How We Fall (33 page)

Ellie looked happy. I stared at her for a minute; seeing her in such an unfamiliar place was strange. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes and took a deep breath.

Both girls had played volleyball. I couldn’t get past that. I kept walking down the hall, suspicion turning into dread in my stomach.

There.

G104. Coach Stevenson’s office.

Locked, of course.

This was why I’d come. It had to be the connection. They could have just met because of volleyball and become friends and gotten into something bad later. But if Sylvia had been telling the truth and they weren’t very close, then volleyball was the connection.

I tried the door again. I’d figured it would be locked, and part of the reason I’d come today was because Saturday seemed like one of the least likely days for him to be here. I peered through the tiny window in the door but couldn’t see anything.

Too dark.

I thumped the door with my fist and backed up, thinking.

The trophy cases and the locked door told me nothing. I kept walking. Maybe I could convince the janitor I was a student here and I’d left a bag in his office. It was a long shot, but the worst that could happen was I’d be told no and asked to leave.

If this didn’t work, I still had Ellie’s parents to talk to, and if I still found nothing, I had the address of one of the teammates who had shown up most often in the photos of Sylvia and Ellie.

Halfway down the hall, near the office for the football coach, I stopped. Hanging in a row with the photos of the 257

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two other coaches was a clear, crisp headshot of Sylvia’s stalker.

Skinny. Shaved head. The driver of the white truck.

Blurry newspaper photos of him with hair looked nothing like this one of him without hair. Mitch Stevenson, the label under the photo read.

I sprinted down the hall. My shoes squeaked on the floors.

The coach was Sylvia’s stalker. I hit the door still running and it flew open. Someone yelled behind me, but I didn’t stop to see who. I flung open my door, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot.

Getting to Sylvia and asking her why her coach had followed her when she moved should give me a good idea of what was going on here. She’d have to tell me.

The wind had picked up and the sky had darkened; the storm might be moving north, but it looked like St. Joseph was going to get hit, too.

I could go to the police with this, but what would they do?

I knew the name of the guy who had wrecked Marcus’s truck now, but they wouldn’t arrest him for that tonight. Sylvia obviously hadn’t reported him for harassing her, and if she wasn’t pressing charges, he couldn’t be arrested for that, either. Fear crawled through me.

If I could convince Sylvia to tell me what was going on, we could go to the police together. That was best thing to do.

My vibrated in my hand and I nearly dropped it. Marcus.

They must have figured out I wasn’t in the house. I put my phone on speaker.

“Jackie—where are you? Why did you leave? The power is out here and the storm is getting really bad. I can’t get ahold of the parents—”

“Marcus, stop yelling at me. Listen—”

“—Water ran all over your dad’s office floor—”

“Stop it! Listen! It’s the coach, Marcus. Sylvia’s volleyball 258

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coach is the man who forced us off the road and he’s the guy she saw in the park.”

“What?” He stopped interrupting.

“I’m in St. Joseph. I went to his office at Ellie’s school and I’m headed back now. It’s the coach, so Sylvia must have seen something.”

“Holy shit,” Marcus said. Lightning flooded the road with ghostly light.

I gripped the steering wheel. Silence fell over the line. “Have you heard from Sylvia?”

“She didn’t answer. I called twice.” The twins started crying in the background.

Not good. Rain pounded on the roof of my car. I turned my windshield wipers up a notch. “Maybe it’s the reception. You couldn’t reach the parents, either. I’m heading home. We have to talk to Sylvia, so keep calling her.”

“Don’t speed, okay? The last thing we need is you going in the ditch. The roads have to be bad.”

They weren’t great. My tires plowed up water and the car swerved. “Yeah. I should go. Call me if anything happens. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

I hadn’t been truly afraid in a while. People around Manson didn’t lock their cars or their houses, and the worst that happened was minor vandalism or petty theft. Sometimes there were stories of a house being broken into, but that was usually in Harris and it never happened to anyone I knew.

I could take a wild guess that this guy had something to do with Ellie disappearing, and if Sylvia had seen something about that, it made sense that he’d threaten her. But why not kidnap her, too? Why let her move away, why just follow her around, and not put an end to a witness?

A sinking feeling in my gut told me the answer.

For another thirty minutes, my hands gripped the steering 259

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wheel and my eyes squinted to see through the rain. The sky was so dark it looked like late evening instead of mid-morning.

I glanced at my sheet of notes to double-check Sylvia’s house number. It was one of the houses that barely made it inside the Manson city limits.

All the lights in the house were on, so at least she was home.

I parked on the side of the road and ran up to the porch.

The front door hung open. I pounded up the steps. “Sylvia?”

No answer. I nearly stepped on a square of white by the doormat, something folded up like a gift. A blue number eight shone up at me. Before I could think better of it, I picked it up.

A volleyball jersey unfolded.

I dropped it. Ellie’s number had been eight. I’d seen it in the photos of her and Sylvia and in the trophy case at the school.

My best friend’s killer had been here. I could report this. I could report finding a murdered girl’s clothing.

He’d come here while I was in St. Joseph, and now he had Sylvia. I dialed 911 and ran into the house.

Looking through the living room and bedrooms was probably the dumbest thing I could do, but I couldn’t stand the thought that maybe she was inside somewhere with him. I gave the address on the phone and the license plate of Mitch’s truck—neatly copied onto my sheet of notes—while I ran up the stairs and looked in the kitchen.

A plate was smashed on the kitchen floor. The only thing out of place in the entire house, as far as I could tell, was a broken plate.

The woman on the line told me to get out of the house. She said to leave the jersey there, and to stay on the line until I got in my car, and to go home immediately; the police were on their way to the address. I told her which way I figured Mitch must have gone.

I ran out to the porch and paused; streams of water poured 260

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in free-fall off the roof as the gutters overflowed. Lightning spidered across the sky, whole chains of it flaring up like cracks in glass.

If he’d taken Sylvia, it must have been only minutes before I pulled up. The porch wasn’t a deep one; the whole porch had been soaked by the rain but the living room rug was barely damp. The door couldn’t have been open for long.

I dashed for my car, but when my tires spun through the water and bit gravel, I knew I couldn’t go home.

One girl dead, one girl missing, and one free.

I hadn’t passed him coming into town, and unless he’d taken one of the dead-end gravel roads here in town, he’d headed out north on the blacktop highway.

The police would be coming from Harris. They’d take twenty minutes minimum to get here, more because of the storm. By the time they searched the house, the coach would have nearly an hour’s head start.

I hadn’t been there for Ellie, but I wasn’t leaving Sylvia.

Something cracked against the window. A drumming started up, low beats in the pounding of the rain on the roof. Hail.

I wiped my jacket sleeve across my face to stop the water dripping in my eyes. Turning up the heat would help; my fingertips were going numb from cold or nerves or both.

The road ahead of me was dark. My headlights burned a tunnel through the storm. I found Marcus in my recent calls and hit “call.”

Marcus. The coach could be heading there. He could be there already.

He answered before the first ring even finished.

“He isn’t there, is he?” I blurted out. “Or Sylvia? She’s not there?”

“No, no one’s here but me and the kids. Why? Are you okay? Where are you?”

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“I’m past Manson, but I’m not coming home. I wanted to tell you where I am in case something happens. Did you get ahold of the parents?”

“I got through to Mom. I told them everything and Dad was trying to get ahold of the sheriff and your dad was yelling on the phone too, last I heard. They’re coming back.”

I’d made it back, but they had a trailer. The wind was forcing the car around on the road; driving the truck with the trailer would be even worse.

“Wait, you’re not coming home? What’s going on?”

I passed the turn-off for my house; the house was dark, so the power must still be out. Branches were down on either side of the road, rolling in the wind like giant tumbleweeds.

“Ellie’s volleyball jersey was folded up on Sylvia’s porch. Sylvia’s gone. I think the coach—he—” I took a breath and started over. “He was there right before me. I called 911, and I’m driving along the blacktop to see if I can find him.”

“What? No! Come home—are you crazy? You’re going to get killed. Sylvia’s gone?”

I explained as best as I could. Going home, though, wasn’t the plan. Scanning the fields on either side of the road for lights, I was suddenly grateful for the darkness.

Something banged or fell over the phone line. “What was that?”

“Nothing. Seriously, Jackie. Dammit, Dammit. Come home, please; come back and let the police do their job.”

“I can’t. They’d be at least an hour behind me before they even started looking for him. He could kill her, too.”

“You don’t know that. Oh, no, Sylvia. Shit, shit.” More banging.

“What is going on there?”

“It’s the kids. They’re scared of the dark. Where are you? At least tell me where you are and where you’re going. Keep me on 262

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the line so I know if anything happens.”

That was a good idea. My hands trembled, but my mind was clear. I couldn’t panic. I’d have one chance to do this right.

“I passed the house three minutes ago, heading north. He must have gone this way if he’s going far.”

His voice was strained. “Jackie, please. You can’t do this. You can’t chase this guy in a storm by yourself. Turn around and come back. If he has her, you won’t be able to help and dying won’t help anyone. This is stupid, really stupid.”

“Sorry.” Hail smacked my windshield and bounced up from the asphalt.

“Dammit, Jackie, just dammit. Chris!” The phone silenced and came back after thirty seconds.

Static sounded. “Are you there?” I asked.

“Yeah. Keep talking to me.” It sounded like Marcus was fumbling with something. “You found Ellie’s clothes?”

I talked him through the whole thing, everything since I’d left the house that morning. He didn’t say much, just asked questions or said, “That makes sense. Where are you now?”

Having him on the phone helped. I was a little less terrified than I would have been, and the small element of company kept me from freaking out at the hail and the dark and the fact I was chasing my best friend’s killer.

My headlights reflected on a road sign. I looked down the turnoff but couldn’t see anything. I might have passed him already; any one of these tiny gravel roads would take him far away from towns and people.

All I could do was keep going.

Sylvia. Why hadn’t she gone to the police earlier? Why hadn’t she told someone if he was threatening her?

“Are you still there?” He said it quietly. His voice had lost some of the strain.

“Yeah.”

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“Good.”

Driving through the rain and the dark talking to Marcus healed some small part of me. After that night, we were okay.

Not great, not fixed, not together. But we were okay.

I kept my eyes focused on the road. “Say something,” I said.

“Talk to me.”

He was silent for a while. “I don’t think I remember everything we said last night.”

“You were a little drunk.”

A tense, short laugh came over the line. “I went out with the guys from the bowling alley after it closed. They—uh—know people.”

We hadn’t talked this much in weeks, and now we had no choice but to talk. “What happened? Why did you get so drunk?”

The line was quiet for a moment again. “Well, you.”

The problem we couldn’t solve. “I wish I’d thought of that solution. Did getting drunk help?”

He laughed again. “No.”

Lights. I killed my headlights immediately. The pinprick glow of a vehicle descended over a hill ahead of me. I wasn’t going to tell Marcus yet. He’d go crazy.

I sped up. If I could get close enough to follow him, I might be able to keep my lights off. The lights made a right turn, going east and leaving the northbound highway. The lights were low, though. Too low to be a truck. It might not even be him.

I told Marcus about the turn so he’d know where I was going, and promised him I’d hang back.

“I don’t remember,” he said, “if you said a specific thing that night.” His voice was calm and even.

“Which thing?” I asked.

“Whether all the times you said you loved me were in past tense.” He paused. “Or, if some of them weren’t.”

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I’d very specifically stuck to past tense. Loved, instead of love.The driver was heading east. If he went far enough, he’d hit a small college town, but between here and there it was mostly tiny towns built around grain elevators or highway intersec-tions. This direction did take us closer to St. Joseph, though, by a little.

“Jackie?”

This was not the conversation to be having right now. But it was the only thing I knew to talk about with Marcus right then.