Vengeance (28 page)

“Janna?” I asked.

She rinsed her hands in the kitchen sink, looked for somewhere to dry them, and shook them over the basin. She spun around and said, “How did Tara get in the lake, Decker? Tara asked me that, like I might know. Why does she think I’d know? I don’t know. I
don’t
.”

I didn’t tell Janna what I was feeling. What I really thought. “She’s desperate,” I said. “She asked me the same thing.”

She looked around, at the brand-new floors under her feet. At the new lights. At the new everything. “I didn’t know water could destroy a house,” she whispered.

Which was a funny thing to say, since it could take a life or two or three. We feared it like it could do much worse.

“And a car engine,” Kevin said.

“Oh, and FYI, it can really mess with your lungs, too,” Justin said. His voice rattled as he spoke, like he was still trying to cough up water, a week later.

“What did the police say?” Janna asked. “About your house.”

I shrugged. “At this point, we wouldn’t be able to prove anything anyway. Still, I want to know. Freaks me out thinking about it. Not knowing. Like it could happen again.”

One of Janna’s hands slipped off the counter, still wet. She wiped it on the side of her jeans, just like my dad had done. And now she was standing exactly where he had been, right before he …

“What?” she asked. She lowered her voice. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I felt my throat closing off, but not from panic. “My dad died,” I said. “Right where you’re standing. He was here, and then he was gone, and now we’re cleaning up the fucking kitchen like it didn’t matter. Like he didn’t …”

Delaney was there before I could finish. Pressing my head down onto her shoulder, her arms tight around my back. What I should’ve felt those first days. What I should’ve done those first days. “He did,” she whispered, so only I could hear.

Janna turned back to the sink, scrubbing her hands, like she couldn’t get the remnants of plaster dust off. “I can’t be here,” she said, to Justin I guess, because he took her by the arm and started walking out of the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Decker,” she choked as they left. “I’m sorry,” she said, as Justin led her out of the room. “I’m sorry,” I heard, from the living room.

“Uh,” Kevin said. “There goes my ride. So …” He squeezed my shoulder as he passed.

Sometimes I dreamed that Delaney didn’t exist and that was horrible.

But sometimes I dreamed that my dad still did. And in the second that followed, in the second I remembered, he’d have to die all over again.

Delaney left to do some project for one of her many AP classes when my mom came home with takeout. The house was
looking like a house again—not exactly ours, but close enough. Same pictures on the wall. Same furniture setup. Same layout of the rooms.

Except my dad’s office, which was empty and purposeless. My mom was standing in the open doorway, and I guess she felt me behind her, because she said, “What should we do with it?”

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. She turned around, narrowing her eyes like she was trying to keep me from seeing what she was feeling. “An exercise room? A sewing room?”

“You don’t exercise,” I said. “Or sew.” She grinned.

“A library?” I asked, like Delaney’s family had in the spare room upstairs.

Now she was smiling for real. “You don’t read,” she said. She pulled the door shut behind her, leaving it as it was. And presumably, what it would remain. An empty, gaping hole in the house. In our life.

I called Delaney before going to sleep. “It’s weird that you don’t live here anymore,” she said.

I laughed. “No, it’s weird that I
did
live with you.” And I got this flash of something, a picture of us in a room somewhere. Somewhere else. A year or two from now. Would we be together in college? One day, would we live together? I wondered if Delaney thought about that. About something that far in the future. Or, with our history, if it was stupid to think past next month.

“Pop quiz,” she said, which was something we used to do when we were younger. “Sole survivor of the apocalypse. Go.”

But before I had a chance to respond, she added, “I call cockroach.”

We used to do this all the time, whenever we ran out of things to talk about. We could both argue any side. The winner was just whoever out-logicked the other.

We didn’t talk about who might be after her or why. We didn’t talk about Tara. We didn’t talk about Boston or whether she was changing her life for me.

I heard her breathing on the phone, like she was sleeping, when I was in the middle of arguing my case for mosquito as final survivor of the apocalypse.

I hung up and lay back on my pillow. It felt good. Like a reprieve from everything. Like when we were in Boston and away from the lake, away from our past, away from everything that we had become.

But the last thing I saw as my mind faded to nothing was the black centers of faceless eyes, growing wider.

Listen
.

Footsteps, creaking along the new wooden floor.

The doorknob twisting, slowly, slowly.

My heartbeat, pounding and pounding in my skull.

I was upright, staring at the door, completely disoriented and powerless. I saw a flash of blond hair caught in the
moonlight from my window the second before Delaney let herself into my room.

I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. “You scared the crap out of me,” I said. Then, focusing back on her, I whispered, “How did you get in?” We’d changed the locks.

She held up a single key, letting it dangle from a miniature silver house. “Your mom left a copy with my parents. For emergencies.”

I checked the clock, stared at the numbers until they slid into focus. After three. “What are you …” I looked her over. She was in sweats. Sneakers. Her hair was in a ponytail. “What’s going on? What happened?”

“What happened is that I couldn’t sleep. And I figured I’d be dressed like this in case someone was up when I got back in. You know, from my morning run.”

Perfectly Delaney. Seeing things three steps ahead. Worrying about things three steps ahead. “And you’re here because?”

She raised an eyebrow at me, wandered over to my desk. “Isn’t it obvious?” She ran her hand along the edge of my desk, pulled out the chair, and sat. “I’m feeling rebellious.”

“You don’t do rebellious. Actually, you’re kind of a dork.”

She leaned forward, gave me the smile I knew she saved just for me. “But am I your favorite dork?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re my favorite.”

I looked at her closer. At the way her heel was bouncing on the floor. And the way her hands were now tugging at the end of her ponytail. And the way she was still sitting in that chair. And that she had snuck out in the first place.

“Is this a thing now? Not that I’m complaining.” I sat on the edge of my bed, my elbows on my knees, leaning toward her. “But are you going to tell me why you’re really here?”

Her eyes drifted to my phone, sitting on the bedside table. “I called you first,” she whispered. “But you didn’t wake up.” She pulled out her notebook, which she’d brought over in a plastic bag. “I’ve been looking through this and thinking,” she said. “I’m making a list.”

“What kind of list,” I said, but I had the sinking feeling I knew exactly what kind of list she was making.

“People … who might want me dead.”

“Don’t do that. I told you already,” I said. “I’m wrong. It’s totally possible that Tara hit her head and stumbled around and fell.”

“A coincidence?”

I pressed my lips together. I knew what she thought about coincidences. She hated them. Said it felt like the world was playing a trick on her.

That notebook was full of death. Obituaries.

“These people,” I said, trying to take the notebook from her hand, “they’re dead.”

She clutched the journal to her chest. Facts. Answers. “You were so mad at me, and you were my … you loved me.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I had a long line of things I was sorry for.

Who would win in a fight? The past or the future? The past. Every time
. It was relentless.

She was running her fingers across the pen marks on the
pages. “Don’t,” she said. “But don’t you get it? If
you
could be that angry, imagine them. Imagine a stranger … did I say something? Do something? Hang around too much and give myself away? Do
they
think I did something?” Troy did things. He sped up their deaths, thinking he was being compassionate.

Delaney needed facts. Not feelings. Not guesses. “Tara tripped and hit her head,” I said. “That’s a fact. Nobody pushed her. Nobody planned to drown her. It’s a coincidence. It has to be.”

“Or maybe not,” she said. I wondered when she had called me, exactly. How long she’d been working all this through. “What if …,” she said. “What if, hypothetically, you needed money. But you’re not a thief or anything. But I’m walking in front of you and I drop a bunch of money, and you pick it up. I mean, it’s
right there
.”

“Like a message from the universe,” I said. Or an answered prayer.

“So, Tara’s unconscious on the side of the lake, and it’s like someone was presented with this opportunity,” Delaney said.

“Opportunity,” I repeated, remembering the things my dad would tick off on his fingers when practicing for the courthouse. Means. Motive. Opportunity. He was always looking for the hole in one of them. “Tara was already unconscious. The job was half-done. Just drag her a few more inches.” A shudder ran through me, and I whispered, “Bet it didn’t even feel like killing.”

“It must’ve looked like a sign, don’t you think?” she asked.

Here she is, just for you. Money, spilling around on the ground, for the taking. A girl, unconscious on the ground, for the killing.

“Only it wasn’t a sign,” she whispered. “It wasn’t even me.”

“It could’ve been Tara,” I said. “I mean, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Tara pisses off a lot of people. Maybe they were really after her. Everyone knows her …”

But there was that feeling.

I could see it so clearly. Footsteps approaching the body. The lake, right there. Like a sign, calling to us. The lake, covering for us.

She slammed the book closed. “Or maybe Janna is right. Maybe there’s something wrong with this place. It makes us forget. It makes us forget ourselves.”

“Or maybe Tara drank too much. And tripped. And maybe you saved her from a horrible, accidental death. Now go to sleep.”

She opened the drawer to put the journal inside, back where it used to remain. But instead she pulled out the recorder that I’d hidden inside. “I thought you were going to return this?”

“It’s blank,” I said. I cleared my throat. “It was just you.”
A lot more of you
.

“I think this makes you a thief,” she said, but she wasn’t upset about it. He’d been calling her. She’d been ignoring him.

And I thought of the words, worried that they were burned electronically somewhere. Her secrets. Her history.

“So be it,” I said, pulling her to the bed, telling her to go to
sleep. And then I kept lying. Filling her head with promises I wasn’t sure I could keep.
You’re fine. You’re safe. Nothing will hurt you
.

Last year, death couldn’t touch us. It was a thing that existed in some other world, some other universe. It happened when you were old. Or to other people in the paper. On the news.

I had summoned it here when I left her on the ice. It sunk its teeth in, getting comfortable, making itself at home. It slept in the center of that lake. And every once in a while, it would roll over and stretch, and one of us would get caught in its claws.

I wrapped my arm around her as she lay in my bed, and I thought it again:

Not her
.

Chapter 18

She was gone when I woke. Always disappearing. But the panic subsided when I felt the imprint in my bed from where she’d just been. Still warm. She left the notebook with me again. Probably because she was half-asleep. No, it was after five. I’d lived next door long enough to know the Maxwell house got an early start to the day. If she was supposed to be out for a run, she wouldn’t have her journal. That would be just like Delaney, keeping her alibi.

Or maybe the notebook had a mind of its own, taunting me, like the lake.
Look
, it said.
Listen
, it whispered. The black and white on the front drifting in and out of focus, like the center of someone’s eyes.

I flipped it open. Names. Obituaries. Some I knew. Some I didn’t. And all the people just off the page, the people who were left behind. I was reaching for something that didn’t exist. Not yet.

And the last page, for Maya’s mom. Delaney didn’t even know her name. But these were the facts, etched into the page with dark ink, in bullet-point format: The date we met them. June 22. A corresponding number. A seven. Pretty high, considering she was still going strong, wherever she was.

And then on August 1, a question mark. Nothing more from the page. Because there was nothing, nothing, nothing coming from Maya’s mom.

Like the lake had healed her. Like they had moved here for that very purpose.

Shit. Shitshitshit
.

I picked up my phone, but Delaney didn’t answer. I checked the clock. Her mom would be up. Making breakfast probably. I threw my clothes on and nearly ran into my mother in the hall. “Good morning to you, too,” she said.

“Going for a run,” I said, brushing by her, thankful I’d grabbed wind pants instead of jeans.

I ran down the stairs, slipped my sneakers on as I hopped from foot to foot on my way out the front door. I raced across our yards and rang her doorbell, my body pressed close to the door.

Joanne opened their front door, bleary-eyed, coffee cup in hand. “You’re early,” she said.

“I know, sorry, I left my homework here. With Delaney. It’s due this morning.”

“She left me a note that she was out for a run. Do you want to come in? I can’t imagine she’ll be that much longer.”

But I was already backing away. Running, like I said I’d be doing. Running, toward the thing we always ran to. The thing that pulled us all together. Binding us all to one another and to this place.