These people were like that now. Holding on to their elbows, their arms folded up into their stomachs.
But put me on a scene and everything slows, simmers, pops. I will remember the gnats over the weeds. The spot of blood. The downtrodden grass. Mostly, it’s the people I see.
“Bethany Jarvitz,” she said, and the tightness in my chest subsided. Not Emmy, then. Not Emmy. “Someone hit her pretty good, left her here.”
I nodded, pretending I knew who that was.
“Some kids found her while they were playing at the bus stop.” She nodded toward the road I’d just come from. No kids playing any longer. “If they hadn’t . . .” She pressed her lips together, the color draining. “She lives alone. How long until someone noticed she was missing?” And then the shudder. “There was just so much blood.” She looked down at her slippers, and I did the same. The edges stained rust brown, as if she had walked right through it.
I looked away, back toward the road. Heard the static of a radio, the voice of a cop issuing orders. This had nothing to do with Emmy or with me. I had to leave before I became a part of it, a member of the crowd the police would inevitably take a closer look at. My name tied to a string of events that I was desperate to leave behind. A restraining order, the threat of a lawsuit, my boss’s voice dropping low as the color drained from his neck: My God, Leah, what did you do?
I took a step back. Another. Turned to make my way back to my car, embarrassed by the mud on my shoes.
Halfway to my car, I heard a rustle behind me. I spun around, nerves on high alert—and caught a faint whiff of sweat.
A bird took flight, its wings beating in the silence, but I saw nothing else.
I thought of the noise in the dead of night. The dog barking. The timing.
An animal, Leah.
A bear.
Just the cats.
* * *
BY THE TIME I made it to school, I was bordering on late. School hadn’t started yet, but I was supposed to arrive before the warning bell. There was a backlog of student cars lined up at the main entrance, so I sneaked in through the bus lot (frowned upon but not against the rules), parked in a faculty spot behind my wing, and used a key to let myself in through the fire entrance (also frowned upon, also not against the rules).
The teachers were clustered just inside the classroom doorways, whispering. They must’ve gotten wind of the woman down by the lake. This wasn’t like life in a city, where there was a new violent crime each day, where the sirens were background noise and mere proximity meant nothing. I wouldn’t have been able to get a decent story about a woman found on the shore of a lake in the paper there—not one who’d lived.
CHAPTER 3
It wasn’t just the teachers.
The entire school was buzzing. It carried from the halls, rolled in with the students, grew louder and more urgent as they twisted in their seats. A hand over a mouth, Oh my God. A gasp, a head whipping from one person to the next. They were surely talking about the woman found down by the lake.
So it would be one of those days. Impossible to get first period in order.
The school would get like this sometimes, with the buzzing, but it was like listening to a conversation in an unknown language. The gossip written in secret shorthand, a scrawl I’d long since forgotten.
I’d begun to think the disconnect stemmed from more than just age. That they were a species in transition: coming in as kids, voices breaking, angles sharpening, and leaving as something different altogether. Curves and muscle and the unfamiliar force behind both; the other parts of them desperately trying to play catch-up.
Behave, we’d tell them. And they’d sit at their desks, hunkered down and waiting, a toe from somewhere in the room tapping against the floor in a manic rhythm. They’d bolt from their seats at the end-of-class bell and dash for the door, taking off as if the wild had called to them, the room reeking of mint and musk long after they were gone.
I didn’t understand how anyone truly expected me to accomplish anything here, except in appearances. This was nothing but a temporary holding cell.
Had I been like this once upon a time? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t really remember. Even back then, I think I had narrowed my sights on a goal and homed in.
The bell rang for the start of class, but the buzzing continued.
I pulled the stack of graded reading responses from my bag, and I heard it—
Arrested.
My stomach clenched. The word razor-sharp, a constant threat. Always there, the slimmest possibility: my ex, Noah, warning me to be careful with that article—I thought that was exactly what I was doing, I truly did.
Back when I was in college, I remembered a professor’s eyes fixing on mine in the middle of his lecture, as if he could sense something in me even then, as he explained that in journalism, a lie becomes libel.
But it was more than that, truly. More than just a legal term, in journalism, the lie is a breach of the holiest commandment.
Get out now, my boss had said. And hope the story dies.
I’d done just that—putting an entire mountain range between us in the process. But in the information age, distance meant nothing. I’d thought I’d escaped it, but maybe I hadn’t.
No. I was being irrational. A woman had been found beaten just a few hours earlier; that’s what this was about.
I weaved between desks, placing their essays facedown in front of them. Leaning closer, straining for information. An old habit.
Connor Evans’s big wide eyes were fixed on me, and my shoulders tensed. Someone in this room?
I took a tally of the class—who was missing? JT, but JT was never on time.
But there, an empty seat, third row, desk beside the window: Theo Burton.
He’d turned in his journal a few weeks earlier with a new free-write that made my skin crawl—but it was fiction, and I’d said anything. Still, he wrote with an authority and confidence greater than his imagination. Too close to something real. I closed my eyes, his words dancing across my mind:
The boy sees her and he knows what she has done.
The boy imagines twisted limbs and the color red.
If Theo had done something, if that entry had been a warning—God, the liability.
I could come up with a story for myself, a cover: I didn’t read it closely. It was a participation grade. I didn’t know.