Now that Owen has finally confessed, it’s like his mouth is in turbo gear. He won’t stop talking. He tells us that Summer came to him that final morning, looking like she’d been up all night. That she’d packed up Return to Lovelorn carefully, in plastic and an old metal lockbox he figured she’d stolen from her foster parents. That he’d taken cash from his dad’s wallet while his dad was PTFO (passed the fuck out, in rehab terminology) and hoofed it up to town to take a cab from Twin Lakes to Middlebury, and from there hopped a bus.
And the crazy thing is, I believe him.
From Middlebury it’s two hundred miles to Portland, Maine, and that’s if you’re doing a straight shot between them. But taking the bus means you go south all the way to Boston before transferring and backtracking north along the coast to Maine, a trip of six and a half hours one way—longer, for Owen, because at one of the rest stops an off-duty firefighter spotted him, thinking it was weird for a thirteen-year-old to be traveling on his own, and held Owen up so long with questions he missed the bus and had to wait for another.
“Thank God for that guy, though,” Owen says. “My lawyer tracked him down just before the case went to trial. It was one of the things that saved me.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Mia asks. “You let the police arrest you. You went to Woodside. Why didn’t you just tell the truth?”
Outside the window, houses blur by. A big smear of whitegreenwhitegreen. Wade must be going sixty, seventy miles an hour, screeching around the turns, not even paying attention to his speed. But it was all supposed to be a joke—the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane on the hunt for the truth, putting our demons to rest. A few days of make-believe just so I could get back to Four Corners.
Except that it doesn’t feel funny, or like make-believe.
“I did, finally,” Owen says. “Most of the truth, anyway. I told the cops I’d had a fight with my dad and was out riding the buses. But they didn’t believe me. Not at first.”
“Why not?” Abby says. She’s been leaning back, eyes closed, and I assumed she was sleeping. Abby, I’ve decided, reminds me of a cat. A kind of obnoxious, maybe a little full-of-herself cat. Cute, though, in a way. Summer would have hated her. I’m not sure why I think about this, but I do. Chubby chasing, Brynn? she would say. You like some jelly rolls with your doughnut hole?
“Because we’d lied.” Owen’s voice sounds all cracked up and dusty, like he’s swallowed old asphalt. “The first time the cops came around asking where I’d been, we told him I hadn’t gone anywhere. That I’d been home. We didn’t know . . . I mean, I’d heard someone had been found in the woods, but I thought it was a hunter or something. Not Summer. Never Summer.” He sucks in a breath. “My mom’s sister was already making noise about taking me from my dad. We thought that’s why the cops showed up—to make sure my dad was okay. That I was okay. He’d had an accident in the winter, you know, just passed out at the wheel, went straight into a tree. . . .”
“I didn’t know that,” Mia says.
Owen shrugs.
“Anyway, my aunt was threatening to sue for custody if my dad didn’t sober up. She said he wasn’t fit to be a parent. He wasn’t, back then. But I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t. I thought if I did . . .” He trails off. When I look back at him, he’s just sitting there, staring at his hands, half his face like an eggplant you forgot was in your fridge. I can’t help but feel sorry for him.
“What?” I say.
He looks up, startled, as if he’s forgotten we’re all there. “I thought he’d die,” he says simply.
And I think of my mom and the way she sits in front of the TV eating green beans from the can, fishing them out with her fingers because she kicked potato chips twenty years ago, and how she always scours the dollar stores for every single Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and Thanksgiving decoration she can find and decks out the house for every holiday—I’m talking fake snow and twinkly lights or giant bunny wall decals or cobwebs on all the bushes outside—and I suddenly feel like the world’s biggest nobody. I wonder if she thinks of me at all, if she misses me, or if she and Erin have made a pact never to mention my name, if they’re happier with me gone.
How can I go back? How can I ever go back?
Owen clears his throat. “Dad thought if the cops knew he’d been passed-out drunk and his thirteen-year-old son had taken the bus all the way to Maine, they’d take me away for sure.”
Outside, all the trees have their hands up, waving. Don’t shoot.
“They came by looking for me around six o’clock,” Owen continues. “Must have been right after they found out—after they found her. My dad was a wreck. Already drinking again, cops at the door, son missing. He told them I was sick. Bronchitis. Couldn’t talk to anyone. They said they’d be back. So when I got home, we agreed on a cover story. He wasn’t even mad.” Owen laughs like he’s choking. “I didn’t get back until two, three in the morning. I’d stolen sixty bucks and spent it all. And he wasn’t angry. He was panicked.”
I remember when the tires crunched up the driveway and my mom twitched open the curtain and saw the cops, I thought they must have found out I’d stolen some nail polish and a few packs of gum from a local CVS the week before. Even after what had happened in the woods, even after Summer and the cat and the carving knife, I was worried about that stupid black nail polish. “You still didn’t know about Summer?” I ask him.
“Not then. My dad hadn’t left the house in two, three days. Wasn’t picking up his phone, either. And my phone had died before I even got to Maine. My dad thought his sister-in-law—my aunt, the one who kept threatening to take me to Madison—must have been the one to call the cops. That she was conspiring with me. I remember that’s the word he used. ‘She’s conspiring to take you away.’ He thought that’s why I’d been out of the house—because I wanted to get him in trouble. I thought he was going to go after me, hit me or something, but he was too drunk to do more than shout.”
Mia lets out a little squeak, like a balloon getting squeezed.
“We agreed on a cover story. I’d been sick, twenty-four-hour virus, hadn’t left my room at all. The cops came back the next morning. They were the ones who told me about Summer. Otherwise, I guess I would have found out online. I’m glad the cops told me, actually. Before I could read about it.”
In the days after Summer’s body was discovered, everyone posted to her Facebook and Instagram profiles—prayers and videos and pictures and poems—even people who’d hated her when she was alive, who said she was a witch or a slut or made fun of her for being in foster care. Then someone found a way to log in as Summer. I was in the middle of the Walmart parking lot the first time I saw her name pop up in my feed.
Resting in peace right now. Thanks for all the love.
I stood there, my hands sweating so much I nearly dropped my phone, like I could press her right out of those words.
But over the days, the messages on her wall turned nastier.
Guess this is a lesson . . . all devils go to hell . . .
And: Maybe the good aren’t the only ones who die young . . .
Until finally someone had the account shut down.
“The cops were nice at first. Just asking questions about how I knew Summer. They’d heard some stuff, I guess, about how Summer and I . . .” He trails off. What happened between Owen and Summer is still a major Danger Zone, obviously, Restricted Access, Hard Hat Area Only. “By the time I knew how serious it was—by the time my dad knew—we’d already told our lie a dozen times. Stupid. Someone had seen me in town on my way to Middlebury. And a cabbie remembered taking me home at two in the morning. Not a lot of thirteen-year-old fares, I guess. Even after I told them the truth, they wouldn’t believe me about anything.”
“Did you ever find out how your blood ended up on Summer’s clothes?” Wade blurts out. I can tell he’s been dying to ask this whole time.
“No,” he says, looking down at his hands.
“It wasn’t,” Mia says. “It didn’t.” When she’s really angry, her voice actually gets quieter. Mia’s the only person I know who scream-whispers. “The cops screwed up. The sample was contaminated.”
“The sample was inadmissible,” Wade corrects her. “Legally. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t his blood.”
“How many miles do we have left until we get to Maine?” Abby jumps in before Wade can say anything else. I turn around and see the look Mia gives her. Thank you, the look says.
And that bad feeling in my stomach worms a half inch deeper.
“One hundred sixty-seven,” Wade says cheerfully.
“How about the radio, then?” Mia reaches into the front seat to punch the radio on, and for a long time no one speaks again, even after the music buzzes into static.
Around mile 115 everyone starts to get cranky. It turns out Mia has a bladder the size of a thimble. After the third time she asks to stop, I tell her she should keep an empty Big Gulp between her legs, like truckers do, so we have some hope of making it to Maine.
I forgot Mia has no sense of humor.
We pull off I-89 and into the Old Country Store, which is nothing more than a 7-Eleven with a fancier sign and a gas pump around the back. Owen’s frozen-burrito ice pack has thawed—Wade proved he is an alien by actually eating it—and he goes in search of new frozen edibles to serve as an ice pack. Abby wants to re-up on iced tea. Wade claims he is starving. He is, in addition to being an alien, a gigantic garbage compactor that needs to be fed a constant diet of beef jerky and potato chips or it starts to wind down.
Wade, Mia, Owen, and Abby disappear into the Old Country Store together, and I quickly yank my phone out of my bag, relieved I have two bars of service. Out here, on these county roads, you never know. The trees absorb the radio signals, or maybe the crickets battle them midair and drown them out.
My sister’s cell phone rings two, three, four times. I’m about to hang up when she answers. There are a few fumbling moments before she speaks. The TV’s playing in the background. Something with a laugh track.
“It’s you,” she says, in a tone I can’t read. “What’s up?”
The Old Country Store is lit up against the long evening shadows. Window signs buzz the way toward cold Coors Light and night crawlers. “Nothing,” I say. “Just calling to check in.”
“They let you have your phone back, huh?”
Four Corners confiscates cell phones. Cell phones, computers, personal property other than clothing. And she doesn’t know I’ve left yet. This is one piece of good luck: the storm took out home phone service for two days. The usual aftercare follow-up call must not have gone through. “For good behavior,” I lie.
“You think they’ll spring you one of these days? How long you been in now? More than thirty days.”
“Another few weeks, at least. Forty-five-day program.” What’s one more lie? At a certain point, maybe they’ll start to cancel each other out. Crap on top of more crap. Like subtracting from zero. “How’s Mom?” I say before she can ask any more questions.
“She’s all right. The same. You want to talk to her?”
“No,” I say quickly. “That’s all right.” But already Erin’s pulling the phone away from her ear. TV noises again, the roar of all those people laughing. My mom’s voice in the background, muffled, so I can’t make out what she’s saying. “That’s all right,” I say, a little louder.
“Christ, no need to shout,” Erin says. “Mom says hi.” Which means she didn’t want to talk to me either. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not surprised.
But still.
“I gotta go. I have group,” I say. Wade’s jogging back to the car, blowing air out of his cheeks hard, like he’s crossing a six-mile track and not a stretch of empty asphalt.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Erin says.
“Sure.” I hang up as Wade heaves himself behind the wheel again.
“I got you a present,” he says, and tosses a rabbit’s foot in my lap, one of the awful ones, dyed neon pink and dangling from the end of a cheap key chain.
“You know I’m a vegetarian, right?” I pick up the key chain with two fingers, get the glove compartment open, and hook it inside.
“It’s good luck,” Wade says.
“It’s nasty.” I try not to think of the poor rabbit, twitching out his guts on the ground for someone else’s good luck.
I have a sudden memory of seeing Summer that day in the woods, holding something dark and stiff that at first looked like a blanket. . . .
“What? What’s wrong?” Wade’s watching me.
“Nothing.” I punch down the window, inhale the smell of new sap and gasoline. “Everything. This whole mission. It’s all wrong.” She’ll never let us go, I almost say, but bite back the words at the last second. I’m not even sure where they came from. “Maybe it’s better if we don’t know what happened. Maybe it’s better if we just forget.”
“But you weren’t forgetting, were you?” Wade says softly. “That’s why all the rehab trips. Isn’t that what you told me? It’s the place you feel safe.”
He’s right, of course. I wasn’t forgetting. Not even close.
“Why do you care so much?” I turn on Wade.
“What do you mean?” Wade looks legitimately confused. “You’re my cousin.”
“Our moms are cousins,” I say. “I saw you maybe twice growing up. And one time you were dressed as Batman. So what’s your excuse?”
Wade looks away, bouncing one knee, hands on the wheel, quiet for a bit. “You ever read about the Salem witch trials?”
“Sure,” I say. “Back in the 1700s, right?”
“No. Earlier. Massachusetts, 1600s. But there were others like them, here and in Europe. Some places they still have witch hunts, you know, when things start to go wrong.”
“Wade.” I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, suddenly exhausted. In my head I see Summer still teasing us to follow her, running deeper into the woods, passing in and out of view. Tag. You’re it. “What are you talking about?”
“Witches, demons, evil spirits. Look, it’s human nature to point fingers. To blame. Hundreds of years ago, whenever something went wrong, the crops failed or a baby died or a ship got lost at sea, people said the devil did it. They looked for reasons because just plain bad luck didn’t seem like a good reason at all. Plain bad luck meant no one was looking out for you, there was no one to blame and no one to thank, either. No God.” He takes a deep breath. “What happened in Twin Lakes five years ago was a witch hunt. Something terrible happened. No one could understand it. No one wanted to understand it. So what did they do? They made up a story. They made up a myth.”
An invisible touch of wind makes the hair on my arms stand up. I open my eyes. “The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.”
He nods. “They turned you into demons. Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a witch hunt.”
Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. I turn toward the window and swallow down something hard and tight. No one’s ever lonely in Lovelorn. The line comes back to me, from our fan fic. No one except the Shadow. The trees are creeping on the edge of the parking lot, like they’re planning to make a sneak attack. For a second, I imagine that maybe Lovelorn’s still out there. Maybe it just picked up and moved, found some other lonely girls to welcome.
“The funny thing is,” Wade says, “they got it all mixed up.”
I turn back to him. “What do you mean?”
His face is pale, like a photographic impression of itself. But here in the half dark, his features are softened and I realize he’s not bad-looking. His face has character. Strength. He looks like someone you can trust.
“Someone really did kill Summer,” he says quietly. “Someone knocked her out and dragged her into the stones and knifed her seven times. There’s a monster out there, Brynn. All this time, there’s been a monster out there. And no one’s tracking it.”
“Except for us,” I say.
“Yeah.” He sighs. He seems almost sad. “Except for us.”