Dead River (21 page)

I struggle to move, but it’s useless. I’m pinned to the ground. This little girl, not four feet tall, has
pinned me to the ground
. She looks over her shoulder and before I can form another plan of escape, I hear the swish of feet along the grass. Someone is coming. I strain to see over the little girl’s shoulder, but can only make out a faint glow.
Jack
. I swallow when I hear his voice. “I’m going to wring that little brat’s neck.” He stops, points his head to the sky, and shouts, so loud it nearly shakes the trees, “Do you hear that? I’m going to wring your neck!” And then he continues on. Once he’s moved on, I exhale. She moves off of me and bends over the body again.

“Wait,” I say, finally understanding. “You want my body to be found so that my mother can’t bring me back to life. You don’t want Jack to become ruler, either, do you?”

She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head.

I lean over and press my eyes into my knees. “All right. I’m totally confused.”

There’s another sound, nothing more than the crack of a branch in the distance, but Vi startles like a doe, stilling, her eyes filling once more with fear. She looks around and grabs a branch, then begins to scrawl something in the soft dirt. I watch each letter as it’s produced, eager to find some answer to the mystery, but what she writes makes no sense, even when it’s right in front of me, etched in mud.

Not Jack
.

“What?” I shrug. “Then who?”

She stands and moves close to me, and for a moment I’m afraid, and the next moment I’m embarrassed for feeling that way in front of an eight-year-old. But I can still feel her inexplicably enormous weight on my waist pushing my back into the ground. When she grabs my hand, not at all gently, I don’t know what to expect. Suddenly the world dims and I’m floating through a blur. When the world comes into focus, after a moment, things look strangely muted again, like they did when I was alive. My body is gone. Vi is gone, although, oddly, I can feel the intense pressure of her hand on mine. I swivel my head around and at once it’s obvious I’m not in the same place I’d been in a second ago. The pines are gone, and now I’m surrounded mostly by leafy trees. The ground is no longer covered in pine needles; instead, I’m up to my ankles in muddy water. There is a smell in the air, like burning coal from a grill. Each way I turn, I see nothing but trees.

Before I can panic, a voice greets my ears. Out of nowhere. I see the girl, Vi, coming down the path, skipping. This time, she’s different. Her pink dress is clean and unwrinkled, her shoes are unscuffed. She is singing a nursery rhyme about a man who lived in the moon, and I know right away that I have slipped into one of my visions. But what a vision! Unlike before, it is so real, I feel I can almost reach out and touch her. She even smiles at me, like she can see me there. But suddenly there is another voice. Angry. “You took them from me!”

Another person comes into view. Lannie, wearing the familiar white dress, but what is unfamiliar is the way her
lip curls in hate as she storms after Vi. Vi turns, her eyes wide with fear. “I’ll give them to you,” she says in a voice I don’t recognize. I realize I don’t recognize it because I’ve never heard it, but it’s sweet, soft, and so full of fear I want to grab her and hug her to me. Protect her. She bends over and begins to roll her sock down as Lannie says, “They’re silk stockings, you know. For women. They’re not kneesocks, like babies like you wear.”

I stare at Lannie. I remember how she taunted me before, when we played, but it was always good-natured. It was always just fun, wasn’t it? She’d never done anything horrible to me. Not at all. Then I turn in time to see Vi lift her foot out of her white shoe. She loses her balance and her foot touches the dirty forest floor.

“Look what you’re doing! You’re getting them all muddy! And I just bought them!”

After some more struggling, Vi manages to take both stockings off. She slips her bare feet into her knee-highs and shoes and holds the white stockings out to her sister. Lannie takes a step forward, and for a glimmer of a second before she reaches out, I see the fear in Vi’s face morph into defiance. Vi throws the stockings to the ground and grinds them into the mud with the sole of her shoe. She smiles triumphantly, but it only lasts for a single instant before Lannie begins shrieking loudly enough to pierce eardrums. She lunges at Vi, screaming, “You brat! You’re always in my things!” and it doesn’t help when she reaches for the stockings and slips in the mud. Vi makes the mistake of laughing. I know it is a
mistake and yet there is nothing I can do to stop it. I know the outcome.

They struggle in the mud. The little girl is small and bony, not strong and nearly fully grown like Lannie. It’s not long before Lannie has handfuls of her little sister’s long brown hair. They both fall to the ground in a heap of mud and grunts and once-crisp Sunday clothing. Vi presses her muddy palm against her sister’s face, flattening her nose, trying to push her away, but it’s no use. Lannie grabs her by the back of the neck and pushes her down against the forest floor. Harder, harder …

Then she straightens and, blinking away mud, her sister’s handprint still upon her face, picks up the stockings. The forest is grave-quiet as she stands, and at first I want to run when she turns to me, but it’s the same as with Justin and Angela: she doesn’t see me. She walks through me, swiping a stray lock of hair behind her ear. I stare at the motionless body whose face I cannot see—so tiny, so vulnerable—tears welling in my eyes. But before they can spill over, something moves behind the trees. I wipe my eyes and strain to see a figure in the dark canopy of leaves, but I already know very well who it is. Trey.

He’s the one. Get him
.

It wasn’t a boy who said that. It was a young woman. Lannie. She said it to Jack. She made him kill Trey, because of what he witnessed. Because he witnessed this.

Lannie did this.

I pull away from Vi’s hand and I’m shuddering. “Oh my
God. It’s Lannie. Lannie is my relation? She’s the one in line to become Mistress of the Waters?”

Vi nods.

“She had Jack kill Trey … and then what?” I ask, but I already know. I hear the sound perfectly—
sleesh … sleesh … sleesh
—and the next words come to me right away.
I did everything you asked of me
. That was Jack.

I can see the whole scene so perfectly now. Jack, poor, gangly little Jack, whose pants never fit quite right and who never had any real friends, let alone girlfriends. Lannie was the first girl who’d taken any interest in him. He was easily her servant. I could see him, begging in the moonlight, begging the girl he worshipped for his life.
Please don’t. I did everything you asked of me
. “But you are not a real man,” Lannie spat at him. “You were going to tell everyone our secret. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut.” And she brought that ax down. She brought it down and killed him, too. I could see the blood coursing over his forehead, his eyes staring up through the tree branches, at the silver moon.

You become what you wanted most when you were alive
. Of course. Now I know exactly why I was attracted to Jack. After being humiliated by women all his life, the one thing he wanted was to be adored by them.

“What happened to Lannie? She was caught?”

Vi strings up a pretend noose and makes like she’s hanging herself.

I think of the bruises on Lannie’s neck, of how I found her hanging from trees whenever we played hide-and-seek. All
this time, it’s been Lannie. But does it even matter? Whether it’s Lannie or Jack, neither of them can become ruler. And I can’t destroy an entire kingdom over my mistakes. Vi’s right. We need to drag my body back to the Outfitters. We need it to be found.

Chapter Twenty-Two

W
hen I reach for the body, Vi makes a move like she’s going to try to topple me again, but I jump back before she can touch me. “Relax. I’m helping you,” I explain. “Let’s pick it up, though. I’ll take the head.”

I slide my arms under it, trying not to look, but the feeling alone is enough to make me want to throw up. This can
not
be happening. My hair is already brittle, and the whole back of my jacket is damp, yet pieces are crumbling off, either mud or dried blood. I steal a look at my face; my eyes are closed, but my mouth is slightly open, and I realize that I don’t look dead, merely asleep. I squeeze my eyes shut and hoist the body up to my waist, and Vi does the same. I wondered why, with all her strength, she was having such a hard time dragging my body, but now I know. I weigh a ton. My clothes are probably waterlogged and my hair must be harboring twenty pounds of mud. It smells like wet leaves. I choke and cough and bury my face in my shoulder so I don’t breathe in the smell as we begin to move toward the building. It’s hidden
from view, and though I know it’s not far, after ten steps I feel light-headed. But Vi moves on, a determined look on her face, and so I keep going until the red cedar front of the Outfitters is visible among the trees. Vi must see it, too, because she picks up the pace and I struggle to keep up with her.

We break out of the woods, near the service entry to the building. I’m about to say that this looks like a good place to dump the body when a voice calls, “Stop!” I know who it is before I turn. Trey. At once he’s beside me. He doesn’t touch me, just stares at me long and hard. “What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I say, not making eye contact. “We’re leaving the body near the Outfitters. So it can be found.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but he’s so furious that all he does is shake. Finally, he takes a breath and exhales slowly, and a Zenlike calm washes over him. “Kiandra. Didn’t we just … That’s a bad idea, and you know it.”

“Oh, and destroying your entire kingdom is a good idea?” I shoot back, putting the body down so roughly that my shirt gets caught on a branch and rips, exposing the strap of my lacy black bra. By the time I realize how stupid it is, I’ve already reached down and made myself more presentable. Like someone finding my dead body would think,
Her bra is showing!

He sighs. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you the
whole story,” he mutters, running his hands through his hair. “You’re stubborn.”

“Maybe you can, but I would never be able to live knowing my mistake caused pain for so many people. No way. Sorry,” I say, turning my back on him.

But I can feel his eyes staring through me. “I know what this is about,” he says. “Your momma. You think you got to go against everything she tells you, or else you’re afraid you’ll start forgiving her. Maybe she
deserves
to be forgiven.”

“Enough with worshipping my mom!” I shout, turning back to him. I want to strangle him. “It’s getting really old.”

He looks down at the ground. “About that … I spent a lot of time doing things I shouldn’t have. That’s why my shine is still strong. Your mom should’ve punished me but she let me go. She saved my hide. So call it pathetic if you will.” He shrugs. “I call it honor.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean to call you that.”

He motions me to follow him, and at first I don’t want to leave the body, but I suppose off on this path, not twenty yards from civilization, is a good a place as any. It’s not as if we can parade the body into the front lobby. I rub my hands on my jeans and walk after him, first toward the river, then around, toward the picnic benches outside the Outfitters. It’s busy here. People I’ve never seen before are milling about with serious faces. Some are walking out through the woods. Everyone seems hyperalert. Is this for me?

Trey says to me, very softly, “I know your momma hurt you. If you want to stay mad at her, it’s up to you. You ain’t got to do nothing for her if you don’t want to.”

I’m about to say thank you, to explain that, really, I know I should forgive her, but that I just need time. It’s like spending a decade loving the color blue, only to suddenly realize my favorite color is red—it doesn’t seem real or right to change so soon. But then I notice that he’s staring at something between the trees, something away from the river, toward the road. I follow his gaze and, among the police cars, see a very familiar gray Honda Civic, and that’s when the world stops for me. The first thing I think of is how I spilled chocolate ice cream, speckled with rainbow-colored bits, on the front seat not two hours after he picked the car up from the dealer, and how he laughed and wiped it up and said, “Nice job, Sprinkles.”

My dad.

Trey hitches a thumb toward the man sitting behind the steering wheel, knuckles white. “You can’t undo this decision, Kiandra,” Trey says. “So even if you don’t want to think on your momma, you might want to think on him.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

I
t’s like the world suddenly shifts, and all the brilliance of this new world fades to darker than the old. In seconds, the allure, the beauty of this place is gone.

I was deluding myself. I’d gotten so good at forcing him out of my mind during the rafting trip—too good. But it’s so easy to commit to something life-altering when you’re not in the presence of the person whose life you’re going to alter the most. And in a blur, every moment I’ve spent with him, no matter how trivial, flashes in front of my eyes, carrying weight it never did before. The same words echo in my ears:
You’re my everything. You’re my everything
. Suddenly I’m dizzy. Trey notices me losing my balance and props me up before I can slump to the ground, a defeated mass. Just like my father, who, behind the wheel of his Civic, looks so small and alone.

I turn to Vi, but words won’t come out. There’s a crushing, suffocating pain in my chest, like my heart is breaking into a thousand pieces. Finally, something comes, the only thing I can manage. “I’m sorry.”

My dad steps out of the car and he’s wearing his trademark wrinkled tweed blazer and L.L.Bean hiking boots. His hair is sticking up, which is a usual thing in the morning before he showers. He has a stack of flyers in his hands; I can see the word MISSING in bright red on top. There’s a picture underneath and I bet with everything I am that it’s the one of me last Christmas, wearing the Santa hat he always forced on me. I look about ten in the picture, which is why he loved it and put it on his desk at school. I’m sure that in the next half hour, half the trees in Forks will have that picture tacked to their trunks.