Vengeance (32 page)

And Maya started laughing. “Wouldn’t they?” And suddenly I saw the Maya that stood on my porch turning mean. No, they wouldn’t. They pulled Delaney
out
of this lake. “You think they’re not hiding things? Are you even
looking
at them? Can you really not see how scared Justin is?” she whispered. “Can you really not see how
angry
Janna is?”

I saw Delaney’s gaze flick over to Janna. “There are things about our past that you wouldn’t understand.”

“Go,” Maya said. And when Delaney didn’t move, Maya yelled,
“Go!”
and Delaney jumped.

But she didn’t leave. “I know what he did,” Delaney said. “To Tara.”

“Who?” Maya asked. “My brother?”

“He was at the party,” Delaney said.

“He was at my house, after the party, where he had every right to be, since he was visiting.”

“But I
know
,” Delaney said.

Maya paused, looked past us. Made sure the cops were looking at the water, distracted, and not at her.

“That’s the problem,” she said, lowering her voice. “He’s my brother, Delaney. I don’t know what you expect me to do. But you can’t prove anything. And he’s all I have.” Then she looked out at the water. “None of it matters.”

She was right. We could prove nothing. In the courtroom, it meant nothing. But I’d know. They’d know.

“It matters,” I said. “It matters that he tried to hurt—”

“Stop it,” she said, glaring at me. “You don’t know when to quit, Decker.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “Though I’m beginning to understand why someone might want
you
in the bottom of that lake.”

I froze. Delaney froze. “I want to believe,” Delaney said, “that you don’t actually mean that.”

Maya turned to Delaney. “And I want to believe that my closest friend in this hellhole didn’t completely turn on me.” She pointed at her. “This is your fault, you know. Holden knew this would happen. He warned me about getting too close, about letting people know me, know us. I promised I’d be careful, and I
was
. You kept asking and asking about my mother. I told him … I told him because we’d have to leave. And we were going to, just as soon as the lease was up. We didn’t know what you knew. He was just trying to find out. And then I guess it looked like you were there, facedown, inches from the lake.”

Like a sign.

She seemed to catch sight of something on the surface of the water, in the distance. A yellow buoy—they’d been sending up buoys every time they came across something suspect. “So you knew about my mother …” She turned to Delaney. Tilted her head to the side. “But what I can’t figure out,” she said, “is
how
you knew.”

Careful
.

I felt Maya grasping at the truth, like it was slipping across the surface of the ice, but she could see it—she could almost catch it.

“When someone dies,” Delaney said, and I thought,
Please no
, “it always matters to someone.” She looked away. Closed her eyes. “It mattered to you.”

I heard the oars dipping into the water as the boats moved another yard away. The water lapping the shore.

“People can’t just disappear,” Delaney said.

And then the strangest thing happened. Maya sat back down, and Delaney sat beside her. Maya’s breath shook, and I felt like I could see the air moving along with her, in the cold. “The last thing she said, before she stopped saying anything at all, was that the water looked so peaceful.”

I didn’t know how anyone could look at Falcon Lake and see peace and calm and beauty, when they had just pulled up sludge and secrets and bones. What side had the lake shown her mother? Or what had she wanted to see? All I saw was black water, churning in the wind, and the yellow buoy, bobbing along the surface.

I saw what it had made us.

Delaney sat next to Maya, watching the water, waiting for this to be over.

And suddenly I understood what that lab guy couldn’t in Boston. Why she felt a pull and not a push. She couldn’t help the dying. Mostly, she couldn’t. But the people left behind—like me, like Maya—she could. She did.

Delaney looked up at me, and she gave me a smile, like she knew what I was thinking by the way I was looking at her.

But she was a better person than me. I looked over my shoulder, caught Holden’s shadow in the sliding door. Hiding,
like a coward. I stomped up the hill, straight for him. He closed the door but didn’t lock it in time. I slid it open and stepped inside. “You think you’re so smart,” I said. “Manipulating your sister into pretending you had nothing to do with this. With any of this.”

“You should probably go,” he said, and I could see how furious he was. I
should
probably go. But there were people and cops and nothing was going to happen to me. Not here, and not now. “I know what you did. Even if no one else ever does, I know. Even Maya knows.”

“Don’t. Don’t act like you care about Maya. Not when
you
have just ruined her life.”

I looked around the house. I didn’t see how I had ruined anything. She was living by herself, taking care of herself.

“You could just take custody of her. Maya said so. Couldn’t you?”

“Oh, sure, I can probably get custody. And then what? I can barely afford to take care of myself. There’s no way I can take care of another person without the disability from my mother’s old job. I am twenty freaking years old. Most twenty-year-olds are at a bar with their fake ID, not working two jobs while at college, not driving back and forth every time their sister gets lonely.”

He didn’t see Maya standing in the open doorway, her eyes wide.

“I love my mom, and she fought hard for years to keep us, to keep us together, but asking me to take care of my sister? She’s dying and she makes me promise. I don’t know
how
to
take care of another person. She told me I’d make it work.” He let out a deep breath. “She told me
how
to make it work. So I’m trying.” Was Holden saying his mother had told him not to report her death?

“But she would understand.”

“Oh, she would? Tell me, how are you so sure? She’s dead. How do you break a promise to someone who’s dead?”

He heard Maya then, standing behind him, heard the noise that escaped from her throat. “Maya,” he said, reaching for her. But she was already gone.

She was running down the hill, straight for the cop, with Holden chasing after her. “Wait,” he said. “Maya, don’t.”

She grabbed the cop’s arm, and she looked out at the lake. She narrowed her eyes against the glare from the setting sun, and she extended her arm forward, pointing at a spot in the distance. “There,” she whispered.

She turned around and looked at Holden over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.” And then, back to the cop. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said between sobs. “I didn’t want to be taken away. I didn’t want to live with strangers. And I panicked. I tried digging a grave, but the ground was hard.” She looked down at her tiny, useless hands. “And I thought of animals … so I found the chains and the concrete in the old garage, and it just seemed like it was telling me something. Like the lake was calling me. They used to bury people at sea, you know.”

Chains and concrete. Oh God. The cop looked over at Holden, and Maya saw him looking. “When my brother got
here,” she said, “he tried to stop me. But it already looked like I was guilty of something. And I begged him. I begged him.”

“And the checks?” he asked.

“I needed the money,” she said. She looked back at Holden. “He had nothing to do with it. But what was he supposed to do? Turn in his own sister?”

He ran a hand through his hair and nodded, like he had a sister of his own and understood. “Don’t move,” he said as he stepped away.

And as he walked away, she whispered, “Where could I possibly go?”

Holden pulled her toward him, wrapped his arms around her back. “Dammit, Maya,” he whispered as he held her close.

“What the hell just happened?” Kevin asked as another cop led Holden and Maya back into their home. “
Maya
said
she
did this?” That’s the lie she was sticking to. But Maya hadn’t done this. At least, not alone. But she was going to take the fall for it.

Nobody left, even though it was getting darker. Even though I didn’t really want to see this part. More people showed up, like the whole town was holding some vigil at Falcon Lake. The buoy went up, near where Maya had directed the cop, and we waited. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. They brought a body bag down, but it didn’t come back up at first.
She
didn’t come back up. She was not supposed to come up. She was
never
supposed to come up. So they waited, hooked onto the bottom of the lake, hooked onto what was presumably something that was supposed to remain hidden.

They got more equipment, more air, to force the cement blocks up as well—the weight and chains that held her to the bottom.

The crowd grew at the shoreline, and then there was a bubble from under the surface, like the lake was gurgling, releasing something—its secrets, its air, its life.

She came up, black garbage bags buoying to the surface, floating there while we all stared.

Kevin made the sign of the cross, then leaned over and put his hands on his knees.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Janna said.

Justin backed away with her. “Let’s go,” he said.

We all started walking toward our cars. We walked away from the lake, bumping shoulders. Closer than we normally walked. Kevin close to Delaney, close to me, close to Justin. Justin had his arm around Janna. “This place is so fucked up,” he said. “How long till we get out of here?”

“Seven months until graduation,” Kevin said. “If I’m ungrounded by then.”

I reached out and took Delaney’s hand.

“This place,” Janna said, “is like living with ghosts.”

I felt a chill run through Delaney, through her hand, straight to me.

Chapter 21

“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked my mom. She’d made supper. Neither of us was eating it.

My mom pushed the food around her plate with the back of her fork. “They’ll probably hold her on what they can until the autopsy is complete. Make sure her mother died of natural causes.”

“What about Holden?”

“What
about
Holden?” she asked.

Holden could’ve killed Tara. Could’ve killed Delaney. “I find it hard to believe that he’s remotely innocent in this,” I said.

She shrugged. “There are things that are hard to prove. And there are things, to the court, that are not worth proving. You should know that.”

“So they’re just going to get away with it?”

What had happened to my house. To Delaney’s house. Taking and taking and making me believe …

My mom fixed her eyes on me, stopped moving her food around her plate. “They lost their mother. And they did something stupid. The only thing that’s going to happen is that Maya is going to have a place to stay and people to look after her. And personally, I’m more than okay with that.”

But I looked at my house, and I thought of Delaney’s windows and Tara in the lake. Holden had been around the night the windows were broken. He was obviously capable of it all. It had to be him. I shoved a forkful of food into my mouth, ground my teeth into it, and concentrated on avoiding eye contact with my mom so she wouldn’t see it in my face.

I wanted Holden to pay. I wanted justice.

“I’m going to Kevin’s,” I yelled from my room.

“Don’t you have homework?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, digging through my top drawer and pulling out the stolen recorder. “That’s why I’m going to Kevin’s. Project.”

I shoved the recorder into my pocket and took off down the street. Delaney’s bedroom light was on. She was home, and she was safe. Maya was gone. Holden was leaving. And I needed proof, for her, for me.

There were tons of cops when we left—I was sure they’d still be combing through the shoreline, taking statements from people. But when I pulled up to Justin’s lake house, into the dark driveway, I didn’t see anyone. I set the recorder on the seat beside me and turned off the engine. I didn’t hear
anything. I didn’t
see
anything. Just a light from the house, behind the cheap blinds. Just a light in the distance, through the trees, from the neighbor’s.

Bad idea. Like standing on the middle of Falcon Lake. I turned the ignition, my headlights cutting through the dark, and something slammed into my door, shaking the van, shaking me. Holden’s face was in the window, and his eyes were wild. A wooden plank was positioned over his shoulder, a bent nail near the top, catching the light from my headlights. Then he brought it down against the hood of my van and yelled, “Get out of the car!”

He tossed the plank aside—I heard it bounce off the ground. “Get. Out. Of. The. Car!” he said again.

This was the guy who wanted to kill Delaney. And for what? To protect his secret. Her life, for a secret.
Her life
, for nothing.

I opened the door, looked at the wooden plank, at the bent nail, and wondered how quickly I could get it in my hands.

Not quick enough. Holden pushed me against the van, once, twice, before I slammed my elbow in his face. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he asked, running his hand over his jaw.

“Me?” I asked, regaining my footing and pushing off the door. “
I
’m not the one who tried to kill someone!
I
’m not the one taking a plank to someone’s car.”

My eyes drifted to the wood and back to Holden. We both dove for it, but I was faster. Got there a fraction of a second before him, had a better grip on the wood, felt the splinters
digging into my palm, my fingers, as I wrenched it out of his hands.

Holden took a step back. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, and I hauled the slab of wood over my shoulder in one quick motion, weighing it in my hand, adjusting my grip.

Holden looked at the wood, took another step back. “Leaving,” he said. “I’m just getting the last of our things and leaving.” He was panting, and he was furious with me. “But the question is, what are
you
doing here?”