Chapter Thirty-Four

Only when morning comes do I realize that it must have been night. I remember drinking. My dreams were full of bright-colored bodies. Shades of blue and orange and red. There was fire. It smelled like paint.

In my living room, a girl deformed by terror is leaning on the armchair, screaming: and then I startle up and I realize that I’m the one who screamed. The girl is Kaycee, embalmed in oil on one of her canvases. A self-portrait.

I look around. On the table, another two stacked canvases, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and cigarette butts floating in a filth of dirty liquid.

I haven’t smoked since college. But I can taste the smoke in my mouth.

I try to shuffle back through my memories, but all the images feel like balloons, slipping out of my grasp. I don’t remember going back to Frank Mitchell’s unit at the U-Pack but I must have: I don’t remember why and whether I was seen, whether I was careful, what on earth could have compelled me to steal the paintings and bring them home with me. I’m moved by a desperate, enormous desire to hide them, to burn them, to get them out. But they are staring back at me, refusing to be moved.

I fall onto the couch.

Ten years, and my dad never said a word to me about Kaycee’s disappearance. I tried to press him for information but he had little to offer: only that he turned up Kaycee’s bag down by the reservoir, half concealed by overhanging brush, and thought she must have forgotten it there after a bonfire. He expected her to come looking for it, only to learn everyone was saying she’d run off.

Who runs off and leaves a wallet, cell phone, and driver’s license behind?

I asked him why he didn’t go to the police, and he only shrugged. It wasn’t any of our business, he said. That girl was nothing but trouble, anyway.

I hardly remember the drive back to my rental, then to our makeshift office. Time is moving in jump cuts again. The rest of the team is already assembled when I burst through the door, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“Kaycee died.”

Joe sits very still, like the way small prey freezes at the approach of a predator. “What are you talking about?”

“Kaycee Mitchell. She didn’t disappear. She didn’t leave town. She died,” I repeat, and as soon as I do, I’m sure it’s right. The words feel right. They feel as if I’m taking out a piece of shrapnel from my chest. “I think she died here, in Barrens. Because she was sick.” Joe’s face hasn’t changed, so I plunge on. “I think that her family was paid off to lie about it. Maybe Misha, too. Maybe even her boyfriend, Brent.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?” Joe asks, in a way I don’t like.

“I’m fine,” I say, because I am, I think I am, and all my memories feel like dreaming so they must be dreams. And I tell him what my father told me about finding her bag near the reservoir.

“Abby, your dad is sick,” Joe says, very slowly, as if he’s holding a fishing line and just begging me to follow the hook. “We can’t exactly assume he’s dealing in facts. Doesn’t he have Alzheimer’s?”

This isn’t the time to correct Joe, so I don’t. The symptoms are the same. But my father hasn’t lost his grip on the past; it’s the present that seems slippery.

“Kaycee and her friends played an awful game in high school,” I say, ignoring his lead. “They weren’t the first ones to play. But Kaycee was the one who thought of a way to make money off of it.” Briefly, I tell him, tell the whole room, what Cora Allen told me. “Blackmail,” I finish, out of breath.

For the first time I realize how strange I feel. But I won’t sit down; if I do, it would be like admitting that Joe is right, that the interns with their shifty glances are right, that I’m standing here babbling nonsense instead of trying to explain that I’ve finally seen the truth.

“Sorry.” Joe rubs his forehead. “What does this have to do with the Optimal case?”

“Blackmail,” I repeat. “Don’t you see? It was her pattern. She’d gotten a taste for it when she realized she could use the Game to get payouts from people terrified their photos would go public. But how much could she possibly have gotten? Forty, sixty bucks a pop?” I’m filling in holes as I go. “Kaycee must have heard about the case Optimal settled back in Tennessee before they moved to Barrens, and she set her sights higher. So she comes up with her little scam to pretend to be sick, maybe persuades her friends to go along with her, thinking they could go to Optimal for a payout. But she didn’t understand how serious things would get. Optimal was working its own scams, flouting environmental regulations, cutting costs, hiding money, bribing officials to look the other way. They couldn’t afford publicity. They couldn’t afford the scrutiny.”

“So they killed her.” Joe’s face is blank.

And here, under the painful bright lights next to crates of file folders and office supplies, I have the sudden sensation of drowning: It sounds crazy. Of course it does. But I’m right. I have to be. “Or they hired someone to do it. For all I know, they paid off her fucking father. But it fits.”

For a moment, there’s silence. I can feel my heart jumping rhythms in my chest.

It’s Portland who speaks up, slowly. “But the school nurse said Kaycee was really sick,” he says. “The pictures prove it.”

“The pictures prove she was a good actress,” I snap, although once again I see Kaycee on the bathroom floor, a swirl of blood in the toilet. And then another image of Kaycee shuffles up from the past, this time from when we were kids. Kaycee’s face, shuttered like a closed door, when I confronted her about Chestnut. I didn’t do it, she said calmly, biting off all the edges of her words so instead they sounded like a brag. You must be really screwed up, Abby, to even think I would do it. “She was a liar. She was always a liar. Maybe she made herself sick.”

Still, no one looks at me. Anger rises like a quick tide: I want to bury them in it.

“I’m telling you, you didn’t know her. We were friends when we were little. She was fucked up. She killed my dog with rat poison.”

This, finally, startles Joe into speaking. “She what?”

“She lied about it for years, and tortured me for refusing to forgive her, and then before she died, or before she was killed, she left me proof, just so that I would know for sure.”

Joe stands, scraping the chair back from his desk, and I run out of air and stand there panting and sweating, and I realize I’m about to cry.

“Can we talk in private?” Joe sounds as polite as a stranger. I have no choice but to follow him, like a child.

Outside, a blaze of heat and sun warms my face. The door swings shut behind us with a bang-snap. Across the parking lot, Sunny Jay’s is already open. I wonder if Condor’s inside. And if he is, I hope he doesn’t come out and see me like this.

“Look.” I take a deep breath. “I know what you’re going to say. Okay?”

“I don’t think you do.” He sounds worried. He screws up his mouth like he’s trying to digest. “You’ve been working too hard.”

My heart drops. He doesn’t believe me. Not even a little. “Joe, this is important.” My throat is so tight I can barely choke out the words. “Kaycee Mitchell died. And everyone has been lying about it. For years.”

But he isn’t listening. He squints into the distance. “I’ve known you a long time, Abby. You’re a friend. You know that, right? Since our very first day at CEAW, when I told you I hated your shoes. Remember?”

I can’t keep the tears back anymore, and I don’t try. I stand there, humiliated and exhausted and furious, feeling as if in just a few words he’s stripped me of my skin and left me raw and open in the hot wind. My father is dying, and Joe won’t listen; I came back to bury the past, but instead the past is burying me.

“I’m worried about you,” he says. “You need a break. When was the last time you took a vacation?”

“I don’t need a vacation! I need you to listen!”

“You’re not well, Abby.” His voice gets a little harder. “I don’t want a repeat of what happened our first year.”

Despite the sun, a sudden chill runs through me. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” When he turns to me his eyes are dark. “You stopped sleeping. You started drinking too much. You were pulled in a thousand directions—you thought Bromley had encoded messages in the invoices, for God’s sake—”

“I’d been awake for seventy-two hours.” My voice cracks on the still air. “Look, I know I lost it. I was eating Adderall. I was a mess, okay? I admit it. I admitted it then.” And you, fucker, promised never to hold it against me. “But this is different.”

“It’s not a negotiation.” Joe’s face morphs, flowing into a stranger’s eyes and lips, a stranger’s sharp tongue and cruel expression. “I’ve already talked to Estelle about it. You’re going home. To Chicago.” He emphasizes this, as if I may have forgotten. “We’re all going home. I’ll continue to run the investigation from there. They’ll bring on Casey Scheiner as support.”

He might as well have punched me. The air goes straight out of my lungs.

“Fuck you.” I can only whisper it.

Joe sighs. He doesn’t even get angry. That makes it worse, in a way. “You’re not in trouble,” he says, as if that’s what I’m worried about. “You still have a job. But you’re going home, and you’re going to get well, and forget about fucking Kaycee Mitchell.” He starts to turn back to the door, then pivots around to face me again. “Oh. That reminds me. Kaycee called you. Apparently she lives in Florida now.” Joe’s smile is cold and narrow, bleak as thin-shaved ice. “She left a number for you, if you want to call her back.”