Twenty minutes later we’re sitting in Mia’s car, AC on. Mia is gripping the wheel tightly, as if trying to guide the car down an icy road, even though we’re still parked. Abby has reclined her seat. From the back I can make out the little ski-slope jump of her nose.
“Okay, let me get this straight,” I say. “Someone else knew about Lovelorn and decides—what? To mess with us? To make us think we’re going crazy?”
“Maybe,” Mia says. “Maybe whoever it was—”
“The Shadow,” I interrupt her.
This time, she does turn around, releasing the wheel with a small sigh. “What?”
“I’m not going to keep saying ‘someone’ or ‘whoever it is,’” I say. “We might as well name him. He might as well be the Shadow.”
“That’s so heteronormative,” Abby says. Her eyes are closed. “How do you know that a guy killed Summer? Why not a girl?”
“Would have to be a guy,” I say. “You never met Summer. She was fierce. Could take your eyes out with a penknife. And someone knocked her down and dragged her halfway across the field.”
Abby opens her eyes, tilting her head back a little farther to look up at me through her lashes. “A guy, or a strong girl.” Then she settles into her original position.
“So, the Shadow,” Mia resumes, emphasizing the word and giving me a does that make you happy look in the rearview mirror. “Maybe he wanted us to look crazy, not just feel crazy. If the cops wouldn’t believe us about Lovelorn—which they obviously wouldn’t—no way would they believe us when we said we didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
“Hmmm.” Abby has her eyes closed again, fingers interlaced on her stomach. “Maybe. That’s a lot of planning, though. There’s another possibility.”
“What’s that?” I say.
She sits up finally, twisting around in her seat so she can see us both at once. “Maybe he just wanted to play. Like for real real.”
There’s a long moment of silence.
I clear my throat. “Owen knew about Lovelorn,” I point out. “He’s the only one who—”
Mia cuts me off before I can finish. “Owen never read any of our stuff,” she says.
“As far as we know,” I correct her. I still haven’t told her that I saw Owen yesterday, and that he asked after her. And I’m still not planning to tell her. Mia’s not exactly up for any Lifetime Friendship Achievement awards. Besides, it’s for her own good. She was always so sure he couldn’t have done it, that he wouldn’t have. But she wasn’t there that day he clocked Elijah Tanner in the face and just stood there staring while Elijah howled and blood came out from between his fingers.
I never understood how she could protect him even after he broke her heart. Then again, I protected Summer even after she shattered mine.
“Please.” Gone is innocent-wounded-Mia, with her big eyes and trembling lip and constant kitten-up-a-tree act: I’m a victim too, I just played along, it was never my idea, none of it was my fault. Now she’s all fire and brimstone. “The cops were desperate to stick the murder on Owen. So was the prosecutor. If he did it, he’d still be rotting in Woodside. He was acquitted, remember?”
“Maybe because the cops screwed up,” I say, even though she has a point.
Hank and Barbara Ball live in one of the cottages: a prefab double-wide souped up with fake siding and a screened-in porch, like all the other backcountry cottages plopped-and-dropped on two-acre parcels back in the 1970s. Even the hummingbird feeder comes standard, I bet. That’s the type of rustic crap the summer people go for. I’ve never even seen a hummingbird around here.
I can’t remember visiting Summer at the Balls’ house more than a few times, but I recognize the turnoff right away, still marked by a dented mailbox sporting a faded American flag motif. A hand-painted wooden sign tacked to a birch states simply Balls.
Abby thinks this is hilarious. “That sign is ambiguous,” she says. “What does it mean? Balls for sale? Balls go here? All balls welcome? Free balls?”
“All right, all right, let it go.” The whole Balls things would be funny if Hank Ball weren’t so damn mean. Mean—and creepy as hell. I remember one time we stopped by just to get Return to Lovelorn, and in the middle of a pee I could have sworn I saw an eye staring in at me through the keyhole. Summer swore up and down it hadn’t been her, either.
The driveway spits us out through the chokehold of summer blackberry bushes and overgrown pine trees into a narrow clearing where the cottage, looking even sorrier than I remember it, sits among a surf of trash, old furniture, and abandoned car parts.
I remember that Mr. Ball was always fixing something in the front yard—rehabbing a crappy desk no one would buy even new, or fiddling with an ancient grandfather clock he’d bought at a yard sale—but it looks like things have been breaking a little faster than he can keep up with.
An orange cat watches our approach from the porch railing, and I get a bad feeling in my stomach. We shouldn’t have come.
But it’s too late. Even before Mia cuts the engine, the cat startles off around the house. A second later, Barbara Ball comes out onto the front porch, holding a dish towel, hobbling the way old women do when they’ve been on their feet all day.
And she is—old, I mean. Older than I remember her. Sadder-looking, too.
“Can I help you girls with . . . ?” She swallows the rest of her sentence just as soon as she recognizes us, and for a long moment no one says a word.
Finally, Abby breaks the silence. “Get any hummingbirds?” she asks, gesturing to the feeder. I glare at her. She gives me a who, me? face.
“Mostly squirrels,” Mrs. Ball responds, without taking her eyes off Mia and me. She lashes her dish towel around the railing and humps a little closer to us, squinting, like she wants to be sure she hasn’t mixed us up for someone else. Or like she’s hoping she has. “What are you doing here?”
Mia swallows so hard I can hear it. I bet when she decided to start playing detective, she forgot all about the awkward middle chapters. I let her sweat it out. “My name is Mia Ferguson. And this is Brynn—”
“I know who you are.” For someone so old, Barbara Ball sure has some volume in her. “What are you doing here?”
“We were hoping to talk with you and Mr. Ball. . . .”
“You were hoping to talk to us?” She says talk to as if it really means bludgeon. “What in God’s green you want to talk about?”
Mia looks to me for help. But I just shrug. This was her idea. Make a bed, lie in it, blah blah.
“About—about Summer,” Mia says.
Mrs. Ball squints again, like she’s trying to make us out through a hard fog even though she’s no more than a few feet away from us.
“Anything we had to say about that child, we said it a long time ago,” Mrs. Ball says. It’s strange to hear her describe Summer that way, as a child—she was the leader to all of us, in all things. But of course she was a child. We all were. “I think you should go now.”
Mia shoots me a helpless look. And now an old, dark anger starts poking my chest. Unfair. “She was our friend,” I blurt out. “She was our best friend, and all we ever wanted was to make things right for her—”
“Let it go, Brynn,” Mia says, in a quiet voice.
But it’s too late. “—and everyone treats us like we’re some kind of disease—”
“Look.” Abby cuts me off before I can say something that’ll get us booted off the Balls’ property for sure, possibly on the wrong side of a rifle. “Mia and Brynn have been doing some spring cleaning. The memorial coming up, and everything. You understand. Good time to let bygones be bygones, turn over a new leaf, et cetera, et cetera.”
Mrs. Ball looks at Abby as if registering her for the first time. Her eyes linger on Abby’s skirt, on her fake eyelashes and carefully drawn lips. She looks suddenly uncertain. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Who are you?”
Abby doesn’t even blink. “Abby Bluntich. Abby B, to my fans.”
She actually says this. Out loud.
“Fans?” Mrs. Ball repeats faintly.
“You might recognize me from Beautycon, or from my YouTube tutorials and my Insta partnership with Howl Cosmetics. . . .”
Mrs. Ball nods dazedly, looking like she’s just been hit by the blunt side of a shovel—I doubt she’s ever even heard of YouTube.
“Anyway, what Mia and Brynn meant to say is that they turned up some old stuff that might have belonged to Summer. Spring cleaning, remember? Most of it’s trash. But if there’s anything you want . . .”
It’s a brilliant tactic. The Balls are obviously pretty damn late on their spring cleaning.
“What kind of stuff?” Mrs. Ball addresses Abby directly. It’s like Mia and I have disappeared entirely.
Abby shrugs, all casual. “There were some old notes, a tube of lip gloss—we trashed that, because yuck—and a mouthpiece for some kind of instrument. Summer was in band, wasn’t she?”
I can’t imagine why it matters: the mouthpiece we found made its way into the shed only recently. But when I shoot her a look, she ignores me.
“When we could convince her to go,” Mrs. Ball says. “But she played the drums.” And then, a second later: “My husband fixes old instruments, though. He has quite a collection of old horns. She might have . . . borrowed it by accident.”
A wind lifts through the trees and touches the back of my neck. Could Mr. Ball have been responsible all along? I can’t remember now why the cops never treated him seriously as a suspect. It makes a horrible kind of sense: how he monitored her emails and social media, how he forbade her to date, even rifled through her stuff while she was out of the house—at least, according to Summer.
The eye I saw, peering at me through the keyhole.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ball,” Mia says. Surprisingly, her voice is steady. “We knew all about her borrowing. We knew her, remember?”
It’s the funniest thing: Mrs. Ball looks at her for a second, her mouth working soundlessly, her body all coiled up with tension. And then, in a split second, she collapses. She lets out a whoosh of air, like she’s been holding her breath this whole time. Her face loses all its suspicion, all its confusion, all its anger, and cracks open along little fault lines of sadness. She ages another ten years right in front of us.
“Yeah,” she says. Even her voice sounds tired. “Yeah. I guess you did.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of a footpath through the antique debris that winds around the house. “Hank should be around back in the workshop. You can go on and ask him yourself.”
Hank Ball’s workshop is nearly the size of the house—and, in contrast to the rest of the property, pristine. Both doors are rolled open to reveal a clean and bright interior, neatly fitted out with circular saws and benches, drafting tables and shelves. One wall is tacked entirely with paper and labeled for tools I’ve never even heard of.
And one wall is shiny with dozens and dozens of instruments.
Tubas, saxophones, clarinets reflecting sun off their polish: it’s like some vertical band dropped their gear before running.
Mr. Ball must be into old clocks, too, because there are plenty of those, including a cuckoo clock frozen with its wooden figurines on parade, like a face stuck with its tongue out. He’s straddling a workbench, doing some fiddly operation on a grandfather clock with all its parts exploding everywhere, like a body mid-surgery.
He barely glances up to look at us. “Help you?” is what he says. I might even think he doesn’t know who we are. But that’s impossible.
Everyone knows who we are—or who they think we are, at least.
Mia takes up Abby’s spiel about the spring cleaning and the mouthpiece. I have to hand it to her. She used to be a shit liar. But she’s doing a passable job.
Hank just keeps on working. His fingers—stumpy with age and arthritis—move with surprising grace. I try to imagine those fingers holding on to a rock, bashing Summer’s head with it. But all I see—all I’ve ever seen—is a shadow, clinging to her back like some kind of horrible cloak, pouring itself down her throat when she tries to scream.
“Might’ve come off one of my horns,” he says at last. “Doesn’t matter now, though, does it? Ain’t missed it in five years. You can go on and trash it.” He straightens up at last, wiping his hands on his jeans. But he stays seated. “We don’t keep nothing she had her hands on around here, anyway. Barbara doesn’t like it. Might as well toss it like all the rest. Besides.” His eyes are mud brown, nested under enormous eyebrows like insects burrowing for cover. “Can’t believe you came all the way out here because of some old junk like that.”
And suddenly I remember that moment in the bathroom when I had my pants around my ankles. I remember a creak outside the door and seeing the wink of an eye at the keyhole. Blue.
“Did you ever hear Summer mention a Lillian Harding?” I ask. Strangely, the fact that it wasn’t him all those years ago—that it must have been Summer, doing it as a joke or to freak me out, or both—makes me want to pin the murder on Mr. Ball even more, not less. I watch closely for his reaction, but he doesn’t even blink.
“Never had any girls coming round here for Summer except for you,” he says. “Had to run off some of those football boys a few times, though. Summer had gone and turned those boys’ heads. They were at each other’s throats, fighting over her like she was a trophy. Lost more than a game or two because of it, I bet.” He shook his head. “I told her she shouldn’t be hanging with older boys like that. What’d she think they wanted from her, anyway? I told her she would get into damn trouble. And look. Look what happened.” He speaks with sudden viciousness, and Mia goes tense beside me. I have an old urge to take her hand, to tell her it’ll be okay. But Mia’s not my responsibility anymore. “She went and got herself killed.”
“You’re acting like it was her fault,” I say. “Like you think she deserved it.”
He stands up then. He plants both hands on his workbench and heaves up to his feet. For a second, I’m half-afraid he’ll come at me.
But he just limps slowly out into the sunshine. His left foot drags slightly when he walks. Mr. Ball, like his wife, seems to have aged two decades in the past five years.
“Nah, she didn’t deserve it,” he says, in a softer voice. “It wasn’t her fault, neither. She’d had it rough. Her mama pretty much booted her curbside when money ran tight for drugs. And she’d been bounced around some bad places. Some real bad places, with some real bad people.”
A memory overwhelms me: Summer, looking up at me calmly, while her cheek reddened with the impact of my fist. It was the first and only time I’d ever hit her. It was the first and only time I’d ever hit anyone.
“But she didn’t make it easier on herself, that’s for sure,” he continues. “Her lying and stealing. Running around with those boys. Jake and Heath and that boy Owen they looked at and God knows who else. Still. We thought if we gave her a stable home . . .”
“Sure,” I say, crossing my arms. The cat is still slinking around the shadows, and I don’t like the look of it. It reminds me a lot of their old cat, Bandit; Summer hated that cat with a passion. “And spied on her, and looked through her email, and kept her basically on lockdown . . .”
Mia shoots me a look and mutters, “Brynn.” But I don’t care. Someone killed Summer. Someone dragged her into a stone circle and made her into a sacrifice. And I’m sick of seeing the killer’s face only in my dreams, a gaping hole that turns to fog as soon as I wake up.
“She needed rules. She needed structure. She’d been running wild her whole life. Never had anyone give a shit about where she was or who she talked to. You think that’s what caring for people is all about? Letting them do whatever they want?” He tilts his head back to look down at me, and I think of how Summer used to do the same thing, even though I was two inches taller. And isn’t that, after all, what we did with Summer? Didn’t we let her do whatever she wanted—to us, to everyone? “You can think what you want. But we cared for that girl. We would have kept her. We tried to.”
The Balls’ new cat slinks out into a patch of sunshine and rolls down into the dirt. Watching me. Tail lashing.
“I was up in Burlington the day she died, filling out paperwork for her adoption.” This he says so quietly I nearly miss it. “We were going to tell her that night.”
No wonder the police never looked at Mr. Ball. I feel like an idiot. Worse. I feel like a zero. I can tell Mia does, too. Her skin is the color of old cheese. Even Abby looks sheepish.
“Sorry for wasting your time.” Mia can hardly speak above a whisper. She won’t look at me.
“That’s all right.” Mr. Ball squints at us. Then he says, “You know, I always felt kind of sorry for you two. For what it’s worth, I always knew you didn’t do it. Not a chance.”
My whole body goes airless, like the words have knocked away my breath.
“She really had you wrapped around her finger, didn’t she?” He means both of us, I’m sure, but he’s looking straight at me when he says it. “Well. That’s just how she was.”
For a long, long second, we just stare at each other. Then, finally, he shifts his eyes to Mia.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you. But you know what they say about the sleeping dogs.” He smiles sadly. “Best to let them lie.”