Half-Truths: New York Times Bestselling Author

by Contreras, Claire

  “Hailey!” I kept shouting her name over and over before switching to, “Lana! Deacon!”

  Nothing.

  I started thrashing, against the ropes I was tied to, against the walls I was confined to. I heard a clinking sound and stopped to try to feel around for what it could be. My fingers tapped against metal, round, a pipe? I grabbed onto it and tried to place it between the rope in hopes that I could pull it apart far enough to stick my hands out. It didn’t work. Anger bubbled inside me and I thrashed again, as hard as I could, banging the wood above me with the pipe. Dirt seeped through when I did that, so I stopped, coughing as I tried to clear my face from it. Bringing my hands up, I felt the wood. It was definitely thin. As I felt around, I noticed a hole. It felt like one of those white pipes people used for plumbing. Some sort of PVC pipe maybe? I’d used those once for a science experiment. Tentatively, I touched around it and noticed no dirt coming out of it. I took the pipe in my hand and stuck it in there, placing my mouth against it.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Hailey? Please. God. Hailey! Lana! Deacon! Help!”

  Nothing.

  I pressed my ear beside the pipe and found that I couldn’t hear anything from it either. How long had she been planning this out? My chest raked with unshed tears. I closed my eyes. She hadn’t even left water.

  She didn’t want me to suffer.

  She wanted me to die.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Logan

  The investigation was moving too slow for my liking. Today marked two days and God knew how many hours. Mr. Bastón had enlisted the help of people who dressed and acted like the S.W.A.T. but weren’t. They’d brought search dogs with them. Search dogs. The mere thought of what that could mean sent a chill down my spine. I’d missed two days of hockey practice and was planning on missing tonight’s game because I knew damn well I wouldn’t be able to give it my all. I was pacing the corridor of The Lab when Nora walked in with Will and Adam at her tail. I froze. Will and Adam were Swords. We only allowed each other in our perspective house under extreme circumstances. It was funny. Will was Nora’s twin and Adam was Nolan’s. Nora and Will looked nothing alike, and Adam and Nolan you could barely tell apart. I always did a double-take when I saw him, even though Adam wore his hair shorter than his brother.

  “They’re helping,” Nora said.

  “How exactly are they helping if they’re here?” I looked between the three of them. The only reason I was here was because I had to use the restroom and now I was trying to figure out places I hadn’t yet been to try to look for Amelia.

  “We’re still hazing,” Adam said. “We’re making the guys do a search on the back end of our woods right now. We’ll take over tonight.”

  “You look like shit, by the way,” Will added.

  “Fuck you.” I started pacing again. “I just don’t understand why we’re only searching the woods. She would never have gone to the woods by herself.”

  “I think . . . ” Nora started and paused to lower her voice. “I think they’re searching in case someone kidnapped her and tossed her body.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” I cast a glare at her and then at the other two guys. “She’s not dead.”

  “It’s only been two days,” Adam said. “The body is meant to survive ten days without water.”

  “Don’t give me a fucking scientific countdown, Adam. I don’t want to fucking hear it. I want to hear you tell me that my girlfriend is going to be okay. I want her to call me and tell me she needed a break and apologize for driving me out of my mind. I do not want to hear about survival.”

  “I’m going to go back out and search,” Will said. “I have to go pick up my cloak.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Adam said. He turned to me once more. “If you need anything at all, we’re here.”

  “Thanks.”

  They left out the back and the front door opened. Nolan walked inside. I did a double-take, making sure it was the right brother.

  “Your brother just left,” Nora said. “With mine.”

  “He told me they were helping.” Nolan sighed heavily, running a hand through his long hair. “Are you missing tonight’s game?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we have enough people searching the woods and campus and every building surrounding the perimeter,” he said. “I think you should play. You already missed two practices.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Since when do you not care about hockey?” he stared at me.

  “Since my fucking girlfriend has been missing for two days,” I yelled. “Are you seriously going to give me shit for missing a game?”

  “No, man.” He shook his head. “I just think it would help if you played. Everyone has got this covered.”

  “Not me. I don’t have it covered. I’d never live with myself if someone found . . . ” I stopped talking, feeling a knot climb up my throat. I didn’t want to verbalize what I was thinking. I didn’t even want to think what I was thinking but Nora’s comment had sunk in and I couldn’t just ignore the possibility.

  “Have you gone to the coffee shop?” Nora asked.

  “Twice,” Nolan said.

  “Have you seen Hailey in the search?” I asked.

  “I think she’s out there with Felipe right now.”

  “Out where?”

  “North side across from the library.”

  “I have to go.” I grabbed my keys. “I have to talk to campus security anyway. They promised me I could see a surveillance video.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  * * *

  I spotted Mr. Bastón talking to Hailey outside of the library. Nolan was walking beside me typing furiously on his phone.

  “Coach said he understands if you miss the game,” he said. “But I still think you should play.”

  “I’ll keep you in mind when I need your counsel.”

  Mr. Bastón stopped talking to Hailey and looked up when he saw us approach. I hated the man, but I had to respect everything he was doing to find his daughter. I couldn’t stand Hailey either, but she looked like she’d been crying. I wondered if this was another one of his many conquests. She didn’t fit the bill. She wasn’t exotic enough for him, but he was a sick man. Perverts didn’t have a type.

  “I’m headed to campus security,” I told him.

  “Campus security for what?” Hailey asked. I cast a glare at her and hoped she would shut the fuck up. “Security doesn’t patrol the woods.”

  “I have a really hard time believing Amelia would run off into the woods by herself,” I said, reminding myself to breathe with each word.

  “Thank you, Logan. Please keep me posted on what they say,” Mr. Bastón said.

  “I’m not doing this for you, so don’t thank me.” I walked off with Nolan.

  “Dude, that’s your girlfriend’s dad.”

  “Fuck him.”

  Nolan laughed, exhaling with the shake of his head. We both turned around when we heard someone running toward us and saw Hailey trying to catch up.

  “What are you going to ask them?” she asked. “Why don’t you ask the guy at the front desk in her building for information.”

  “We did that,” Nolan said, stopping. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Sunday morning.”

  “At the coffee shop?” I walked back to them. “Around what time?”

  “Eleven? Twelve?”

  “Did she say where she was going after she left?”

  “No. She was talking about an assignment she needed to get done for the newspaper but that’s it.”

  I stared at her. She glanced away after a moment. So she’d been at the coffee shop that morning and then . . . headed where?

  “Maybe she’s with her ex,” Hailey suggested, looking at me again. “Did you try calling him?”

  My stomach coiled. I felt my fists close. Nolan stepped forward and grabbed my arm.

  “We’ll keep you posted,” he said, pu
lling me away. “Dude you need to calm down.”

  “I wasn’t going to hit her.” I felt anger radiating through me.

  “Sure didn’t look like it.” He paused. “Call Lincoln, get that guy’s number, and play the fucking game tonight. You need to do something with this pent-up anger.”

  He had a point. I called Lincoln as we approached the security office. His mother answered the phone.

  “Hey, Mrs. Bastón, this is Logan. Have you spoken to Travis by any chance?” I grit my teeth. “Maybe Amelia decided to visit him?”

  “Travis?” she asked. “Travis took the first flight over there. He’s in the woods looking for her with some teammates.”

  “Okay. Just checking. Thank you.”

  “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Lincoln wants me to take him. He won’t be able to do much, but he wants to be close by anyway.”

  “Let me know when you’re here.” I hung up the phone and gripped it when I looked at Nolan. “Travis is fucking here with some teammates.”

  “Dude. We need all the help we can get.”

  “Fuck everything.”

  I was seething by the time we went inside the security office. We asked for Jeff, who was a big hockey fan and nice guy around campus. He ushered us into his office quietly, as if he was plotting something.

  “I want to let you know that the police are on their way so that I can hand over this video. It’s grainy, but I think I see her in it.” He let us stand behind his desk and stood with us, clicking the mouse. He fast-forwarded ten seconds and then slowed it down. My pulse quickened. It was her. She was wearing jeans, a trench coat, and sneakers. Even in black and white she looked beautiful. Her hair was in a long braid, covering her face partially as she typed on her phone. She stopped right underneath the camera to type, leaning against a column and then answered the phone with a huge smile on her face. She was laughing. I could practically hear the laughter in my ears as I watched her. My chest felt heavy. I knew it was me she was talking to. She pushed off the column and hung up, still smiling, as she continued walking.

  “Wait wait wait.” I tapped the screen. “Where does she go now?”

  “She has to be going into the library,” Jeff said, clicking the video to a stop.

  “Is there another angle?”

  “I tried it but you can only see her feet.” He clicked another button and a second video started playing. I could see her legs and someone else’s in the shot, but no faces.

  “Where are their faces?” I asked. “We need it to be higher.”

  “It doesn’t go higher. That camera has been pointing in the wrong direction for months. Every time I fix it, it falls again.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I punched the desk with each curse, then bit my knuckles to stop myself. “Jeff, we need more, man.”

  “Is there a video from when she leaves the library?” Nolan asked.

  “Nope. She never leaves.”

  “What do you mean she never leaves?” Nolan asked.

  “It seems impossible, I know. There’s only one entrance, but she never left.”

  Nolan and I looked at each other. There wasn’t only one entrance. Both of us ran to the door at the same time.

  “Thanks, Jeff,” I called out as we ran.

  We pushed the doors to the library hard, nearly knocking out Paper Boy Max, who was walking out.

  “I just asked them, they don’t remember seeing her,” he called out as we ran. “I’ll keep checking.”

  “Where the hell is the door?” Nolan ran a hand through his hair. “Fuck. The one tunnel we never fucking use.”

  I lifted my phone and dialed Marcus. He was a nerd. He would know.

  “It’s . . . shit. I never use that tunnel. I did once and it left me way further from where I was trying to go,” Marcus said. “I think it’s behind the classics.”

  “Got it.” I hung up and looked at Nolan. “Behind the classics.”

  We stood in the middle of the library, taking in the magnitude of it. In a building filled with old books, who was to say what was considered a classic? Nolan called Marcus this time.

  “Dude, what the hell is a classic?” he asked, his gaze wandering. He looked at me. “He says it’s around Harry Potter.”

  “Harry Potter’s a classic?” I frowned, walking in the direction of the information desk. The girl behind the desk looked up from her book. “Hey, where can I find Harry Potter books?”

  She pointed toward the back of the library. I thanked her and headed in that direction.

  “No running,” she called out.

  I lifted my hand to stick my middle finger out, but just held it flat and slowed down. I didn’t know that poor girl and she’d just helped me out. Nolan caught up to me.

  “Can you believe Harry Potter is a classic?” he asked.

  I shot him a look. “Look for the door.”

  We walked to the end of the row. There was an emergency exit door, but that was it. I exhaled, putting my hands over my head. Where the hell could this door be? It had to be here. Marcus had taken it. We’d heard about it. Amelia had never come back out of the library. She had to have gone through a tunnel. Maybe she’d gotten lost and had no cell phone reception. Maybe her phone died, like every other iPhone user in the world. Those thoughts eased my mind slightly.

  “Look,” Nolan said, pushing a door behind us open.

  I could’ve kissed him. I slapped him on the shoulder instead and started running down the stairs, the lights flicking on as we went. I looked up and down the tunnel. It was as big as they all were. This one didn’t even have funny street names up top like the rest of them, it was just white walls and endless gray floors. We searched it anyway. There were three exits. We went to all three, looked around and ended up right back where we started. Square one.

  “There aren’t even cameras on each exit,” I said. “That’s just plain stupid.”

  Nolan brought his phone out. He glanced at me. “I’m calling Adam.”

  We walked out through one of the exits, the one closest to the apartments, and walked in that direction. I felt like the weight of the world was on my chest. Where could she have gone? What could have happened?

  * * *

  Against my better judgment, I played the game. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t remember anything that had transpired. I remembered the feeling—the anger as I skated the ice, the adrenaline as my legs pushed me forward. My first actual recollection was sitting next to Nolan in the box.

  “What the fuck happened?” I asked.

  He looked over at me. “What the fuck happened was that you sent someone to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He chuckled. “That’ll teach him not to fuck with the Smash Brothers.”

  I blinked, looking around. There was no one on the ice. I did see the blood though. Fuck. I turned to Nolan. “Is the game over?”

  “Did you not hear me?”

  “Yeah, but is it over?” It wasn’t like this hadn’t happened before. What was hockey without a little blood anyway? I’d already replaced five of my teeth and I hadn’t even started playing pro yet. None of this was surprising.

  “Yeah, it’s over. I don’t think they wanted to feel your wrath after that last one.”

  “Is he okay?” I frowned.

  “Yeah, they called. Concussion, broken nose, split lip.” He shrugged. “He’s fine.”

  That was a new record for me. I’d never sent someone to the hospital with all of the above at the same time. My thoughts drifted back to Amelia. She would’ve probably been horrified at whatever I did out there. I found that unlike insistences in the past, this one had left me feeling empty, not any better than I did when I walked out there today. It was the worst kind of feeling, the emptiness.

  Rage, I could handle.

  Sadness, I could handle.

  Emptiness was something I didn’t do well with.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Amelia

  It felt like s
omeone was squeezing my head together. The pressure was immeasurable. It wasn’t a migraine, not quite, because I felt it everywhere, in my skull, in my temple. Opening my eyes made it worse, but something had made me open them. I’d run out of oxygen soon. I could feel it in the way my breathing had turned shallow and my pulse was slowing. I’d die here in these woods, in this dark box. I’d gotten accustomed to being surrounded by people and I was going to die alone. It served me right for being a brat, for not appreciating what I had when I did. I heard something above me. A person?

  “Hailey?” I tried to call out, but couldn’t.

  I no longer had a voice. That had been the first thing to go. I was about to close my eyes again, but then I heard it again. A loud sound. I tried to move, but my body was sore, aching all over from kicking and screaming, from trying to fight the wood above me. I’d used the pipe to push with and it had done nothing but fill me with dirt. More dirt fell now, tiny granules, almost like sand seeping between fingertips. I tried to move again. Tried to scream, to no avail. The sounds got louder. Voices? There were voices. My heart seemed to accelerate at that. Maybe Hailey changed her mind. Maybe Lana made her. Maybe Deacon? Voices. Louder. Male.

  “You’re going to stay in this one,” one of them said. “Don’t worry, it’s only overnight.”

  The wood was pried open slowly, dusting more dirt onto me as they lifted it. It was evening, but my eyes still squinted as I looked up. Red cloaks.

  “What the fuck?” one of them said loudly. “Will, is this her?”

  “Who?” another guy asked, coming into sight. Another red cloak. “Holy fuck it’s her.”

  “I’m gonna be sick,” a third guy said.

  “Shut the fuck up. Go get me that towel,” the first guy shouted. “Oh my God, dude.”

  “What the fuck is she doing in here?” the other one said.

  They sounded panicked.

  “What do we do with her?”

  I felt my chest rake. I had no tears left. I had nothing. One of them came over with a bottle of water and opened it quickly. He yanked the red cloak from his head, took it off and tossed it aside.