The Darkest Corners (10 page)

“Goddamn.” I let out my breath in a slow hiss. “Shit. Frigging son of a bitch. Damn it.”

There's no way I'm making the twelve-mile trip to and from Deer Run with a flat tire. I'm only ten minutes away from the Greenwoods', if I want to turn around and head back. Though the gas station is a few hundred yards up the road; I could try to put air back into Callie's tires there. Maybe they're just old and need to be inflated a bit.

I wipe the sweat from my eye with the shoulder of my T-shirt. I have to get to Deer Run, and I'm not walking, so I really have one option. I step off the bike and walk it up Main Street to the Quik Mart. The guys who watched the police outside of Ari's house with me yesterday are riding their skateboards in the parking lot. Decker Lucas watches from the curb, a bag of Twizzlers in his lap.

“Hey.” He waves me over with a Twizzler. “You again.”

“Me again,” I say.

“Whoa, how are you riding with that?” Decker nods to Callie's tires.

I accept a Twizzler from Decker as he examines the front tire. “Nice hole,” he declares. “I've got a patch kit.”

“You do?” I could hug him. For some reason, the desire to get to Deer Run
right now
is a throb in my chest.

“It's at my house, though,” he says, and I deflate.

“Oh.” I tear the candy in half with my teeth.

“I live right around the corner, behind the school,” Decker says. “We can walk there.”

“Great. Thanks. I'll buy you more Twizzlers, or something.”

Decker laughs and waves me off. He doesn't tell his friends where he's going, and they don't seem to care. I walk Callie's bike alongside the curb as Decker takes off down the street on his skateboard.

“So, are you, you know…back?” Decker stops suddenly and waits for me to catch up, probably realizing that it was rude to leave me back there.

“In Fayette?” It's not a hard question, but I'm having trouble answering.

“Yeah. Are you here for good?”

“No.” I pick at the rubber peeling from Callie's handlebars. “My dad was sick. I came to say goodbye.”

I look up at Decker. His eyes are wide. “That really sucks,” he says. “Here, we can cut across the soccer field.”

I follow him, thankful to be able to leave it at that. On our right is a chain-link fence blocking off the elementary school playground. They've replaced all the equipment since I was a kid.

“I'm just across the street,” Decker says. “Watch out for the geese poop.”

We pick our way around the green piles like we're in a minefield and pass through a wooded area at the edge of the soccer field. It leads to a quiet road. I follow Decker across, once a car has passed.

His house is a ranch-style painted forest green. There's an old-fashioned car in the driveway; when Decker undoes the padlock on the garage door and lifts it open, I see why the car isn't parked inside. There's no room for it. Wall-to-wall cardboard boxes rotted with water stains. Stacks of old phone books. It looks like a scene from one of those shows Gram watches where some guy goes into a house in a hazmat suit, maybe finds a dead cat or two, and by the end everyone is crying happy tears.

“Ah,” Decker says, “my mom doesn't like to throw stuff out.”

“It's cool,” I say, because the tips of his ears are red.

“A lot of it's my dad's crap,” he rambles. “Eleven years, and my mom still thinks he's coming back to get it or something.”

Decker taps the indent in the center of his chin, as if he'd forgotten why we're standing here. “Oh yeah! The patch kit.”

I just sort of stand there, hands in my pocket, as Decker disappears into the cavern in the garage. There's some rustling, then he emerges with a patch kit. I sit on the lawn, pulling my knees up to my chest as he works on the bike.

“So how long are you here for?” Decker asks.

“I'm supposed to be gone by now. I wanted to stick around for Ari Kouchinsky's funeral.”

“I kinda remember you guys playing with those little plastic bears in Ms. Brogan's kindergarten class. She said they were for practicing counting, but you guys always made bear armies out of them.” Decker rocks onto his heels, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he moves from Callie's tire to inspect her chain. “I can't believe she's dead. Who'd want to hurt her? She was so nice.”

Nice girls are always the ones who get hurt. It's like the universe gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of taking out the nice girls one by one, while the whole world watches and gets some perverse pleasure from mourning the loss of yet another nice girl.

“It was probably a random creep,” I say.

Decker pumps air into both of Callie's tires. “I heard a rumor that it's the ORM again.”

Decker takes my silence as confusion. “The Ohio River Monster. Sorry, I keep forgetting you moved when that was happening.”

My toes curl. “Where did you hear that rumor?”

“My mom.” Decker looks sheepish. “But she, like, reads a lot of stuff. Conspiracy theories about how the cops know they probably got the wrong guy but won't admit the Monster's still out there.”

So Decker doesn't remember that I testified against Stokes, I realize. Or maybe he never knew. The papers never named Callie and me as witnesses, since we were minors, and the judge issued a gag order for our testimony, to protect us. A lot of people knew Callie and I were involved in the trial somehow, but most of our classmates were clueless as to why we were being taken out of class so much. Jealous and clueless.

I pick up a twig from Decker's lawn and snap it over my thumb. “I don't think it was the Ohio River Monster. The cops seem convinced it was Ariel's ex-boyfriend.”

“Nick Snyder?” Decker looks thoughtful. “That guy's a tool. He punched me in the face in the tenth grade. I didn't even deserve it. That time, at least.”

I feel a small smile creeping up, in spite of myself. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Decker says, wiping his greasy hands on his shorts. “I was just smiling to myself, 'cause I do that sometimes, and Nick saw me and said I was laughing at him. So he punched me.”

My smile fades. I feel bad for Decker; it must be hard to have a spirit in this town. Everywhere you turn, there's someone who wants to kill it.

I'm light-headed as I stand up.

“Thanks, for this.” I gesture to the bike and nod to Decker. He beams.

“Anytime. Hey, I might get a job at this bike shop in town. I could hook you up with new tires.”

He looks so desperate to be helpful that I don't want to say that it's not even my bike. “Sure. Okay.”

Decker scratches the back of his neck, his shirt pulling up to expose a sliver of pale, hairy tummy. “Where's your cell? I'll give you my number.”

I fumble in my back pocket. My phone falls onto the driveway and skitters at Decker's feet. He reaches it before I can bend to pick it up, his brow furrowing as he flips it open, begins adding his info.

I want to snatch it back, just in case he sees that the Fayette County Penitentiary is in my contacts. But his expression doesn't change. When he's finished, he hands the phone back to me, its screen still flipped open.

He's put himself in my contacts as “DECKER, YOUR FRIEND^_^”

I wave goodbye and hop back onto Callie's bike. I think I'll leave his number in my phone; you never know when you can use a friend around here.

The ride to Deer Run is a straight shot south. Brown, parched earth follows me for miles on each side.
We're in need of a good soaking,
my mother would always say. Then when the rain finally does come to Fayette, it feels like it lasts for days.

The sign says
WELCOME TO DEER RUN: A MOBILE COMMUNITY
. Two shirtless guys, probably in their twenties, look up from playing beer pong on the lawn to stare at me.

Deer Run isn't the meth-y type of trailer park. Mostly families live here—I can tell by the clotheslines hanging outside each home. Pajama pants, cloth diapers, a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt.

I imagine my mother and Jos sitting in one of the trailers, like some sort of messed-up family reunion that I wasn't invited to, and I almost turn around.

I follow the noise—kids shrieking, accompanied by splashes, a radio playing a Top 40 station—to a white building labeled
MAINTENANCE
. Inside, a woman sits near a fan, reading a copy of
People.
She looks up when I clear my throat.

“I'm looking for Annette Lowell.”

The woman's eyes flick down toward her magazine. She flips a page. “Doesn't live here anymore.”

I could have figured that much out on my own. Any other day I'd duck out, embarrassed at even having opened my mouth, but I didn't ride all this way in Death Valley-ish heat to be told no.

“I need to find her.” I'm shocked by how forcefully it comes out.

The woman sets down her magazine. “Yeah, well, when you do, tell her she owes two months' rent.”

I clench my hand into a fist. “Fine. I'll knock on every door here until I get someone who knows where she is.”

I expect her to give me more attitude, or maybe tell me it's useless, that no one here knows where Annette Lowell is. Instead, she shrugs. “Probably should start with Nicki.”

“Nicki?” An awful thought strikes me: Is Nicki my mother's daughter? It's been long enough that my mother could have started another family.

“Babysitter,” the woman says. “Around back.”

I nod to her and go out the way I came in. I circle around the building, where there's a concrete slab with a swing set and a sandbox. A sorry excuse for a playground. Beyond it is a pool, where a group of older kids are shouting “Marco Polo” back and forth.

A little girl pushing around a stroller with a filthy blanket inside stops to gawk at me. She's in a hot-pink bikini bottom and nothing else. She slips her thumb out of her mouth in order to address me. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I say. “Is Nicki here?”

She points to a row of lawn chairs. A girl who can't be more than fifteen sits in one of them, her eyes glued to her phone. At her feet, a toddler in a diaper stumbles around, a dandelion clutched in a chubby fist.

I approach Nicki, suddenly unnerved. She's in a bikini top and denim jeans. Everything is harsh about her, from her brassy highlights to her eyeliner, but she's pretty. It doesn't matter that I've got at least three years on her. I feel two inches tall.

“Are you Nicki?”

She sets her phone down on her lap, annoyed. “Yeah.”

“I'm looking for Annette Lowell,” I say. “You know her?”

“She used to watch the kids and stuff.” Nicki shrugs. “Before me.”

“How long ago?” I ask.

“She was here awhile. More than a year. Phoebe got pretty attached to her.”

Nicki's eyes are on the little girl with the stroller, who's adjusting the blanket with extreme care. She can't be more than five or six. I need to get out of here, away from this child who is depressing the crap out of me with her invisible baby. Did she cry when my mom left? I can't think about it.

“What about a blond girl, twenty-sixish?” I loop my finger through the hole in the side of my jeans. “Did she come looking for Annette this week?”

Nicki's eyelids flutter as she really looks at me for the first time. Hope swells in me, but she reaches for her phone. “Nope.”

I hate myself for being the slightest bit disappointed. “When did Annette leave?”

“Couple months ago,” Nicki says. “Said she was moving into her family's cabin. That's all I know,” she adds, her eyes back on her phone. The baby at her feet crawls under the chair, and then emerges on the other side. Moving toward the music coming from the pool.

I turn to leave, then stop myself. “You should really keep an eye on the baby. The pool gate is open.”

I don't wait to see Nicki's reaction. As I'm leaving, I'm stopped by a small tug on my hand.

“Is Nettie okay?” Phoebe, the little girl, stares up at me with wide, baby-blue eyes.

“I don't know,” I say. “But I'm going to try to find her.”

Phoebe's eyes narrow, and she pulls her hand back. I've said something to make her not trust me.

“You can't find her,” Phoebe whispers hollowly. “Because she's hiding from the Monster.”

I punch out the kickstand a little harder than necessary before hopping back onto Callie's bike. I stub my toe and curse under my breath. Jos didn't come looking for my mother here, and I'm no closer to finding either one of them.

By the time I get back onto the main road, I've convinced myself that I'm starting to hear things. There's no way Phoebe said my mother is hiding from
the Monster.
She must have said
monsters
or
a monster.
Some combination of the heat and my brain tricked me into hearing
the
Monster.

But what kind of monster?
Did my mother get mixed up with an abusive man or felon at Deer Run? Did she leave to get away from him, and told Phoebe so the little girl wouldn't be sad?

Or maybe Phoebe is making shit up, because she's a kid, and that's what kids do.

But what if my mother really
did
tell Phoebe she was hiding from the Monster? Does my own
mother
know who really killed those girls?

Do she and Jos both know who he is? Is that why my mom let Gram take me away—to keep me safe from the Monster too?

My mind races, in sync with the wheels of Callie's bike. My father knew a lot of unsavory people, some of whom he owed money to. Men with sallow cheeks and cracked leather jackets. Men with rifles and red-eyed dogs in the beds of their pickup trucks. Any one of them could have killed someone.

Maybe the Monster did kill Lori, and Jos couldn't stop it. She kept her mouth shut because she knew him—maybe we all knew him. She left not because she was hiding something but because he would have come after her next.

There's nothing to prove it, but it could still be true. I think of the empty envelope with my name on it, allowing myself to entertain the wild possibility that it contained the Monster's identity.

Everyone else in my family has secrets. Why wouldn't my father have had them?

Callie is still gone when I get back to the house. I take the stairs two at a time up to the guest room, wiping the sweat from my face with the collar of my T-shirt. I smell like I slept in a barn.

The bag of my father's things is on the bed where I left it after sneaking up here earlier, before Deer Run. I sit and dump the contents onto the quilt in front of me, pick out the torn envelope.

My father had something to tell me; the envelope had my name on it. Not Jos's, and not Annette's. Maybe he figured I wouldn't come to say goodbye, so he wrote me a letter. I think of my mother standing over the woodstove in our old living room, the flames reaching hungrily toward the letter in her hand. My letter.

My chest constricts.

My mother can't be the one who opened the envelope. According to the guard, she hadn't visited my father in years. Whoever opened it had a reason. Maybe a wayward guard who thought there might be cash inside.

Or someone who didn't want me to find out what the letter said.

My mother didn't visit my dad on his deathbed. But Joslin did.

I push the envelope away so I don't have to look at it.

I always loved my sister the most. I knew it drove my mother insane to see Jos holding me at her hip, spinning in circles around the living room, and swinging me airplane-style. Whenever my mother snapped “Put her down,” there was a layer of venom in her voice; she cared less about me getting hurt than seeing Jos make me giggle until I was in hysterics.

I was afraid of my mother, that she'd one day take my sister, the person I loved more than anything else, away from me.

There was only one time I was afraid of Jos. She and my mother were arguing—once Jos turned sixteen, they fought all the time. Ugly fights that made me hide in my closet.

The biggest ones were because my mother wouldn't let Jos get her driver's license. A few months earlier, there had been a horrific accident not far from the high school. Two boys on their way home from football practice—seniors, one with a full ride to Penn State—were split open like squirrels on the pavement, the driver's truck nearly torn in two by a telephone pole. He'd been speeding. There's still a wooden cross with their names on it on the side of the road where it happened.

My mother always talked about the boys—Rob McQueen and Tyrone Williams—as if Joslin hadn't walked the same hallways as they had, hadn't cheered for them at home games. They were ghosts, cautionary tales. The reason Jos wasn't allowed behind a wheel until she turned eighteen.

I ran down the stairs that night when I heard something shatter.

I found Jos in the kitchen, holding a shard of a drinking glass in front of her, a manic look in her eyes.
Like she needed an exorcism,
my father used to joke whenever he was around to break them up. Jos was holding the shard like a weapon and shrieking, “Just back the hell away!”

When she saw me crying in the doorway, it was as if someone had flipped a switch. Jos dropped the glass and ran to comfort me. “I would never, ever hurt you, Tessa.”

I hate how I always circle back to that moment when I'm trying to convince myself that Joslin never could have let anyone hurt Lori. I hate how I have to wonder what Joslin would have done with the glass in her hand if I hadn't been in the doorway to stop her.

My stomach is groaning, so I dig out of my backpack the last granola bar Gram packed me. I tear the wrapper off with my teeth as I start to sort through my dad's drawings.

I have to admit, he's pretty good.
Was
pretty good. I wonder if it's a skill he honed in prison, or if he was always a natural and I just never knew. There's a portrait of a waterfall, sketched with such detail that I can almost point out each drop of its spray.

There's something scribbled in the bottom corner.
Rattling Run, 1986.

I sift through the other pictures—mostly scenery, portraits of nature. Except there's something oddly specific about them; the window looking out over a backyard, two girls piled onto an Adirondack chair.

Jos's birthday, summer of '01.

They're not portraits. They're memories.

I hate myself for how quickly I fly through the drawings trying to find it. I have to know if he remembered it too. Our trip to Laurel Caverns when I was five. The only trip we ever took as a family.

Halfway through the stack, I pause at a sketch of a cabin.

I hold it up to the ceiling light to get a better look, my hands trembling in spite of myself.
Shack
might be a better word for the house; it's propped up on a raised wooden foundation. There's an enclosed porch. My father even drew a tear in one of the screen windows.

Bear Creek, 1986.

I rack my brain for any memory of a place called Bear Creek, and fail. For all I know, Bear Creek isn't even in Pennsylvania. Did my father stay at the cabin as a child? Why wouldn't he have mentioned it if his family owned a house? But wait…didn't Nicki say Annette was moving into a cabin her family owned?

I stuff everything back into the bag and put it under the bed. A quick look out to the garage from the guest room window tells me Callie still isn't home yet. I poke my head out into the hall; her door is open a crack.

I glance into Maggie's room to confirm she isn't in there, before I slip inside Callie's. The laminated blue card is on her dresser, where I spotted it earlier.
FAYETTE LIBRARY.

Downstairs, Maggie is in the kitchen, starting dinner. She's on the phone, but she doesn't have her Rick voice on this time. I slip past her, through the side door leading to the garage, where I left Callie's bike earlier.

Hey, Maggie, I need to use the computer for a sec to check flights.
It would be that easy. Of course she'd say yes. But I can't take the chance of her seeing all the stuff I've been Googling. I can't answer the questions she'd be bound to ask.

The library is around the corner from Decker's house, down the road from the elementary school. When I get there, I leave the bike in a rack outside, even though I don't have a lock. There's no one around to steal it, and I'm not about to drag it inside with me.

The sliding doors open with a
whoosh,
and a blast of cold air hits my face. When I was really young, my mother used to bring us here on oppressively hot days for the free AC.

There are a lot of people here doing just that. In the aisles of the main stacks, I have to step over a toddler smacking a naked Barbie against the carpet by its hair. There's one shelf marked
NEW RELEASES
, boasting a James Patterson book that came out last year. I know because Gram needed my help downloading it to her e-reader.

I round the corner into the study room, where the computers are. I log on to the Internet using the bar code on the back of Callie's card.

The first thing I do is search for
Bear Creek.
The auto-fill asks me if I meant
Bear Mountain,
which is a two-and-a-half-hour drive, according to the map. Apparently, Bear Mountain used to be a ski resort before it shut down in the eighties. The town of Bear Creek had a few restaurants for skiers, but they're all closed now too.

There aren't any population statistics for the town. In fact, there's nothing to suggest that Bear Creek is even a town where actual people live. Most likely, the picture my father drew means he went skiing on the mountain and stayed in a cabin for a weekend.

My family never owned shit. I accept it now, with a small wave of disappointment. People who own shit don't steal other people's shit.

I lean back in my chair, a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of unfettered Internet access. I wind up doing what I always end up doing when I'm by a computer, and search for Wyatt Stokes.

There's a new article from this morning, matching what I saw on the TV at the prison. The judge has set a preliminary hearing for October to decide whether the new evidence is strong enough to let Stokes's appeal move forward. No mention of what the evidence is. I rub my eyes and peer at the last paragraph.

While attorneys for Stokes have not disclosed what evidence they will be bringing to the state supreme court, many have speculated that forensic evidence omitted from the original trial will come into play. Investigators found an incomplete DNA profile under the fingernails of two of the victims, but were unable to determine conclusively whether or not the profile was a potential match for Stokes's. Rachel Steinhoff, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, says that if the DNA is someday entered into CODIS, the FBI database for DNA from violent offenders, it is a strong possibility that investigators could have a new suspect on hand.

I click out of the article. I read about the DNA profile years ago, and knew that Kristal Davis and Lori Cawley didn't have the killer's DNA under their nails. Just another minor inconsistency that the prosecution explained away: Kristal and Lori didn't have any DNA under their nails because they didn't fight back.

I close my eyes and I see her. Joslin and the shard of glass.

Sometimes I think that I've inflated the gravity of that phone call over the years. Friends argue. Jos and Lori seemed like they were inseparable, but they
were
teenage girls. They were bound to get into an argument at some point, probably about something completely stupid. In this case they just never got a chance to make up.

I've tried to pinpoint even one moment before that night when it seemed that Lori was threatened by my sister—a whisper, a strange look—but trying to remember feels like searching for something in the dark.

I've made zero progress today in terms of leads on Joslin—or my mother—so I refuse to leave the library without something. Even if it's just a name. Someone who still lives in town, who I can talk to—someone who might shed light on Jos and Lori's friendship, and if they were having any problems.

I need someone who will talk to a girl who shows up on their doorstep like an intrusive reporter.