I remember where the circuit breaker is, feel Caleb beside me as I go to it. I do the same maneuver, using the side of my hand to take the entire house offline. I flick it all back on, then open the garage door, and hope she will think it’s an unexpected, unexplained part of the power surge.
Max takes my hand, pulling me around the corner of the garage, in hopes we won’t be seen. He has the box of photos tucked under his other arm, from upstairs. I hear the door from the house to the garage swing open, but we don’t look back.
It’s not until we’re around the corner, tucked out of sight, catching our breath with our hands on our knees, that I realize, in the clenched fist of my other hand, I still have Sean’s pocket watch.
We are sitting in Max’s car, but the engine is off. The only sound is of us both trying to catch our breath. The pocket watch is on my knees, and the blood looks more like rust in the light of day. Max keeps looking over my shoulder, out the window, as if expecting Eve to come along at any moment, but nothing happens.
“Did she see us?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was running.” His throat moves as he swallows, and his eyes drift to the pocket watch in my lap. “What’s going on, Jessa?”
My fingers tighten on the watch. “I don’t know. But I think…I think something happened to Sean. I don’t think he left.”
“And you think…Caleb?”
“I don’t know, Max,” I say. The lies are bigger than I thought. If he is truly alive, then this is a deception, and he’s done it to all of us. “I showed up at his house the day his mom kicked Sean out, and they’d been fighting. Sean had hit him. Caleb had a mark on his face, and this watch has blood on it. I assumed that’s why his mom kicked him out. But now Sean’s clothes are in the garage, in suitcases. His wedding band and his phone are still there, in the garage. And this.” I hold up the pocket watch. “She’s pulling things back out of Caleb’s boxes. What am I even doing up there?”
“It doesn’t make sense, Jessa,” he says, but his voice is low, unsure. “You think Caleb did something and took off because of it? Where would he go?”
“I don’t know.” I laugh to myself, a hollow, pained sound. “And here I thought he was just meeting up with some girl.”
“What girl?”
“Ashlyn Patterson. From sleepaway camp.”
Max frowns. “He didn’t go to sleepaway camp.”
I pull up her profile on my phone, show him the picture. “I thought this was her, but she said she didn’t know him.”
He shakes his head, then grabs my wrist and pulls it closer. “I know her.”
“How?”
He narrows his eyes. “I don’t know. But I know I’ve seen her before.”
“They were talking at the slopes, last year when we went skiing.”
He wrinkles his nose. Like he’s trying to place her there. Slip her back into focus. “No, no, I remember now. That game we drove to. Remember? The one when you got stranded in the boys’ locker room and Hailey had to bail you out?”
The hair on the back of my neck stands on end. The phone call he got, when he left me. I thought it was from his mom, but what if it wasn’t? I try to remember where we had gone. It was up north. Out of the way. Was it her school? Somewhere nearby?
“When did you see her?” I ask, though the words feel like sandpaper coming out.
“With Caleb. After the game. By the locker room. We were leaving, you guys had already said goodbye, and I went back for a drink at the vending machines. I saw the two of them, but he was saying goodbye to her, nothing sketchy or anything. I asked him who it was, and he just said someone he knew growing up. Maybe through his dad?” He shrugged. “I don’t really remember. It didn’t seem important.”
I think about the letter I found, his name on the envelope, with no address—as if it had been left for him somewhere, and not sent. I think of all the secret places Caleb had brought me: the library, the burned-out house, that hike. And then I think of the places he never brought me, but disappeared to: when visiting Terrance in college, the man who showed up for him.
Nothing makes any sense, and I can’t pull the answers out of the air. I open the message, the one from Ashlyn Patterson, and I write: I know that’s a lie. But the message comes back as undeliverable. She’s blocked me from making contact again. My grip tightens on the phone. It’s her. It has to be her.
“How far is this town from here?” I ask Max.
He looks between the phone and me, and he makes a decision. He doesn’t ask any questions. He looks at the clock on the dashboard and says, “We can make it if we leave right now.”
“Then let’s leave right now,” I say.
—
The longer we drive, the more weight seems to fall around us, until we’re trapped in silence and our own thoughts. “Max,” I say quietly, and he jumps, pulled from whatever dream he’d been running through.
“Yeah?”
“Should we call the police?”
He clenches his jaw. “And say what?”
“That something happened in that house.”
“What happened in the house, Jessa?”
I think about it, really think about it. If something happened in that room, I believe Caleb may be in trouble. I think Eve knew about it, and that’s why she’s been spending so much time in the locked garage, looking for evidence. But I can’t figure out why she has me in that house, if she knows. There’s a piece that doesn’t fit. It doesn’t make sense.
“I don’t know,” I answer Max. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m wrong.” But it doesn’t feel wrong. The past begins to make more sense, the memories filtered through a different perspective.
“Look,” he says, reaching over the console for my hand. But once he has it, he’s not sure what to do with it, and he drops it again. Caleb is suddenly looming larger, between us in this car. “We’ll talk to Ashlyn and figure out what she knows, and then we’ll decide what to do. Okay?”
I nod, but as we pull into the high school parking lot, I realize the futility of our plan to find Ashlyn. Her school is massive. At least five times the size of our private school.
But Max seems undeterred. He walks up to the front doors, just as school’s letting out, and he starts asking.
“I’m looking for Ashlyn Patterson,” he says. He gets a few shakes of the head, a few tips of the shoulder, a few glances around, mumbled sorrys. But one girl stops and thinks. She makes a show of raising her eyes up under bangs, twisting her mouth, she adds an um for good measure—and I know it’s because of Max. That he is our ticket in, because of the way he looks, and asks kindly, and doesn’t push.
“She’s probably working at the paper.”
“The paper?” Max asks.
“The school paper?”
“Could you show me?” Max says, and the girl looks around for her friends for a moment, then shrugs.
She goes back inside, and Max walks beside her, and I trail behind. “It’s that door, see?” It’s open, and the hall is silent. “Sorry, I really have to go.”
“Thank you,” Max says. She nods. I don’t think she’s even noticed I’m standing here.