Hanging by a Thread (23 page)

There was no end date on trying to discover what had happened to Amanda, and who had killed Dillon. Walking around Winston, you got the feeling that if we all got through this week, there would be this huge sigh of relief and everyone would be able to pretend nothing bad had ever happened. The tourists would come back. The businesses would start earning profits again. Alone in their houses, the grieving parents would continue to mourn
the children they had lost, but out in the streets of town Mrs. Granger would smile and greet people and move ahead with her life. Maybe, in time, her husband and Mrs. Stavros would too.

The only loose thread in this whole plan was me. I had the visions, the jacket, the need to find out what happened. Now, maybe, I had an ally. But if last night I had felt like I could trust Jack completely, in the bright light of morning common sense returned. I wanted to see Jack, have him beside me as I hunted down the truth. But I was going to take one precaution … just in case I was making a huge mistake with him.

I got the plastic bag from my backpack, trying not to look at its contents. It was cool and squishy in my hands as I went down into the cellar. Most houses in Winston didn’t have basements, but the dress shop had been built over a dirt cellar used for storage long ago. When my parents renovated, they’d had some foundation repairs made but left the cellar alone. I remembered seeing spider nests, old broken glass, and bits of paper and ancient trash down there. We’d never used it for storage because of the damp and dirt, but long ago my ancestors had, and there were niches and decaying wooden shelves lining the walls.

The single bulb overhead did little to illuminate the space, and the dust made me sneeze, but I took my time, considering and discarding half a dozen spaces before I found a relatively sturdy shelf in one corner. It had been constructed of raw lumber many decades ago, and as I
brushed dust off the boards with my sleeve, I saw that something had been written on the wood.

I squinted in the near darkness. A single word had been written in a childish hand: “Josie.” My great-great-grandmother. Alma’s daughter, raised by her mother’s sister, who went on to work in the shop upstairs, who passed her mother’s dark gift on to her own daughter and, many years later, to me.

I wondered what she had kept down here. Incomplete projects, maybe, or patterns. Yard goods or a stash of fabrics she’d collected. Or maybe this was where she kept her private things—journals and treasures, love letters and hopes for the future. Whatever she’d stored here, it was long gone.

I touched the wood, wondering if I’d be able to feel the connection across time. But all I felt was the dirty, splintering board. I slid the plastic bag far back on the shelf—and my fingertips brushed against something.

My heartbeat quickened as I closed my fingers around a small round object and brought it into the light. A button. I rubbed it on my shirt to get rid of the layers of grime, and saw that it was beautiful, made of shimmering mother-of-pearl and edged in scalloped silver.

Turning it this way and that in the light of the bare bulb, I was certain that this small treasure had belonged to my great-grandmother. I felt like Josie had left it there just for me to find, as reassurance that everything would be all right, that I could trust my gift.

I slipped the button into my pocket, feeling like I had found the thing I didn’t know I was looking for.

Half an hour later I was showered and out the door, pedaling across town to the Stavros house, the button tucked in the pocket of my shorts. I liked knowing it was there, especially since I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. I felt like I was trying to arrange a playdate for my mom, like somewhere along the line the tables had gotten turned and we’d switched roles. But I was trying to help Mrs. Stavros, too. I had run out of ideas for trying to figure out Amanda’s disappearance, but maybe coming at it from a new angle would spark something.

It probably made more sense to start with my mom, but that was going to be a tough sell. Mom could be really stubborn, and if she knew I was trying to push her into a friendship, she’d probably resist. But once they were in the same room … well, wasn’t there a chance that something would spark?

As I coasted onto Elderberry Circle, my ankles getting sprayed by the sprinklers as I rode past the beautiful lawns, I felt hopeful that this would help me move on too. Dillon’s death, Amanda’s disappearance, they were just sad statistics, lives ended too early, leaving heartbreak and pain behind. But nothing I did now would change that.

Walking up the Stavroses’ drive, I noticed a car I knew parked next to the dark red Acura that had been there the day before: a sleek blue Mercedes with a crystal charm hanging from the rearview mirror.

Rachel’s mom’s car.

I’d ridden in it half a dozen times when she took us out for dinner or to go shopping. She didn’t like to ride in Rachel’s car because she said it messed up her hair.

What was she doing here? Rachel had never mentioned her mom and Mrs. Stavros being in touch. Had they kept their friendship up without Rachel knowing? Or was Mrs. Slade just checking in on an old friend, someone she knew was struggling, maybe coming over to talk and have coffee?

If she hadn’t seen Mrs. Stavros in a while, though, she was in for a shock.

While I was standing there trying to figure out what to do, the front door flew open so forcefully it bounced against the wooden bench on the front porch, and Mrs. Slade backed out, tripping on one of her pink wedge-heeled sandals and grabbing the bench to steady herself.

“Get out, get out.” Mrs. Stavros was standing in the door sobbing, her hair even more of a mess than it had been yesterday. Her face was shiny with tears and her bangs were stuck to her forehead, mascara smudged under her eyes.

“Heaven, I’m telling you, you’ve put us all at risk.” Mrs. Slade looked angry, and she jammed her foot in the door so Mrs. Stavros couldn’t pull it shut. “I’m going to go now, but I’m coming back when you’re sober, and we’re going to figure out a
plan
. Just promise me you won’t talk to anyone else.”

“We’re going to figure out a plan,”
Mrs. Stavros mimicked, her face twisted as she echoed Mrs. Slade’s words. “You always had to tell everyone else what to do, Brenda. But
you’re not the one who lost a daughter. So you don’t get to push me around anymore.”

“Heaven, you know how terrible we all feel about that, how much we miss Amanda—”

“Right, I know, but you still get to go home to Rachel and Adrienne and Cal. The perfect little family. What do I have? Nothing.
Nothing
. And it was every bit as much Rachel’s fault as Amanda’s. What’s fair about that? Huh?”

She swayed on her feet, blinking, trying to focus on Mrs. Slade, who looked like she was about to jump out of her skin. “Quiet,” she hissed. “Do you want the whole neighborhood to hear?”

“But I said—”

“I am very sorry about Amanda, and I always will be, you know that, Heaven, but it was
not
the same. Amanda was driving. Not Rachel. And I will not let you drag her down with you, I swear to you—”

“I’ll talk to whoever I want,” Mrs. Stavros said, almost to herself. “You can’t make me stop.”

I backed down the driveway as carefully as I could, glad I’d worn my rubber-soled Converse sneakers. I couldn’t let them see me. I could still hear the sound of Mrs. Stavros’s crying and Mrs. Slade’s tense, fast talking as I coasted down the circle.

My head was full of questions, the shock of what I’d overheard numbing my senses. I was dimly aware of cars, lawn mowers, kids yelling in the park, but it wasn’t until I almost ran into a car door that I realized that if I didn’t calm down, I was going to get into an accident. I turned
onto another residential street, pedaling slowly and taking the long way down the hill, crisscrossing the neighborhood and avoiding the main road.

Mrs. Slade was angry that Mrs. Stavros had been talking to someone—and it didn’t take a genius to guess who she meant.
Me
. Mrs. Slade had somehow found out that I’d visited Mrs. Stavros, and she wasn’t the least bit happy about it.

Amanda was driving.…

It was every bit as much Rachel’s fault as Amanda’s.…

I felt the beginnings of a headache. I’d reached the bottom of Lycester Court, where I could turn right toward my house or left across town to Rachel’s. I’d steered to the left even before I was aware of deciding.

“So you’re my self-appointed bodyguard now?”

Rachel was digging into her single scoop of strawberry ice cream from the Frosty Top. She seemed mostly back to normal, if exhausted; nearly all traces of the instability in the last few days were gone.

I was probably the only person in town who didn’t think much of the Frosty Top’s twenty flavors, but that was because I wasn’t all that into ice cream, period. My thing was the kettle corn they sold down by the pier, hot and salty and sweet and fresh out of the warmer. But I was so desperate to get Rachel out of the house that I told her we could go to Frosty Top and I’d even pay. Now we were sitting out on
the pier having ice cream for lunch, ignoring the tourists walking back and forth who irritated the guys who were there to fish. We always sat in this one place where the fishing was supposed to be bad, and since no one ever dumped bait here, the gulls didn’t tend to mess it up as much.

I pushed my Gummi bears around in my melting vanilla yogurt, not really feeling like eating.

“Rachel … I need to ask you something.”

“Okay,” she said, wiggling her bare toes and admiring her pedicure.

“I just wondered …” I hesitated, knowing I was about to risk the one good friendship I had here in Winston. I took a deep breath, carefully setting my yogurt cup down on the splintery pier. “Where were you the night Dillon Granger died?” I asked quietly.

There was a long pause, and when Rachel spoke again her voice was strange—thin and hollow. “What are you talking about, Clare?”

The inside of the car. The phone in my hand. The jolt, the bump, the pain.

“When someone threw him off the cliff. When they made that nine-one-one call from the truck stop. I just wondered where you were.”

“I don’t know, Clare, it was a long time ago, I guess I was probably home watching TV or something, or, I don’t know, at a movie or the mall or—”

I knew she was lying, knew it from the way she still wouldn’t look at me and was talking too fast, the words tripping over each other. And it hurt to know she was lying
to me—but then again, I’d kept a secret from her, too. One I still couldn’t tell.

“Stop,” I said, very softly. “Stop a minute. Please?”

She did, and her eyes darted toward me, long enough for me to see that she was scared.

“I know Amanda was driving,” I said carefully. And I’d known it for a while now, deep down inside, though it took seeing Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Stavros arguing to understand what it meant. “I know that she was texting. That she never meant to hurt him. She just looked away from the road for a second and that was all it took. Her car ran off the road onto the shoulder and she ran into Dillon’s bike, just hard enough to push him over, and the rail was broken. That wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.”

Rachel was staring right at me now, the color draining from her face. Her lips parted slightly, and she said something like “Oh,” the ice cream falling from her fingers and bouncing off the rocks lining the pier right into the water. Seawater filled the cup, mixing with the pink ice cream as tiny narrow fish darted instantly to the surface to check it out.

“What I think must have happened was that Amanda called her mom, and Mrs. Stavros told her to go home. Then she called it in. She picked the truck stop because she knew a call from a pay phone couldn’t be traced to her, and she got lucky, no one saw her. That was taking a chance but I guess Mrs. Stavros felt like she had to. That she had no other choice. Because Amanda was her daughter.”

Rachel had gone ghostly pale, her lower lip trembling.

I wanted to hug her, wanted to stop this terrible story, to say it didn’t matter. But her reaction confirmed my fears. Whatever had happened …