Deep Betrayal (Lies Beneath #2) (16 page)

“It’s a poncho. It’s chenille.”

Calder shook his head. “Who wears a chenille poncho on a camping trip?” He took two fingers and flipped the pompon ties that hung under my chin.

“The wind is cold,” I said.

“I didn’t think the cold ever bothered you.”

“That only applies to the lake, and it’s easier to stay warm when you’re around,
but since you weren’t
 … I guess I had to resort to inappropriate outerwear.”

He kissed me quiet. “When everyone else goes to bed, you go, too. I’ll come wake you later.”

It was harder to pay attention to the campfire banter after that. Serious Boy had grown quiet, and he was the only one I was interested in hearing from anyway. Once or twice he looked at me with a strange wistfulness that made me squirm in my chair.

As the night drew on and people got tired, the conversation slowed. Some people seemed to be asleep in their chairs. Others got up and quietly retreated to their tents. Gabby snuck off with Serious Boy’s friend. Looked like I was going to have the tent to myself.

Before I had time to consider what that might mean, Brady broke the long silence with a sentence that brought everyone back from the dead: “So how goes the mermaid hunt, Jack?”

Serious Boy looked up quickly, his eyes wide and intent, first on me and then on Jack. There was a beat of silence, then the fire cracked on a pine log. Connor looked around the circle. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Jack here thinks we should spray mermaid repellant around our campsite,” said Brady. Connor snorted, then—when he noticed Jack’s serious expression—laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.

Jack glared at him in the darkness, vitriol in his eyes.

M
y dad always said if anything good was going to happen, it would happen before midnight. That was the rationale for my twelve o’clock curfew back when we lived in Minneapolis. Of course, he was wrong. Dead wrong. Even when I was in junior high, slumber party conversations didn’t get deep and interesting until after one. The same was true with dating a merman. Nothing compared to a midnight swim—our first real swim, alone, since returning to the lake. If this was what Calder meant by “concentrated time,” he could have it whenever he wanted.

“I thought you didn’t want me in the water,” I said when he brought me up for air.

“Just this once,” he said. “For old time’s sake.”

The Big and Little Dippers filled the sky with a light that held its own against the pale disk of the moon and stirred the lake into a rich navy, with black ripples, like a Van Gogh painting. The only other light was the reflection of the silver-sequined tail that propelled us forward and kept us buoyant when we stopped to appreciate the time alone together. When the moon hit it, a dazzling spray of twinkly lights scattered across the surface of the water. It was like dancing under a disco ball, and it was like choreography, slow and twirling.

Calder would extend his arm, letting me out as far as I could go while maintaining contact, and then he’d pull me in so close his heart pounded in my ears. He circled me over and twisted me down. Sometimes I wondered if he was reliving the experience of taking a life. I didn’t like to think of another girl in this dance with him. But I could at least revel in the knowledge that he got more from our dance than he had from any other. For now, Calder still found all his happiness in me—and he didn’t have to kill me to get it.

At one point I heard the soft sound of the letter
L
lilting under the water. Like a song:
luh, luh, luh
. And then the word
love
. It startled me because I didn’t know where the thought came from: him or me?

“I’ve missed this,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I responded, impressed that the most perfect words came to mind in time to speak them. Usually they came to me in the middle of the night, allowing me to only wish I’d said them.

“I guess I don’t,” he said, and we dove, his mouth on mine as we serpentined the rocks and sandbars. I accepted the air I didn’t really need and kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t betray my secret.

It was too dark to see anyway, and Calder seemed to navigate more by sound than sight. I imagined I could almost hear the vibrations and tinny nuances of the varying topographies of the lake. The pictures played on my mind like a sonar image, but I didn’t open my eyes to verify whether there was any truth to my imagination. I would have been too disappointed to find out I was wrong. Pretending was so much better.

An hour or two later, Calder brought us back to a small strip of sand not far from the campsite. I let go of him and swam up to the shore, walking the last few feet, my clothes saturated and plastered to my body.

“Hurry back,” I whisper-yelled as Calder swam away, and he must have heard me, because a silver tail breached the surface and hit the water with a gentle
thwap. Someday
, I thought.
Someday that will be me
.

Minutes later, Calder returned and led me to a small, moss-lined cave cut into the side of the hill. It was warm there, maybe even more comfortable than the tent. I was so tired I could have slept standing up, and I took no time curling into Calder’s arms. My wet clothes clung to me, and I shivered in the night air. He pulled a quilt from deeper in the cave. When I looked at him questioningly, he shrugged. “I borrowed it from Gabby’s tent. I doubt she’ll miss it.”

“I don’t know. It’s her lucky blanket.”

He ran his thumb over my fingertips. “We swam for a long time. Shouldn’t your skin be pruney?”

“Hmm?” I mumbled, already half asleep. I thought he said something more, but I wasn’t sure what.

When the first pink and orange strains of Saturday morning laced across the horizon, I couldn’t help feeling sad that the night was coming to an end. The morning was already turning humid and the air in the cave was suffocating. I peeled myself out of Calder’s arms and wandered the beach, pocketing a few pieces of beach glass that caught my eye: two whites and a brown.

A buzzing noise broke my concentration, and within seconds it was all around me. It was all I could hear. Out of nowhere, Calder’s hand came down on my shoulder, but I brushed it off. He couldn’t startle me anymore. I turned to silently ask him if he heard it, too. His face was tense with concentration, and his nostrils flared as flies buzzed past our heads.

I took one cautious step toward the swarm of insects. My feet sank into the soft sand, slipping under me as I tried to climb the bank to investigate.

“Lily, no,” Calder said. “Stay back.” But my feet kept moving. There was something half buried in the sand. Something big. Not a log or a rock. Goose bumps rose on my arms.

As I got closer, I saw toes. Then bare legs. Blood pooled inside the still body. Milky eyes stared up at the sky. Flies crawled in and out of slack jaws. A scream ripped through my chest, but Calder slapped his hand over my mouth before I made a sound. He pulled me back as I gasped for breath through his fingers, forgetting to exhale in between.

“Maris,” I finally whispered as bile rose in my throat. Blood rushed away from my head, and I swayed. For a moment I thought I was in a slow-motion fall and I wondered, as the sand came up to meet me, how I could avoid falling on top of the body. Calder supported me as my legs gave way.

I knelt in the sand, Calder’s breath hot on my neck. I couldn’t look away from the gruesome scene. I’d never seen a dead body before. It repelled as much as it compelled me to draw closer.

Connor, the laughing boy from the night before, lay in the sand, staring blankly up at me. Red stripes lashed across his bare chest. His shorts, once wet, were caked with drying sand.

Would Maris have dragged him from his tent? I couldn’t picture that. Had she lured him out into the water? That seemed more likely.

“I’m sorry,” said Calder. “I am. Be glad it’s only one.”

“Glad?” I pulled away from him. How he could he minimize this?

He leaned forward and carefully closed Connor’s eyelids. “Clearly, Maris is in bad shape. It could have been much worse.”

I couldn’t see how.

“Letting targets escape is a bad sign, but
this
? They’ve lost complete control of their senses. Leaving a dead body on land … it’s completely reckless. We’re lucky they didn’t wipe out the whole campground. This is insanity.”

“Really, Calder?” My tone was scathing. “Tell me what a
sane
murder looks like.”

He gritted his teeth until bands of muscle jumped in his jaw. “That’s just it. A
sane
murder wouldn’t look like anything.
You’d never see it. They’d hide the bodies underwater. They’d be inconspicuous. This is anything but.”

I waved the flies away from Connor’s face. They swarmed around me before settling back on his corpse. “Such a waste,” I said, waving them away again. I reached toward his face and tried to close his jaw—I couldn’t let the flies have their way with him—but it was locked in place. “Can we move him?”

“Best that we leave the body alone.”

“Then let’s go,” I said. “There’s a radio on Jack’s boat. We can call the Coast Guard.”

“No, Lily. We can’t.”

“Obviously we won’t tell them the truth, but we can’t let Connor rot out here. And the others are going to wonder where he is.”

“You’re right,” he said, hanging his head. “Of course, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

But I wasn’t paying attention. I already knew I was right, and I was distracted. Someone was crying. First, low snuffling, followed by deep gasps at the air. Someone was crying and trying to hide it. It was coming from the woods, farther up the embankment.

I climbed after the noise. Calder held me up when my feet slipped in the loose sand. We made our way over the rocks and up the bluff and into the trees. Below a white pine, a dark, hooded figure sat curled into a ball, a blanket bunched in his arms.

Jack Pettit looked up, his face wet with ugly red blotches. He quickly wiped his nose, and his expression darkened. Hatred burned in his eyes when he saw Calder behind me. “Did you see?” he asked.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“
You
did this,” Jack said, glaring at Calder.

“Of course he didn’t!” I cried. “Why would you
say
something like that? Besides, he was with me the whole night.”

Jack snorted in disgust. “Then another one of your kind.”

Calder’s silence was his affirmation.

Jack choked on the air and his face contorted with pain. “This should have never happened. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“She’s grieving,” Calder said, and I recognized his effort to physically restrain himself. “We did lose a sister. Perhaps you remember.”

“
She’s
grieving,” Jack scoffed. “So she gets a pass on murder? What about the rest of us? What about
him
?” Jack couldn’t bring himself to look toward the body. “Where is she? Where’s Pavati?” Jack was yelling now. “Tell me where your sister is!”

“Jack,” I said, trying to calm him. “You can’t tell anyone what happened here.”

He laughed one short, humorless laugh. “People need to pay attention.” His words bit at the air between us. “If this keeps up, everyone will have to listen to me. It’ll be like ’67.”

“Then let me handle it,” Calder said, and his voice was rigid.

“Yeah, you go ahead and
handle
it,” Jack said. “You’re a real pro at that, aren’t you? You did an awesome job protecting Lily from them. If it wasn’t for me, she’d be no better off than this kid.”

Calder was as much bird as fish. He flew through the air
at Jack, tackling him to the ground. Sand spit up in all directions before Jack was skittering out of the way and yelling, “Get off me! Get off me, you freak!”

“Stay away from Lily, and stay away from me. Don’t think I don’t know who killed Tallulah. You set this ball rolling. This boy’s death is as much your fault as theirs.”

Jack’s face burned red, and he looked nervously at the body. “I acted in defense. In defense of Lily. What they do … it’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t always think so, did you?” Calder’s voice rose above Jack’s, and Jack cowered back into the trees. “You were all right with it when you thought Pavati was yours forever.”

“Shut up!” yelled Jack, covering his ears. He turned away from us and banged his forehead against a tree.

The sound of voices coming up the beach pulled us out of the trees, back toward the spot where Connor lay.

“What’s this? Hey, guys,” said Brady Peterman. Three people followed, including Connor’s roommate, Eric, and Serious Boy. “What’s going on? Has anyone seen—”

Brady froze and put his arms out to stop the others from going any farther. I watched as his mind worked to come to terms with what he was seeing.

I stepped in before Jack could say anything more. “I found him here,” I said.

Serious Boy trained his eyes on me.

“How did he get here?” asked Brady. “What the hell happened?” Eric covered his mouth to hold back the dry heaves.

“I warned you about this,” Jack said, wiping the remaining tears from his cheeks. Bits of pine bark clung to his sweaty face.

“Shut up, Jack,” Brady said. “Bear, maybe? I told him not to have snacks in the tent.”

“Oh, wake up!” Jack said. “The body’s too clean for a bear.”

“Show some respect,” Brady said. “You’ve got a lot of nerve.” He looked over his shoulder at a tall blond guy in a Marquette sweatshirt. “Get on the radio, Mick. Call the Coast Guard. Jack, give me that blanket of yours. We need to cover him up.”

Jack handed off the blanket and stalked down the beach. I watched him go and saw, beyond him, my father’s face barely above the waterline, watching from the dark water. “Calder,” I said, turning, but he’d disappeared, leaving just as silently as he’d arrived.

Over the next few minutes, the rest of the campground was alerted and gathered solemnly on the beach. The other kids displayed a combination of fear and curiosity. No one knew Connor well enough to cry; rather, ashen expressions were the norm. Eric, Connor’s roommate, sat beside the body until the Coast Guard arrived.