The Telling (22 page)

People whispered that the notes to the school must have been from Ben, but kids mostly shrugged it off because our classmates knew that what Ethan and Max had done to Fitzgerald was bad. Not bad because it was against the rules, like speeding on the highway; badness itself. Dozens of witnesses had seen Ethan and Max smoke at parties; it was easy to believe they were stupid enough to keep pot in their lockers. Easy for everyone who hadn't watched Ben leave our house the night before.

Ben had cracked open my bedroom door, a black beanie pulled to his eyebrows. “Wish me luck,” he'd whispered as I let the book I was reading close on the comforter.

“For . . . ?” I said. The corners of his mouth tucked up, full of mischief, and he lifted a plastic bag full of neatly wrapped joints. Ben didn't smoke pot. I went to ask what he was up to, but then he was tiptoeing downstairs, heading into the night.

I thought Ben was satisfied getting Ethan and Max suspended and getting them booted out of baseball. He didn't mention either boy again, not even when the rumor started circulating that jumping Skitzy-Fitzy had been Ethan's idea and Max had been dragged along.

But on a morning a couple of months later, we sat opposite each other on the kitchen counter. I sipped an espresso and Ben ate cereal. I noticed the abrasions on his knuckles. He swallowed a large spoonful of granola. “I was going at that punching bag Cal got me in the garage.” It was a lie, and by the way his eyes lingered on mine, I could tell he knew it was unconvincing. The punching bag had never been taken out of its box and was collecting dust in the rafters. “If anyone asks, you heard me last night,” he added meaningfully.

“Sure,” I said. “The noise kept me up super late.” He smiled. And
like that, I had agreed to be Ben's alibi for an unknown misdeed that had left his knuckles split. Dad was out of town; Diane had been home, but she wasn't lucid enough from the sleeping pills she took to contradict anyone.

When I saw Ethan hobbling across the quad on crutches, a raccoon-eyed look to his face, I knew it had been Ben who'd injured him. Maybe Ben had been waiting the months since Ethan's suspension for the opportunity; maybe it had serendipitously presented itself. And while Ethan was the kind of boy who would attack a vagrant with a bat, he was not the sort who'd admit to be being beat up by a classmate. He was all pride, and Ben got away with it.

Ethan ended up barely passing his senior year. He left Gant for a state college in Nebraska, his big baseball future not going to happen since he'd been kicked off our high school team. Max ended up drinking too much senior year and showing up to class one morning, stumbling. After a stay in a rehab center, his parents sent him to live with an aunt in Arizona for a fresh start. I know what happened to these boys, because when Ben died, Sweeny requested the names of anyone who'd ever had a confrontation with Ben. They'd be natural suspects. Max, Ethan, and the host of other boys Ben fought with came up. All were cleared of suspicion. The shadow man remained a shadow.

It's obvious to me that Ford chose me out of all the girls he might have bullied because of Ethan and Ben's history. Ford knew what Ben did to his brother. He thought he could hurt Ben, through me. He was wrong. Ben never even knew what Ford was saying and doing.

While it's true that I was embarrassed to tell Ben, I was also afraid. Ben took a lot from Ethan: his girlfriend and his dream of
playing on a college baseball team. And after that, Ben wasn't satisfied. What would he take from Ford? I worried it would be even more.
I knew Ben.
Remember that we'd believed in revenge since we were two kids in a blanket fort, shivering over bloody stories.

Ben didn't surprise me, not usually. And although it's true I kept a bunch of stuff from him, he told me everything. At least I thought so, until Josh found the envelope Ben gave to Maggie. Ben had no reason to lie about talking to her while he was in Guatemala. I never whined that I thought he should end things, or made the negative comments about her I wanted to, or complained when he ditched me for her.

Ben arrived home after three months away and said he was ready to move on. Maggie's e-mails had gone unanswered. He was going to break up with her for good. College sounded all right. In reply I jumped in place like a kid. Ben would apply to the schools I wanted to go to, including Dad's alma mater, and hopefully he'd get into one of them. Maggie didn't fit into that equation. There would be college girls.
Sorority girls,
he said in a hard-to-impress way.

Who was this Ben who lied to me and sent Maggie love notes just before he broke up with her?

I can't let it go once I'm upstairs in my bedroom. I'm curious to see if there were letters sent from Maggie to Ben. Ben's room is the mirror image of mine across the hall. His window seat overlooks the narrow street, dying at the summit of hills both ways. I toe open his door, look around, take a deep breath, and enter. His swollen hiker's backpack is at the foot of his dresser. I make a beeline for it. It's full of dusty, rotten-melon-smelling clothes. Plenty of unwashed jeans; no letters. I give up on the pack and go for Ben's desk. I intend to
flip through Ben's sketchbooks. Each drawing, the familiar style, the charcoal strokes, the way he reinvented the ordinary surreally, will be proof that I knew him.

I reach for the middle desk drawer. I go still. The desk's flat expanse is covered with dust like a fine coat of ash. At the center is one perfectly drawn handprint. I touch my palm to its palm and align my fingers. It's identical in size to mine. Stranger, though, is that unlike the desk, the print is dustless. It's been made recently. Diane's at Calm Coast. Mariella's hands are oven mitts. No one's been in the house for over a week—not Willa, or Becca, or Carolynn.

Maggie knew where our spare key was.

She might have known that our alarm code is my birthday.

I picture Maggie returning to the island after seven weeks of hiding, stealing through our house at night, and riffling through Ben's drawers. Why else bend over the desk? Why risk being caught breaking and entering? Was she searching for a piece of evidence that if found would prove her guilt in Ben's death? A note that might have shown that Maggie was furious enough with Ben to arrange his murder? She was gone, vanished, though. The police weren't looking for her. Now I wonder if Maggie didn't set the sequence of events that led to her death in motion because she returned to Gant. Would she have lived if she'd stayed away?

Our island: craggy black cliffs, periodic sweeps of gray beach, arms of fog strangling the shore, the sound's slapping waters drowning out passing ferries. It's not the pretty little snow-globe town islanders act like it is. In my head it appears cursed and cast off from the mainland. It's the kind of in-between place where a shadow man drags a boy from his car and a girl is poisoned by
rosary peas. It's a lot like Ben's imagination in that way. Stories don't jump from your thoughts to lay waste to the world. All our make-believe didn't escape Ben's imagination before the shadow man pulled him from the car.

It's been weeks since I've felt suffocated by Gant. The secrets are multiplying, and the island's becoming crowded again. The rosary in my hiding spot and the rosary in Ben's story seem like too much for me to keep to myself. These secrets are a stain expanding on the ground, threatening to soak my socks as Mom's overturned wine did after she jumped. They make me feel like an island myself, and I'm dying to trust someone with them.

Not
someone
—Willa. I retreat back to my room, curl up on the window seat, and dial her. “Hey,” she answers softly.

I was sure her phone would go to voice mail and was at the beginning of composing a lengthy apology message. I'm caught off guard. “Hi. You answered.”

“Astute observation, L,” she replies glibly.

“I mean that I thought your mom might not be letting you talk on the phone and that I'd have to leave a message begging your forgiveness. I was going to bribe you with a dozen marionberry scones from Marmalade's.”

She snorts.

“One dozen every week for the rest of the year to show you how sorry I am,” I try.

“Throw in an almond-milk latte and we can talk,” she says. “Mom's at a meeting with the teachers about the start of classes.” A pause. “You didn't call after the police station yesterday.”

“I was worried that you didn't want me to, not after you were
hauled there and accused of murder all because you were with your selfish best friend at Swisher Spring.”

She sniffs. “I didn't want to talk yesterday.”

“How about today?” I sit stiff with trepidation.

“When was the last time we went more than twenty-four hours without speaking?” The timid smile seeping from her voice has me smiling.

I exhale, stretch out, kick my foot up on my knee, and think back. “The four days you were at physics camp the summer after freshman year.”

“Exactly.”

A low-flying V of birds cuts over the harbor. “I'm so sorry, Willa. For this whole summer and for dragging you along to the spring and for acting like grades and college applications don't matter. They do.
You do.
And I don't know why I care about the core—I mean, obviously I have always had this crush on Josh, but I want the others to like me too. I shouldn't. I like thinking that we belong with them and that they're realizing that they were wrong not to be friends with us before, like they missed out,” I say in one blast.

I hear a tapping over the line and imagine Willa's nail making contact with the bridge of her tortoiseshell glasses. She sighs after a time. “Following the loss of a family member who was important to you, it's not surprising that you'd seek acceptance elsewhere and that you'd try to distract yourself.”

The heat of the house and the cool air outside steams my windows. There's the faint outline left of the sailboat. It looks lonely. I draw a fleet of boats surrounding it as I confide in Willa. I recount our hike to Swisher Spring earlier this morning and tell her about
how upset I am that Ben sent Maggie a note when he swore to me that they'd had no contact. I tell her about the prank we're planning to honor Ben, my secret place, and what I found there. I try to explain Ben's stories. Every word is stupid and wrong; there's no right way to say what our make-believe meant to me; how those stories and our games grew like tree roots around my whole life.

“I was bigger than just myself because I had this fictional . . .”

“Likeness,” Willa supplies.

“Yeah, this fictional likeness that was better and braver than me. And I've never told anyone about the stories, because
why would I
? They were our game, like a secret language siblings have. And it was embarrassing how important the stories were to me.”

I glare at the window sweating with condensation. My hand has been busy, drawing ten sailboats. The original sticks out from the rest, though. It's a different style from my drawing.
No
—I must be drawing them differently today is all. I grab my fuzzy throw and wipe them clear. I flip to my other side. “How did my great-great-grandma's rosary get in my secret hiding spot? Am I going crazy?”

“You aren't losing your mind,” she says matter-of-factly. I hear her shift position, the comforter swish, the mattress whine. “I read about PTSD—that's post-traumatic stress disorder—after Ben died because I wanted to be prepared.” She says this so freely, Willa being Willa, studying for an exam that might never come. “And memory loss is a symptom. There can be a block in your memory of the traumatic event, or memories of earlier events can just be erased.”

“I remember everything,” I tell her, “so clearly it hurts.”

“You think you do, but it's possible there are bits you aren't recalling.”

“So your theory is that I'm not going crazy, I have amnesia.”

“Not amnesia, nothing that dramatic. A little confused is all. You might have put the rosary in your spot years ago. Hidden it when you were a kid because you worried your dad would see it and know you and Ben had snooped for the key and looked in the chest.”

I shake my head at the empty bedroom. I would remember something like that. “Okay, but am I messing up a murder investigation by not telling the police I found it? Is it significant that Maggie was killed in the same way victims were in one of our stories?”

“Probably and unlikely,” Willa says in her cool figuring-it-out voice. “The authorities just stopped suspecting you. They questioned all of us, yes, but you were the only one with a motive. The rest of us were suspected of conspiring and covering for you, Lana. The police had the motive. They needed proof.” A meaningful pause. “If you turn the rosary in, one that you've had in your possession for years, there's their proof. You aren't sure how it got from your mom's chest to your hiding spot. Your fingerprints are all over it. All bets will be off. Motive
and
murder weapon. Keep it hidden where no one will find it. Once this dies down, we'll brainstorm a way to lose it for good. And the connection with Ben's horror stories, it's slim. There are a million ways Maggie's killer might have known about the paralytic properties of rosary peas. I mean, Jeannette Rankin, I think I knew as much from a
Masterpiece Mystery
.”

“Jeannette who?” I laugh into the round pink pillow under my head.

“First woman elected to Congress. What are they teaching kids in US history if not that?” she groans.

“Thank you, Willa,”
I say. She makes me feel temporarily lighter. “For everything.”

She breathes into the phone. “Of course. Thank you for not letting Carolynn or any of them turn on me. My mom was relentless at the police station. She wouldn't quit insisting that I tell the
truth
. The others were looking at me like I was a bomb about to detonate. If the five of them pointed fingers at me, who knows what would have happened?”