The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (24 page)

Albert’s first instinct is to shield Olivia from MacLennan, but she’s awake, too, and she’s ducking away before he can do much of anything. From the corner of his eye he sees her spring to her feet. He scrambles up as well, never taking his eyes off MacLennan.

Albert’s tired brain does a few somersaults as he tries to figure out what to do next. He’s been sensing something—someone—for miles, and here that something is. Finally. MacLennan in front of him … not the boogey monster, but a real person. Albert can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that the guy isn’t here to knock a lunch tray out of his hands for his buddies’ amusement. It’s much more serious.

Albert clenches his fists to stop them from shaking. He wonders what’s going to happen. Are they actually going to have to fight?

Bringing him back to the moment and adding to its surrealness is Olivia’s voice from over his shoulder. “Look, Morales, it’s Perry’s little bitch.” Her voice is bright but brittle, like it’s about to break. As if this is just one setback too many.

“Shut up,” Albert says sharply, adding in a softer voice, “If you piss him off he’s going to punch me, not you.” He glances over at her and sees her biting her lip, her black glare shifting between Albert and MacLennan before settling on MacLennan.

To MacLennan, Albert says, “So?” He wonders how long MacLennan has been hanging around, and what, if anything, he’s heard.

MacLennan takes a step forward and Albert puts out a protective arm to push Olivia back. Albert can’t see anything in MacLennan’s hands, but it’s too dark to be sure and he isn’t taking any chances. “Stop there.”

“You two really know how to make a guy feel welcome,” MacLennan says, putting his hands up. It sounds like he’s laughing, but he takes a few steps back just the same.

“Are you alone?”

“Completely,” MacLennan says. “My truck is about half a mile up the road.”

“He’s probably lying,” Olivia says to Albert. To MacLennan, she says, “Who’s back there? The GWHS Wolverines’ starting line? The cops? Wait, let me guess, your new best friend, my stepfather?”

“Olivia—” Albert says.

But MacLennan interrupts him. “Well, that’s one thing I don’t have to wonder about. Yes, folks,” he says, as if talking to a crowd, “Liv Odilon is still a huge bitch.” Then, to her, “I guess you don’t wonder why no one likes you anymore.”

“Funny,” she says. “I thought it was because you felt guilty for letting my sister almost bleed to death when you idiots were—”

“Stop!” Albert shouts at them both, his voice ringing. “You,” he says to MacLennan in what he hopes is a menacing voice. “What are you doing here?”

MacLennan turns his face up to the sky for a moment and sighs. He doesn’t act menaced. “Looking for you two.”

Afraid to ask the question but asking it anyway, Albert says, “Did Kogen put you up to it?”

“No,” MacLennan says. His face is grim. “I’m here because the cops are looking for you. I’ve been … I guess you could say I’m sort of helping Detective Andersen.”

Albert’s heart sinks. That isn’t much better.

“Then we can assume you’re not here to kill us, anyway,” Olivia says with a humorless laugh. “How’d you find us?”

“I
followed
you. You’re not as stealthy as you think you are.”

Before MacLennan can say anything else, Olivia is flying at him. “No matter what, she was your friend!” she screams, her voice echoing in the clear air. “Do you want me to tell you what Perry did to her? What he’ll do to
me
if your cop friends come and force me to go home?”

MacLennan catches her wrists easily as she comes at him, pulling her to his chest and tightening his grip on her. Albert moves to pull Olivia out of MacLennan’s grasp but MacLennan says, “Stay the hell back, Morales, and let me explain.” To Olivia he says, “I don’t want to stand here and keep your arms pinned, but if you don’t calm down and listen to me for a minute, I will.”

“Let go of me, Patrick,” she says in a dead tone.

He does. He releases her with a small push and she stumbles away from both him and Albert. She sits on a rock a little bit away.

“Are you going to explain, then,” asks Albert, “or are you stalling for time?”

“Why would I be stalling?”

“You’re still doing it! Is there a SWAT team waiting nearby or something?”

“You’re a weird dude,” MacLennan says, shaking his head. “I’ve been following you by myself. There’s no one else.”

The meaning of this hits Albert hard, and for a moment he thinks his legs won’t hold him up. He’s been thinking they’ve been so clever, and that if they’ve done nothing else right, at least they’ve managed to escape the net of Little Solace. But here this mouth-breathing jock itch has been right behind them all along. They’ve been just that easy to follow—so easy a not-so-bright guy their own age has done it. They’ve led him along, almost right to Lily.

They haven’t escaped at all; they’ve just been given enough rope to tie neatly around their own necks for whoever wants to pull. The only thing Albert can’t understand is why MacLennan has bothered following them in the first place.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “What happened? From what I saw at the gas station, you’re in pretty deep with Kogen. We’re supposed to believe you’re not helping him now?”

“And why did the police let us get this far, if you’ve been behind us all along?” comes Olivia’s voice from where she sits.

“The police didn’t send me,” MacLennan says. “You don’t understand anything. You haven’t been there.”

“I think we understand enough,” Olivia says.

MacLennan ignores her, wrapped up in trying to make his explanation. “After that thing at the gas station, I was really freaked. I knew Kogen was intense, but that was …” He trails off, shaking his head. “I tried to catch you when I saw you,” he says to Albert, “but you were so fast. I figured you didn’t trust me, and it made sense, because up until right before that night I didn’t trust you, either. I didn’t know what happened to Lily or who might know about it or who was to blame. Then after Kogen got all crazy, waving that gun around—”

“That was you following us at the movies, wasn’t it?” Albert says.

“Naw, that was Kogen,” MacLennan answers. “I didn’t even know you were there. I was following
him
. I found you that night because
he
found you. And when he started chasing you, I stopped following him and started following you. And I’ve been following you ever since, because I thought you might be going to her. To Lily. I figured you’d found her when you stopped here.”

Albert doesn’t understand. “Why do you want to find Lily, if you’re not helping Kogen?”

“He’s lying,” Olivia says flatly.

MacLennan drives a fist into his palm. “I’m trying to explain, if you’d just shut up a minute.” He pauses, and when neither of them say anything, he goes on. “I know you both think I’m scum. And yeah, at first I
was
helping Kogen. He had me cornered with that shit about the night of Lily’s accident, and he threatened to go to the cops if I didn’t help him get that diary back. He kept telling me he was trying to help Lily, and he also kept hinting that you”—he’s pointing at Albert—“had something to do with Lily being gone. I wanted to believe him. Not just because it was easier. But he started really pressing on me about getting that book back, and it was freaking me out. And then I just started to wonder, what was in that book that he wanted it so bad, you know? So when I stole it from you—”

“You read it,” Olivia says. “You knew. The night you gave it back to Perry to
destroy
, you knew. You knew it was evidence.”

Albert grabs her by the wrist to stop her from flying at MacLennan again. He wants to hear the rest of the story before they kick the crap out of this asshole, this false friend, this coward. He wants to hear the guy out before they do whatever they have to do to keep him from being a problem, if it isn’t already too late.

“Yeah, I read it. Didn’t feel good about doing it, and felt even worse about it once I saw what was in there. But Kogen was so strange about it, I had to know. But you have to understand, that guy is crazy dangerous. I couldn’t just keep it from him. I was afraid he’d do something to me, or my family.”

Olivia snorts. “That would suck, wouldn’t it?”

“I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with a plan,” MacLennan snaps at her. “Kogen was leaning on me hard once he knew I had it. So I took some photos with my cell phone before I gave it to him.”

“You did?” Albert has not expected this. It was actually a smart idea, from MacLennan.

“And I called the cops right after I left the gas station and texted them the pictures.” By now MacLennan is sitting on the ground, as is Albert. Olivia stays back, now on her feet.

“You know,” MacLennan says slowly, “I almost didn’t look at her diary before I gave it back to him. I can’t stop thinking about what would’ve happened. What I would’ve done. It would have been so much easier just to try to believe that Kogen was the good guy and I was helping Lily by helping him.” No one says anything. “When I think about it, I feel like I might puke. But I did read it, and now I’m definitely the newest name on your stepfather’s shit list, Liv.”

Still no one says anything. Albert is by now wide-awake and aware of how cold the air is. “Finish the story,” he tells MacLennan. “We need to hear the rest.”

“There’s not much left to tell,” MacLennan says. He tells them briefly how things have changed in Little Solace in the short time since they’ve left. After the pictures came through, Demiola and then Andersen had a lot of questions and wanted him to come in to make a statement. He didn’t want to let Kogen out of his sight, so they had to settle, after making a couple of empty threats, for hearing MacLennan’s version—of the long and kind of sordid story of how and why Kogen was blackmailing him—over his cell while he drove. But in light of what the photos showed, even as poor quality as they were, it was too bad to ignore. It seems the police decided to overlook MacLennan’s own shady behavior because they brought Kogen in for questioning.

“The cops even thought he might have had something to do with Lily’s disappearance,” MacLennan tells them. “I don’t think the guy’s in jail, but he’s definitely in deep crap, according to Andersen.”

“I thought Andersen and Kogen were friends,” Albert says, though it’s really a question.

“I guess they were,” MacLennan says. “But Andersen’s a cop, and the stuff Lily wrote was … bad. Kogen’s denying everything, of course, but somehow the TV news and the newspapers got ahold of it, and he had to deny the story to them, too.”

Albert wonders if MacLennan had something to do with that, and how Lily will react to the fact that her private misery is now public.

“If you’ve been following us, how do you know all this?” he asks.

MacLennan holds up his cell phone in the pre-dawn dark, the little screen glowing. “I’ve been talking with Andersen, and seriously, if you’d looked at a newspaper or a TV in the last few days, you’d know all this, too. It’s all over the place. They’ve been looking pretty hard for you guys. I told Andersen I knew you guys skipped town and that I thought I could find you. He didn’t like it, but I also told him that I thought you might be going to Lily and since he needs Lily’s statement before they can charge Kogen, he didn’t have much choice. Especially since I didn’t tell him where I was looking. He doesn’t know I actually found you. Yet.”

The first thing to pop into Albert’s head is,
It’s not too late
. Still, he doesn’t get his hopes up yet—not without knowing what MacLennan wants or if he’s planning to be a problem. Glancing over at Olivia, he can barely make out her face, though he can see that she’s looking back at him and probably having the same thoughts that he is.

“So,” MacLennan says, leaning forward. “What was the plan—for the three of you to run away? Where’s Lily?”

So he
doesn’t
know. Albert silently thanks whatever thin luck they have that MacLennan didn’t come across them sooner and overhear them talking about The Last Good Place.

Albert thinks of lying, of telling MacLennan that they don’t know where Lily is, but Olivia speaks first. Albert’s heart crawls up into his mouth and he’s terrified that in her anger she might blurt out their idea of where to find her sister.