The Creeping (33 page)

Right then and there I swear that I won't doubt Sam. I'll accept that he really is as good as he seems, and I'll spend however long it takes, forever even, making all the times I hurt him right. After that sleep comes easier.

In the morning Sam's muddy-brown eyes, fringed with hazel lashes, are watching me from their place on the pillow we're sharing. Blinking carefully, purposefully, so they don't miss a thing.

I hide my intake of breath with a yawn. “Hey. How's the leg?”

He mimes rapping on his knee protruding from under the covers. “Still there.” He smiles lopsidedly. “Stiff, but not so bad. You okay?”

“Fine,” I say in a tense voice. “Have you been awake for long?”

“Twenty minutes or so. I've been thinking about the cat in the cemetery.” He frowns. “Griever admitted to sacrificing all those animals, but she also made a point to say she buried them so people didn't come across their corpses. She's managed to fly under the radar for decades.”

I shrug against the pillow.

Sam's brow knits as he focuses on me. “The cat in the cemetery was just left there. We found it.” He waits for me to comment. I should. Sam is observant and smart, but I can't stop watching his
hands like they're going to thrust out and strangle me. “That seems pretty sloppy for someone who's been at it for decades.”

I blink once and focus on his face. “She must leave the animals out as an offering to . . .
it
. She collects their bodies later.”

“But the cat was beheaded.”

“She's deranged.”

“The pelts on the walls had their heads . . . or at least the fur that would have been on their heads and ears.”

“I don't know, Sam.” I sigh, shaking my head. “Maybe she's going crazier?”

Sam pushes up on his elbow, eyes crinkling, studying me. “What's wrong?” His hair is plastered to his head, and his cheeks are lip-gloss pink. The covers, twisted around us, seem to tighten around my legs, binding them up.

He reaches to touch my shoulder and stops. I'm staring wide-eyed at the approaching hand like I'm looking for traces of blood. “Stella, talk to me,” he whispers.

Heat creeps into my face. What am I doing? What am I thinking? This is Sam. I laid all this suspicion to rest. It was only a symptom of the horror of the night. But from the instant I opened my eyes and saw him watching, all I could think was,
You don't miss anything
. How did you miss Jeanie being taken?

“Look, I want to forget about all of this. Jeanie. Jane Doe. All of it,” I say, fast and messy. If I spew enough words, tell Sam whatever lies I must to make him leave, the horrible things I want to accuse him of won't come out. “Even if I do remember, I don't know that a recovered
memory eleven years too late is going to make a difference. I destroyed my believability once I lied in front of the whole world yesterday.”

Sam rubs the parenthesis between his brows. “What about what Griever told us?”

“What about it? I didn't need her to tell me there's something unnatural in the woods. Decades of missing girls. Centuries more of everyone who ever settled here dying and fighting and struggling. It's always been here. The bone in Jane Doe's hand proves that it's been killing for a thousand years. Maybe more. Maybe it causes the darkness in Savage, or maybe all the darkness clotting here made it. Like a scab on the earth in this one place.” My tone has the hush of sharing an awful secret.

“I don't need to know. Jeanie's gone. There's no bringing her back. Or any of them. And this is nothing but crazy, us hiking through the woods, talking about monsters and things that totally can't exist.” I'm going on blindly, groping for words. “I mean, if whoever or whatever offed Jeanie has it out for me, they've had eleven years to get me. And guess what? They haven't.” A shudder of awareness runs up my spine. If Sam is hiding something, he's had years to hurt me, and all he's done is proven that he won't.

“I have to ask, though.” I rub my palm back and forth across my face.
No, no, no, what am I thinking?
This is Sam. I can't stop it, though. Here it comes. “Where were you, Sam?”

He half smiles, like he's not certain if I'm telling a joke and he doesn't want me to feel like I'm not funny. “Where was I when?”

“When Jeanie was taken.” I exhale the words with a breath I've
been holding. “Why weren't you there, at Jeanie's, with us in the woods? Why haven't you ever mentioned where you were before?”

Sam bolts upright, kicking the blankets away, swinging his feet to the floor. “That sounds like more of an accusation than a question,” he says softly. His back to me, he bends to slip the sweats off and his pants and shoes on. I hear a soft grunt like he's in pain, but he doesn't stop until he's on his feet.

I will my body to free itself, untangle my ankles, but I can't make my legs cooperate through the trembling, and I only manage to sit. “Why aren't you answering me?” I plead.

Blood tie-dyes the white gauze around his revealed leg. “Because I shouldn't have to defend myself, Stella. Not to you. Not after . . .
after everything
.” I know he means every time I threw him away; every time he gave me another chance. Sam strides unevenly to the door and pauses at the threshold. He stares at his sneakers. “I was an idiot to think you're still that little girl who loved more and climbed higher and swam faster and laughed harder.” I slump back onto my pillow. “I kept looking. Trying to find bits of who you used to be, but she doesn't exist anymore. Y
ou're not her.”
He moves soundlessly from the room, down the stairs, and out of the house with barely a rumble as his station wagon accelerates from my driveway. Sam leaving me is the loudest noise I've ever heard.
You're not her.

During the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, every time I think of Jeanie or Sam or Zoey or Daniel, my ears ring with Sam's words. I'm letting them all down because Sam is right; I'm not as fearless as that little girl growling in the Polaroid, gripping a spear on the
hunt for monsters. I'm surprised she couldn't keep Jeanie safe. I'm not as brave as the ten-year-old who pulled Sam in for a kiss. And I'm definitely not as honest. I should have admitted to myself sooner what last night and this morning were actually about. Sam got hurt because of me, and I was scared to death that I'd lose him like I lose everyone else, like I lost my mother, who is the one person in this world you're not supposed to lose. I guess making him leave by accusing him of something unforgivable was easier than waiting around for it to happen naturally. How could I doubt Sam for even a second? I take refuge in the shower, hoping the water will pound away the aching in my chest.

I can't stop thinking about how everyone else changed because of Jeanie, her absence, and the mystery around it. Is Jeanie why Zoey is the high school equivalent of a Viking raider when she covets something? Did Zoey learn early on that you lose what you don't fight to keep? Is Jeanie why Mom left? Did Mom wonder if there was a reason I came back and Jeanie didn't? Did Mom wonder what it said about me that I survived a monster? I dunk my head under the pounding water.

I won't stop looking for who or what took Jeanie.
I can't.
Everyone else stopped, and she deserves better.

I check my cell after drying off. A text from Zoey:

Come 2 Cole's bash tonight. We've got 2 talk.

That's it. No
Sorry for flaking on watching your back last night.
No
Did you survive
? I throw the cell at my bed; it skids to a stop at my stuffed bunny's feet.

“Can you effing believe that?” I ask in a tizzy. The bunny doesn't answer. So this is how it's going to be. I'll get whiplash trying to keep up with Zoey's bipolarness over Sam. I throw myself on my bed. I completely forgot about Cole's party. Playing host at your first bash is kind of a rite of passage for newbies at school, and now that the whole town thinks the psycho serial killer on the loose has been caught, there's no reason people wouldn't show up. Still, I feel burned that Cole didn't at least try to cancel.

After texting Zoey ten times with no response, I text Cole and Michaela the same message:

Not up for 2night. Soorrryy xoxo

Michaela responds before the screen turns dark from the sent text:

Miss u. Let's hang 2morrow. Call if u need me.

Cole responds a minute later:

Tried canceling. Z says party must go on.

I blink at the screen as I'm walking to the kitchen to scrounge up a piece of fruit or a yogurt. I'd probably spend most of the afternoon wondering what Zoey's motivation is for not letting Cole cancel, but a fist pounds on my front door.

I peek through the peephole and see Caleb raking his floppy hair from his eyes.

“Hi, stranger,” I call.

He jumps a little as I swing the door open. “Hey, can I come in?” His voice sounds tight, nervous. He ducks his head and shrugs deeper into his jacket as he slips past me. It occurs to me that he might be upset that I've been secretive and absent since we spoke the day at the cove.

“I'm really sorry we haven't been able to hang out much since you've been home,” I say as he hovers in the middle of the living room. He's shifting by the recliner, as if he can't make up his mind whether he's staying long enough to sit. “Are you mad?” I ask.

His eyes meet mine for the first time. They're caught off guard. “No, sorry. I need a cigarette or something. I'm freaking nervous.” He flashes an apologetic smile and drops into the recliner with a groan.

I settle cross-legged on the end of the couch nearest him. My eyes drift to a muscle pulsing in his jaw. “Why are you nervous?”

“Look, Stella.” He rubs his dry palms together like sandpaper. “I've got to be honest with you about something.”

My hands wrap around my ankles and I squeeze, willing away dread. “Okay. You're kind of scaring me.”

He hazards a quick smile that doesn't reassure me. “It's just that Zoey cornered me last night and had a million questions about the summer Jeanie went missing, and I realized I kind of left you guys high and dry without talking to you. Saying I'd tell your dad and all . . . well, it was a dick move. Snitches get stitches and all that.”

I smirk and relax. “Did you learn that from a Jay-Z song?”

“Probably.” He smiles at the joke, but the lightness of his expression fades fast. “I remember hunting monsters.” I'm instantly angled forward. “I told Zo last night I didn't want to talk about it. I wouldn't give her answers. There's a reason for that. There was so much in the year leading up to Jeanie that you guys are too young to remember.” His face is thinner and sharper than usual; his cheekbones like blades as he continues. “Boys always talk about supernatural shit. In the second grade we'd yell ‘Bloody Mary' three times in the mirror. At the beginning of third grade a couple of kids saw two bums beating on a mangy-looking dog in the woods. It inspired all kinds of crazy stories. Kids were going on about camps full of drifters who were cannibals or dog eaters. That same year Jeremy Bellamy—he was that kid who walked with a limp from shattering his right leg when he was a toddler?” He pauses and I nod. Jeremy graduated last year from Wildwood. “Anyway, he pissed his pants in the woods behind the elementary school and came out crying about a ghost with empty wet sockets instead of eyeballs. For weeks we tore through the trees, searching.” He takes a deep breath. “None of it was true. Boys want to hunt shit and we didn't have anything real, so we hunted make-believe.”

I bob my head encouragingly. None of this is new; it's more detailed than Sam's account, but there's nothing earth-shattering. “The spring before Jeanie started that same bullshit way. We—Daniel and me—overheard his dad talking to a ranger buddy about some town legend no one remembers anymore.” His chin juts out, giving
him a slight underbite as he thinks hard. “This ancient animal thing lived in the woods. There was some history to it, I think. I couldn't remember what, and I went to the library the other day to see if they had any folklore-type books about Savage.”

I'm leaning forward, practically falling from the couch I'm so intent. “Did they?” I whisper.

“No. The librarian looked at me like I was high.” He snorts. “Ironic, 'cause it's the only time I've ever been in a library when I wasn't.” A clipped chuckle. “So anyway, it was springtime, and we started hunting this monster in the woods. We made spears and bows and arrows. I mean, we really got carried away. And it was more fun than doing it with the boys at school because you, Zoey, Sam, and Jeanie were only six.” A bolt of pain snaps across his features at admitting how young we were, and I realize where this is going. Caleb suffers from guilt over how he contributed to Jeanie's disappearance, and he wasn't even there. “You all got really into it. And at some point, we forgot that it wasn't real.” He sniffs. “Or maybe kids know what's real better than adults do?” He focuses on my expression. “Maybe we were smart to believe in what lives in the dark?” My pulse is in my throat. He gives his head a jolt and starts massaging his hands with the look of someone trying to rub the cold out of his knuckles.

All the years fall away, and there's this childish quality about him sitting sunken in the recliner. He's been skipping meals, and his black bomber jacket swims on him. His skin is pale porcelain; a lattice of blue veins shows through on his neck. No, not childish, fragile. “So that's what
we did all spring and into the summer, until Jeanie was taken,” he says. “We hunted the monster.”

“Caleb, why didn't you tell anyone this? Why not tell the cops once Jeanie disappeared?” It isn't that I think it would have made a huge difference; Jeanie was gone, and who would believe a nine-year-old crying about monsters?