I pry my fingers into the gap—one of the boards is just barely hanging on; one nail in the corner, balanced on the piece of wood below. I pull it out and let it swing quietly down, and then we’re staring into the open expanse of what looks like an abandoned shipment center.
There are crates in the corners, broken down and emptied. And in the center of the space, three guys sit in a circle of metal chairs around a lantern. Other than those crates and the wrappers and trash littering the floor, the room is barren. There are sleeping bags behind the guys, making it seem like they’re planning to stay here for the night.
Kennedy presses her face up against mine at the window. The kid facing us has white-blond hair, and he laughs at something another one says. Her hand comes down on my wrist. “That’s him.”
She pulls back from the window, looking at me. “We should talk to him,” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. I get this feeling, this premonition, standing in the rain, peering into the abandoned factory. He’s here because he doesn’t want to be found. What happens, then, if we find him?
Kennedy takes a step to the side and stumbles off the bench. She reaches a hand out and grabs a piece of the wood from the window as she falls. The sound echoes through the night.
The guys inside go silent. I crouch down lower, still peering through the window. The three guys all stare back, but I don’t think they can see me. And then on instinct, Hunter dives for his bag. I brace myself, thinking he’s going to grab a weapon, but he doesn’t. He grabs his bag, and he runs in the other direction, for the door.
Before I can reach for Kennedy’s arm, she takes off around the building.
Everything clarifies: the night, the rain, this moment. I take off after her, on instinct. She’s a blur in the night that I’m following through the trees. My God, she’s fast. “Kennedy, wait!” I shout, but she doesn’t listen.
I hear her shout in the distance. “Please. I’m Elliot’s sister!”
And then I almost collide with her back. She’s standing still between the trees, and across from her, Hunter stares back.
He looks her over closely. “I remember you,” he says.
She nods. “Kennedy. I saw you once, at the house.”
He frowns at me. “Who the hell are you?”
“My friend,” she answers for me. “We’ve been looking for you.”
His hair drips with rainwater, and he shakes it out. His T-shirt clings to his skinny frame, and his worn jeans and tan boots are also rain-and mud-covered. “I don’t know what happened,” he says.
She steps closer. “But you do know. You know something happened. You know Elliot’s in trouble.”
He looks over our heads, as if he’s expecting someone else to appear from the trees. “I couldn’t stay,” he says. “Not for that. Not for the police.”
Then he brushes by both of us, and I guess that’s a sign that it’s okay to follow him back to the old building. He leans his hip into a side door where the lock has worn through the rotted wood.
It’s cold and impersonal inside, but at least it’s dry, and there’s still that lantern set up in the middle of the room. The other two kids who were here are gone—apparently spooked by our presence. Why would anyone want to stay here, I think, unless they don’t want to be found?
Hunter kicks an empty can out of the way and settles into one of the metal chairs.
“I saw, on the news,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s it? You’re sorry? You think Elliot did…that?” Kennedy asks, standing over him. She looks like she’s conducting an interrogation.
He runs a hand through his hair. “I didn’t. I don’t. Not really. Except I saw on the news, the evidence was pretty clear. And I know how he felt about Will.”
She frowns. “What do you mean? How did he feel about Will?”
He laughs. “He hated him. Obviously. Which was something I could definitely relate to. Me and my stepdad don’t exactly see eye to eye, either,” he says, looking around the room. Which I assume is why he’s here. He focuses back on Kennedy. “Elliot said he was controlling, manipulative. He kept fighting with his mom about it. Your mom, sorry.” I can see his throat move as he swallows. “Said Will wasn’t good for her, but she thought his attitude was just because he was failing Will’s class.” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t that. He said there was something off with him. Something no one else seemed to notice…I guess Elliot confronted him. I guess he…well. I have a hard time believing it, but what do I know? I’d only met him a couple months before.”
“So…what? You hear what happened, and you take off, and now you’re hiding out here?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not hiding. I don’t want to go home. I’d been staying near the college up there—no one looks too close, and it’s easy to use the dorms, and student services. It’s how we met.” He bites his lower lip, looking at the dirty concrete beneath our feet. “I had to leave. I don’t want to be dragged into the case up there. I’m sorry, Kennedy. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see. Last time I got involved with something that wasn’t my business, it ended badly. So, yeah, I got as far away as I could.”
Kennedy leans over him so his back is pressed into the seat—but there’s nowhere else for him to go. “You just left him there.” She shudders, like there’s a ghost in the room. And I can feel them, all of them—Liam, her mother—watching us now, thinking about all the things we didn’t do, and couldn’t stop. She steps back. “Your sister is looking for you,” she says. “Go home.”
Hunter looks at me instead, like I’m about to absolve him of something. But I am not that person.
* * *
—
Kennedy stays silent on the drive home, twisting around in the seat, staring back into the darkness. “What are you looking for?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. I’m not sure if she knows, either. I drive for ten minutes before she faces forward again, but she’s shaking.
I can’t tell if it’s the nerves, or the fact that we’re soaking wet, in day-old clothes, but I just keep driving. I want to go home. I want to get her back.
“I didn’t know Elliot hated Will,” she says. “He didn’t seem warm to him when he was around, but I thought that was just because, you know, he was our mom’s boyfriend. We didn’t spend a lot of time together other than at my mom’s work conference over the summer and the occasional weekend dinner. Most of the time, they would go out, or spend time at Will’s, just the two of them.” She sits upright in her seat. “I heard them arguing once, Elliot and my mom. About how she didn’t see what he was really like—I didn’t realize he was talking about Will.” She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “I didn’t see. But Elliot did. He saw something that no one else did,” she says. “I need to talk to Joe. You know, Will’s prints were on the gun, too, right? The police said…they said Will tried to wrestle the gun away from him. But what if that’s not what happened at all?”
I try to see both possibilities—Elliot with the gun; Will with the gun. The images switch. Her brother, holding the weapon. An older man, graying beard, holding it instead.
Eventually, the rain lets up, but I keep driving until we’re at a rest area on the highway, heading back to Virginia, where we wordlessly take turns standing guard outside the restrooms while the other changes.
It’s 2 a.m. and the adrenaline is wearing off. There’s a truck stop behind the rest area, lights on in the parking lot, full of people, despite the hour. In contrast to sneaking around an abandoned factory in the middle of the night, this feels decidedly safe.
I try to sleep, but I can’t. There are too many thoughts swirling in my head. An hour later, I look over, and she’s staring straight up at the ceiling. Wordlessly, I reach a hand out for hers. She laces her fingers around mine, then shifts to the side.
“I need to tell Joe,” she says. “If Elliot doesn’t remember what happened, then maybe it wasn’t him. He can’t stand the sight of blood. It makes him sick, always has. And there was so much blood…” She drifts off, then continues. “It’s possible Elliot took my mom’s gun out to protect himself. Or my mom took it out to protect herself. Maybe it was Will who did it.”
I try to see it, to believe, to make it so. I shake my head. “But then who shot Will?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. And then, quietly, “Elliot,” she says. And it’s like everything finally clicks together: why he hasn’t denied it, why he isn’t sure. If the night is a blur, and he pulled the trigger…He did do something. It’s terrible.
But then I think of what I would do if I saw someone hurting someone I loved.
“Are you ready to go back?” I ask.
“Not really. But I have to. Are you awake enough to drive?”
“Yeah, just, maybe you can talk to me on the way home, to make sure?”
She smiles then. “Pretty sure I can manage.”