“I don’t want to tell it to everyone,” I say.
“So just tell it to me,” he says.
* * *
—
Inside, there’s no one working at the front desk, and we walk by the same vending machine with the crack I saw last week, the same lacquered walls I ran my fingers across.
The three of us walk into the same conference room, but that’s the end of the similarities. Now there are two men at the table, along with a woman, and a video camera set up between them. “Oh,” I say, freezing at the entrance.
Joe puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes.
“I’ve asked my colleagues to be here today, to help make sure we have all the facts. And to make sure there’s no…confusion,” the man in the wire-rim glasses says.
I’m not sure whether he’s talking about my confusion or his, but I walk to the seat across from the camera.
I notice that his tie, today, is straight. “So, Kennedy,” he says, “I hear you’ve remembered something important. Something that will shed some light on this case.”
I nod. I’ve always remembered. But I wait until Joe and Nolan take their seats, and then think how to begin.
“I panicked,” I say, feeling my throat close, even now, with the thought of it. “When you questioned me in the hospital. There are things I didn’t want to say.”
His eyes gleam, and he presses Record. They’re all watching me, waiting. But instead I focus on Nolan, sitting at the other end of the table. Just one person. One person, who will listen. One person, who will believe me.
I will have to tell them about Elliot, standing and pointing the gun at me. And about hiding in the shed, the call I made for help, which no one received. I will have to tell them I never looked at the shadow house.
I pretend it’s just me and Joe, in the car on the side of the road; or me and Nolan, sending messages to each other, back and forth—a connection before we’d even met. And then I start talking. It comes out in a rush, like I’ve been holding it in forever and it’s been trying to escape all this time.
I repeat the things Hunter told me about Will and my mom, what Elliot believed. I tell them about Hunter Long, how he could be a witness, maybe, if they can find him, and convince him. Though I worry he’s unlikely to agree—he said he didn’t want to be involved. And then I tell them what I think must have happened.
They all look at one another, and I know what they’re remembering. The police traced Elliot back to the woods, that night, but couldn’t find him. Like he was hiding, ashamed of something he had done. But I try to look beyond that. “Elliot can’t handle the sight of blood,” I say. “When he was younger, he used to pass out, just looking at a cut. That much blood…it could’ve sent him into shock.”
He must’ve stayed in one spot for hours, just standing there. I imagine him in the circle, where Liam disappeared. The police searched that area over and over, and they didn’t find him. Sometimes I wonder if the earth swallowed him up. That crack in the universe. If he slipped right through, for a moment, to be safe. If he escaped for a little bit, too.
When daylight came, he walked back home; up the road, to the driveway, through the front door. Blood-soaked, shaking, fingertips near frostbitten. He came back, and nothing would ever be the same.
When I finish my story, the woman is watching me closely, and the man in the glasses stares at Joe, like he expects him to talk some sense into me. Or like he expects Joe to ask me to leave the room, like last time, so he can explain. But he doesn’t. He sits there, staring back, and then the man asks if he can speak with Joe alone.
Joe shakes his head. “That’s what Kennedy knows, and we wanted you to know it, too. I think it’s fair to assume that if you call her up to the stand, that’s the same truth she will tell you then. We will be sharing this with Elliot’s lawyer as well.”
Joe hands them the file that Nolan gave him, with all the information on Hunter Long. I have no idea if they’ll follow up—maybe not if it’s messing up their case. I have to hope that their goal is not just a tally in the win column, but uncovering the truth. And I do. I believe it.
I think there’s something tying us all together here. Everyone in this room. The type of people who search for answers, who want to know, who want the proof. I think it’s maybe true of all of us, outside this room, too, stretching across the globe, on and on and on.
The man in the glasses looks through the file before frowning. “Kennedy, you’ve told us Elliot had the gun. He pulled the trigger—”
“I know he did. But I don’t think he started it. I think he was protecting himself.”
He sighs.
“Were my mother’s prints on the gun, too?”
He frowns. “They would be there, from any time she touched it. Even if it was a different day.”
My eyes widen. “So the answer is yes,” I say. I see her, then, racing for the linen closet, opening the compartment, for the safe where she kept the gun. I see her punch in the code, taking it out. I hear them arguing. I see her backing down the hall as Will steps closer, even as she holds the gun. And then Will telling her to stop, reaching for her, taking it from her as she backs into the stairs…
I can see that the people across the table are thinking it through, too. That there’s something here, that we’re reaching for, just beyond the places we can see.
“The evidence supports Elliot as the shooter,” he says, but more softly.
“His prints were on the safe?”
Three heads shoot up, and they look at one another. “What safe?” the woman says.
I don’t understand and look to Joe. “The safe where the gun was kept.”
But the man in the glasses is already shaking his head, just as the others are shuffling papers around. “When we asked you at the hospital, you said the gun was kept in the linen closet. Elliot said the same thing.”
“Right. It was hidden in the linen closet. Inside the safe.”
“There was no safe,” he says.
My heart beats faster, until I can hear it, echoing inside my head. “Inside the wall panel. It’s disguised to look like an electrical box. The safe is inside the wall panel.” It was just another quirk of the house that she loved, a hidden compartment the previous owners must’ve installed. One more secret she uncovered after we’d already moved in.
Silence. And then: “Will you go through that night, one more time, Kennedy? Every second of it, to the best of your recollection.”
“Yes,” I say.
I sit in that room, listening to every painful thing Kennedy has to say.
Imagining myself there.
Her voice lulls, haunting in the barren room, and it’s like I’m there.
I can feel the rain. I can hear the thunder. The house lights up in the distance, under a crack of lightning.
“I was waiting at the fence,” she says. “At the edge of the property. There was a light on, in Elliot’s room. That’s all I could really make out, in the dark. The lightning felt so close, and I didn’t want to get struck while I was running across the fields, but I figured at that point, I could also get struck just standing there, too, while I was waiting at the fence. So I talked myself into it. After the next bolt of lightning, I would go. But then I heard a boom. And it sounded so much closer…like something else….” She shakes her head. “So I counted down from three, and then I ran.”
I open my eyes, and she’s looking straight at me. I counted down from three, she says, and I feel something stir inside.
Three, two, one, I hear, and I can’t breathe.
The timing of the signal. We were wrong—it wasn’t pi, nothing about the geometry of a circle, or trying to communicate through math. But the count of three. Three, two, one.
It was the message.
She keeps talking, telling her story, but I’m somewhere else. I’m no longer in the room at all.
The trees come into focus first, and they blur by as I race through them. I’m running through the woods after Liam, both of us younger, shirtless, in bathing suits. The branches catch at my skin, and he’s laughing. Come on, Nolan, he calls over his shoulder.
We emerge in a clearing, and he points over the ledge, to a still body of water. We’re standing on top of a granite formation, slick gray walls jutting out in geometrical patterns, a pool of impossible blue down below, in the middle. Our parents are somewhere out there on a picnic blanket, looking up—but I can’t pick them out from all the others. And there’s a lifeguard on a stand waiting at the base. Some people have jumped. Other people are swimming.
There’s another lifeguard in the clearing, and he gestures to the pile of flotation devices beside us. Liam hands me an orange life jacket from the pile, but my fingers aren’t strong enough to work the straps.