The Darkest Corners (22 page)

“No, sir. Visiting family.”

The man pauses, a gray, spindly creature in his grasp. My father used to say he'd never touch a fish from a Pennsylvania stream. Too much contamination from the coal plants.

“Family,” the man snorts. A bit of gray dots his beard along his jaw. He's not wearing a shirt, and he has a deep suntan and broad, weathered shoulders. There's a scar on one of them, like a brown dash cutting a sentence off.

I find my voice. “Her name's Annette, but she may be going by something else. She's fair-skinned, average weight…” I falter, suddenly realizing I can't really remember what my mother looks like. It's as if someone had asked me to draw her, and I've come up with a stick figure devoid of details. Panic creeps in; Decker is eyeing me curiously.

“Um, she has freckled arms,” I continue. “Light brown hair. And on her neck, there's like a patch…of discoloration.”

Something flits across the man's face. Recognition, maybe. He turns his attention back to the crawfish. “Don't know nobody like that.”

Decker must have seen it too—the brief second where the man looked like he knew who I was talking about—because he opens his mouth. Before I can grab the sleeve of his T-shirt, Decker says, “I think you can give us a little more than that.”

The man stops cleaning the fish. “I'll give you five seconds to get the fuck out of my face, Boy Scout.”

My heartbeat stalls. Decker's gaze drops to where mine is—on the knife in the man's hands. The one he's using to clean the fish.

I drag Decker into the mini-mart. “People aren't very friendly here,” he mutters as the door tinkles overhead.

The mini-mart is about a thousand degrees. The fans overhead do little more than blow around the hot air. The cash register is conveniently positioned next to the icebox. A sign printed on computer paper says
BAG OF ICE TWO FOR $3
in bleeding ink.

The girl behind the register barely looks up at us. Her face is youthful, but she has the type of tired skin where she could look either really good for thirty or really bad for twenty.

Decker drank all the iced tea in the car, so we head straight back for the fridge where the bottled waters are. I open the fridge door and grab one, while Decker reaches for a Coke.

“Let me handle the talking this time,” I say as we approach the counter.

“Sure, sure,” Decker says.

The register girl looks up and blinks at us.

“Hi there,” Decker says. I elbow him.

“Hi,” the girl says, slowly, tentatively, as she rings up our drinks.

“I was hoping you could help me with something,” I say.

The girl tenses. “Yeah?”

“The mountain,” I say. “People live up in the woods, right?”

She crosses her arms across her chest.

I lower my voice. “I'm not here to bust anyone. I'm just trying to find someone.”

The girl scratches the back of her neck. Glances at the door. “Yeah, there's a lot of people livin' up on the mountain. Sheriff came and ticketed some a couple months ago, but they always find their way back.”

“How many houses are up there?” I ask. “If I went to look around—”

“You go knocking on doors, and you'll be looking down the barrel of a gun.” The girl's voice has a new sharpness to it—one that makes me think that she is older than me, after all. “If you found your own way up here, then you're looking for someone who doesn't want to be found.”

“Not someone,” I say. “My mom.”

The girl's face softens a little. Next to me, Decker sticks his hands into his shorts pockets and rocks back on his heels; he has to physically hold himself back from talking.

“Is this the only place to get groceries around here?” I ask the girl.

“The next place is twenty miles south,” she says.

I describe Annette as I remember her. The girl nods, a quick, almost imperceptible dip of the head.

“Yeah. She comes in here, sometimes.”

The adrenaline zips to my toes.
My mother is here.
I try not to sound overeager. “When was the last time?”

She shrugs. “Last week, maybe.”

My head swims.
Last week.
“If you see her, could you tell her that her daughter is looking for her?”

The girl hesitates, and nods. “Should probably leave your number for her.”

She pushes a pen and an old receipt toward me. I scribble my number on the back. As an afterthought, I write
Tessa
beneath it.

“Thanks,” I say, breathless.

The girl nods again, holding my gaze in a way that makes me feel like I can trust her. If my mother comes down to the grocery store, she'll know I was here, know I was looking for her.

As we leave the store, the man with the crawfish eyeballs us. He's talking to another man now, one with a shaved head and hollow black eyes. I look away.

“So what next?” Decker asks. “Should we head up the mountain and see if your mom's up there? My car can't handle that terrain, but we could hike.”

“Um. I don't know.” I give Decker a look that I hope he'll understand means,
Please lower your damn voice.
The men are still watching us, and they don't seem happy.

Decker glances up the mountain, shielding his eyes from the sun. Smoke rises above the trees, curling toward the mountain's peak.
That could be my mother's fire.

“We've got a while before night falls,” Decker says. “Sucks we don't have boots or long pants or a flashlight, but—”

“Decker,” I say through gritted teeth. The men are coming toward us.

The guy who just showed up is as thin as a pole, hip bones jutting out over the top of his sagging jeans. I spy a swastika buried in the design of the tattoo covering his entire arm.

He's half the size of the crawfish man but ten times more terrifying. I sense Decker go completely still next to me.

“Hey, homeboy,” the skinhead says, putting his face inches from Decker. “It's time for you and your bitch to get lost.”

Decker puts his hands up. They're trembling. “We don't want trouble. She's just here to see her mom.”

The man cracks his knuckles. Each one is tattooed with a different letter, but I can't make out the word it forms. “I don't care what y'all are doing here,” he says. “You're not welcome.”

I finally push the words out. “Let's go, Decker.”

He doesn't object. We power walk the few steps to the car; Decker fumbles with the keys to unlock the door.

“You know,” Decker says once we're locked inside, his breathing shallow, “we could go around town. Find another way to hike up the mountain.”

I stare through the windshield at the expanse of woods climbing up Bear Mountain. Hundreds of square miles of the unknown. We'd have to hide the car, hike up the rest of the way. I don't know which is a worse way to die—at the hands of the skinhead and crawfish man, or getting lost on the mountain and succumbing to the elements.

“What now?” Decker says when I don't respond.

I run my finger along the side of the car door to make sure it's locked. “We get the fuck out of here.”

Decker can tell I'm not in much of a mood to talk on the ride back. He offers me one of the Twizzlers bags. I shake my head and look out the window.

“Do you think that man was a white supremacist?” Decker asks between chews.

“Yeah.” And judging from his reaction to us, I'd wager he's on some sort of FBI watch list. “Sorry I almost got us killed. This was a bad idea.”

“No, it wasn't,” he says. “I mean, now you know your mom definitely lives there, right?”

I turn to meet his eyes; Decker gives me an encouraging smile. I smile back, and he returns his attention to the road.

I lean my head against the window and watch the mountain disappear in the side window. The surge of adrenaline from back in the mini-mart is gone, and hopelessness is working its way in. Suddenly, I'm sure that my mother won't be back to the store anytime soon.

She has to eat,
I argue with myself. But my mind goes to the men fishing at the creek. I think of wild game wandering the woods on the mountain. There are ways she could fend for herself.

Yet in my heart I know that it doesn't sound like her. She could barely feed my sister and me when my father and his income were gone.

Jos was always like Daddy, the one who knew how to survive. My mother and I are lucky if we can figure out how to get by.

I consider the fact that Bear Creek has no cell service. What are the chances my mom even owns a phone?

The store has got to have a landline she can use. I saw power lines along the road.

And the one question I don't want the answer to: Will she even call me if she gets the message?

The radio signal returns about twenty minutes out of Bear Creek, when we're back on the interstate. My phone buzzes in my pocket. A single, long buzz, which means a voice mail.

I flip open the phone, not surprised there's no missed call. It would have gone straight to voice mail while we were in Bear Creek. My fingers tremble over the keys as I punch in my PIN.

“Hey, Kelly. This is Dan over at Smith's Nissan. Give me a call back so we can talk about that Altima! We've got a deal going on the—”

I tune the rest out, waiting for the callback number. It's a good thing I was always too lazy to set up a voice mail greeting. My ears are thrumming; I can't think around the Linkin Park song Decker is blasting. And drumming along to on the steering wheel.

I can't call Danny back in front of Decker. Technically, if there were someone in town I could trust, it would probably be Decker, but I can't ask Danny the tough questions about my sister in front of Decker.

If Decker knew what I suspected Joslin of being involved in—if he knew the real purpose of this trip to find my mother—it would probably cut short his
Tessa and Decker, Adventuring Folk Heroes
fantasy.

We hit a few patches of traffic headed south. It's the longest ride of my life. What if Danny's not there anymore by the time we get home? I can't chase away the nagging thought that I'll be too late, that he'll catch on that something's not right before I get ahold of him. Maybe he'll replay my message and be able to tell from my voice that I'm not looking for a car.

It's after five by the time we get back to Fayette. Decker pulls into the Greenwoods' driveway; the minivan is still gone. Callie and Maggie aren't home from Pittsburgh yet.

“You should call me,” Decker blurts. His ears redden. “If you hear from your mom, I mean. Let me know.”

“Yeah. I will.” I open the door and hop out. I poke my head back into the car. “Hey…thanks.”

“Anytime. Remember, friends?”

Of all the things I thought would happen in Fayette, making friends wasn't one of them. But I'm glad I was wrong.

I wave at Decker and shut the door. He waves back as he pulls out of the driveway, taking the Greenwoods' recycling bin down with the bumper of his car. It's empty, so I pick it up and drag it to the garage.

I don't feel like wasting time fumbling with the front door key, so I head through the gate into the backyard. I sit down on the grass with my back pressed against the fence.

I listen to Danny's voice mail once more to make sure I have the number right, and I'm even more certain than I was yesterday that I have him. I listen to the voice mail again. I'm stalling, of course.

Stop being such a goddamn wuss, Tessa.

I dial; someone picks up on the second ring.

“Dan here.” His voice is bright, bubbly. Ready for a sale. It knocks the wind out of me; the guy I knew was always mumbling around a wad of gum or tobacco in his mouth.

“Danny?” I ask, feeling two inches tall.

He pauses, like it's been a while since someone's called him that. “Who's this?”

I grab a fistful of grass to anchor myself. “My name is Tessa Lowell. Do you remember me?”

A longer pause this time. “How did you get this number?”

The friendliness has leeched from his voice. I tighten my grip on the phone. “Please don't—don't hang up.” I sound like I'm out of breath.

“Look, I don't know what this is about, but I'm real busy—”

“I'm in Fayette,” I say quickly. “I'm trying to find Joslin.”

Danny snorts. “I sure as hell don't know what happened to her.”

What happened to her,
I notice. Not,
where she is.
My stomach clenches.

“I'm not trying to narc on you or anything,” I say. “But I know you used her as your alibi, for the night the house in Arnold exploded. I need to know if she was really with you.”

I can practically hear the gears in Danny's head turning. How much do I know? I'm shocked when he speaks instead of hanging up on me.

“No, Jos wasn't with me,” he says, sighing. “I told her to say she was, because I'd gotten mixed up in some stupid shit, but that was ten years ago. I'm clean now, and I haven't heard from her since she took off.”

“Do you know where she actually was that night?” I ask, feeling the hope inside me swell up like a balloon.

“No idea,” Danny says. “When I called her that night to see what she was up to, she said she was on her way to her friend's house to pick you up.”

She was on her way to the Greenwoods'? That makes no sense; Jos wouldn't have picked me up in the middle of the night unless something was seriously wrong. That, and if she did come to get me, she obviously never made it.

“You there?” Danny says.

I swallow, hoping it will calm the thumping in my chest. “It's just…she didn't pick me up.”

“I know.” Danny's voice is grave. “Guess she didn't make it there in time. Jos is lucky. If she were there, it might have been her.”

Lucky, maybe. Or maybe Joslin
did
make it to the Greenwoods' in time. Only it wasn't to pick me up.

The slashed screen window could have been a ruse. My sister wasn't stupid—if she had killed Lori and staged her body like one of the Monster's victims, Jos would have thought to make it look like someone had broken into the house.

“Look, kiddo, I want you to find her, but she and I were done
months
before she left,” Danny says. “I'm the last person she would have told where she was going.”

No. No, you're not. You don't know my mother.
She's
the last person Jos would have told.

“After Lori died—was Jos different?” I ask, hesitant to clue Danny in on
why
Jos would have been different. “Did she say or do anything…weird?”

“I mean, yeah, she was real bummed about Lori,” Danny says.

Bummed.
Like we were talking about the Eagles losing the Super Bowl. Jos was devastated after Lori's death—missing her shifts at work, unable to get out of bed to help me get ready for school. It hits me that Danny never really knew my sister at all and he's just another ghost I've been chasing.

“She did she say was fighting with her mom a lot,” Danny says. “That if it weren't for you, she would have been out of there.”

My eyes prick. I can't let my emotions undo me right now. “Did she say anything about her real father, or maybe going to live with him?”

“That's pretty much what she and her mom—I mean, your mom too—were fighting about.” There's a low hiss on the other end, like Danny has cracked open a can. “She wanted to know who her dad was, and your mom wouldn't say, because she didn't want Jos to meet him.”

Alan Something-or-other, the man my mother followed to Louisiana. The man who didn't want the baby who didn't make it, and who was abusive to my mother once Jos was born.

“Did Jos ever find him?” I ask.

“I don't know,” Danny says. “But I hope she did. She deserved to know where she came from.”

I wonder if that's why my mother kept Jos's father from her; she didn't want my sister to see for herself that Alan in Louisiana hadn't wanted her. Maybe Annette was just trying to protect her, and Jos was too stubborn to see it.

“Thanks, Danny,” I say. “Will you—will you call me if you think of anything that might help me find her?”

“Sure. Hey, kiddo,” he says gently as I'm about to press the button to hang up.“Good luck. Give Jos my best when you find her.”

When I hang up with Danny, I have to run upstairs, where my cell charger is. I've got only one bar of battery left, and from here on out my phone stays with me, charged, all the time. Just in case my mother calls.

I lie on my side and watch my phone on the pillow next to me.

I found Danny. Now I have to decide if I believe him.

I map out a scenario in my head. The night of Lori's murder, Danny is in Arnold with Mike and Tommy Faber, and everything goes to hell when the meth house explodes. Danny realizes he needs someone to place him in Fayette and calls Joslin. She says she's going to pick me up from the Greenwoods. She just had an argument with Lori over the phone, which she doesn't tell Danny about.

Or maybe she did, and Danny conveniently didn't tell me that part. Jos could have told Danny that Lori knew what the guys were doing in Arnold; maybe the Fabers heard, and panicked, realizing Lori could implicate them in the explosion. They decided they had to kill her and left to come back to Fayette.

But it's unlikely that Danny and the Fabers would be in any state to rush back to Fayette in time to kill Lori and move her body after their drug operation exploded. In the state they were probably in, someone was bound to notice them in the Greenwoods' neighborhood, if they were there. Three different people saw the suspicious man who was casing the neighborhood, looking for his cat that afternoon.

No one saw anything suspicious in the moments before the murder. The most likely scenario is that the killer was alone, or not suspicious-looking.

Downstairs, there's the sound of the front door opening. Then voices: Maggie's and Callie's. I freeze, as if I were an intruder. Something feels wrong about being here while they were gone.

The voices lift—they're arguing. I stick my head out the door to hear them better, but all I can make out is that it seems like Maggie's trying to calm Callie down. I inch toward the top of the stairs.

“You can't just burst in there, Callie—”

“He did this.” Callie sounds hysterical. “Mr. Kouchinsky did this. I know it.”

I can't help myself. I take the first three steps down so I'm visible. “Daryl did what?”

Maggie and Callie look up at me. Maggie hesitates.

“Katie Kouchinsky is in the hospital,” Callie says. Her eyeliner is smeared. “One of her friends—a girl we drove to tryouts today—says she needs stitches.”

Callie's leg jiggles so hard, it looks like it's going to give out beneath her. She turns to Maggie. “You don't understand. I have to see her—”

“I'll take you later, then,” Maggie says. “I have to get dinner started.”