Breaking Beautiful (32 page)

“I said I don’t know!” I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to be anywhere but here right now. I grip the tigereye to keep from bolting from the room.

“Still nothing, huh?” He puts the bag back in the box. Then he sets the box deliberately back on the shelf, turns around, and sits back down. “I’m not your enemy, Allie. I’m just trying to find out the truth.” He leans closer and lowers his voice. “I read the notes from your locker. And I talked to Ms. Holt. I know Trip was hitting you, maybe for the whole time you were
dating. I think there were probably a lot of people who knew about it, but they all looked the other way. Ms. Holt told me she filed a suspected abuse report a year ago but never heard anything more about it. I bet he was responsible for the scar on the back of your head and the one over your eye. If you killed him, in the heat of an attack, then that would be self-defense.” He lets the words hang in the air.

I struggle to keep the emotion out of my face. The words are on the tip of my tongue where they have been a thousand times before. Trip hit me. Trip hurt me. This is all Trip’s fault. But like a thousand times before, I can’t make myself say it. I let the proof that was all over my body fade away. No one will believe me now.

“But if somebody cut his brake lines, then that’s premeditated murder.”

A chill runs down my back. “You don’t have any real proof.” It comes out before I can stop it. “None of this means anything.”

He smiles and leans toward me. “You’re smarter than he gave you credit for, aren’t you? You’re right. Without a truck or a body, we don’t have enough evidence to turn this into a homicide investigation.”

“After all your work.” I know I’m baiting him, but it seems only fair.

“Not yet.” Triumph creeps back on his face. “But maybe tomorrow.”

I shouldn’t ask, but I do. “What happens tomorrow?”

“Tonight the tide will be higher than usual, and with the storm, we’ll probably have some flooding. Things are likely to wash up that have been buried deep in the ocean. Then tomorrow
morning we’ll have an extremely low tide. Roger Phillips is anxious to figure out what happened to his son. So anxious that he hired a couple of divers to go down below the cliff and look for the truck. They’re going to wait until the tide is at its lowest early tomorrow morning. That way they’ll have more chance of finding something and it won’t be as dangerous.”

Divers looking for Trip’s truck? Is that what Mr. Phillips meant by the ocean returning things you thought were lost?

“You have less than twenty-four hours to decide what you’re going to do. Your friend Blake isn’t going anywhere.” He nods toward the back of the building. “It’s time to tell the truth. The truth about everything. If they find that truck tomorrow and there’s any evidence that the brakes were tampered with, Roger Phillips will be out for blood. You’ve already seen what he can do without any proof. What do you think he would do if he was sure Trip was murdered?”

I sit in stunned silence, my body numb. So numb that I don’t think I could touch the tigereye if I tried.

Behind him, the boxes of evidence haunt me. Blake’s shirt—and the ring, still in my pocket. Evidence that Blake was there the night Trip died. Why didn’t he tell me?

Blake’s voice fills my brain. “I have to tell you something about the night Trip died.” His note: “We need to talk.” And what he said to me the night of cotillion: “You don’t have to go anywhere with him. He doesn’t own you.”

Blake didn’t want me to leave the dance with Trip.

My shoes, covered with brake fluid. The fluid leaking from Trip’s truck when we got to my house. He had already sabotaged Trip’s brakes.

Blake killed Trip.

“Believe it or not, I’m sorry for all of this.” Detective Weeks indicates the box behind him. I focus on draining the emotion from my face. “You’ve already been through a lot. You don’t have to take the fall for what someone else did. Think it over, Allie. You’re the only one who knows what really happened that night. What do you owe Blake, anyway?”

Detective Weeks knows.

“The threats, the message on your locker, maybe even the fire in the gym. He was trying to put the blame on you. He’s scared that you’ll remember and tell what happened that night. My guess is that he already knows about the ring. Maybe he even has it. He’s doing this for the money and to save his own skin. He doesn’t care about you.” He leans across the desk, his eyes locked on mine. “You don’t have to take the fall for something someone else did. Think about what you owe yourself, Allie.”

Chapter
47

The wind drives the rain in my face as I stumble across the parking lot to Mom’s car. I barely feel it. I barely hear the wind screaming in my ears. I barely know the storm is coming, because the storm inside me is much fiercer. I drive like I’m on autopilot past the high school, the line of condos, and Blake’s house toward home.

My house is dark when I pull up. It’s only about four in the afternoon, but the press of clouds makes it feel more like late evening. There’s a note on the counter.

Andrew is sick. Mom and I took him to the clinic.

—Dad

I try to turn on the lights, but the power is out. I walk back to the bedroom, sit on my bed, and wrap myself in my quilt.
Sasha yowls and paces and wraps her body around my feet. She’s always hated storms. I try to pick her up for some comfort, but she scratches at me until I let her go.

I’m waiting for the tears to come, but they don’t. With every breath I feel more numb, like I’m retreating to a place in the center of my body where no one can reach me, where I can’t feel anything.

Detective Weeks’s words fill my head and swirl around my brain like the eddies that fill the little pools in the cave when the tide comes in.

Blake was there that night. He didn’t save me. He stood and watched me fall and watched Trip grab me.

What do I owe him?

My fault. All my fault. The only two guys I ever loved. One is dead, one is in jail. Because of me.

“
You don’t have to take the fall because of something someone else did
.”

Blake killed Trip.

I’m so numb that the thought barely penetrates my brain. But another thought stays clear. He did it for me. He did it because he loves me. Because he’s always loved me. Because he wanted to protect me. Because I was too stupid to tell the truth about what Trip was doing to me.

My fault.

I can’t let him take the blame.

Thanks to Detective Weeks, I don’t have to. He gave me all the pieces I needed. Everything that was missing from my memory.

I know what I have to do.

I go to the kitchen and dig through the drawers to find a
match. Sasha is standing at the door yowling. The sound splits through my numbness and goes down my spine like fingernails on the chalkboard. I yank the door open and watch her streak across the yard and disappear behind the trash cans. The cold wind blows through the door and rain stings my face. The smell of the ocean permeates everything outside. It brings me back to myself.

I return to my hunt with a new purpose. I find a lighter in the back of Mom’s neatly organized junk drawer and take it back to my bedroom. Inside my hutch I dig out a candle that I brought home from Grandma Joyce’s house—one of my screw-ups that I chose to keep instead of melting it down and starting over. I light the candle.

The musky smell of sandalwood and dust mixes with the ocean. I breathe in the memories of rainy afternoons with Blake in Grandma Joyce’s attic. My place to hide. My refuge from the truth, but only for a little while. The light reflected in the mirror above my dresser lights up my freaky eye and makes my face look haunted. The flame plays across the picture of me and Blake from the dance. It’s too bad it’s our only picture together. I look stiff and stressed out. I hate for him to remember me that way.

Through the mirror I can see the painting Blake gave me for Christmas—the three of us playing together as kids—innocent. Maybe he can remember me that way.

I pick up the first set of papers I find on my desk, an application for South Puget Sound Community College, a little college in Olympia. Close enough that I could have driven home on the weekends to see Blake.

I won’t need it anymore.

I search my desk drawers for a pen, but I can’t find one. I almost laugh at the irony of my own disorganization coming back to bite me now. I go back into the kitchen and find one lined up neatly next to Mom’s “phone notes” pad. She’ll miss it in a day or two, but I’m sure she has a new package ready to replace the one I take.

I feel so calm that I’m surprised when I start to write and my hands are shaking. I force myself to be slow and deliberate, focus on the words in front of me. This is important.

I write my confession. Talk about how I felt trapped dating Trip, how controlling he was. I write about being jealous the night of cotillion. How I knew he still loved Hannah. That will make her happy. I confess to looking on the Internet and figuring out how to disable his brakes. I say I punctured the brake lines on Trip’s truck so they would be completely bled out by the time the limo brought us back from the dance.

I write that Trip was going around the cliff road when the brakes failed. That I knew he couldn’t stop and so I jumped out before he went over. That that’s how I ended up on the side of the road. How I got hurt.

I say I’m sorry to everyone for everything—Mom and Dad and Andrew and Blake, even Trip’s mom, but not Roger Phillips.

At the end I write why I did it, what Trip had done to me.

It’s the one secret I’m not going to take to my grave.

I lick my fingers and extinguish the candle the way Caitlyn did. The smoke curls in the fading light of my room. I watch it and think about what she said about death and souls. I wonder what it will be like on the other side—nothingness or kind of
the same. I pray I don’t have to be at my funeral and see what my death will do to Andrew and Blake and Mom and Dad.

Hannah will probably come, dressed in black, crying and talking about how we were such good friends.

Or maybe no one will come after they find out I was a murderer.

I leave the note on my dresser and walk out to the front door. For a minute I pause on the porch and watch the wind tearing at the empty trees in front of my house. I call for Sasha, worried about her in the storm and feeling guilty that I let her out. But she’s weathered worse than this storm. I don’t know how long she waited in the trap Trip put her in before Blake and I found her. Regret crushes my heart like waves against a castle of sand. If I had listened to Blake back then, none of this would have happened.

But it did and I’m running out of time.

I check to make sure I have my tigereye and the ring before I climb in the car.

As I pass the forest, the trees bend low against the wind like they’re trying to grab me, but this time they don’t even slow me down. I go to the cliff, thinking that it would be poetic justice to end everything here. The rain drives against my face and the wind blows what’s left of my hair. I stand on the cliff and watch the last rays of the sun sink into the ocean. Like the woman in Blake’s picture, only without hope. I linger too long, imagining Trip’s body mangled in his truck below the cliffs. I can’t stand to be there with him, even in death.

I head back into town. Pacific Cliffs never has much traffic, but tonight it’s completely deserted. I park my car next to the
condo that stands where Grandma’s house used to be. Nobody is staying in it now. I get out and look up at Blake’s house. The windows are dark and neither of the cars are there. I hope Grandma Joyce is at the police station and they’ll release Blake to her.

One good-bye glance toward the window of the attic before I plunge forward, down the familiar trail, toward our cave. The wind howls through the cliffs, no longer mournful—only angry and accusing. It pushes against my back, driving me forward toward the water. The waves roar and toss. The ocean shows all of its awesome power, but I’m not afraid.

Chapter
48

Everything is muted when I step inside the cave. The water is already coming in. Inky-black and gray-green swirls wrap around the edges, flowing in and out of the entrance, gently, rhythmically. The motion stands in sharp contrast to the rage of the storm outside. I pause for a second and touch the tigereye before I start climbing toward the back of the cave.

Fear doesn’t hit me until I scramble onto the ledge in the back, tuck my legs up under me, and wait. I rub the pieces of stone between my fingers, searching for the courage that the woman had promised, but none comes. Someone with courage wouldn’t die like this, huddled on a slimy, rocky ledge, listening to the roar of the ocean and waiting for death to come. Someone with courage would run out to meet it, embrace it, welcome it. Not that I’ve ever done anything that could be considered courageous.

Maybe this—my final act—taking the blame to protect someone I love. Maybe this could be considered courageous.

But no one will ever know.

Lies.

Even my last words, scrawled on the back of my college application, are lies.

Once I could have stopped all of this from happening by telling the truth. But I didn’t. And now it’s too late.

Going off the cliff might have been better. I even messed up my own suicide. I didn’t think about how long it would take for the cave to fill up with water or how long it would take for me to drown—too long. Long enough for me to wallow in my own guilt and self-pity. Long enough for this to not seem so noble anymore. Long enough for me to worry about Andrew at the clinic and reach for my cell phone to see if anyone has called. I left it at home. Not even on purpose. Not so no one would call and try to stop me. Just because I forgot.

Nice, Allie. Can’t even get your own death right.