The Darkest Corners (12 page)

I pee, wipe the gunk of out my eyes, and shuffle downstairs, where Callie, already dressed, is fixing herself a coffee. She looks up at me, her bottom lip folding under like something is off.

She heard me on the phone,
I think.

My knees go weak until she says, “You slept late.”

The stove clock says it's a couple minutes after nine. Normally, I'm up at seven every day, a pattern I haven't been able to break for years. At least I was never late for school.

“Guess I was exhausted.” I slide into a chair at the kitchen table, where Maggie has left a paper plate with two bagels. I can't bring myself to eat; it was so, so stupid of me to talk to Wyatt Stokes in this house.

I know Callie wouldn't understand why I had to talk to him. I know she's only digging into the past with me out of fear that the police will pin Ari's murder on Nick, and the real Monster will be free to prey on more girls. She feels guilty for how she treated Ari, scared that it's our fault she's dead. All on top of us being exposed as little liars, right before we're supposed to start our shiny new lives away at college.

But she doesn't want Stokes to get out of prison. She thinks he'll come after us if he's free, get revenge on us for lying.

Is that why I felt like I had to talk to him? To convince myself he doesn't want to hurt us?

I tear off a piece of bagel. It sticks in my mouth.

Callie sips her coffee and looks at me. “I thought about what you said last night, about your sister's boyfriend. He's probably a good place to start.”

I nod, swallow away what's left of the bagel in my mouth. “I don't know his last name, though.”

“Maybe an old yearbook?”

I shake my head. “I don't know where he went to school, but I know it wasn't in Fayette. And he never graduated.”

Callie cups her mug with both hands. “I'm out of ideas, then. I haven't seen him since that summer.”

“So he could have left town not long after Jos did.” I rack my brain, trying to remember if I saw Danny around in those short months after Jos left and before I went to live with Gram.

“You think it means something?” Callie looks skeptical.

“Like, do I think they planned to run off together? I don't know.” I'd never considered the possibility that simpleminded Danny might have been involved in what happened that night. He'd only ever hang out with Jos alone, maybe to convince himself he wasn't dating a high school girl. He never interacted with Lori much either, except for a head nod when we all ran into him. I'd hear him and my sister on the porch sometimes, from my spot on the living room couch. Jos would nag Danny for never wanting to hang out with Lori, and he'd mutter that Lori was stuck-up.

But as far as I knew, Danny didn't hate Lori. He regarded her in the same way he regarded me, as a minor annoyance standing in his way whenever he wanted Joslin's attention.

“Didn't Jos say she was with Danny the night Lori was murdered?” Callie looks up at me. I can see the wheels in her head turning. I swallow.

“Yeah. Hey, what if we asked someone at the pool?” I say, redirecting. “Danny worked for the company that cleaned it.”

My sister was never interested in high school guys, no matter how much my mother tried to beat it into her that older men were trouble. My mother never liked to talk about Jos's real father, except to say that he was twenty-one when he got Annette pregnant at seventeen, and he promised to take care of her and he didn't.

Jos met Danny on Memorial Day weekend, before Lori arrived that summer. I only remember because my mother told us we had to stay home while she was out cleaning houses, but as soon as the door clicked behind her, Jos showed me that she was wearing her bathing suit already. The Greenwoods were camping at Cranberry Run for the weekend, so it was just Jos and me at the pool.

I was practicing blowing bubbles in the shallow end, like she'd taught me, when I saw Jos staring at the guy cleaning leaves out of the pool house gutter. Danny smirked at her; Jos didn't smirk back. Instead, she got this determined look on her face like she saw something she wanted, and that was that.

Callie slides a finger across the screen of her cell phone. “The pool's open till five. Let's go.”

The town parking permit stuck on the window of Maggie's minivan is expired, so we walk to the pool from Callie's house. I'm weirded out by how familiar this feels, so I remind myself of all the ways this isn't the same. There are no towels slung over our shoulders. The Greenwoods' new house is farther from the pool, and we have to take a different route to get there.

The longer trip sucks because there's more time to fill with small talk. Eventually, Callie decides it's not worth the effort, and she pulls out her phone and starts texting, stopping only when we have to cross a street.

I hate myself for how much I want to fill in the blanks for her, answer her questions about what my life has become, even though she didn't ask. I want to tell her about how I'm going to Tampa in the fall and majoring in astronomy; about living in Gram's retirement community and her bastard neighbor Frank, who is always quick to point out that my presence violates the fifty-five-and-older rule; about Ariel's letters in pink envelopes and her emphatic pleas for me to
Write back!!!!!
even though I always did.

I hate myself, and I hate Callie for making me feel like a pathetic loser without even really trying. It makes me all the more sure that I can't tell her about Joslin yet—not when Callie would never be able to understand why I kept quiet.

We hear the pool before we see it—splashing, shrieking, punctuated by the lifeguard's whistle. The parking lot is full, and we have to wind through the cars until we reach the gate, a flimsy, barbed old thing posted with a set of pool rules.

The snack bar is gone, replaced with a slab of concrete and a row of lounging chairs. One of the guys who used to work there testified at the trial—Kevin, who snuck Callie and me french fries sometimes.

A man dripping sweat pushes around a cooler, halfheartedly hawking frozen Snickers and SpongeBob ice cream pops.

I catch Callie looking at a group of girls pulling jean shorts over their bikini bottoms and packing up their stuff. They're looking at us—or Callie, rather—and angling their chins over their shoulders, whispering to each other.

Callie lowers the sunglasses perched on her head. “God, I hate this place.”

I don't know if she's talking about Fayette, the pool, or both. “Come on,” I say, uncomfortable with the way that the girls are watching us.

The pool-house-slash-management-office is the same ugly hunter-green building it was ten years ago. A guy with an acne-scarred face sits on a stool next to a soda vending machine, flipping through today's paper. He's wearing jeans despite the heat, and he has one of those faces where he could be either thirteen or thirty.

“Hi,” Callie says. “We're looking for someone who used to work here.”

The guy tucks the paper under his arm. “Don't keep employee records around. Check city hall.”

“He wouldn't have worked for the town,” I say. “He worked for a landscaping company.”

“Which one?” The guy slides off his stool to chase away a pigeon that's wandered in the open door. “The town's had contracts with four, maybe five landscapers in the past ten years.”

In my head, I try to picture the pickup truck Danny used to ride off in. “Their logo was a leaf, I think.”

Callie rolls her eyes, as if to say,
That's helpful.
“It was about ten years ago. Do you know which company the pool used then?”

The guy shrugs. “I didn't work here back then. Sorry.”

“Thanks anyway.” Callie turns to leave, but I stare at the guy. I figure he could be around my sister's age, maybe.

“Did you go to Fayette High?” I ask him.

He nods.

“Did you know someone named Joslin Lowell?”

Next to me, Callie stiffens.

“Sounds familiar.” The guy folds his arms across his chest. “Think she was a couple grades younger than me.”

“What about a guy named Danny?” I ask. “Really skinny, smoker, blondish hair?” The more I attempt to describe him, the less distinct his face becomes in my mind. Did he have a birthmark? Busted teeth? I can't remember.

The guy blinks at me, and Callie tugs at my arm. “Thanks anyway,” she says to him, before dragging me outside.

“He might have known Danny,” I say, pulling down the hem of my shirt. “It wasn't that much of a stretch.”

“It's not that. I literally
cannot
be here right now.”

I trot after Callie, back toward the parking lot. She lets me catch up to her. I can hear her ragged breathing near my ear. Her face is ashen. I know what's happening to her, because I've been there.

“When did you start having panic attacks?” I ask her.

Callie shrugs. “I think I was eleven. We'd been in the new house for a while, and all of a sudden I realized there were still windows I didn't know about, and a cellar door. I just freaked, I guess, because if I didn't even know all the ways into the house, how could I stop someone from getting in?”

We step onto the sidewalk, ducking under a low-hanging branch from an oak tree on the other side of the fence.

“I had them too,” I say, after a beat. “When I started at my new school, and there wasn't a bathroom in the class like there was at Eagle Elementary.”

I leave out the part where I wet my pants and got sent to the nurse's office; after Gram explained over the phone that I'd witnessed a murder the year before, my teacher was nicer to me, which should have made me feel better but really made me feel kind of pathetic.

Besides, I hadn't actually witnessed Lori's murder. I don't know if Gram hadn't bothered to get the story right, or if she told people this version because it was simply easier for them to process.

“I haven't been to the pool since,” Callie says, her voice soft. “I was supposed to go with Sabrina in the eighth grade, but I freaked when her mom dropped us off. We had to call her to pick us up.”

Callie looks at me. “I just—I want to get out of this place. I'm never going to feel safe here, and that sucks, because it's the only home I've ever known. At least you're far away from it all in Florida.”

I nod and kick at a chunk of concrete that's come loose from the sidewalk. Callie's finally opening up to me after ten years, and I don't want to ruin it by telling her that she's wrong.

There's nowhere in the world that's safe. No matter how far we go to try to outrun that night, the monsters will always find us.

We can't think of an excuse for Maggie about why we're home from the pool so quickly, so we stop at the park adjacent to the pool to kill time. Callie looks up the number for the Fayette Department of Parks and Recreation and reads it to me.

The clerk in the office gives me the name of the landscaping company the town used ten years ago—Faber & Sons Landscaping—but when Callie searches for them online, we get an expired domain name. The only number the results turns up rings about a dozen times when we call it.

Callie hangs up. “Probably went out of business. Like everything else in this shit place.”

I can't argue with that. I'm sure a lot of people think poorly of their hometown, but Fayette actually
is
shitty. Seriously, you can smell the cow feces when you get off at the exit for Fayette on the freeway.

This place is too suburban to be rural, too far east to be a fly-over state, too far north to be redneck country. Fayette simply exists—the type of place that no one thinks about. The type of place where people up and leave, and if you ask about them years later, it's like they never even existed.

“We'll find him,” I say, more to myself than to Callie. I
have
to find Danny, and not just because he might know what really happened between Lori and Jos that night. It's not even just about Lori's murder anymore. My father is dead, my mother is God knows where, and I'm not leaving Fayette without finding my sister.