Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (12 page)

Trees backed the lots on my left, and through their branches, I caught glimpses of a tall brick wall—the wall that encircled Fern Ridge. I wasn’t superstitious, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would think building a subdivision practically on top of a graveyard was a good idea. Didn’t anyone watch horror movies?

My steps slowed as I reached the edge of the development: I could hear engines in the distance. Paranoid after yesterday, I quickly stepped into the shadows behind a billboard as the noise drew closer.

Both the subdivision and the cemetery were located just off a winding road that led up to the interstate. Most of the cars you saw out here were either heading into or out of town.

Into
, I determined, as a battered pickup with Illinois plates rumbled past.

Behind it were six motorcycles and two RVs. One of the
RVs had speakers—blessedly silent—mounted on its roof and had been painted with a huge version of the Tracker dagger. I squinted at the license plate: Ontario. People really were coming from all over for the rally.

Two news trucks from major networks followed the caravan.

They proceeded down the hill and around a bend, heading for downtown.

As soon as the last bumper disappeared from sight, I stepped out of the shadows and walked the short distance to Fern Ridge. It was early, just past eight o’clock, but the cemetery gates were open and there was already a black Acura in the small row of parking spaces used by people who preferred to walk the tree-lined paths.

I bit my lip as I passed the car.

I was late.

The graveyard seemed oddly silent—not even the sound of birds or the noise of the breeze through the branches overhead—as I made my way to the far corner of the grounds, and I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was being watched.

I used to come here a few times a year with Tess—Fern Ridge was filled with family Hank had never told me about—but I hadn’t set foot through the gates since Amy’s funeral; I hadn’t wanted my memories of her tied to a stone slab.

I still didn’t, but I couldn’t risk going back into town, and the graveyard was one place I felt reasonably sure would be private at this time of morning.

Come and see me
—that’s what Amy had said in my dream.
Maybe it was right that I had chosen this place.

Like every other Walsh, Amy had been buried in the area reserved for Hemlock’s wealthiest and most powerful residents. The closer I got, the larger the tombstones became. The more important the person—the more money their family had—the bigger the marker.

It was a far cry from the small cemetery back at Thornhill. There, only numbered plaques marked final resting spots.

I stepped around a mausoleum that was half the size of my apartment and slowed as Amy’s grave came into sight.

A familiar figure stood in front of the tombstone. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of a black wool coat and his head was bowed.

Stephen.

Last night, when Kyle had thought I was trying to call my father, I had texted Amy’s brother and asked him to meet me here.

“Stephen?” My voice came out louder than I had intended, startling us both.

Amy’s brother turned, his blue eyes wide. “Mac.”

I hadn’t seen Stephen in almost a year. He looked a little older—more tired and with more shadows around his eyes—but otherwise just as I remembered. A younger version of his father with tussled blond hair, eyes the color of a winter sky, and a lean frame that I knew—from the countless times he had picked me up and tossed me into the Walsh family pool—was stronger than it looked.

His jacket gaped open, revealing a blue scarf and a gray
T-shirt with an illustration from
Where the Wild Things Are
on the front. The shirt had been a birthday gift from Amy; I had been with her when she bought it.
Stephen needs to be a little more wild
, she had said.

Maybe this had been a bad idea.

The last thing I wanted was to grill Stephen over his sister’s grave, but he was the best link I had to CBP. Other kids got summer jobs at the pool or the mall, but Stephen’s family had always expected bigger things from him. From the time he was fourteen, he had spent every summer working for CutterBrown. According to the voice mail he had left me yesterday—and how was it possible that so much had happened in twenty-four hours?—he was working for them now.

I swallowed and searched for words. “Thanks for coming. I know it’s early.”

He shrugged, the gesture oddly graceful. “You said it was important. Besides,” he added. “I needed to come here.” He glanced back at Amy’s grave. “I can’t run from it forever.”

I closed the distance between us and stared down at the epitaph on the stone.
AMY ADLER WALSH. BELOVED DAUGHTER
.
“You weren’t at the funeral,” I said, letting the words hang in the air like a question mark. I knew he hadn’t gone—I knew he had only made it as far as the gate—but it had been six months; it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not have come here in all that time.

“No,” he said, answering the part of my question that had been unspoken.

“But you came when I texted?” I couldn’t quite keep the
surprise from my voice. “Why?”

Again, he shrugged. “Because you were Amy’s best friend. Because you asked. Because it was time.”

Three explanations. I was sure all of them were true, but I had a feeling there was more to it than that. “Because you were curious?”

A slight, tight grin flashed across his face. It wasn’t a real smile—I doubted Stephen would smile again until he left the cemetery—but it was still nice to see. “That, too.”

We fell into an awkward silence as he waited for me to explain why we were here. “I got your voice mail,” I said finally, not sure how else to begin. “You’re working for your dad?”

“For a little while. I needed a break from school, and I figured I could learn just as much about business working for my father as I could in a classroom.”

I couldn’t imagine Stephen ever needing a break from anything. He had always had this quiet strength that made it seem like he could tackle any challenge—at least until Amy’s death.

Her murder had been an earthquake. All these months later, we were all still trying to survive the aftershocks.

“It must be interesting,” I said, “working for a company that does so much cutting-edge stuff—like that LS detection test they were working on.” Inside, I cringed. The words felt about as subtle as a wrecking ball.

“It is interesting,” he conceded. “But I’m sure you didn’t ask me to meet you in a cemetery at eight in the morning to talk about my career plans.” His tone was mild, but
something in his expression became a little more guarded.

I chewed the inside of my cheek.

How exactly did you work your way up to asking the brother of your dead best friend whether or not their father’s company had partnered with a deluded prison warden in the torture and murder of dozens of teens?

As I struggled to figure out what to say, a light breeze kicked up, stirring a scrap of color in the grass near my feet. My heart caught in my throat.

He was leaving flowers on my grave—pink carnations from the grocery store.

I crouched down and plucked the remains of a crushed flower from a tangle of weeds. The petals had withered and turned brown, but you could still tell they had once been pink.

A pink carnation.

A wave of goose bumps swept down my spine.

“What is it?” asked Stephen.

“Nothing,” I said. The word caught in my throat as, shivering and standing, I let the mangled petals fall back to the ground. “Just a carnation.”

“Where did you—” Stephen cleared his throat. “Where did you get that?”

He was staring at my wrist. My bracelet—Amy’s bracelet—had slipped out from underneath the cuff of my borrowed jacket.

I opened my mouth to tell him the truth, but a lie came out instead. “Your mom gave it to me.”

A shadow passed behind Stephen’s blue eyes as he raised
his gaze to mine. “I asked her about the bracelet yesterday. She said she hadn’t seen it.”

Blood rushed to my cheeks as every thought of CutterBrown was driven from my head. “I didn’t think anyone would miss it.” The bracelet felt suddenly heavy around my wrist and I fought the urge to cover it with my other hand.

Stephen just stared at me, waiting for an explanation.

“I was at your house a few weeks ago.” The words tripped over one another and fell flat. “I went upstairs—I just wanted to see her room again—and I saw the bracelet. I didn’t want it to get thrown out.”

“So you just took it?” The tone of his voice made me feel small and guilty. “Did it ever occur to you to just ask for it?”

I had come here to question Stephen; now I was the one on the defensive.

“I’m sorry,” I said weakly. “I didn’t think anyone would notice or care. I didn’t think it would be worth anything to anyone but me.”

He raked a hand through his hair. “The bracelet wasn’t the only thing that was missing.”

The accusation behind the words hit me like a blow.

Pressure built inside my chest. No matter how many years I had been friends with Amy, no matter how many afternoons I had spent at the Walsh house, I was still just a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The kind of girl people thought would steal from her dead best friend.

It didn’t matter why I had taken the bracelet or that it didn’t have value to anyone other than me. The only thing that mattered to Stephen was that I had taken it.

Eyes burning, I fumbled with the leather tie that held the bracelet in place. I tried not to think about how much I had risked to keep the bracelet in Thornhill or about how I had almost lost it during the hunt for Amy’s killer.

And I tried not to notice how naked my wrist felt without it as I reached out and laid the coins on the cool granite of Amy’s headstone.

“That’s the only thing of hers I had.” My vision blurred but my voice was as hard and final as the stones around us. “I didn’t take anything else.”

Before Stephen could reply, I turned and walked away.

I
MADE IT HALFWAY TO THE GATE BEFORE I HEARD STEPS
behind me.

“Mackenzie! Wait . . .”

I spun and crossed my arms. My breath fogged the air as I exhaled in a rush. “I gave you the bracelet. I don’t have anything else. Do you want to frisk me?”

“Frisk you?” A flash of amusement crossed Stephen’s face. “We both know you’d slug me the second I put a hand on you.”

He waited for me to soften. When I didn’t, his expression slid into something that was almost contrite. “What I said back there . . . it came out wrong.” He held out the bracelet. “Here. Take it.”

When I didn’t move, he took my hand and pressed the bracelet to my palm. “I was planning on giving it to you, anyway. That’s why I asked my mother if she had seen it.”

I felt my cheeks flush as my fingers curled around the small bundle of coins. “I guess . . .” I stumbled over the words and started again. “I guess I kind of overreacted.
The last couple of days have just been kind of . . . crazy.”

It wasn’t an apology—not quite—but Stephen shot me a small, wry smile. “Tell me about it. With all the civil unrest last night, I thought my parents would cancel the fund-raiser, but the first catering truck pulled up at five this morning.”

He thought I was talking about everything going on in town. If only. Nevertheless, I felt myself relax a fraction of an inch as I carefully tied the bracelet back onto my wrist.

I pulled in a deep breath. I needed to ask him about CBP, but something he had said back at Amy’s grave was still bothering me. “What else did you think I had stolen?”

“Stolen is the wrong word,” Stephen said quickly. “Someone should have asked you, months ago, if there was anything you wanted. I just don’t think anyone was up to going through Amy’s things.” His gaze sharpened, the blue somehow becoming darker. “Most of her stuff was all there, but her diary and her old iPod are missing. And an external hard drive.”

An external hard drive? I guess one of Kyle’s lectures about backing up her computer had finally sunk in. In the years I’d known her, Amy had managed to lose four laptops—if you counted leaving a laptop on the front seat of your unlocked car as “losing.”

Stephen slipped a hand under his jacket collar and rubbed his shoulder, kneading it lightly as though it ached. “Rugby injury,” he explained when he realized I was watching. “The cold makes it ache.”

“Rugby?” I raised an eyebrow. Stephen had always been
athletic, but he hated team sports.

He shrugged. “Ivy League school. They’re big on things like rugby and rowing and secret societies that meet in caves under frat houses.”

I shook my head. I would have to take his word for it. The Ivy League wasn’t exactly in my future. Hell, as things stood now, I wasn’t even sure graduating high school was a certainty.

“The hard drive just had a bunch of pictures and movies on it,” said Stephen, steering the conversation back on track. “Stuff that’s not on her laptop. It’s not important.” But the expression on his face contradicted the words.

I knew what it was like to desperately want to hold on to pieces of someone. Of Amy. “She never said anything to me about a hard drive, but I have a bunch of photos she gave me on a USB key last spring. I could email some of them to you.”

I cursed myself the second the words left my mouth. The USB key was back at the apartment. I didn’t know how, if, or when I would ever be able to go back for it.

Stephen didn’t notice my insta-regret. An oddly relieved look crossed his face as he said, “That would be great. I can come over and get it.”

I hesitated. I couldn’t go back to the apartment but I couldn’t exactly tell Stephen the reason why. “I think it’s in my locker, actually,” I lied. “I won’t be able to get it until Monday.”

He hid it quickly, but the flash of disappointment on Stephen’s face was impossible to miss. “Well, at least let me walk you to the gate.”

I nodded and fell into step beside him.

We walked in silence. After a few minutes, the cemetery gates came into sight in the distance. I felt a small rush of panic. I still hadn’t asked Stephen about CutterBrown. Once Eve arrived at the church, we’d be leaving Hemlock. There was no telling if or when I would see him again.