The Space Between Trees (17 page)

That week that we make the list, Hadley’s angry. No, it’s more like she was always angry, but the incident in the diner parking lot gave her permission to stop hiding it. She’s in detention nearly every day after school for mouthing off to her teachers, and her little brothers hunker down into tiny blond rocks when she storms the living room. She’s starting to get paranoid, too. She’s convinced that cars are following her.

“Look now!” she’ll shout while we’re driving, turning both her head and the steering wheel so that we nearly veer off the road. I grab the wheel and steer us back center, but by the time I’ve done that, she claims the mysterious car is gone.

Things get even worse when the waitress-witness, Laura Grossman, turns out to be a bust. The two guys she overheard in the restaurant turn themselves in. They’re bag boys on break from the supermarket down the street, and the dead body they’d been discussing was from a movie they’d watched the night before. On the evening news, they shake their heads and open their eyes wide.

“We were just talking about movies,” one of them says.

“We didn’t mean to sound like we’d hurt anybody,” the other adds.

“We like scary movies.”

“Like anybody, right?”

“We like to be scared.”

“But just pretend. We’re not scary.”

“No, we’re not scary.”

The newscasters take a moment to chuckle after the clip before dialing their facial expressions back over to serious in order to announce that the hunt still continues for the murderer of local teen Elizabeth McCabe.

“Liar,” Hadley hisses over the phone. “That waitress wanted attention, that’s all. Sad little waitress life. Wonder how she’d like the attention I could give her. Liar.”

The next part of our plan is to look for suspicious behavior and add any instances of it to our list. We try and fail to sneak into the principal’s office to see if there’s any information about the students the police questioned just after Zabet’s murder. The police haven’t come to the school in a couple weeks, or at least the rumors about police interrogations have stopped. Hadley says this proves her point even more; we can’t count on the police for anything. We have to rely on ourselves, our list.

After our first brainstorming session, our list had twenty-eight people on it, and each day, during passing or lunch, Hadley asks me to add more. You wouldn’t think that people would do much that’s suspicious, but you’d be wrong. When you start looking for it, everyone is suspicious almost all the time.

For example, it starts to seem creepy the way Mr. Denby is so obsessed with his plants, especially after some research into Hadley’s mother’s detective novels, which teach us that sociopaths often express an interest in owning flower shops. Or the way that Greg Lutz doesn’t use a fork to eat his Salisbury steak, just his sloppy, gravy-covered fingers. Or how whenever anyone mentions Zabet, Wendy Messinger rolls her eyes and says, “Let the girl rest in peace.”

But Hadley and I won’t. In addition to the list, we launch a whisper campaign. The plan is to mention Zabet as much as possible in order to shake up the killer, whoever he or she is. We start rumors about why Zabet was in the woods that night—that she was pregnant and waiting to tell her lover, that she had a drug habit and was meeting her dealer, that she knew a secret about a teacher and was there to blackmail him. The rumors hiss through the school like wind through those old Chippewa cornfields, coming back to us during the next passing break on different lips, with different details.

After we spread a rumor, my job is twofold. I write any new details or changes from the story of our initial rumor. There might, I tell Hadley, be something true there, a clue that has worked its way into our rumor like a stray hair in your homemade pie. I use the signout log in the office to record anyone who goes home sick after the rumor has been spread. Just in case guilt or fear might drive the killer underground. The data is never quite right, though. For example, we spread the drug rumor just before a stomach flu outbreak, and a dozen people leave by lunch. On top of that, I worry that we’re ruining Zabet’s reputation with rumors about pregnancy and drugs.

“She’s dead,” Hadley says. “She doesn’t have a reputation anymore.”

Our number one suspect, however, is easy to find. He can be located in one of three places: slumped in a chair in the main office, slouched against a locker bank after being ousted from class, or hunched across the street in the smokers’ field with the bright bloom of a cigarette between his hands. Suspect One resists our methods of detection and defies our data. Garrett Murray skips at least one class every single day. He doesn’t, as far as we can tell, bother with gossip. Even so, gossip bothers with him. Hadley knows all the rumors.

“In seventh grade he punched a teacher.”

“He started a fire in the chem lab.”

“He got kicked out of his last school and the one before that, too.”

“The police called him in for questioning twice.”

“He’s supposed to be on about five different types of medication for”—she circles her finger around her ear—“but he never takes them.”

“Once, he totally beat up this kid for getting his sleeve wet with water from his umbrella.”

I don’t remind Hadley that this last incident was the exact same one that she’d told me about Justin Paluski.

We try to scrutinize Garrett Murray. We move in close to gather more data. Hadley posts herself in the smokers’ field with full packs of cigarettes, knowing that Garrett’ll almost always ask to bum one. She trades the clean, white cylinders for dirty tidbits.

“He said he wanted to kill Ms. Hauser.”

“He got kicked out of gym class for swinging a softball bat into the wall.”

“I memorized his shoe print. We could match it to the scene of the crime.”

“I asked him if he knew who Zabet was, and he said, ‘Yeah, the girl who got squelched.’” She ducks her head. “I hate him a lot.”

Still, she trudges back to the field during the next passing break, and I can see her through the stalks of winter wheat, letting him light his cigarette off hers, the ember glowing between them bright enough that I can see it through the stalks, past the cars, all the way to where I’m hidden behind the school doors.

“Y
OU COULD GET HIM
to take you there,” Hadley says.

We’re in the stomping area between the two sets of doors into the school. It’s been over two months since Zabet’s body was pulled out of Hokepe Woods. It’s a Friday morning before first period, and kids come from the bus circle in waves, chattering as they pull open the heavy doors, their zipper-pulls brushing against my back, snagging my hair for a second before pulling free.

“Who?” I say. She’s prefaced this sentence with nothing, just marched up to me and spat it out.

“Jonah Luks. Sunday. Get him to take you.”

She pulls her ponytail around and tugs her fingers through it. She’s just come back from her morning cigarette with Garrett and the smokers. The skin around her mouth is blushed pink and her eyes cut all over the stomping area.

“Where?” I say, but there’s only one
there
we ever talk about—the spot in the woods where Zabet died—so Hadley doesn’t even bother to answer me. Her hand is still jerking fast through her hair. I reach out and touch the knuckles; it stops. Hadley’s knuckles are hard little bumps under her skin, like pellets from a pellet gun.

“How?” I ask next. “He won’t want to.”

“Vie.” She rotates her hand under mine so that instead of her knuckles, I’m touching her palm. She wraps her hand around two of my fingers, firm and triumphant, the way a baby grabs fingers. “He will if you ask him right.”

Next Sunday, early, I wait on the porch of 2010 Buckskin Blvd. It’s a big house with crumbly white bricks that are rough and sparkling and threaten to rub off on the back of my coat, like I’m leaning against a giant salt lick. I don’t worry much about being found. 2010’s paper service has been stopped for two weeks, probably for a vacation, probably somewhere better than here. The porch is enclosed on three sides, so I can sit in the corner of it without any of the neighbors seeing me. One of those fake brooms, the kind made from twigs and twine that isn’t really meant to sweep up anything, sits in one corner. I hunker down next to it and pull my knees up to my chin. I rest my head against them and practice what I mean to say to Jonah. Finally, I hear his old engine, and the sound vibrates for a moment in my chest so that I feel rewound, spooled back to the Evie I was before all this, before I saw that body bag. I get up and scoot down the front walk like I’ve just delivered a paper.

Jonah’s leaning over the back of his truck, pulling out his stuff and setting it on the road next to him in a line—sled, tarp, twine. I think about the trap I stole. It’s in my room right now, still stowed among the shoe boxes beneath my bed like it’s trying to disguise itself as benign cardboard. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think of it down below me; I pretend that I can feel it down there, coiled and sharp.

I stop at the other side of the truck, just across the truck bed, and wait for Jonah to see me. Maybe if I sneak up on him, then he’ll be startled, and if he’s startled, then I can apologize for startling him and, on the heels of my apology, deliver my first line. When Jonah looks up, though, it’s like he’s known all along that I’ve been standing there.

“Running late today, kiddo.” He pulls his sled up on the lawn.

“You were out late last night?” I ask—not one of my lines, but I can’t help asking it. I think of him at another house party, a sleek, clever college girl wound around his body, asking if he wants to check out the rooms upstairs.

He frowns. “
Up
late at least.”

“Like watching TV?” I fidget with the hem of my coat. “Or reading?” I try to picture Jonah in an armchair, a pair of reading glasses on his nose, a book in his lap, a lamp casting light across his shoulder, but I can only picture the glow of the lamp illuminating the careful rows of words.

With a wave, Jonah’s off, and I have to hurry to catch up.

“I’ve finished delivering all my papers,” I tell him. I’m back on script. This is one of the lines that Hadley and I had practiced:
I’ve finished delivering all my papers.
Hadley says that talking to guys is easy, that it just takes a word or a look to make them follow you around. I must have done it wrong, though, because here I am tripping after Jonah. He doesn’t act like he even heard my line, so I repeat it: “I’ve finished delivering all my papers.”

“Cool. You can knock off early,” he says.

This is a much nicer response than the ones Hadley would give in our practice sessions.
Why should I care about your papers?
she’d say in her gruff voice, or,
Get out of here, little girl.

“I thought, actually, that maybe I could walk with you,” I say, my next line.

He stops, and the sled skates a few feet before stopping, too.

“For just a little while,” I add.

He glances, not at me but over his shoulder like he’s measuring the distance from here back to the road.

“Nah,” he says. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Sure I do. It’ll be something different, and . . . don’t you want company? I’ve got good eyes. I can help you spot animals.” I spill all the rest of my lines at once, leaving me with nothing else prepared to say.