The Darkest Corners (2 page)

The guard folds her arms across her chest. Her badge says
WANDA
. “Ma'am, I understand your frustration, but Glenn Lowell's daughter was here last night. I wasn't aware that he had two.”

“Wait.” My legs have gone weak. “She was here?”

I sense Maggie stiffen next to me. Without a word, the guard flips back a page on the ledger set before her. She passes it under the glass pane. My fingers tremble as I search for her name on the page.

“She's not on here,” I say. I go to push the ledger back, but Wanda stops me.

“Six-thirty-five p.m. yesterday,” she says. “I signed her in.”

I slide my finger down the page until I find the time.
Brandy Butler.

In my sister, Joslin's, handwriting.

My toes clench in my sneakers. I know it's hers—I used to make fun of the silly way she wrote her
e
s, the exaggerated dip, as if it were trying to touch its toes.

Maggie puffs up, starts arguing with the guard about needing to speak with the warden.

“Glenn Lowell doesn't have a daughter named Brandy Butler,” Maggie says.

“It's her.”

Maggie turns to look at me.

“That's Jos's handwriting,” I say.

Maggie's lips part with disbelief. There's something else in her expression—pity. I'm getting really goddamn tired of that today.

“Let's go,” I tell her. “He's dead, and that's that, so can we leave?”

Maggie hesitates. My leg is jiggling again. She casts a look at the guard, as if to say,
Someone will be hearing from me about this.
Then she grabs my hand.

The gate beyond the desk buzzes. A guard appears with a clipboard propped on his forearm. He doesn't look up from it as he shouts out a name. “Edwards?”

A man in a suit stands up in the waiting area, sheepish, as if he'd just gotten called to the principal's office in the middle of class.

“Your client's ready for you,” the guard says. Edwards tucks a manila folder under his arm and walks past Maggie and me with a polite nod. He doesn't know who we are.

Maggie's hand tightens around mine, and I know she recognizes him too. Maybe from the documentary about the murders,
Unmasking the Monster,
if she brought herself to watch it. Or maybe she's been following Stokes's appeal, because her niece was the last of his victims and she feels like she has to.

Either way, Maggie's nervous energy transfers to me, and I know she sees what I see: the defense attorney who has been trying for the past ten years to get a new trial for Wyatt Stokes.

Wyatt Stokes, the Ohio River Monster, who is on death row because Callie and I put him there.

“Come on, Tessa,” Maggie barks, as if I were the one holding us up. She drops my hand, and I follow her outside.

The doors slam behind us, shutting out the darkness of the prison. The sun streams into my eyes.

Maggie is wearing the same face she had on outside the courthouse the day Stokes was sentenced to death—as if all the light had been sucked from the earth. I wasn't there for the sentencing; Joslin, my mother, and I watched the local news from our living room so we could hear the judge's decision. One of the camerapeople got a shot of Maggie and Bonnie Cawley, Lori's mother, on the steps afterward.

I didn't understand why Maggie didn't look happy; Stokes got the death penalty, just like everyone had hoped he would. Maggie wouldn't talk to any of the reporters, but Bonnie looked right at the camera and said she'd be front row at Wyatt Stokes's execution.

I'd heard Maggie explaining to Callie that Lori's murder had changed Callie's aunt Bonnie. At Stokes's bond hearing, Bonnie had waited on the steps of the courthouse until the guards had brought him in and she could tell him to his face that he was Satan's child. Bonnie hated the man who killed her daughter so much that she hadn't been able to go on living until she'd found out he was going to die.

But I look at Maggie now, and I know that hate isn't something you can put in a person's heart by taking away something they love. You either have hate in you or you don't; it hides in someone's body like a cancer, waiting for the right moment to come out.

I didn't realize I had so much hate in me until right now. I don't hate Wyatt Stokes for making us live in fear. I don't hate my father for being sent to prison, and I don't even hate him for not holding on for a few more hours when he knew I was coming to say goodbye.

It's my sister I hate. My only sister, who kissed my eyelids when I cried and let me hang on her like a monkey at night, taking up the whole bed with my tiny body. My sister, who protected me when my father went to jail and our mother unraveled in front of us. Joslin, who said she'd never leave me but ran away from home two days after my ninth birthday and never came back.

Only she did come back. Just not for me.

There was never going to be a funeral for my father, even if he'd died on enough notice. There's no money to pay for one, and I'm not sure who would have shown up if we'd held it in the prison chapel. Wanda? The other inmates? It's mortifying. Everyone who mattered to my father—and it was a short list, trust me—is long gone. So I'd booked my return trip to Orlando for tomorrow night.

That was before I knew my sister is back.
Was
back. Who knows where she is now—she's had a twelve-hour head start to get the hell out of Pennsylvania.

What I can't figure out is, how did Jos know my father was dying? Glenn Lowell wasn't even her biological dad. Our mother left Joslin's father when Joslin was two; all we'd ever heard about him was that he lived in Louisiana. He and my mother had never gotten married. I never had the nerve to ask whether or not the scar on Joslin's chin had anything to do with the reason my mother left him.

Jos called my father Daddy, and there was never any mention of the Louisiana man. My dad called us both his babies, and Jos cried like I did when he went to jail for three counts of armed robbery and attempted capital murder.

I doubt that Jos found out he was dying from our mother, since I haven't heard from her in almost ten years. Gram hasn't heard from her in twice that. I'd think maybe it was Maggie who got in touch with Jos—Maggie always had an almost mystical quality of being connected to people, always knowing what everyone was up to. But she was just as surprised as I was to find out that Joslin had been to the prison last night.

And Maggie never really liked my sister anyway.

Callie and I had been friends since pre-K, but until we turned eight, Joslin was always “That sister of yours, Tessa,” said with a disapproving sidelong glance. That June, Lori Cawley came to Fayette to spend the summer with the Greenwoods. Jos was about to be a senior in high school. Lori had just finished her first year at college in Philadelphia. Maggie tried to introduce Lori to girls her own age, but she met my sister when Jos dropped me off at the house, and that was that. Joslin and Lori brought Callie and me to the pool almost every day when my sister wasn't working; they'd bend their heads together over copies of
Cosmo
and talk about the things they did with boys, and if Callie and I overheard, they'd buy our silence with giant jawbreakers from the ice cream parlor.

It was also the first summer my mother let me stay over at a friend's house. The first time I slept at the Greenwoods', Callie and I watched
Mulan
twice because we didn't want to go to sleep, our mouths white from the jawbreakers. I was having so much fun, I didn't even miss having my sister in the bed with me, like I did on the nights when she snuck out to meet her boyfriend, Danny.

The last time I stayed at the Greenwoods' was the night Lori Cawley disappeared. In Fayette, we'd heard rumors of a serial killer abducting girls from truck stops along I-70. They'd found three bodies in the previous two years. All runaways, drug addicts. Girls of the night.

Girls like Lori didn't have anything to worry about. In Fayette, we were safe from the Monster, who stalked the outskirts of town in search of the next troubled, desperate girl to accept a ride from him.

That was what we thought until the police found Lori's body in a wooded area off the interstate a day after she went missing.

“Do you want me to put on some tea for us?” Maggie asks when we get back to the house. I can tell she's being nice, that she's rattled by everything that happened at the prison and just wants to be alone.

That's fine by me. “I should probably call my gram.”

“Okay.” Maggie leans her back against the kitchen counter. Presses her fingers to her eyelids. When she moves her fingers, she blinks as if she'd never seen me before. She catches herself and forces a smile. “Anything you need, you let me know. Anything.”

I can't ask for the one thing I really need, for Maggie to drive me to Pittsburgh so I can switch my flight to tonight, because I don't know how I'm going to make it until tomorrow.

It's two days. If you survived ten years here, you can survive two more days.

I mumble a “Thank you” to Maggie before heading upstairs. My cell phone is on the nightstand charging, where I left it. I dial Gram's house and get her answering machine. While her greeting plays, I try to figure out what I'm going to say.

I can't tell Gram that my father died before I even got to see him. She'll just feel guilty, even though it's not her fault. I hang up.

I don't have an Internet plan on my cell phone. I share minutes with Gram, even though her phone is always dead, buried in the debris at the bottom of her purse. If I'd had the chance to pack for myself, I would have brought my laptop.

I swallow the lump climbing up my throat. I saw a computer in the family room downstairs.

The top step groans under my weight, and I flinch. I don't like being in an unfamiliar house, where the slightest misstep could mean drawing attention to myself. I've learned how to avoid all the spots in Gram's house like they're land mines—the creaky third step from the bottom of the staircase, the screen door around back that desperately needs its hinges oiled.

The sound of the Greenwoods' front door slamming freezes me in place.

“Callie?” Maggie calls out from the kitchen.

I don't breathe. I feel like I'm ten again—pissed off at Callie for abandoning me, but willing to do anything to catch a glimpse of her.

The first few months at Gram's, I didn't talk much. Eventually, Gram got tired of me moping; she cornered me and pulled the truth out of me, like the way my father used to chase me down and yank the baby teeth out of my mouth when he got sick of watching me wiggling them.

Gram probably expected me to say that I missed my mom or Joslin, but the truth was, I'd already accepted that they were both gone. Callie was all I had left, and Maggie couldn't even get her on the phone with me.

“Yeah?” Callie's voice is low, slightly husky. Nothing like I remember. There's the sound of something being tossed onto the couch in the foyer—a purse, probably—and her footsteps fade into the kitchen.

I grip the banister. This is ridiculous. I can't hide in the guest room for two days.

I tiptoe down the stairs. Maggie and Callie are murmuring in the kitchen. I pause in the foyer, with the sinking feeling that they're having a conversation I wouldn't have been invited to.

I catch pieces of it. Maggie's voice. “…know it's hard for you. She didn't have anywhere else to go.”

“We're not a halfway house, Mom.” Callie's voice. It's angry.

I turn to head back upstairs. The living room floor creaks underneath me. There's a loaded silence in the kitchen.

“Tessa, honey?” Maggie sounds nervous. “Is that you?”

Crap.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I just needed a glass of water.”

Maggie appears next to me in the living room. “Oh, of course. I'm glad you came down, because guess who's home?”

She leads me through the archway. Callie looks up from the table. She's in a green East Stroudsburg University sweatshirt, her honey-brown eyes smudged with day-old eyeliner. She's beautiful, in a way that always made me feel like something that crawled out from a sewer.

Callie meets my gaze, the color draining from her face. And in that moment I see myself exactly how she sees me: Tessa Lowell, her embarrassing, white-trash childhood friend.

The reminder of the year of her childhood that was taken away by the trial.

Maggie looks from her daughter to me. Her eyes are red. I picture her sneaking off when we got home from the prison to have a good cry about seeing Tim Edwards.

“I'm so glad you girls finally get to spend some time together,” Maggie says.

Callie snorts. “Yeah, because I
definitely
asked for this.”

She gets up and pushes her chair in. She's gone before the shock on Maggie's face morphs to anger. Maggie turns to me, her expression strained.

“Tessa, I'm so—”

“It's okay,” I say. “Really.”

Maggie reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “I need to pick up a few things from the supermarket, if you want to come.”

I shake my head and make an excuse about wanting to lie down, then head up to the guest room. I sit on the edge of the bed, palms on my knees, until I hear the front door shut. And then I hurry downstairs to the family room, where the computer is.

I've typed his name so many times that my fingers have memorized the strokes; they're ready once they find the keyboard.

Wyatt Stokes.
He's not in the news often anymore, but the latest article is from last week. It's one I must have missed between picking up all the extra shifts to make my second tuition deposit in time.

JUDGE GRANTS MOTION TO HEAR NEW EVIDENCE IN WYATT STOKES APPEAL

I knew that he was appealing, of course. Stokes fired his first defense attorney right after he was sentenced, and replaced him with Tim Edwards. After years of trying to overturn his conviction, a judge denied Stokes a new trial, saying the first was fair enough. But Edwards said he'd take the appeal to the highest court.

This always happens, but nothing ever comes of it,
my mother explained when I was worried that Stokes would get out and come after Callie and me for testifying against him. Back before I knew that, guilty or innocent, no one goes down without a fight.

I skim the article, but it doesn't say what the new evidence is. Doesn't say when the new hearing will be. It could be years; death row inmates have nothing but time. Until the day they don't.