What We Lost in the Dark (20 page)

“Is that … was what they cremated … even her body?” he asked. His voice shook. “That girl? This doesn’t answer any questions. It brings up more questions.”

“It was her body. It was a tissue match. Maybe she drowned, but not then,” I said, suddenly and acutely sick and miserable. If I’d had to lose her, if Tommy and Ginny had to lose her, at least it should have been quick.

“I don’t even want to think about that,” Rob said. “I guess I knew that she suffered, but every day, we have to know all over again. Does this ever end?” He got up and looked out at the snow, which had begun to drift and settle. “This is why I didn’t want to go here anymore, Allie. It isn’t that I don’t care. It’s that … is this what our lives get to be?”

I didn’t know. And I didn’t answer. Until just then, there had been some kind of thrill, or kick, or high from thinking I could take down Garrett Tabor—little pale Allie Kim with her razor-sharp deductive skills. Now, I heard again Juliet’s voice as I had in those fragmentary messages from months ago. I smelled Juliet rushing into my house in her purple Uggs, in clouds of Cartier del Lune cologne. I watched her pull off her ridiculous rabbit fur hat with the knitted bobbles on it, holding a bottle of ginger ale like a microphone, and singing old Gavin DeGraw songs with Angela.

She was just a kid.

She was just a kid, and so was the girl called Sky, and so was my friend Nicola Burns, and Garrett Tabor’s little baby sister, Rachel. No match for a skilled and determined madman who felt only that their deaths were inconvenient, that they were obstacles in the enjoyment of his life.

They were kids.

And so was I.

Taking Rob’s Jeep, I ran home to get some clothes. The forecast was for snow, but the forecast is always for snow in the North Woods, from Labor Day onward. In all those nights outside, I’d tried to train myself to smell snow coming, and sometimes I could. I brought a toothbrush in case. With Rob back in my arms, and with the new evidence to ponder, I didn’t want to leave his side. I rifled through my drawers as Angela pouted in the doorway.

“I do not want the babysitter,” she said.

“But I have to go out.”

“You didn’t go out for two weeks! That was better. It’s boring when you go out. Kissing, kissing, kissing. Doesn’t your mouth get sore?” In fact, it was sore. “Can’t you stay home just tonight?”

“I can’t tonight. I’ll be home more when I’m in college. I’ll have to be here all the time at night because I have classes on Skype.”

“I hate Mrs. Staples,” Angie said.

“You don’t really. You hate that she’s not Mom or me.”

“My life is so awful! I just come home and do homework and eat some disgusting stuff and go to bed. That’s all my life is.”

“You’re starting dance class,” I offered.

“Big deal. Who wants to come home, do homework, eat some disgusting stuff, and go to boring dance class and go to bed while you never see your only mother and sister?”

She did have a point.

“What do you want to do, Angie?”

“I want to be a skier. Like Juliet. I decided at Christmas. Something happened this year, and I became a very good skier.”

On the plus side, she couldn’t have gotten much worse. Our videos of Angie falling off the rails last year were mandatory sharing with mom’s family. Her rear end had personally wiped most of Torch Mountain.

“I want to learn to jump,” she said. “And Coach Gary will teach me.”

I had been folding up some pretty underwear Mom had given me as a Christmas gift. I froze. I had to look at my hands and say to them,
Open your fingers. Lay the clothes down
.

“How do you know Coach Gary?”

“He came to our school. He showed videos of Juliet, and he had me come up and talk about her because she was my best friend who was practically grown up. And he showed videos of Barrett and Ben.” These were the Ebersol twins, who now skied for the Canadian team. “He told me that it was better that I was shorter, like Juliet, and that he could teach me. I can sign up for classes.”

I stared at her. “You can’t go around Garrett Tabor, Angela.”

“Thanks! You don’t like him because he thinks I would be good at something and you want me to come home from school, do my homework, eat some disgusting …”

“No,” I nearly shouted. “You can’t talk to him because he’s a bad man.”

“How’s he bad?”

There was no truth like the real truth. I took a deep breath.

“Rob and I think that he hurt Juliet once. We think he forced her to have sex when she was just in freshman year. Do you know what forcing someone to have sex means?”

Angela nodded furiously, her eyes deep and wide. Of course she did: Jackie Kim would not have neglected good and bad touching with a nine-and-a-half-year-old fashionista who favored bikinis with boyshorts.

“We think he may have hurt Juliet when she disappeared,” I added.

“But he’s, like, Mom’s age.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s bad.”

Angela’s eyes went full saucer. “He killed Juliet?”

“I don’t know. But if you hurt someone, unless you’re trying to protect your child or your sister or something, that means you broke the law, or you are crazy. And he knows I know this. So he sends me things that prove he could hurt you. Like bad teasing.”

She leaned against the door frame, her face twisting in a scowl. “He acts so nice!”

“You can’t tell Keely.”

“I know,” Angela said, quietly. “Because he might hurt Keely, too.” It touched me that it didn’t occur to her for a moment to doubt me.

“Does he do things like hanging a doll in a tree?”

What shit was this?

My head spun dizzily. “Yes, like that. Did you ever see a doll hanging in a tree?”

“Yes.”

“Where, Angie?” I gasped. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t supposed to see it.”

“But you have to tell me, anytime you see something weird or scary like that. You have to tell Mom or me right away.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be watching the show.”

Never had I felt greater relief over my sister’s clandestine wish to avail herself of inappropriate entertainment choices. Neither Jackie nor I could figure out how to install the parental controls that the satellite dish said was a snap to use. (Without a dish, TV in Iron Harbor was like good radio). Three hours into trying to make it work, with a pleasant-faced spokesguy telling us the whole time that anyone could navigate this system, Jackie threw the monitor at the screen, which cost her thirty bucks for a new monitor. At the time, she muttered, “I don’t care if she watches Real Showgirls of Las Vegas live.”

A few moments later, Angie said, “I taught Mrs. Staples to make ice cream.”

“Good,” I said. “Listen to me. I won’t leave you too many more nights.”

He really was supernatural. He was everywhere. He was the chess master. He owned the board.

Grabbing up my things was the moment I later realized that I’d set my course. He might have owned the board, but I would checkmate him. He had to be stopped, and no one would do that except me.

Rob dropped me off before eleven that night.

Neither of us felt like doing much talking.

Rob didn’t even make the pretense.

Either he didn’t notice Gideon’s truck parked in the shadows of our driveway, or he didn’t care. He seemed distant, preoccupied. What Gideon called a “thaw wind” was blowing off the lake—and that lovely, isolating, pristine snow was sliding off roofs in great heaps. In the darkness, I could barely see Rob’s face, but he looked tired, as though we hadn’t spent most of the past two days lying in bed, resting and dozing.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing. Thinking maybe. Schoolwork I didn’t do, and junk. My parents will be in at two
A.M
. Their flight was taking off at ten
P.M
., but they already knew it would be delayed. Everything’s backed up. But I have to scoot.”

“Well, bye. Let me know what happens before you go to bed.”

“Lucky first day at school.”

“That’s not until the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

“I got from five to nine five nights a week and Skype a class on Saturday morning from eight to ten. It’ll be great.”

“Hmmmm.”

“It’s a class in being naked. All the students are naked. Even the professor is naked.”

“That’s good,” Rob said.

“Did you hear me?”

“See you, Allie.”

He drove off.

I stood in the driveway for a moment, wondering if the conversation I’d just had with Rob had actually taken place, or if it was some surreal nightmare. Then I rushed for my house, punching in the combinations for our locks and security system. Mrs. Staples was asleep and snoring on the couch. She sputtered, sat up, sat down again, and pulled down the hem of her maxi-length wool skirt. “You’re home, Allie. I was expecting your mom.”

“And she’ll be right here. I have to go back out, Mrs. Staples. Is Angela asleep?”

“For hours. School tires her out. Fourth grade is the hardest one. I always thought that with my boys. Fourth grade, seventh grade, and junior year. And she had her new dance class tonight for the first time.” Angela and Keely were taking hip-hop at the YMCA.

“Did she like it?” I asked, planning the architecture of a double Brie and pimento with romaine on wheat toast.

“She said she did.”

In my room, I slipped into my featherweight black waterproof pants, then I sealed up my sandwich, stuffed a few cookies into a plastic bag and filled my Nalgene with ice
water. I put the kettle on, so I could bring a thermos of tea. While it was boiling, I plugged the camera into the charger, stuck my phone on the dock. After that I hefted my old poles out onto the porch and slid into my fuzziest boots and the no-nonsense parka that drawstringed at the waist and the butt. Long fingerless mittens with suede palm pads and little hoods to shield your fingertips when you didn’t need to use your phone:
check
. For my head, Juliet’s real mink hat with the silly red-and-green knitted bobble strings (I tried not to think about who had given it to her). The teakettle boiled (would I ever hear a kettle boil without thinking of Blondie?), and I spooned some honey into the thermos with a couple of tea bags before pouring boiling water over all of it. My miner’s light on its headband (with fresh batteries) and my Maglite. A long scarf that I could wrap triple. And then, the big flat-headed screwdriver that was really a kit, and had all those other attachments inside: one of last year’s Christmas gifts from Angela to our mother. Finally: the filet knife Rob had given me when I caught a six-pound smallmouth bass.

Into my little backpack went all of it.

Then I was out the door, standing on my toes to slip my skis and poles into Gid’s truck bed and hauling myself up into the high seat with the bag filled with gear. At the last moment, listening to some primal cue, I ran back into the house and grabbed a blanket. Back up, four feet off the ground on those fat tires. But after I turned the ignition, I hesitated. With the truck rumbling, I hopped back down again.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Staples. My mom will be here any minute!” I said as I breezed in the door.

“Slow down, Allie! You’ll leave your head on the counter next!”

Not exactly what I wanted to hear.

I ran into my bedroom and sent an urgent-marked email to Professor Yashida.

I attached newspaper clippings about Juliet’s disappearance, although I’d already sent them to him at the time of the voiceprints.

Then, I left, merrily calling back some nonsense over my shoulder. As far as Mrs. Staples knew, I was now off to my life as a teenager without a care in the world, probably meeting up with her beau for some moonlight picnic.

If only.

I had never driven anything bigger than my mother’s Toyota minivan, so it took a moment to get used to the sheer heft of the truck. But soon, I was cruising along Beach Road toward the back of Lutsen Mountain, not letting myself think,
not letting myself plan, trying only to observe and stay in that very moment. It was just after midnight, not far past the south end of town, when the high beams of Gideon’s truck picked up the sign for Cannon Road. I didn’t go up here much. As Gideon said, most of the land was tribal or private. Some of the older “motels” that were located on part of this mountain had reverted to their rightful owners (the tribes) after fifty-year leases ran out. While some had been bulldozed, the majority just sat there in mute, foolish anticipation of families with kids in swimsuits who would never come back. Beheaded charcoal grills and snaggly shutters underscored the atmosphere of abandonment. The fronts of the old motels seemed to watch you, their broken windows like old eyes, swiveling to follow your progress. They were good places to make campfires and have a sit-down if you were on a long night’s ski, but I found them eerie, not antique enough to be beguiling, but instead creepy the way some old black-and-white movies were creepy. When I passed one, I could see evidence that someone had used the place as a squatter’s refuge. There was a wreck of an abandoned very defunct car, its hood up and its motor cavity filled with snow, and a heap of trash in front of Unit 11 at the Trail’s End Traveler’s Inn. The sign unfortunately featured an image of “The End of the Trail”: Minnesota artist’s James Earle Fraser’s depiction of a defeated warrior on horseback, head hung low. (Fraser was also, I remembered bizarrely, the creator of the Buffalo nickel image.) There was A Summer Place, an entire building clad in Pepto-Bismol pink, and a little farther on, The Pines, a two-story Cape Cod building that once had a restaurant promising “The Finest Fish Fry in the North Woods.”