She thought he might start yelling. She was almost hoping he would. But instead he just sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Look, Heather. I don’t want to fight with you. I want you to understand—”
“Didn’t you hear me? Just go. Leave. Get out of here.” She swiped at her eyes with the palm of her hand. His voice was screaming through her head. You want everything to be shitty . . . so you’ll have an excuse to fail.
“Heather.” Bishop put a hand on her shoulder, and she shook him off.
“I don’t know how many other ways I can say it.”
Bishop hesitated. She felt him close to her, felt the warmth of his body, like a comforting force, like a blanket. For one wild second, she thought he would refuse, he would turn around and hug her and tell her he was never ever leaving. For one wild second, it was what she wanted more than anything.
Instead she felt his fingers just graze her elbow. “I did it for you,” he said in a low voice. “I was planning to give you the money.” His voice cracked a little. “Everything I’ve ever done is for you, Heather.”
Then he was gone. He turned around, and by the time she couldn’t stand it anymore and her legs were about to give out and the anger had turned to eight different tides pulling her to pieces, and she thought to turn around and call out for him—by then he was in the car, and couldn’t hear her.
It was an upside-down day for Carp. Bishop Marks turned himself in to the police for the murder of Little Kelly—even though, as it turned out, Little Kelly hadn’t been killed in the fire at the Graybill house. Still, no one could believe it: Bishop Marks, that nice kid from down the way, whose dad had a frame shop over in Hudson. Shy kid. One of the good ones.
At the police station, Bishop denied the fire had anything to do with Panic. A prank, he said.
Upside down and inside out. Sign of the messed-up times we’re living in.
That night, Kirk Finnegan came outside when his dogs began to go crazy. He was carrying a rifle, suspecting drunk kids or maybe his piece-of-shit neighbor, who’d recently started parking on Kirk’s property and couldn’t be convinced that it wasn’t his right.
Instead he saw a tiger.
A fucking tiger, right there in his yard, with its enormous mouth around one of Kirk’s cocker spaniels.
He thought he was dreaming, hallucinating, drunk. He was so scared he peed in his boxer shorts and didn’t notice until later. He acted without thinking, swung the rifle up, fired four shots straight into the tiger’s flank, kept firing, even after it collapsed, even after by some grace-of-God miracle its jaws went slack and his spaniel got to his feet and started barking again—kept firing, because those eyes kept staring at him, dark as an accusation or a lie.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 16
heather
HEATHER HAD SUCCESSFULLY MANAGED TO AVOID talking to Anne for a whole day. After her fight with Bishop, she had walked two miles to the gully and spent the afternoon cursing and throwing rocks at random things (street signs, when there were any; fences; and abandoned cars).
His words played on endless repeat in her head. You want everything to be shitty . . . so you’ll have an excuse to fail.
Unfair, she wanted to scream.
But a second, smaller voice in her head said, True. Those two words—unfair and true—pinged back and forth in her head, like her mind was a giant Ping-Pong table.
By the time she returned from the gully it was evening, and both Anne and Lily were gone. She was seized with a sudden and irrational fear that Anne had taken Lily back to Fresh Pines. Then she saw a note on the kitchen table.
Grocery store, it said simply.
It was only seven thirty, but Heather curled up in bed, under the covers, despite the stifling heat, and waited for sleep to put a stop to the Ping-Pong game in her mind.
But when she woke up—early, when the sun was still making its first, tentative entry into the room, poking like an exploratory animal through the blinds—she knew there was no avoiding it anymore. Overnight, the Ping-Pong game had been resolved. And the word true had emerged victorious.
What Bishop had said was true.
Already, she could hear Anne noises from downstairs: the clink-clink-clink of dishes coming out of the dishwasher, the squeak of the old wooden floorboards. When waking up in Fresh Pines to the usual explosion of sounds—cars backfiring, people yelling, doors banging and dogs barking and loud music—she had dreamed of just this kind of home, where mornings were quiet and mothers did dishes and got up early and then yelled at you to get up.
Funny how in such a short time, Anne’s house had become more like home than Fresh Pines had ever been.
And she had ruined it. Another truth.
By the time she came downstairs, Anne was on the porch. She called Heather out to her immediately, and Heather knew: this was it.
Heather was shocked to see a squad car parked a little ways down the drive, half pulled off into the underbrush. The cop was outside, leaning his butt against the hood of the car, drinking a coffee and smoking.