The Telling (3 page)

Willa's arms go around my shoulders, and I angle against her like a kickstand.

Carolynn trips from the shadows between the trees and braces her hands on her knees. “I . . . called . . . for help,” she wheezes. A cell falls to the towel at her feet. The flashlight app's white glow washes us colorless as snow. The chill of the fast approaching night pinpricks me everywhere, filling me with every bit of cold in the whole state of Washington. I blink hard when I see water crystallize in Maggie's hair. This isn't happening.

Carolynn looks to the familiar figure on the ground. “Shit, it's
her
.”

“Why isn't the CPR working?” Becca cries. She's up on her knees now, swaying and wringing her hands.

Rusty paces, yanking on clumps of his hair. “Josh, why are you stopping?”

Josh is straightened up after suctioning his mouth to Maggie's a fourth time. He keeps his purposeful stare on her. “Because it's not bringing her back.”

Rusty squints at the neon digital face of his wristwatch. “You don't know that,” he says. “It's only been a few minutes.”

“Spaz, we've been here the whole day. She's been under for hours.” Duncan throws a sopping-wet towel at Rusty.

“But you can't just give up on someone.” Rusty stoops over Maggie, gets right in Josh's face, and starts shaking him by the shoulders.
“Do something.”
Rusty's voice goes uneven. His seams are ripping.

“Get out of his face.” Duncan steps forward and shoves him. Rusty trips back, catches himself with a wide, wobbly stride, and then a second later, pivots to throw his weight into a punch. Rusty's fist connects with Duncan's square jaw. Duncan absorbs it, groans, shrugs off the pain, and tackles Rusty. The exchange
takes only five seconds, as the rest of us are frozen.

Rusty isn't as broad and muscular as Duncan, who spends mornings lifting weights. Rusty is corded and flexible, built for stealing bases, and he crashes to the rocks, landing with Duncan on top of him. Rusty's head snaps back and collides with the rough surface. Duncan's instantly off him. “Bro, bro,” he cries, “are you okay, man?”

Carolynn rushes forward. Becca starts crying, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.”

Rusty rolls onto his side. His eyes are squinched shut as he coughs big, whooping barks. I almost cry out in relief. Carolynn kneels at his chest. She looks to Duncan coldly. “Were you trying to give him a concussion?”

“He punched me first,” Duncan says lamely.

“You pushed him first,” Carolynn snaps.

“Car,” Rusty wheezes.
“I'm okay.”

Josh remains crouched at obviously dead Maggie's sternum. Carolynn keeps laying into Duncan. “Why do you have to act like such an animal? Why does everything come down to you trying to prove you've got more testosterone than everyone else?”

“Josh?” Becca whispers. “Can a hospital help her?”

“No, B,” Josh says, scrubbing one hand over his weary eyes. “She's dead.”

Maggie's dark hair is a curtain over her face; only a sharp nose peeks through as a white little iceberg. Her pale form stands out against the night. She has the look of a character from one of Ben's stories. My throat tightens. She reminds me of the lily-pad maiden who was strangled by a mad king and left in a watery grave. I never thought Maggie was pretty and now there's a celestial quality to her, like we fished her from the liquid moon of an outlying planet. I spent
years trying to figure out what Ben saw in Maggie. And now she's dead.

I thought I'd never see Maggie again after she went missing seven weeks ago. I was glad—
relieved
. It hurt to look at her off-center ponytail of brownish-red, henna-tinted hair, her coal-lined eyes glaring, her clomping, steel-toed boots missing their laces and pulled over fishnets, and her bony, long fingers always two seconds away from flipping me off. What right did she have to be alive, and as pissed-off and disaffected as she wanted to be, when it was because of her that Ben was dead?

As much as I didn't want to, I also
needed
to see her, needed to corner her and make her tell me why and how. And now, with water bloating her lungs, it's too late.

Her lines blur and bleed into the night, as if she's a wet ink blot spreading on paper. As if night has unhinged its jaw and is swallowing her whole, making her disappear like it did Ben. There's static in my ears. A wormhole opens up in time, and I can see clear through its passageway to a night two months ago.

The night everything that mattered changed.

I
t was June 8, half past eleven. Ben's and my movie night had been interrupted. We'd eaten lobster tacos and I drank two beers, which was two more beers than I'd ever had before. Then a pissy Maggie arrived.

She and Ben started fighting—a blustery, name-calling argument. He'd broken up with her five days earlier. She wasn't supposed to show up at our house anymore. She had to accept they were over. For good. Although I didn't pick up on it as it played out, it was suspicious that she had a friend drop her off, only to demand a ride home.
No
, she wouldn't let Ben call her a car when he offered.
No
, she wouldn't sleep off her buzz in the downstairs guest room.

I'd given Ben a sleepy and inebriated frown as we stood in the hallway while she used the bathroom. “Please.” He bent nearer, the light in his eyes diminishing until his forehead touched mine. He was all I could see. “I don't want to be alone with her. Come. Save me.”

The three of us braced ourselves against the early summer breeze as we filed along the path to where Ben's SUV waited in our driveway. I was pouting, letting my flip-flops spray pebbles at Maggie's heels.
She scowled at me before she climbed into the front passenger seat—without even bothering to call shotgun. I sat in the back, pulled my knees to my chest, leaned against the window. “Turn the heater on,” I whined. I stuck my earbuds in and was listening to the kind of angry, screeching punk I don't even like just to tune her voice out. And here's the second worst thing I've ever done.

I fell asleep, and I couldn't tell the police what happened next.

Two hours later my ears buzzed with the sharp, stuttered
ding
of car doors left ajar as the police tried to make sense of the blood splatter in the interior. The engine had been left running. My earbuds dangled out of the rear door, where I'd thrown them after yanking my cell free to dial 911. Each time the breeze picked up they swung, grating against the road. I'd never use them again.

The wind hissed through the pines behind Maggie and me. The police had set up perimeter lights; they stretched our shadows and threw them back at sharp angles. Mine was trying to detach from my feet; it wanted to run and hide. A police officer, his finger on the trigger of a camera, blinded me in intervals. The light flashed in my peripheral vision as a second officer captured the splatter on Maggie's face, arms, and torso. Ben's blood had gotten in my mouth; it was all I could taste as we waited for the detective Gant PD had called in from Seattle to direct the investigation.

Detective Sweeny started a mile down the highway, with another group of officers examining the crime scene where Maggie and I had left Ben to his attacker. Sweeny was small and wiry, cutting through the blockish male cops in uniform. She sized us up with close-set eyes as she approached. Unlike every other officer, her gaze stayed steady, ticking over the details of us like Willa absorbing a study
guide before an exam. Sweeny didn't flinch away from all that blood.
We'll be okay now,
I thought.

Sweeny introduced herself. She was a homicide detective. Then she held up her hand when my expression went runny and frantic and added, “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The
detective
part is why I'm here.” She asked me if I'd been able to reach my parents. They were in Seattle overnight and their phones were off, and she measured her words even more carefully when I told her there was no one else to call. Ben hadn't been found; the police were searching; the coast guard had been mobilized.

I wanted to help them look. Sweeny put her firm grip on my shoulder. “The best way for you to help is to tell me exactly what transpired. Leave nothing out.”

Only Maggie knew the first half. She could lie and I wouldn't be able to contradict her. We were a couple of miles before the narrow bridge that connects Gant Island with the Olympic Peninsula. It was the only route to take Maggie to where she lived, off the island. Maggie told the police that Ben and she were arguing. The car slowed. Maggie looked up to see why. To the right there were rocky bluffs that plunged to the island's heaving waters. To the left there was a dark, meadowy slope that ran until a distant wall of pines.

“A man appeared in the middle of the highway,” Maggie whispered.

“Where did he appear from?” Sweeny asked. “The trees aren't close to the road. Was he hiding behind something?”

“No. He wasn't there and then he was.
He appeared
,” Maggie insisted, her voice rising. “Ben stopped the car. Rolled down the window and asked if the man needed help. Um, I think he offered his cell or asked if the guy's car had broken down.”

“Did you see another vehicle?” Sweeny asked.

“Don't think so.”

“Then why would Ben ask about car trouble?”

Maggie shrugged.

“He stopped the car, rolled down his window, and offered help. Seems strange that Ben would have been so friendly if the man just ‘appeared,' ” Sweeny pressed.

Maggie said, “Ben is charitable and shit. How do I know what he was thinking? He is always
helping
.” She rolled her eyes. “But the guy was in front of the car one second and the next he was right at Ben. And I started screaming.”

Sweeny's eyebrows shot up. “Did he have a weapon?”

“I didn't see it.”

“Why were you screaming, then?” Sweeny said like she'd caught Maggie in a lie.

“Because his face was red. Painted,” Maggie said. The clouds were disintegrating in the sky as she spoke, and the stars that were revealed began orbiting us. I had to work to keep my feet stationary on the road, which started buckling under me like the black, netted skin of a trampoline.

“What kind of paint?”

“How would I know?” Maggie snapped.

Maggie said that she hadn't recognized the man on the road.

“Is it possible you knew him and you just didn't recognize him because of the paint obscuring his features?” Sweeny asked her that night—and probably every time she questioned Maggie over the course of the week after.

“No, I saw him clearly,” Maggie insisted. “He was a stranger. The
paint was frightening, but I'm positive I don't know him.”

Maggie was asked how the attack started. She was vague and confused—traumatized, I thought initially. “He reached through the window for Ben. To get to him, to stab, I mean. Blood squirted on my face and Ben was shouting. Then the door was open and Ben was out of the car and dragged across the road. The stranger's hand kept coming up and down, stabbing Ben.”

“What was he stabbing him with? A knife?” Sweeny asked.

I lurched around and vomited onto the gravelly shoulder as Maggie answered, “I couldn't make the object out. . . . It was sharp.” She added hoarsely, “I heard it cutting skin.” I thought we were both in shock. I didn't notice the oddness of her story until I was out of the fog of that night.

Sweeny asked us both what happened next. I couldn't say why I woke up when I did. I'd been pouting, and then I was lulled to sleep for the first few miles. I wasn't dreaming exactly as much as thinking nonsense things dreamily. Somehow between watching the Cheshire smile of a tiger I'd seen on TV earlier drift through my head and sensing that I was in our dinghy on the harbor, I was struck with the conviction that something bad was happening. My eyes snapped open. I tugged the earbuds from my ears before I was fully alert. Maggie was screaming.
Shrieking.
The car wasn't moving. We were on the highway. The driver's-side door was open.

“Where's Ben?” I asked.

Maggie screamed more shrilly.

I jolted awake completely. Everything rushed in at once. The windows were tinted and it was night and there wasn't a moon. Unexceptional. This is Washington. Clouds always fill the sky. The
car interior light was on and moths were fluttering inside the cab. I saw past the yellow papery wings to a figure. A shadow man, I told the police. He was lumbering, or limping, or dragging a clubbed foot. He passed through the SUV's high beams. He was dragging some living thing. He was immense, a part of the dark, darkness personified. He moved across the highway toward the rocky bluff that swung out above the tide pools.

It was the strangest thing. Surreal as flipping through TV channels and landing on a horror movie. You haven't been watching. Your pulse isn't racing. The gruesome scene is almost lost on you. But then I heard a broken grunt, and I put it together. The shadow man had Ben.

My hands shook. They were slick and slipped from the rear passenger-side door lever. When I finally got a grip, I yanked and nothing happened. The child lock was on—although I only realized this in hindsight. I was shouting at Maggie to go after them. To get out of the fucking car and to help Ben. She scrambled over the emergency brake to the driver's seat, and I thought,
Maybe her door isn't working either
? She had stopped screaming.

She pulled the driver's door closed. It didn't latch all the way, and the interior glow of the car stayed on. There was blood everywhere. Red graffiti sprayed across the black roof and smattering the leather seats. I looked to my hands and saw that it wasn't sweat but blood making my fingers slippery. Maggie hit the accelerator, the car swerving before righting itself on the road. I was sitting sideways, pushing against the door, and with the force, I shot back, my temple crunched against the window. My ears rang. Maggie wasn't rescuing Ben. She was leaving him.
We were leaving him.
I pressed my face to
the window, trying to see. My eyes weren't working. Everything was fuzzy. The phantom man was stooped over Ben. Ben was a heap at his feet on the bluff above the sound. Neither of them were more than shadowy outlines.