“Speak and I’ll make your dad bleed. You speak to no one.”
I shut my mouth again. I turned and started trying to walk away, hoping and hoping he wouldn’t follow, but I was so scared my legs wouldn’t work properly. Then a big guy in a Giants shirt turned the corner and started walking toward me, laughing loudly into his phone. It was as if I’d been in a twilight zone thing where the whole world had stilled and turned into an empty film set, and then he’d come and broken the spell.
Relief shot through me like antifreeze, thawing my limbs, and I hurried off.
I heard Mr. Suit behind me say, “Hey! What’s the deal?”
But I didn’t stop; I kept on walking. I didn’t even feel that guilty. I mean, if you’re a man, you have to figure that stopping a teenage girl for directions on an empty street is stupid, right?
As I kept on walking toward the library, I checked there was no one near me and then said, “Why can’t I speak to people?”
I could feel the voice considering. “You deserve no human contact. You are poison.”
I think I actually gasped. Rivets of pain and horror pinned me to the sidewalk, and I stopped still again. You have to understand, when you’ve felt for a long time that you are dangerous to people, that you are a stain, and then someone else says it, it’s a shock.
“Remember?” said the voice. “Remember what you did?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just ******* shut up.”
The voice laughed. “Nice way to talk,” it said. “Slap yourself.”
“What?”
“Hard. On the face. So it stings.”
“But—”
“Do it. Now.”
I did it.
My mind floated away from my body, a balloon with its string cut. I was in the sky, with the clouds and the seagulls. Cass, Cass, Cass, they called, and I thought of Procne, her soul put into the body of a nightingale to save her from Tereus, and I wished right then that my soul could turn into a seagull, could fly away into the wet sky, full of hanging raindrops, a screen of shimmering water that was in all places at once.
Then, after I don’t know how long, my breathing started to slow. The world came into focus again, slowly. I started walking. The voice didn’t say anything.
I passed the baseball cages, where Dad and I used to go sometimes when I was young. Mom would come too, but she’d go for coffee at the diner on the corner. She said she didn’t want to be there to see it if a ball gave me a black eye.
Now, the place was boarded shut—a lot of stuff was boarded shut. There’d been the financial crash, in 2008. I was young then, but of course I’d seen how the number of tourists went down every year, how the businesses closed one after another, enough that I had spent most of my life worrying about my dad and the restaurant, even before what happened with my mom. And then there’d been the killings. A lot of people said the town wouldn’t recover until the murderer was stopped. Families with teenage girls didn’t want to come here on vacation, just in case.
That was the theory anyway, to explain why the town was dying.
I kept going. Came to a construction site where a row of old condemned houses had been. This was the other thing, along with stuff being boarded up: a load of projects had been abandoned. There were empty lots up and down the boardwalk and the avenues behind, like the sockets of pulled teeth, the closing bracket of decline. Scaffolding that never came down.
The only new businesses you ever saw: gambling shops, bars, discount stores. The town had a lot of gamblers and drinkers now.
“Are you a ghost?” I asked as we passed a rusting crane, towering above us. “Are you dead?”
The voice didn’t answer.
“Am I going mad? Answer me. Please.”
“No,” said the voice.
(NOTE: Remember me saying this exchange happened a lot?)
“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
“I want justice,” said the voice.
“Justice?”
But the voice was gone; I sensed it withdrawing, the dispassionate eye of some great predator wheeling away, distracted, for now.
Justice? I thought. Justice for what?
Unless … I thought of the foot on the beach.
But no. It was a crazy thought.
I kept walking to the library. This was another piece of vernacular architecture—white and blue, art-deco curves, on a street just one block back from the ocean. In any other town it would have been a tourist destination; it was beautiful. But people just walked past it.
Not me.
I went in, and Jane raised a hand. “Hey, Cass.”