“No. She scared me sometimes. But no.” She takes a long sip of her beer. “We let her down, all of us. She was sick, you know,” she goes on. Then, in response to my look of surprise, “Sick in the head. Her dad used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.”
Suddenly my stomach drops. I remember Kaycee in fourth grade, proudly showing off tubes of mascara and lipstick, tucked at the bottom of her backpack. My daddy gave them to me, she told me. He says I’m a big girl now so why not?
I think of Kaycee, heating up a silver Zippo lighter, shocking my skin with the burn of steel. You know it’s love because it starts to hurt. I was too young to understand.
The air is stifling—the smell of stale beer coats everything. I feel as if I can hardly draw a breath.
“She tried to tell us, too. What do you do about something like that? Misha accused her of wanting attention. Misha was always accusing everybody of wanting attention.”
I clear my throat. “That’s called projection,” I say, and she laughs, throaty and surprisingly rich.
“I’d say.” Suddenly she leans forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her eyes fighting their way to sharp focus. “I think that when she got sick, it was because of that. You ever heard about that? How the mind can make you feel bad even when you’re not?”
“Sure,” I say carefully. “But I thought she was only pretending?”
She leans back. All at once, she seems totally exhausted. “No,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t pretend. She was sick all right. We all were. It was no one’s fault but our own.” She directs the words toward her beer, as if it’s proof of this.
Misha always said that what happened senior year was a prank that quickly spiraled out of control: as more and more girls began to get sick, no one knew what was real and what was pretend anymore. Cora’s idea is that the sickness was a kind of punishment.
But for what?
She avoids my eyes and watches her beer drain toward empty with every sip, as if trying to figure out what’s happening to it. No point in holding back now. “Was it because of the Game?”
Bingo. She jerks her head up to stare at me. “That was some sick shit. I remember when they found Becky Sarinelli hanging. I thought I was going to puke.”
“Me too.”
“It was Kaycee’s idea, you know.” She stabs a smoke ring with her pointer finger to dissipate it. “Not the Game itself. The senior boys had been competing for nudies for years. But the money part.”
The cigarette smoke is making me nauseous.
“That was typical Kaycee,” she says. “Always running some scheme.” And I know she’s right. Kaycee was always scheming for money, even when we were little. Her family was worse off than mine, or even Cora’s. “She used to steal stuff whenever she could. We all did—beer and rolling papers and gum and shit like that. But with her it was like she couldn’t help it.” She shook her head. “So then Kaycee had this idea, right, that we could ransom back the pictures they took. Make the girls pay, or else. I didn’t want to. But you know how Kaycee was…” She trails off, shrugging.
She doesn’t need to finish, anyway. I know what she would have said: It was impossible to say no to Kaycee. She could talk you into anything.
Dogs like that should be put down.
“What did she do with the photos after people paid up?” I ask. “Did she actually return them?”
Cora frowns. “What do you think?” She leans forward to stub out a cigarette. “She kept them.”
Chapter Thirty-One
On the way to Monty’s house that afternoon, I get two calls from the same Indiana area code—Shariah, I assume, has found my note. Joe’s face pops up cartoonish in my head, saying focus, saying this is about what’s happening now, but I send the calls to voicemail instead.
The water results have bought us all the time in the world. We have nothing but time now: years of litigation, of grunt work, of remediation and blame-casting and bureaucratic red tape.
But I let Kaycee disappear once before. I can’t let her disappear again—not when I’m closer than ever to finding the truth.
Cora’s words play again and again in my head.
Her daddy used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.
Always running some scheme.
She’s right about some of it. Even as a kid, Kaycee stole things—little things, trinkets from other people’s houses, stuff from the cubbies at school. She was never sorry about it afterward. I remember when Morgan Crawley cried until her nose bubbled with snot over a pair of mittens her grandmother had knitted her—mittens Kaycee had showed me, gloating, at the bottom of her bag the day before.
“Then she shouldn’t have been so careless with them,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “If you love something, you have to take care of it and keep it safe.” She was so angry at me that she took the mittens and threw them in a storm drain, and I’ll never forget how she looked then, standing in the street while a rush of rainwater roared the mittens down into the sewer. “Look. Now they’re not stolen anymore. Now no one has them.” As if it had been my fault all along.
Nothing was ever her fault. She was immune to guilt, and her memory worked like one of those old gold sifting pans, shaking away all the dirt, all the bad stuff, leaving intact only the things she really wanted to remember, the things that made her look good.
That’s why the thing with Chestnut’s collar has always puzzled me, too. What made her keep the collar and then, so many years later, give it back? Why was that so important to her? It was as if Chestnut’s death wasn’t proof of something terrible she’d done, but proof of something terrible done to her.
But what? It didn’t make any sense.
Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.
—
I follow the school bus right to Monty’s doorstep, expecting to see him pour out through the open door, all six feet of him. But only a girl disembarks, bent nearly double beneath the weight of an enormous backpack, and trudges across a browning yard to a neighboring house.
Maybe Monty caught a ride home with his mom: she works in the cafeteria at the high school and part-time in one of the tollbooths on Interstate 70, which runs between Columbus and St. Louis. She told me once she liked to wear her hairnet there, too, tried to dress herself down and look as plain as possible, so the late-night drivers coming through would be less tempted to stroke her palm when she was giving change or whisper dirty things to her.
Monty lives in a funny patchwork house that looks like two ranch homes got into a collision and never got unstuck. An American flag hangs over the door.
The house is dark inside. But his mom, May, comes to the door as soon as I knock, still wearing her hairnet.
“Abigail,” she says, and gives me a huge hug. She smells like cinnamon airspray. I’ve always thought May was like a favorite quilt, colorful and comforting, soft to touch. The kind of mother who makes you feel, right away, like you’re at home. My mother was exactly like that.