Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (17 page)

AMELIA

T
he deer crashed away into the brush as the engine
tick-tick-ticked
and then slowed, and died. Terrified into silence, they both watched the bobbing white of her tail as it vanished through a cut between the bushes and into the dark.

When Amelia spoke, her voice was cold and thick with fury.

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

Luke, his bravado cracked, answered her in a tiny, terrified squeak that would have been funny if not for the still-too-close memory of his baseless accusations, the suggestion that she’d slept her way to the top.

“Hang on,” he whispered.

He turned the key in the ignition. There was a cough, and then, incredibly, the purr of the motor.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Okay.”

“Okay?” she snapped, exasperated. “We’re in a freaking
cornfield
.”

Ahead of them, a long dirt track wound away through the tall green architecture of the cornstalks, many still heavy with green-husked ears that grew out at angles, a soft tuft of silk waving at the end like a tiny flag. In the dark, they looked like skeletons, clustered together uncertainly and whispering over the alien machine that had appeared at the edge of their field. When the breeze blew lightly down the rows, they brushed against each other with a sound like paper.

It gave her the creeps.

Luke ignored her, throwing the car into reverse and backing away.

Amazing,
she thought, realizing how close they had come to ruining somebody’s crop.

Instead, he had veered right onto the dirt path and clipped only two stalks, which lay like fallen soldiers among their still-standing brethren. She watched the line recede—they waved in the wind,
good-bye
—and then they were on the side of the road.

Luke put the car in park and turned to her.

“Look,” he said. For a moment, she thought with relief that he might apologize. Her stomach tied itself into a tight knot when she saw that the cold, cruel look had come back into his face.

“I don’t—” she began, and he held up a finger.
Shh
.

“Just tell me the truth,” he said. “You fucked him, right?”

Shocked, she could only stare.

“C’mon,” he said, his voice louder. “Just tell me the truth. You
fucked him
.”

Recovering, she leveled her gaze at him and did not blink. In a voice dripping with contempt, she said, “You know I didn’t.”

He scoffed, and she raised her voice. “You’re pathetic, you know that? It didn’t have to be like this! All you had to do was bend the tiniest bit, just give up your precious, precious plan—”

“Oh, that’s rich,” he snapped. “My plan was fine, until that asshole made you think I wasn’t good enough—but you had to be special, right? You had to be a
star
. How many other girls do you think he’s told that to, just to get in their pants?”

Her mouth dropped open. He’d scored a point there, he thought, and began to shout at her.

“Why don’t you just admit that you did it, huh? You fucked him! C’mon, Ame, why not admit it? Why the big secret?!”

She was quiet for a minute, her lips still parted and the look of disbelief still painted on her face. She began to shake her head, slowly, then crossed her arms and sighed, turning away, refusing to look at him.

“I’m not doing this with you anymore, Luke,” she said, quietly. “You won’t believe me anyway.”

He sat back, mimicking her, crossing his arms and allowing his smile to become smug.

“Yeah, I knew it. I’ve got you pegged, haven’t I? I knew you couldn’t do it by yourself.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she snapped.

“All that talk,” he said. “All those things you said, wanting to do it all different. Wanting to talk dirty. Look, I’m just saying, I knew it.”

She stared at him. His eyes were glazed, glassy, blazing with triumph behind his glasses, and as his lip curled in a sneer, she felt it happen.

Her love for him—whatever shred of it was left—was gone. It had slunk away into the night. It would die out there, and she would not be sorry to leave it, at the side of the road, in a no-name town surrounded by nothing but blackness.

Quietly, she said, “Knew what, exactly?”

He licked his lips.

“I knew you’d never turn into such a whore without a little help.”

“Good-bye.”

The word was out, and she was gone. Out of the car in a flash of fabric and tossed blond hair, gone so quickly that he barely had time to react. He flung open his own door and looked wildly around—she had run to the back, was trying to open the trunk, and he rushed at her while the vast night yawned away in all directions. There was only the car, the slap of his feet on the pavement, the slim yellow lines that ran unassumingly along the road and disappeared evenly into the distance. And her.

Her.

She saw him coming and moved away, past the hood and into the twin beams of the headlights, and turned under the dizzying canopy of stars with her mouth wide open and her eyes squeezed down to tiny slits.

“It’s over!” she screamed, and he could only stare. He stumbled, feeling dizzy, feeling drunk with jealousy and rage.

He clutched at the door as she turned away, walking with her head held high. Hot tears appeared at the corners of his eyes and he swiped them away, hating them, hating his impotence in the face of her anger.

It’s over.

He could not make her stop.

Could not keep her.

Could not make her stay.

CHAPTER
21

A
raindrop, early and alone in the face of the coming storm, fell from the sky and punched against my temple. It exploded, slithered and slipped through the loose hair near my ear, disappeared under the curve of my jaw.

I was alone.

I hadn’t moved for five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, as the wind began to blow harder and the dark puddle of Craig’s blood stopped seeping and sneaking away in rivulets on the asphalt. Without touching it, I knew that it had turned sticky, knew that it was drying against the heat of the road just as the dead girl’s had done so many days before. When she had bled. When she had died.

Inside the restaurant, shadows moved along the wall and behind the bar, frenetic waves of dark and light as the men inside made some attempt to tell their story. Led inside and with the door locked behind them, I imagined them stumbling backward through the past while the police listened and shook their heads, while the silver circlets of handcuffs bit deeper into their wrists, until they reached the beginning. Before the first kick, before the first punch, before the rock had glanced off Craig’s broad shoulder, when the air had been full of shouting and the smell of alcohol and . . . me.

The sound of raised voices drifted across the street—I caught only fragments, the word “murdered,” a barked order to be quiet—and I crouched lower in the shadow of the car. A face appeared at the window, unrecognizable behind the wavy glass and scanning the shadow line of the trees. They were looking for me now.

I straightened my legs slowly and then darted across the asphalt, into the alley. Overhead, the sound of tapping: the moths had begun to turn maniacal circles, throwing themselves harder against the orange bulb of the streetlight and then drifting away, carried by the wind.

My mind, gone blank and black in the moments that followed the fight, began to fill with fragmented thoughts. I closed my eyes; the sight of Craig’s kicked-in face and broken teeth reared up in the blackness and I felt my stomach twist.

I had to get out of here.

I had to find James.

Together, we would explain everything to the people who needed to hear it.

I was reaching into the pocket of my apron again when I realized that there was no telltale jingle of keys beneath my hand.

Stupid,
I thought as shame flooded my face with hot blood. I had come with Lindsay, had allowed her to goad me out and into the role of designated driver, had slipped distractedly into the passenger seat of her car and left my own car at home. Stupid. Stranded.

The thunder came again, closer this time, as the storm barreled over the mountains and into town. Weakened leaves were beginning to loosen themselves from their holdings, tumbling down and along the street in playful loops. The rain was coming, it was getting closer.

Craig would have to confess now, wouldn’t be able to run or hide from what—from whatever—he’d done. It was over. They were inside, it was all coming out, the story would be spilling its way down the bar and across the tables and into phone lines that would ring busy with big news. There would be a front-page article, there would be a press briefing, there would be warrants and evidence and confessions in a court of law.

A storm was coming, and the blood in the road would be washed away.

And then, I thought, people would begin rewriting history to show how very unlike us Craig Mitchell had always been.

Closing my eyes, I pulled the cool air—blessedly cool, tinged with damp and stray raindrops and the electric, ozone smell of a storm—into my lungs. Relief flooded through me from the inside out; I felt it creeping through my veins, escaping like steam from the top of my head. The thudding moths seemed to beat a rhythm against the streetlight, their small bodies tapping in twos that registered inside my head like a mantra, joining the rough cry of the katydids in the trees.

All done.

All done.

I was still standing there, face turned skyward and drinking in the night, when the back door of the restaurant slammed and the final words of a conversation kicked down the alley and reached my ears. I recognized Tom’s tired voice, and the gravelly cough of the Chief of Police.

“—see her out here?” the chief was saying

There was the rough sound of flint-strike, the quick suck of air. Tom had lit a cigarette. I hadn’t even known he smoked.

“Only when you did,” he answered. I heard him exhale. “I didn’t see her leave.”

It was me they were talking about. I slunk backward, into the shadow of the Dumpster, wrinkling my nose and fighting back the urge to retch as the stench of rot hit my nostrils. All those peaches, tomatoes, baking in the hot sun, had begun to sag and stink inside. It was a terrible smell, rancid, fetid, sour and sweet, carried horribly toward me with every light gust of wind.

The chief was talking again, muttering so that I could only half hear his words before they were lost on the wind.

“—find her,” he said, the beginning carried away on another rancid gust of air. “You heard what they said . . .”

Another gust.

I wasn’t ready to be found. I wanted no part of what was to come.

CHAPTER
22

T
he first time we’d made love, I marked the time that passed afterward by counting James’s heartbeats. I listened to the thudding in his chest and thought that his heart must be closer to the world than most people’s; he was so thin, so wiry, that I could feel it fluttering against his breastplate as easily as if it had been encased in linen. Then, in the aftermath of the first time—my first time, and his, and ours—I lay my head against his chest to feel the beats slow from a furious gallop to a light patter.

“Are you okay?” he’d said.

I sat up, feeling awkward and suddenly, exceptionally naked. I registered dim gratitude that my hair, falling in a cavewoman tangle over my shoulders, was long enough to cover my nipples. You can’t talk to someone, I thought, if they can look down midsentence and just see your nipples. Nipples are a conversation stopper.

The look on his face was deepening from care to concern.

“Becca—”

“I’m fine. I’m fine . . . Better than fine,” I added, smiling in a way that I hoped was self-assured.

“Your face?”

I had to laugh. He had elbowed me in the eye at the very beginning, when it had seemed like there was no place for all of our arms and legs to go—no possible way that two people with all these limbs could lie down together, holding each other hip to hip and lip to lip, and actually arrange them in such a way that nobody would get hurt.

Later, when the awkwardness had passed, he had gathered me back into his arms and pulled me up to his chest, up to the place where the hollow rhythm of his heart seemed to knock, knock, knock its insistent desire to be set free. I laid my head against his chest and listened again to that sound, the hollow drumbeat that told me he was still here, still alive, still with me.

With James, I’d never been unsure. Never anxious over what was to come. Never afraid.

I was afraid now.

I was waiting when the truck pulled in, slipping out of the shadows, wide-eyed and paranoid at the possibility of being seen. I had been sitting in the shadows behind the gas station for what seemed like hours, slapping at the mosquitoes that whined in my ears and tried to drain the blood from my neck, watching the road and willing each car to be his. There had been little traffic. Fifteen minutes before, a police car with its lights strobing had sped past, its driver holding the radio to his mouth, the slumped shapes of two silent men sitting in the shadow of the backseat.

I had called him, praying as I punched the pay phone’s keys that I was remembering the number right, praying that he would finally pick up, nearly crying with relief at the sound of his voice in the receiver. He was just getting into town, he told me, and what was going on, and I struggled to keep my voice level as I asked him to pick me up.

He had asked where, and asked nothing else.

Alone in the dark, with nothing to do but wait, my mind had begun to race. Back to the night when everything had changed. I wondered whether she had fought back, at the end, when she realized what was happening. When she realized that she would never get out of this town.

I knew how she felt.

James leaned back in his seat, one hand on the wheel, as I slipped through the passenger door and shut it with a thunk. My heart began to thud in my chest, leaping higher, in my throat now. I thought I might choke on it.

“How long have you been back?” I asked, touching the worn handle of the door. It felt cool. At last, cool. Nothing had felt cool this summer. He didn’t answer; I didn’t wait for him to.

“We have to talk,” I said, looking at him and then losing my nerve, looking down at my lap instead. “Something’s happened, James. Something bad.”

“Tell me now.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to do this here. I need to get away from here, right now, before somebody sees me.”

James looked at me for a long time.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

* * *

We drove without direction, grit kicking under the tires as the canopy of trees closed overhead and the lightning grew brighter. The sky was beginning to spit, raindrops falling in twos and threes until they covered enough space for James to turn on the wipers and flick them away. As we had pulled out of the parking lot, I had reached into the glove compartment, jittery and desperate for cigarettes, when his hand slammed the compartment closed.

“Dammit! Don’t do that!”

“You need to talk to me,” he said.

“I need to smoke,” I said, hearing the whine in my voice and not caring. My hands had begun to shake.

“Becca, if you don’t tell me what’s going on right now, you may not get a chance to.”

I stared at him.

“What do you mean?” I said, my voice growing loud. James looked uncomfortable. More drops plunked against the windshield. In the silence, over the whir of the tires, they sounded like music. In the silence, I knew I had to speak.

“Craig knew something, James. He knew who killed that girl, or . . . or he did it himself.” I took a deep breath. “He was there.”

We were speeding now, careening around curves, the wheels of the truck fishtailing dangerously close to the slick grass at the roadside and the deep ditch beyond. James was hitting the wheel with the palms of his hands, swearing, demanding that I tell and then retell what had happened at the restaurant.

“Oh God,” he kept saying, “Oh God. Why? Why would you do that?” and then, “It’s not possible,” and then—angrily, now—“How do you know any of this?!”

Reluctantly, I told him what I had seen in my house—what I had heard.

“I can’t believe this.”

I slapped the open palm of my hand against the window. “How can you not? It makes perfect sense! He wanted to brag about it, all that posturing was just cover for what he’d done.”

“He’s been obsessed, Becca, that doesn’t make him a fucking killer.”

“Evidence!” I yelled. “I told you what I heard! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No,” said James, and fell silent.

My ears were burning, rage running like fire through my veins at James’s stubbornness, his blind loyalty to someone who had never deserved it and who had done unspeakable things. I felt something made of ice uncoil in my stomach, stretching its angry neck out and opening its mouth to scream.

“Dammit, James! How can you be so blind to this?
I’m telling you I was there, I heard everything! Jesus, I confronted him! He was going to hurt me, doesn’t that matter to you?! Or maybe it doesn’t! Maybe you’re more like him than I thought, maybe you’re just another—”

“ENOUGH!” he roared, swerving right over the yellow line that snaked down the center of the road and then back, losing control, barely regaining it as I sat back in the seat. Stunned. Silent.

He was breathing hard again, gripping the steering wheel with hands laced with stress lines, a white cobweb of tension that cracked across every knuckle. We were driving too fast. The road was growing slick, growing dangerous and dark with every passing minute.

“Dammit, Becca,” he finally said, and his voice broke.

I looked at the floor. “I didn’t mean that.”

James shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” A sick smile had begun to play at the corners of his mouth.

“Of course it matters.”

James laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. “Not anymore. Not now. And this is my fault, I should have just . . . shit, and now what? He’s in the hospital? Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

Another beat passed in silence. James
took another turn too fast. Outside, the starved yellow grasses blurred and waved like brittle ghosts in the glow of the headlights, bending toward the truck and then snapping back like switches. The thunder was rumbling closer, the lightning coming in short, bright bursts.

“Lindsay . . .” He trailed off.

“What?”

“This is going to wreck her.”

I thought of Lindsay’s face, her narrowed eyes, the hiss of her voice, and felt my face flush with shame and hurt. I shook my head, shook the memory away.

“It would have happened sooner or later. Their relationship . . . it’s all a lie. If he did this, he spent all summer hiding it. All summer.”

“What’s your point,” he said.

“Somebody who could do that . . .”

“People hide things for all kinds of reasons, Becca.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m telling you,” he said, gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead, “that there’s a lot you don’t know. And whatever you think of Craig, whatever his faults, he’s still someone I consider a friend.”

“That’s not what he seems to think,” I retorted, suddenly remembering his anger in the alleyway. “He said that you haven’t hung out with him all summer. He said . . .” I paused.

“What?”

“He said you’ve been ditching him to be with me,” I said, slowly. “Except—”

I stopped abruptly, and listened to the whoosh of the tires against the pavement. Listened to the thought that had risen, pulsing white and bright like a silent alarm, inside my own head.

“Except,” I said, slowly, “you’ve been lying to him, haven’t you? You haven’t been with me. I haven’t seen you since . . .”

Since the party,
I thought, suddenly. Since July. No wonder I’d felt so lonely, so lost. No wonder he had seemed so far away.

“You . . . you’ve been somewhere else. And I was a convenient excuse.”

I thought of Craig, his face contorted, his voice guttural with rage.
A stuck-up bitch who fucks everything up . . . just like you
.

But James had been keeping secrets from me, too.

He slumped in his seat as I looked at him, his shoulders buckling, the breakneck pace of the truck finally slowing.

“James—”

“Not here,” he said. “Wait. We’re almost there.”

There was a sudden snap, and the truck was rumbling over rough road. Looking out the window, I saw trees—thick, close, branches that reached out like fingers to claw at the window. Below us, a rutted drive, carving a hidden two-track opening back away from the road. Above, a heavy canopy of trees rustled and shushed in the growing wind. The tunnel of green opened far ahead, into blackness, in what I knew was endless, open space.

A space covered with rough grass that would be crushed beneath the truck’s tires and die, fragrant and sweet, in the night air. It would clog my nostrils, a scent I would never smell again without remembering his body, his hands, his voice. Without remembering the twist of scratchy flannel on my skin. Without feeling heat, unwanted and shameful and instantaneous, between my legs.

I stared at him, and thought I could feel the first thread of something horrible unraveling between us.

The first thought that I—that all of us—had made a terrible mistake.