I never—”

“Not my business what you did or didn’t do with Herrera,” Jack said grimly.

I still wanted to explain that nothing had happened with Luke, but I could see that Jack wasn’t going to let me tell him the story. “Well—then why did you hit him?”

“Don’t know.”

That brought the conversation to a halt. And after a few minutes, Jack sighed.

“Okay, yeah, I know why. I didn’t like it. I wanted to make sure he stopped saying it. So I hit him.”

“You can’t just settle every disagreement by hitting people,” I said.

“Yeah, I got that. Thanks. That’s why I only hit him
once. That’s why I stood there and let him try to hit me until he got tired. Fucking idiot.”

I couldn’t help smiling to myself. “I thought you and Luke got suspended together in middle school.”

“This is how guys settle things, Clare. Real guys, anyway.”

“Real” guys, as opposed to Earl-Dobby-wearing rich kids from Grover Hill, I figured. Well, if I was Jack, I might have some resentment stored up too.

“Do you always try the violent way first?”

It wasn’t the way I meant for it to come out, but suddenly the air between us was charged with tension. I seemed to have a way of always saying the wrong thing around Jack, always provoking him.

“Look, Clare, either you like me or you don’t. I’m here. I came for you. I want you. Not the girl you think you have to be to fit into that crowd. But the girl I saw the other day”—he reached across the seat and touched my hair, pushing it away from my eyes—“with that stupid blue feather in her hair. The girl who looked like she could tell the world to go to hell.”

I froze, his touch taking my breath from me. “I do,” I whispered.
Like you. Want you
. But I couldn’t get any more words out.

We met in the middle, somehow, of the seat. I don’t remember moving toward him but the next second his hands were in my hair and my arms were wrapped around him, and his lips found mine and he kissed me like last time, except more. More of everything, and I was out of breath
and I didn’t care and I was so glad this truck was old enough to have a bench seat and that Jack knew where the fire road was and that we’d come back to Winston. Glad for all of it, even if it was just for a while, and I could forget all the rest and just be there with him.

After a while, a long while, he pulled me close against him and we sat in silence, looking at the view. I could make out our street far below—the Logans strung red, white, and blue lights around their porch for the Fourth of July—and the bright lights of the town. I thought I could see the Shuckster’s parking lot, and the outdoor seating of the restaurants that lined the water, sparkling with candles. Out in the bay the lights of a few boats bobbed and floated.

“It’s beautiful,” I said after a while. “Do you bring all your girlfriends here?”

“Are you my girlfriend?”

“Uh, well …” I turned my face against his shirt. The fabric was soft, thick and well-washed. His warmth was irresistible.

“A few things you should know. This won’t work if you have allergies, for starters. At least to animals. And you have to be able to put up with me reeking.”

“You don’t smell too bad,” I murmured. That was actually an understatement—Jack smelled great, like soap and something spicy and well-worn, and really masculine. Leather or tobacco or something.

“Earlier tonight I smelled like cat urine and dog vomit.”

“I don’t have allergies,” I said, smiling. “To answer your question.”

Jack played with the hair at the back of my head, twisting it around his fingers and then releasing it. It would be so easy to let the evening sweep me along, to forget about what had happened earlier. To try to ignore my fears and have just one night with nothing on my mind but being here with Jack, under the stars, and falling … falling hard for him.

But I kept thinking about Mrs. Stavros, the Grangers; about Rachel and Amanda and Dillon. About touching the denim jacket, about trying to understand my role in everything that had happened. All of it. I needed to talk about it, to tell someone.

“Hey,” Jack said, touching my face lightly. “You okay?”

I blushed in the dark, because he had read me so easily. I might be making my biggest mistake yet, but at some point I had to trust someone. And so I started talking.

I didn’t mean to tell him everything. Not at first. I started with the argument with my mom, with how hard it was to know what I was meant to do with my life and having her disagree so completely. But from there it was an easy jump to the move here and trying to fit in, making friends, and holding back. And he listened. Jack really listened, staying quiet much of the time, asking a question once in a while.

Before I knew it I’d told him about finding out Rachel had been keeping things from me, my confusion about our friendship.

“What kind of things?” Jack asked. He was stroking my hair, pushing it behind my ears with his strong fingers. It felt so good. And so … safe.

Safe enough that I was walking along the edge of trusting him with things I’d never trusted anyone with.

But it involved him, too. His own life had been dramatically affected by Amanda’s disappearance. He’d dealt with his own pain and loss, and he’d hit rock bottom before he recovered.

“I … don’t know how to talk about it,” I said carefully. “It’s about Amanda. About what happened to her.”

There was a long pause, his fingers still in my hair. I could feel his breathing, slow and sure, his chest rising and falling gently against my cheek.

“All right. I’m listening.”

I’d expected him to pull back. I had been ready to stop, to change the subject, to accept that we wouldn’t be able to get around this obstacle in our relationship. And yet I couldn’t
not
say it, either. Being with Jack wasn’t like being with any of the other boys I had dated; I felt like we connected in a way that no one else had ever come close to. If we were going to be together I wanted to be completely honest with him. Even about the things that were hard.

Even about the things that were secret.

And if, after hearing what I had to say, he turned away from me, I’d deal with it then. Maybe he’d think I was crazy. Maybe he wouldn’t ever speak to me again. But at least I would have tried. I was so tired of watching what I said, what I revealed about myself. I was tired of being ashamed of what I could do, of thinking of my gift as a curse. I felt safe when I was with Jack, even though lots of people would
say that was crazy, given his record; I felt as though he already saw into me, felt what I felt and didn’t judge me for it. And I wanted to take it farther. Wanted to show him more. For once, I wanted to stop hiding, to reveal both what I could do and who I really was.

I took a deep breath. “I … There’s this thing I can do.”

But that didn’t feel right. How could I explain something it had taken years for me to understand? And even now I was still learning. I burrowed deeper against his soft, warm shirt and Jack wrapped his arms around me, holding me closer. I tried again.

“A week or two ago, when I first went to the flea market …”

Once I got going, the words just flowed, faster and faster, until I was interrupting myself, trying to express how it had felt to hold the jacket in my hands the first time, what it was like to look into Mrs. Stavros’s cloudy eyes and see her pain, how afraid I’d been when Mr. Granger looked at me. How betrayed I felt knowing Rachel had lied to me. All of it. I didn’t pull away from Jack’s chest, and he didn’t say anything. But he never stopped holding me and he never interrupted, and when I’d reached the end, when I’d told him everything, he was silent for a while longer. His hands rubbed my back and he kissed my hair, and then he touched his fingers gently to my chin, tipping up my head so I was looking at him.

“You’re not crazy, Clare,” he finally said. “I’m not sure exactly what you are. But crazy’s not the word for it.”

I held my breath, sure he was going to tell me that he
had to go, that he wished me luck but he couldn’t get involved with something like this.

But he didn’t.

Inside the truck, lit by starlight and warm with our own body heat, Jack didn’t let go.

“Where’s the jacket now?” he said suddenly. I thought I detected a sense of urgency in his voice, and a tiny alarm sounded, deep in the recesses of my mind. Why was he asking? For what possible reason would he need to know, unless the jacket was connected in some way … to him?