How close had it been? One pill? Two? Or had I lashed out at Aaron, disrupting his perfect scene? Had I screamed after all, so a witness might come forward, and he couldn’t take the risk?
How close I had come to becoming a photo in a newspaper. A quick shake of the head before the reader moves on. Someone else’s story, constructed around the hidden truth. A voice that nobody hears.
CHAPTER 33
As Rebecca returned to cleaning out the kitchen drawers, I dug through my school supplies, searching for the journal entries. I’d been rethinking everything Theo had written or said to me. The words on the phone, the vaguely threatening remarks in his emails. Do you ever wonder who else sees you? he had written.
And now I wondered what else I had misinterpreted, filtering through a different person or a different context. I flipped through Theo’s journal to the entry he made in the weeks before Bethany was found at the side of the lake. I read the words again, as I had read them to Kyle earlier:
The boy sees her and he knows what she has done.
The boy imagines twisted limbs and the color red.
What if he wasn’t talking about an imaginary person? I had briefly thought back then that his journal entry was referring to me, thought he was implying that he knew about my past—because I was looking for it. I was waiting for it. Imagined he could’ve been talking about the terrible thing people thought I had done: lying in a story that led to the death of Aaron Hampton. But what if he had been talking about something else?
What if he was trying to tell me something right then?
I needed him to explain. He had to be on the computer right now.
I’m listening, I wrote.
The computer dinged in response.
Meet me there in 30 minutes.
I looked at Rebecca, looked at the clock, looked back at the screen.
Meet you where? I wrote.
I waited. I waited. I refreshed my inbox. Ten minutes passed and he still hadn’t responded. If he hadn’t by now, he wasn’t going to. There were twenty minutes left.
I grabbed my keys. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Hey, wait. Where are you going?” Rebecca took a step closer, and I worried she would insist on coming with me.
“One hour, Rebecca,” I called as I walked through the door. “I’ll come back.” I raced out the door, strode to my car, and hoped that was true.
There were only so many places he could mean. I knew where he lived, and I knew where the man in the car had been found.
Ten minutes later, I pulled into the empty lot in front of Lakeside Tavern. The lights were off inside, too early for the lunch shift, and the flag whipped on top of the pole. I walked around to the back, to the packed gravel incline where they had pulled Emmy’s car from the lake.
I stepped in a pocket of mud, the cold wind whipping up off the water, and wished I’d remembered my jacket. I was alone. I checked my watch, stood at the water’s edge, and scanned the trees around me.
“Close enough, I guess.” His voice came from down the shoreline, and I stepped closer to the trees. I put my hand on the nearest trunk to keep myself steady, and I saw him sitting on a felled log near the waterline around the bend. He wore a brown shirt, dark track pants, mud-streaked sneakers. If he hadn’t spoken, I might’ve looked right past him—right through him.
“What are we doing here, Theo,” I said.
He tipped his head to the side. “Weird that you don’t remember. I could’ve sworn it was you . . .”
“What was me,” I said. I walked closer toward him, rubbing the sides of my arms.
“The girl that night. The girl dragging the body to the lake . . .”
I sucked in a breath. “You saw it?”
“I see a lot of things,” he answered.
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
He stood then, and I remembered he was so much taller than I was. “No,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t know the man. I thought maybe he did something to the girl first. Maybe he deserved it. None of my business, right. The girls were both so much smaller.” He looked me over again.
“Girls? More than one?” And I had this awful hope, even as he was telling me this. Emmy. Maybe he had seen her.
“Not at first. First there was just the one.”
“What did she look like?”
“Well, like I said, the girl dragging the body, she looked just like you.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his lips thinning as he smiled.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“When was this, Theo.” And when he didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t you think you at least owe me that?” But I knew better than to think that the world was fair, that for every take there would be a give.
He laughed then. “By the way, there are no cameras in the library,” he said. “Most you could get is an IP address. Which would be the same for any teacher, student, or employee of the school. Including Coach Cobb.”
“How do you know that?”
“God, do you have any clue what happens in that library after hours?” He laughed again. “No, I’m sure there are no cameras.”
“I have the phone number,” I said. “Of the burner phone. I know it was you.”
He tipped his head, just faintly. Neither confirming nor denying. “You don’t have anything, Leah,” he said.
I turned around, walked away. I wouldn’t get anywhere, but I would not be in Theo Burton’s debt.
“It was a Monday night,” he called after me, and I froze. “Or Tuesday morning. Couple weeks ago, maybe a month. I can’t remember exactly. I was on my way back from JT’s trailer. Cuts right by your place, you know. I like to walk through the woods. Nobody notices.” I turned to face him and saw that he was smiling. I follow you, Leah. I watch. “Anyway, I saw that girl, holding him under the arms, in the woods on my way back home. I followed them here. His limbs were all twisted, and the front of his shirt was covered in red. I knew he was dead. He was already dead.”
“You didn’t do anything?”
“And risk my own life? Anyway, she seemed to be waiting for something. And that’s when the car pulls up.” He pointed to the gravel behind us where I’d been waiting for him, as if I already knew all this. “And that’s when the other girl gets out, and she’s freaking out. I mean, I’m surprised nobody heard them—I was so sure she was going to call the police.”
The breeze blew in off the water, but my skin felt numb. I couldn’t possibly feel any colder.
“What did she look like, this other girl?”
“Tiny little thing, short hair, skinny. But it was dark.”