Cannon stared after him, immobile, his blank face hollowed by shadows.
I wondered if he was considering going in with Jim, ending it all, right then and there.
Instead, he turned with an empty stare, climbed into the car, and drove off.
It was a moment before any of us could move.
I was standing on top of the pipe in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind short-circuiting. Too late, I realized the cement was cracking under my feet. Abruptly, with an angry belch, the entire thing collapsed, Martha and the others jumping back into the grass as I was sent plummeting into the pile of rubble.
Wit helped me, gasping, to my feet.
“What the hell was that? Are you okay?”
I nodded, climbing out, dusting myself off.
We stood silently in a circle for a moment, eyeing each other in shock.
“But who did Cannon call?” whispered Wit with a hint of indignation. “Because it wasn’t me. I never knew any of this.”
“He called Kipling,” said Martha.
We turned to Kip. He eyed us stiffly, guiltily, his arms held at odd angles at his side.
“She’s right,” he whispered. “The devil called, and I answered.”
He said it flatly, with a hint of relief, and I remembered with a shiver of shock the meaningful glance I’d seen Kip exchange with Cannon back in the Wincroft library, when they were confessing how Kipling had made it through Darrow. They hadn’t been thinking about the arrangement Cannon had made, or the cheating. They’d been thinking about this very night, and the secret they kept.
“I helped him throw Jim’s body into the quarry,” said Kipling.
We stared at him.
“How can that be?” asked Whitley. “We didn’t see you.”
“Chapter Thirty-Nine, The Bend,” whispered Martha. “You never run into yourself in the past or the future.”
Kipling nodded. “I had to come here. I had to watch. I had to know, once and for all, if it had been my idea to throw Jim into the lake, or Cannon’s. Would it happen if I wasn’t a part of it? I had to know who was the bad one, and who was worse.”
“Did Cannon tell you why he had come here?” Martha asked, and bit her lip.
“He did.”
“What did he say?”
Kipling smiled demurely. “Why don’t you ask her?” He nodded at Whitley.
She glared at him, livid. For a moment, I thought she was about to start screaming, unleashing one of her rages. Instead, she sighed.
“Cannon was my best customer,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I whispered.
“Adderall. The White Rabbit gave him his boundless supply. He popped them like Tic-Tacs. He still does.”
“All that time during school, he never knew you were the White Rabbit?” asked Martha.
Wit shook her head. “Not until Vida. I was too scared to tell him.”
I thought back to Cannon’s reaction when he’d learned Wit was the White Rabbit. He had been livid. Now I understood why. It was because she had known his secret all along, and had never told him hers.
“So let me get this straight,” said Martha. “On the night Jim died, Cannon called the White Rabbit for another stash of Adderall, and you sent him out here.”
Whitley nodded, sullen.
“Why here?”
Wit shook her head. “Jim had found me out a few weeks before. He was watching me constantly, telling me I had to stop. I was afraid to do a drop on campus. So I decided out here was perfect. It was remote. I texted Cannon as the White Rabbit, telling him he could find his supply inside a desk in the mapping office. Only I couldn’t make it out here in time. I got caught talking to Mrs. Lapinetti about my Italian final. I raced back to the quarry and did the drop, but I had no further contact that night from Cannon.”
“When did you make it back here?” asked Martha.
“It was three in the morning. I didn’t see anything or anyone, I swear to God.”
“You must have just missed them.” Martha checked her watch. “When Jim turned up dead at the quarry, you must have suspected Cannon. After all, you knew he’d come out here.”
Wit nodded. “But I knew he’d never willingly hurt Jim.”
Martha turned, staring up at the Foreman’s Lookout.
“So the only question now is…”
She fell silent, nibbling a fingernail.
“What?” prompted Kipling.
“How did Jim appear so suddenly under that car?”
She turned on her heel, resolved.
“Come,” she ordered.
Beckoning us to follow her, she vanished into the grass.
When we caught up to Martha, she was crouching underneath the Foreman’s Lookout. Staring overhead, I saw in astonishment that the ladder to climb up was missing. I realized then that what remained of it was strewn all over the ground.
“Incredible.”
Martha gasped in shock over some revelation, then stood up, shaking her head.
“It’s really the most impossible sequence of events.”
“What?” asked Kipling.
“Momma Greer was right.”
“About?”
“The freak possible.”
Martha rolled one of the pieces of wood under her sneaker, then gazed up at the landing suspended high over our heads.
“Poor Jim.”
She looked at me, and instantly I felt chills inching up my arms. What was she aiming at? What was she trying to do? It was dark, but her eyes sparkled behind her glasses, alert, alive.
“It happened right here,” she said. “Jim was undone over Beatrice confronting him about his lie, the night he went off with Vida. He was also distraught over Estella Ornato. His perfect life had fallen down around him, so he escaped here, as he often did, to be alone, to write music. He started to climb up to the Foreman’s Lookout, but the ladder gave out. He managed to grab a few supporting beams, trying to save himself, but they didn’t hold.”
Martha bent down to inspect a piece of the wood, showing us that the underside was completely rotten.
“He fell. It was a considerable distance, five, six stories, a drop that would have killed most people. Yet Jim survived.”
“How?” I whispered.
“He was drunk. It’s why drunk drivers survive car accidents. Drunks don’t tense up on impact. They relax. That saves their lives. He was unconscious for an hour. Maybe two. Then he woke up.” She squinted out at the quarry road. “He must have heard the car, or seen the headlights. Or maybe he was just trying to get to his bike.”
Martha hurried to the other side of the road and dragged Jim’s bike out of the grass, throwing it at our feet with the flair of a magician whisking a rabbit from a hat.
“He crawled from here to here.” She pointed toward the road. “That’s eight, ten feet? He was trying to get help. At that point, Cannon had climbed behind the wheel again. If Jim called out, it was lost in the crickets, the engine, the radio. We couldn’t hear a thing, or see much in the dark. Neither did Cannon. Cannon, assuming the White Rabbit stood him up, has to get back to school, drive the car back before Moses returns to the gatehouse after his AA meeting. Frustrated, he puts the car in reverse, hitting Jim. He realizes what’s happened, and he goes crazy. He calls Kipling, who is in his debt. Kipling arrives, and together they decide that the only way out of this unimaginable turn of events is to throw Jim into the quarry and pray the police think suicide.”
Kipling nodded. “We hoped the cops wouldn’t notice the difference between injuries sustained from a car hitting you and injuries from a three-hundred-foot fall.”
“The police probably would have looked closer,” said Martha, “if not for the Masons. They were worried the business about Estella Ornato was about to be exposed. They didn’t know what Jim had told people. Given the level of his anger, they probably weren’t so sure Jim didn’t commit suicide, having learned the truth about what they’d done. What he had done. So they stayed silent. And probably applied some pressure on that little police station. Whatever other pieces of evidence the cops unearthed—Jim’s visit to Honey Love Fried Chicken, Vida’s tip-off about Shrieks being the real White Rabbit, cell phone records? They stopped pursuing it.”
“The Masons confiscated the contents of Jim’s case file, don’t forget,” said Kipling.