Vengeance (29 page)

“Delaney!” I yelled her name before I could see her.
Be there
, I thought, as the shore of the lake filtered into view. But she wasn’t.

I ran down the embankment, scanning the surface of the lake first, like a horrible instinct.

And then I saw her. Just around the bend, darting through the trees, toward me.

“What are you doing?” I asked in the darkness. Sunrise hadn’t happened yet.

She really had been running, it looked like. Just not where she should be. She shouldn’t be anywhere near here. She bent over, resting her hands on her knees. “Running,” she said. “Man, I hate running.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, looking past her, down the path disappearing into darkness. At the shadows on the other side of the lake.

“Why not?” she asked, staring straight at the water. “I stood on it,” she said. “I was stupid. We were stupid. I almost died because I stood on the surface. The lake didn’t do anything to me. It never has.”

“I’m not talking about the lake,” I said, keeping my eyes on the distance. Not the lake, a person.

I put my hand on her arm, started pulling her back toward our houses. I stood close, whispered with my face close to
hers, so no one else could hear, could know. “A stranger, right? It had to be someone who didn’t know you.”

“Right. But then that makes no sense, because everyone at the party knew me.”

I shook my head. Delaney was listening. She was smarter than me, I knew that. But she also knew I was good at stuff like this. Making connections without logic. Taking the jump. Things that didn’t count in school. I’d spent years trying to out-logic her. “Someone
near
the party.”

I didn’t say anything in the silence that followed. Neither did she. We had to be thinking the same thing. About a person near the party who didn’t know her until he did. Whose eyes bore into her in Maya’s living room. Who seemed surprised. Who’d said, “This is Delaney,” like he was confused. He had the means. He had the opportunity. He could’ve been at the party without us knowing. He could’ve been that guy in the mask watching Tara. He could’ve been
anyone
.

“He was in my house,” she whispered.

I pulled her farther from the lake. From their house.
Not her
.

“He …” She shook her head. “What did I
do
?” she asked.

“Why does a person come to a place like this?” I asked. “In the middle of nowhere. With a sick parent. It’s not closer to any major hospitals. It’s not closer to anything. And it’s … I mean, people think it’s cursed. Why would someone move here?” I felt it this morning, while reading the last page of her journal.

I felt her know it in the silence. I felt her believe it.

She was so close. Too close. Almost too close to see clearly.

“To hide,” she said.

A place like this. Far from everything. Far from anyone. With people who gave life to a curse. The perfect place to disappear.

“When’s the last time you saw their mom. Why don’t you feel her anymore?”

It was so obvious now. If we were really looking. If we weren’t so preoccupied with our own lives. Delaney raised her fingers to her mouth, shook her head at me. “Because she’s dead,” she said.

I nodded. “You didn’t do anything,” I said. “You
know
something.”

That’s something the doctor from Boston didn’t understand. Sometimes knowledge is
not
for good. Sometimes knowledge is dangerous. Sometimes it can get you killed, because it’s not something that can be undone any other way.

“They’re not who they say they are,” I whispered. They could’ve been anyone. A life we never saw off the page. “What do you really know about her anyway?”

“I know … I know what she tells me. And I know … I know it’s not all true. But I let her say it. It’s like she needs me to believe it.” She looked over her shoulder, at their house. “So I pretend that I do.”

A chill ran up my spine. “Go home and get ready,” I told her.

“For what?” she asked.

“For school. I’m taking you there. And then I’ll take you home. You’re staying with me.”

We didn’t have enough. An accusation with nothing behind it. It was Tara in the water, not Delaney. And there was no evidence that anyone had done anything to Tara, anyway. She had a head injury. There were no facts. Just a feeling. All the connections, all the layers, lining up and feeling true.

In my head, I saw Delaney disappearing in every way possible. In her red coat, under the lake. Or facedown, a year later. Slipping under the surface of the water while we were swimming, and never surfacing. Leaving for college. Leaving me.

“And then what? And then what?” she asked, her voice going higher.
And after and after and after
, I thought.

“I’ll do some research,” I said.

Delaney loved research. She believed it could make sense of anything. I saw her relax. Saw her cling to the idea that it could save her. “Meet you in the library after school?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, but Delaney and I had very different definitions of the term “research.”

“Listen,” I said into the phone, because Justin most definitely was not listening. He was losing it. Sinking in paranoia. Drowning in fear.

Or maybe that was me.

“I’m not going to take anything,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything. I swear.”

“I was sleeping,” he said. Which was completely irrelevant,
but it’s what Justin did when he was nervous about something. Grabbed onto any possible excuse. Then he started coughing again. I couldn’t tell if he was faking.

“Wake up,” I said.

“Why the hell do you need the key to the lake house? And even if I could get it, just because I have a copy doesn’t make it legal. People live there.”

“It’s about Tara,” I said. And I could hear the weight of his fear in the pause that followed. Him processing which he feared most: the curse coming after us all or getting in trouble for giving me a key.

“I’m not coming with you,” he said. “And if you get caught, I’m gonna say you stole it from me.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I owe you one.”

I walked Delaney to her classroom. Thankfully, she didn’t have any classes with Maya, because Maya was a year behind us. Delaney’s face would be a dead giveaway. She always sucked at poker. “See you at lunch,” she said, and I made myself smile as she turned away.

I couldn’t find Justin—not at the lockers, not hovering around Janna, not in his first-period class. I ran back to Janna before she headed to her room.

“Where’s Justin?”

She held her textbook to her stomach and said, “Last I saw, he was still in the parking lot, leaning against your minivan. Said you guys had plans and he’d see me at lunch.”

I smiled. I hugged her. Didn’t mean to, but I did.

He was still leaning against my passenger door when I got outside. He shrugged and yanked on the handle. “I forgot to do my history homework. I’d rather take the skip.”

We drove away as the first-period bell rang, and I smiled to myself for a second, thinking of Janna telling me that dead dad would get me out of a bunch of unexcused absences. I hoped she was right.

“What are we looking for?” Justin asked.

“Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to know.”

“Easier for me to claim ignorance anyway,” he mumbled.

Easier for me not to explain that I was looking for proof that the person renting his house was dead. I wondered if Maya was who she said she was. If she showed different sides to different people. I wondered why the hell she was here.

“So,” Justin said as I drove slowly by their street. “Park over here.” He gestured to the driveway two houses before theirs. I couldn’t see their lake house through the trees.

I pulled half off the road so the van sat at an angle, tilted toward the lake. Two wheels off the pavement, two wheels on. “I won’t be long,” I said.

He handed me the house keys as I turned off the engine. “No,” he said. “Leave it on.” He cleared his throat, looked out the window. “It’s cold.” He put his hands in front of the vents and rubbed them together.

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“Don’t fuck up,” he said as I hopped down from the car.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” I said, closing the door behind
me. The sound carried over the running engine. Justin was right: it was cold. I could see my breath as I picked my way through the trees, checking to make sure Holden’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

Nothing but trees and rocks and packed dirt from here to the house.

I stayed in the trees, like Delaney and I had two nights before, making our way from the party back to Maya’s place. I snuck to the side of the detached garage that doubled as a shed.

No car.

But there was something. Something through the dirty glass window on the side. A wheelchair. A pile of pill bottles across the dirt floor. Boxes that were never emptied.

Great. Now I felt like an ass. A creepy asshole. But I took the key from my pocket and walked across the yard and up the front steps anyway. I rang the doorbell to make sure nobody was inside, then looked around behind me, checking that nobody was walking in the woods or driving down the road. Then I slid the key into the lock and turned it.

I stepped across the threshold, officially a criminal. Wait, if I had a key, did that make me a criminal? Probably. Maybe somebody used a key to get into my house, too. I hated that I was doing the same to someone else. Except this was for a different reason. I wasn’t here to destroy anything.

The house looked the same as it had the night of the party. Barely lived in. The same furniture we’d seen, and used, for years. And suddenly it didn’t feel like trespassing. This place
was ours. Our life. Our history. Like I could see our names carved into the walls:
Decker was here, Carson was here, Janna was here, Delaney was here, Tara was here. …

I ran my fingers along the back of the couch and walked to the kitchen. I opened the fridge—saw the bare essentials. Juice. Milk. A box with leftover pizza.

I let it swing closed, and the sound of the door catching echoed through the kitchen. I ran my hand along the counter, stopped at a pile of mail. Saw a bunch of opened envelopes addressed to Katherine Johnson. For a second I wondered if this was who Maya really was, but then next to the pile of mail, I saw a check made out to Katherine Johnson from social security, and another one from some official-sounding company. Probably for disability, which backed up Maya’s story. I wondered if this was what they lived on now. I assumed so. Though I hoped they got more than this, because not that I knew much about money and the cost of living, but I got checks bigger than this from working over the summer, and the money went fast.

I dropped the checks back on the counter. One landed upside-down, and I saw the messy scrawl of Katherine Johnson on the back. I fumbled to turn it the right way, hoping to leave no evidence that anyone had been in here.

I went down the hall to the bedroom with the closed door. The one Holden had walked into that night. I knocked, then turned the handle and pushed it open. There were half-unpacked boxes on the floor, the furniture this place came with, an old computer set up on the tiny desk in the corner.
The closet door was open, and I could see a few random pieces of guys’ clothing hanging.

Definitely Holden’s room.

I went back into the empty room with the quilted bedspread that I’d passed Saturday night. I reached for a drawer, to see if there were clothes inside, and heard the sound of the back sliding glass door.

I froze, tiptoed out of the room, back down the hall. I knew this house by heart. There was a second exit that cut out the side, down toward the lake.

I heard footsteps in the kitchen—walking
past
the kitchen—the sound of shoes being kicked off. I kept moving down the hall, slowly, silently, but the footsteps started moving again, toward the hall. Toward me. I was losing time, so I ran the last few steps in the hall and hoped for silence. No such luck. The floorboard creaked one step from the exit. I froze. The footsteps froze.
Please let them think it’s the house, settling with the change in temperature
. I held my breath, my heartbeat pounding in my head.

“Holden?” I heard.
Maya
.

Shit
. I flipped the lock to the door, the sound echoing through the empty hall, and reached for the handle as the footsteps started moving again.

I stepped outside and eased the door shut behind me, holding my breath, hoping she’d waste time checking the rooms first, hoping I’d have time to get away.

But the door flew open as I was darting down the hill toward the lake.

“Decker? What the hell are you doing?” I froze at the bottom of the hill. Turned toward her voice. Maya was standing in front of the door I’d just escaped from. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt and socks. No shoes. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she looked like a kid. Like someone’s little sister. Not someone who had Kevin wrapped around her finger for months, not someone who made everyone turn their heads. Not the person who gripped my chin and smiled meanly and told me to grow up. Someone people had to take care of.

“Shouldn’t you be at school?” I asked. Deflecting accusations with accusations.

She laughed. “Who’s going to make me go, Decker?” Then she pulled her phone out of her back pocket and held it up, like a threat. “Now tell me what the hell you were doing
in my house
before I call the police.”

“Where’s your mom?” I asked. I couldn’t stop the accusations. Couldn’t let her get a word in. “I saw the checks, but I know she’s not here.” Strong offense is the best defense, so said my dad. “Is she at the hospital? Is she with Holden? Was she ever even here?”

Maya narrowed her eyes, started stalking down the hill toward me. “Of course she was here. What kind of question is that? You think I just conjured up the existence of my mother? An entire person? That she was never here?”

No, I knew she had been here. Delaney said as much. Said she felt her … had seen her once. What I really meant was,
Is she dead?
But I couldn’t bring myself to say it with her standing in front of me all alone.