The Darkest Corners (6 page)

“It was nice seeing you,” I lie to Marie. I shoulder my way through the sea of bodies, stopping when I see Ryan lean in and say something into Callie's ear. She jerks away from him, knocking her purse off the bleachers. Ryan bends to help her pick up her things; from here, I can see that he's still talking. The color drains from Callie's face.

I reach them as Callie stands, stumbling over her own feet. I grab her arm to stop her from face-planting. “What is wrong with you?” I hiss.

“I just need to get home,” she mumbles. “Ryan's taking me. Us. Unless you want to call my parents for a ride.”

I'd sooner walk than call Maggie and Rick, and I'm not about to let some guy lead Callie into his truck alone while she's completely trashed—even if it's only Ryan Elwood. I follow them out to the lot, where Ryan stops beside a red pickup truck. Callie stumbles for the door. I think she's going to vomit all over the pavement, but she climbs through to the backseat and stretches out.

I bite back my annoyance at having to sit up front with a stranger. Ryan climbs into the driver's seat and grips the wheel. After a few minutes, Callie starts snoring lightly. I relax a bit; as long as she's making noise, I don't have to worry she's going to pull a Jimi Hendrix back there.

Ryan's truck starts with a low rumble. He reaches for the radio, but pulls his hand back at the last second, probably realizing that this situation doesn't call for music.

“What did you say to Callie?” I ask.

He lifts his eyebrows. “I didn't—”

“I saw you,” I say quietly. “By the bleachers. You said something to her, and it freaked her out.”

Ryan massages his jaw. Unnecessarily adjusts his rearview mirror. “I didn't realize. I forgot about her cousin.”

My heart goes still in my chest. “Her cousin Lori?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan hits the speed bump at the parking lot exit. Callie rolls forward and lets out a small “Oof.”

“Sorry,” Ryan mutters. I stare at his profile until he turns his head and notices me.

“What did you
say
to her?” I ask.

Ryan scratches his nose with his thumb. Drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I told her how Ari was killed.”

Killed,
not died. It feels like a punch to the stomach.
Died
means that maybe Ari got into her car in the rest stop parking lot, closed her eyes, and that was that. A heart murmur, maybe, or one of those migraines you never wake up from.

Killed
means she knew exactly what was happening to her. I swallow hard, trying to shut down the sounds in my head. Ari begging for her life. Ari screaming, trying to fight back.

“How do you know how she was killed?” I ask Ryan. “They're not…No one's said yet how it happened.”

Ryan's quiet; I think back to last night, of how he said his uncle would know if someone had reported Ari missing. His uncle, the cop. Cold sweat breaks out on my forehead, and I know whatever Ryan says is going to be true.

Ryan taps his pinky against the steering wheel, steady like a metronome. I'm going to explode.

“I was her friend,” I say.

The tapping stops. Ryan hesitates. “You can't tell anybody, all right?”

“I don't have anybody to tell,” I say, even though it's probably not the response he was looking for. Ryan exhales.

“She was strangled,” he says. “And naked.”

I swallow. That can't mean what I think it means—but obviously Ryan's noticed the connection too, or he wouldn't have said anything to Callie in the first place.

“Where did they find her?” I ask, even though I already suspect the answer.

“Off 74, not far from the truck stop. Guy pulled over to pee and saw her clothes…called it in, and they found her a few miles away.” He swallows. “She was by the river.”

Just like the other girls. I brush my hand against the side of the seat and find a space where the filling from the cushion is leaking. I imagine tearing it open and climbing inside. Never coming out.

I should never have come back here at all.

“I don't know. It just made me sick, thinking of Ari like that.” Ryan's eyes flick to the rearview mirror, pointed down to reflect Callie's still face. “I don't know why I told Cal….They haven't even told Ari's family yet. So please don't say anything.”

I stare out the window, the streetlights zipping past the truck in rhythm, as if punctuating the names in my head. Marisa Perez. Rae Felice. Kristal Davis. Lori Cawley. And now, Ariel Kouchinsky.

“They obviously don't want the news to find out how she died,” Ryan rambles on. “They'll try to spin it like there's another serial killer out here.”

The pause that follows feels so long, I'm surprised Callie doesn't feel the tension and wake up.

“You don't think it's weird that she was killed the same way and in the same place that Callie's cousin was?” I ask.

Ryan runs a thumb down the side of his jaw. His mouth hangs open for a moment before he says, “The guy who killed all those girls is in jail. It's gotta be a coincidence. Or some sick fuck obsessed with the murders, maybe.”

A coincidence.

A copycat.

Or a third explanation. One I don't dare say with Callie in the car, because of what it means for us.

Everything is all wrong. The police were wrong about who killed Lori and those other girls—they were wrong, and the Monster's still out there.

We helped them get the wrong guy, and Ari could be dead because of it.

From the backseat, Callie mutters something that's barely audible, but I can just make it out.

“I never got to tell her I'm sorry.”

Ryan helps me get Callie into bed. Once he leaves, I slip her phone out of her pocket and text Maggie.
Didn't feel well. Tessa and I got a ride home.
I open her bedroom window to air out the room. She's starting to sweat out the poison she put into her body earlier. Outside, thick summer rain begins to fall in sheets.

I close Callie's door and shut myself in the guest room. After I change into my pajamas, I crawl under the bed and stick my earbuds in. My fingers are trembling so hard that it takes me three tries to find the song I'm looking for—Peter Gabriel's “Red Rain.”

When I close my eyes, all I see is Ariel with her Rainbow Brite backpack, floating facedown in the Ohio River.

I think of Wyatt Stokes—blond ponytail, sullen, hollow eyes.

Wyatt Stokes, who strangled his victims and left them naked along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania.

Wyatt Stokes, who couldn't have killed Ariel, because he's in jail.

Stokes was twenty-three around the time of the first murder—Marisa Perez, a seventeen-year-old runaway. Eight months later was Rae Felice, twenty, a truck-stop prostitute.

A year later they found the remains of Kristal Davis, nineteen, a stripper and a drug addict who'd gone missing a month earlier. Someone leaked to the media that Fayette County was dealing with a serial killer. But no one was really worried. The killer was targeting the types of girls who didn't have anyone to worry about them.

Until Lori Cawley. A sophomore at Drexel. Second in her class at Lehigh Valley High School. The girl you noticed on the yearbook page because of her smile.

No one in Fayette really questioned that Stokes was the one who killed the girls. He was a high school dropout who'd spent a couple years in juvie for burning his stepmother's garage down. He had stringy hair down to his shoulders and hollow eyes. The kind of guy you'd see walking alongside the road and you'd lock your car doors.

As Charlie Volk, the detective who arrested him, said in a now infamous quote,
Wyatt Stokes just
looked
like a serial killer.

It also didn't help that Stokes was an asshole.

He just couldn't shut up. In the interrogation room, he smiled when he touched the crime scene photos. When the cops raided his trailer, they found disturbing sketches of girls. Dead, naked girls with the word
bitch
scrawled on them over and over on every inch of free space.

Stokes granted an interview after his sentencing, saying that he'd really been subjected to “trial by the media” and that if he were black, some lawyer from the NAACP or ACLU would have taken his case by now.

So yeah, most people tended to agree that even if Stokes didn't kill those girls, he still deserved to be locked up.

The case against Stokes was never airtight. There were witnesses who placed him at the truck stops, looking for drugs or odd jobs, where the other girls had been regulars. Stokes was a creep who had threatened a slew of ex-girlfriends and ex-bosses—anyone who didn't give him what he wanted.

But the only real evidence linking Stokes to the murders was a denim fiber found on Kristal Davis's body that matched a pair of Stokes's jeans. An eyewitness placed Kristal in the Stokeses' trailer the day she disappeared, and when the police questioned Stokes, he said he hadn't seen Kristal in weeks, before changing his story and saying they'd done drugs together that morning.

It was me and Callie who put the final nail into his coffin, though. We testified via a closed-circuit TV feed on the second to last day of Wyatt Stokes's trial. We described what happened that morning at the pool and identified Stokes as the man who threatened Lori. We swore that it was the same man sneaking into the Greenwoods' yard the night Lori was murdered.

The jury deliberated for a day and found him guilty of all four murders.

Then the rest of the world forgot about Fayette, Pennsylvania, and all its dead girls.

I can't sleep or bring myself to pack for my flight tomorrow morning, so I lie in the darkness with my music, replaying in my head my entire conversation with Marie Durels, until Ariel's face blurs with Lori's.

Several songs later, I lower the volume on my iPod, sensing someone else in the room. From my spot under the bed, I can see the door cracked open. I dig my nails into my thighs. Next to my ear, bare feet pad across the carpet. The toenails are painted turquoise. I let out a sigh of relief.

“Tessa?” Callie whispers.

I flatten my body and wiggle out from under the bed. Callie's brow creases.

“Were you sleeping under there?” She looks better than she did earlier. The color has returned to her face, and she's showered. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a bun.

“I…What are you doing here?” I get up and sit on the bed, as if she were the one acting bizarrely. The clock on the wall says it's almost one.

“We need to talk,” she whispers. She sits at the end of the bed. Delicately tucks her feet underneath her. She looks around the room, almost like she's in a stranger's house and not her own.

“About what?” I ask. I know exactly what she's here to talk about. But I need to hear her say it. We weren't supposed to discuss the trial while it was going on, so our mothers kept us apart. By the time it was over, there was some sort of seismic shift in our friendship. On the rare days when Callie felt like having me over to play, Maggie was always within earshot, hovering as if we'd disappear the moment she turned her back.

Even if I'd had the nerve to ask Callie if she'd really seen the face of the person in her yard that night, I never would have gotten her alone to do it.

“About what Ryan said in the car.” Callie squeezes her eyes shut. Collects herself and exhales. “It could still be a coincidence.”

“Maybe,” I say quietly.

The clock on the wall ticks, filling the space between us. Callie hugs her knees to her chest. “I looked up his appeal….A lot of people really believe he didn't do it.”

“I know.” I've known since I was old enough to search for the answers. As soon as I could use the Internet on my own, I knew that there were people who believed Wyatt Stokes wasn't the Ohio River Monster.

Callie casts her eyes down, picks at a chip in the polish on her big toe. “He could get a new trial this time. If there's a link between Ari and the other girls…he could
get out.
”

Wyatt Stokes, out of prison. Wyatt Stokes, who knows our names.

“My parents can't afford to move again,” Callie says. “I'm going to Stroudsburg, but they can't leave Fayette, and my dad's job.”

“Callie,” I say, her name feeling unfamiliar on my lips. “What did you really see that night?”

A tear snakes down her cheek. “I didn't lie.”

“I never said you did.”

We just sort of stare at each other for a bit.

“Did you really see his face?” I finally ask.

I expect her to get angry. Storm out on me. Instead, her voice goes soft, and she says, “I don't know anymore.”

The silence in the room is loaded; the sound of the clock's second hand hangs in the air like a bomb ticking.

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying I was just a little kid, and I could have been wrong about seeing his face. Of course, I
thought
I did—Stokes was like the bogeyman, and I was so scared that he'd come after Lori after what he'd said to her.”

Angry tears stream down her pink cheeks. She's not looking at me anymore.

Is that why you shut me out?
I want to ask.
You thought I knew you lied?

“Even if I was wrong,” Callie says, “there was evidence he killed those other girls. He didn't even get up on the stand and deny it. They had enough to convict him.”

“Maybe,” I say. But I don't know if I've ever fully believed that. Not with the things I know about how that night really went down.

The things that the jury didn't hear. The things that Callie still doesn't know.

I swallow and bunch up the comforter in my fist.

“What did you tell them?” Callie whispers. “When they asked you what you saw?”

“I said you woke me up and said someone was outside,” I say. “The person ran around the side of the yard. I had heard you say it was Stokes, and the police kept hammering it into us that our stories had to match.”

I pick a pill of fleece off the comforter and flick it away. “So I said it was Stokes. Even though I never saw their face.”

“
His
face,” Callie says.

I'm quiet for a beat.

“You don't think Stokes did it,” Callie finally whispers. Her face says what I feared, that this is the ultimate betrayal of the Greenwoods. It's one thing to question what we saw that night, but in this house “Wyatt Stokes is the Ohio River Monster” is an irrefutable fact.
Y
equals
y
.

“I just want to know what really happened,” I say. The truth is, I
have
to know. Some days I think I'll explode from not knowing.

“If this means the real Monster is still out there, we have to figure out what really happened,” I correct myself. “He could go after other girls. Maybe he never stopped, and the police just haven't found those girls yet.”

I swallow away the sick taste in my mouth. I think of all the girls no one would miss, what's left of them washed away with the detritus from the river.

“You mean we have to take back our statements,” Callie whispers. “My family would never forgive me.”

“No. We can't do that unless we're absolutely sure,” I say. “We have to be sure.”

“How are we going to do that?” Callie wraps her arms around her middle. “It happened almost
ten years ago.
If someone besides us saw something, they would have said something back then.”

The pit in my stomach grows. “Unless they had a reason to stay quiet.”

“Where would we even start?” Callie says. “You're talking about finding a
murderer.
”

Or murderers.
I don't dare say it—that it's possible Lori wasn't killed by the Monster at all, but by someone who wanted to make it seem that way.

I wipe my palms on the knees of my pajamas. The room feels like a sauna—small, suffocating. “We were there when Lori was taken. There has to be something we missed…something that could help us put everything together.”

“But you're going home tomorrow,” Callie says.

It feels weird, hearing someone call Florida
home.
For me, it's always been where Gram's house is. A pit stop along the way in this giant circle I'm walking.

Because Fayette isn't home either. It's just the place where I started. The place I'd do anything to leave behind for good. And if Callie and I make this whole thing with Stokes right, then maybe I'll be able to.

“I'll reschedule my flight,” I say.

“Okay.” A breath leaves Callie in a low hiss. “So where do we start?”

“I don't know yet.”

It's a lie, spun out of the truth I've been holding on to all these years. The part of the story I didn't tell the prosecutors because I didn't want her to get in trouble and get taken away from me. The part that I had almost convinced myself meant nothing, until now.

My sister knows something about that night. She knows who besides Wyatt Stokes would have wanted to hurt Lori.

I know, because an hour before we finally went to sleep that night, I heard Lori call Joslin and tell her to stay the hell away from her.