“What’s your problem? Don’t you want this or what?” Luke was asking me.
And him. He’d been a part of it. I wanted to punch him in his chiseled nose, break it clean across the middle so he never recovered and he lost some of his luster and people called him ugly sometimes. How would he like that? But before I could make a fist, I realized what he meant. There was no door open into the house. There was no Abby in his grandma’s hand-knitted sweater leaning out, laughing at me for trying to save her when she didn’t need saving.
We were alone in the garage as before, and he was balancing a blue Schwinn bicycle, holding it upright by the handlebars. The frame was doused in rust, and one of the tires was punctured.
“What’s that?” I said slowly, putting it together. “That’s not . . .” I eyed the rest of the garage. My panic soothed when I heard her breathing. She must have trailed me so closely, I hadn’t even seen her shadow.
“Abby’s bicycle,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“No,” I said. You see, the bicycle in his hands was blue. Sure, it was a Schwinn, but I could have sworn, when I saw it in her memories, that it had been green. Bright green. Green like the trees surrounding the road she’d been riding.
Green. “That’s not it.”
“Uh, yeah, it is,” he said, rolling it as best he could with the flat back tire over to me so I had to take it. Its metal frame was very cold, and its seat was gashed open, spilling yellowed fluff and a protruding wire spring.
“If it’s her bike, why didn’t you give it to the police?”
“What do you mean? Why would I?”
“Because she’s missing,” I said.
“She ran away,” he said, and shrugged. “That’s what I heard. Some girl at that camp told me.”
I couldn’t speak. Why could no one who knew her see that she hadn’t run away? How was it that I hadn’t met her in real life and yet I, of all people, knew?
“She rode this over that night,” he said. “Then she had a conniption when she heard me on the phone—she was late, I didn’t think she was coming, so I called some other chick. So what?”
“She . . . She did see you that night?” I wasn’t expecting that. “She rode all the way here, on her bike? That night? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, but like I was saying, she didn’t stay long. She started bawling, the whole freak show. Then she gets on the bike to go and runs over something in the driveway and this happens.” He kicked at the flat back tire. “And—get this—she dropped the bike and she took off. I went after her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere on the road. Maybe she took the shortcut through the woods, dude, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We weren’t exclusive. What did she expect?”
I was still trying to understand. I’d seen her reach the bottom of the hill, but nothing beyond that, nothing outside that patch of darkness, and I’d assumed that’s where it had ended.
Instinctively I touched the pendant, resting beneath my clothes. How did it get in the gully then? Was it when she was walking back? Did I misunderstand, get the whole trip reversed, shuffle the events out of order, confuse the whole night?
Luke seemed happy to get rid of the bike. I was the one holding it upright now, and he used his free hands to fix his hair.
“You’re . . . giving this to me?” I said.
“I figured she’d come back and get it, but yeah. Then I heard she was gone, so.
It’s a piece-of-shit bike anyway, but take it. It’s what you came here for, right?”
“But, Luke, that was the night she disappeared. You were the last person to see her.”
“Wasn’t me, Officer.” He put up his hands in surrender, laughing, but when I didn’t laugh back he lowered his hands.
“Seriously, though. Everyone says she ran away or whatever. You don’t think I —”