The Hollow Inside

by Brooke Lauren Davis

  But just a few minutes into their warm, easy stroll, she felt Ellis stumble and heard him curse softly.

  And then he took off at a sprint back toward the cabin. Without her.

  Before she even had time to call out his name, a furious humming was all around her, a cloud of wings, and she felt a sting at her temple, and then her arm, and then her cheek. Ellis had stepped on a bees’ nest that had fallen from a tree.

  She ran after him, swatting at her hair and clothes, tree branches whipping at her face and bare arms, until the murderous cloud was far behind her; she was panting, the stings already aching and swelling into little bumps.

  “Ellis!” she called. “Ellis! What did you leave me there for?”

  She almost tripped over him in the darkening clearing. He’d collapsed just outside of the cabin, and his breath came thin and wheezing. She turned him over, and his face was swollen and red. And then she remembered—her father had mentioned it in passing once—that he was allergic to bees.

  He could hardly walk, and she struggled under his weight while she helped him into his truck, tears streaming down her cheeks and her heart beating so fast, she had trouble breathing.

  She was in the waiting room at the hospital for half an hour before Jill ran through the doors and threw her arms around her, thanking her through sobs for saving Ellis’s life. And Nina could only stand there with her arms limp at her sides, still trying to think up some lie about why she was alone with her husband in the first place.

  She offered up a half-baked story before Jill could ask her. “I saw him driving up the hill to Jameson’s house, and I followed him.”

  Jill frowned. “What for?”

  “I know it’ll sound strange . . . ​but my father told me to always follow the feeling in my gut. And I just—I felt like something bad was going to happen.”

  A feeling she’d had for months. A feeling she’d ignored. But Jill didn’t need to know that. Just like she didn’t need to know that the same feeling still roiled in Nina’s stomach now.

  Like her fall hadn’t ended yet. Like the ground was looming larger and larger beneath her, and once she finally met it, she’d be broken into a thousand, irretrievable fragments.

  -

  When Ellis met her at the cabin a week later, he stood in the living room and breathed in deep, running his hands through his hair.

  “I can’t anymore, Nina. I’m sorry. I mean—I’ve got a family. And—well. Almost dying makes you look real hard at your life. I realized that Jill and the twins are more important to me than I ever thought they could be. I can’t risk losing them. This has to stop before we get caught. I’ve got too much to lose.”

  Nina said nothing. She sat on the couch, looking up at him with shining eyes. And he lifted the corner of his mouth and rested his big hand on top of her head, like he’d really thought of her as sixteen this whole time.

  Like he’d never put his weight on top of her.

  “Now, don’t look at me like that. Stop looking at me like I’ve ruined your life. You’re not even seventeen yet, and you’ve got plenty of life left. It’s gonna be all right.” He settled onto the couch beside her. “You can’t go home looking like that. We’ll watch some TV until you’re feeling better. I’ll sit with you till you calm down.”

  He switched it on, and she heard the drone of a news report and watched a man on screen, but her eyes were blurred and her ears buzzed and she had to keep swallowing. There was too much going on inside her at once—a shivering in her bones and a burning under her skin.

  Chapter 17

  THE NEXT DAY, I have a short window where everyone is out of the house at once. Ellis is at Pastor Holland’s place for coffee. Jill went right back to the restaurant after she drove me home from my lunch shift. The twins left to pick up a pizza for dinner, and with the winding roads and Neil’s inability to see someone he knows and not talk to them, they should be gone for at least an hour. Which means it’s time for me to search the house.

  I don’t set out looking for anything specific, just something we might be able to use against Ellis somehow. Proof that he had more to do with Mom than anyone else ever knew.

  I can’t resist pawing through his office first. It’s just off the kitchen, tucked into the corner of the house and furnished with a soft carpet, a dark, wood desk, and big, leather reading chair. There are shelves lining the back wall, filled with copies of his books—anniversary editions and reprints and versions translated into different languages. His name flashes on their spines a hundred times over in the light from the window.

  All I find in the desk drawers are pens, reading glasses, used plane tickets, and scraps of paper with scribbled notes about meetings. I try the shelves next, shuffling around stacks of books and looking under fake potted plants and behind a broken, antique typewriter.

  And there it is. Shoved into a corner on the top shelf, hidden behind a hardcover copy of his very first book—an old, wooden cigar box.

  I can tell the moment I pick it up and hear the contents shifting inside that it holds a deeper story than any book in this room. After I cast a look over my shoulder at the door, I gingerly lift the lid.

  What’s inside would look unimportant to most people. Just a collection of odds and ends—a bottle of pink nail polish and a chewed pencil that I run my fingers over like a topographical map.

  And a blue, velvet hair bow.

  My father made me wear it, Mom told me once. Ellis pulled it from my hair, right before he kissed me the very first time. I never saw it again.

  It’s nondescript enough—it could have belonged to Melody when she was little. And maybe it did. Maybe all these things did. But then he’d have no reason to hide them like this.

  I’m tempted for half a second to think that maybe Ellis kept the bow because he cared about my mother more than I realized. But my guess is that it’s probably more like a trophy to him. Maybe he takes it out when no one is looking, running his hands all over it, reliving his past transgressions like dark fantasies.

  She only ever told me about the bow. The nail polish and the pencil might have been hers, too. The alternative is too horrific to think about.

  That they’re his trophies from other girls.

  The bile rises in my throat. I swallow it back and try to shake the thought from my head. I don’t have time to dwell on it.

  But it sticks, and I have to sit down on Ellis’s office floor until my bout of dizziness passes. The nail polish is pink, and Mom has never liked pink. And I’ve never seen her chew on a pencil once.

  My guess is that whoever they were, Ellis was with them before Mom—assuming he wasn’t lying when he said his near-death experience inspired him to focus on his family again. The nail polish in particular looks like it’s been here for years, dry and flaking around the cap, the label peeling. It’s a brand I don’t recognize, and I’ve covetously scanned the makeup aisles in grocery stores enough times to know.

  Which means it’s unlikely that he’s having any affairs right now. Because catching him red-handed, exposing his true nature without a confession, would just make my life too damn easy.

  With a final shiver, I make myself get up. Instead of wondering who these objects belong to—where they are now—I decide to focus on what I can do. So I shove the box in the waistband of my jeans, tucking it safely under my shirt.

  These things never belonged to Ellis. I’m taking them back.

  -

  I don’t find anything else useful before Jill and the twins get home. But I do manage to convince Jill to lend me her laptop after dinner.

  I get in bed with it, the screen glowing blue in the dark room, and it isn’t until I start typing that I realize how rusty my computer skills have gotten. I painstakingly search out each letter on the keyboard with my index fingers until I’ve finally searched Ellis Bowman.

  There are countless results about the accident, and I can see why he felt the need to do damage control. The tabloid headlines are each more inflam
matory than the last—­

  Man Who Preaches Family Values Kills Little Boy, Self-Help Author’s Careless Driving Turns Deadly, Distraught Mother from Bowman Accident Speaks Out. I click on one and read the details, filling in the gaps of what I gleaned from Tim.

  It was a dark night in March, the roads slick with two days of heavy rain. Ellis and Neil were on their way home from a college visit when Ellis struck and killed a fifteen-year-old boy who was crossing the street.

  Tim was quoted as a witness, though it seems he didn’t actually see much. He was determined to defend Ellis before anyone had even made an accusation—I’ve known Ellis more than forty years, as long as he’s been alive, and I can’t think of a better man.

  There had been a few other witnesses, including someone who anonymously submitted a grainy photo of Ellis’s back, which is mostly blocking the view of the body. But you can tell he has his arms around the dead boy. He’s holding him. He has his face turned, screaming something.

  And now I understand Melody’s reaction the second she saw my camera—someone had made her father’s private moment of pain very public. For money.

  Next, I click on the interview with the boy’s mother because it’s the most recent article, skimming it to see if there’s any additional information that’s come to light, but it’s sparse—her responses are short and numb, and I suspect she just wanted the reporter out of her house. Yes, Anderson was good in school. Yes, he had a lot of friends. I don’t have any idea what he was doing in Jasper Hollow that night. I was working late. Yes, I’m sad, but sad is such an inadequate word for a feeling like this.

  There are plenty of YouTube videos of Ellis’s speeches and interviews, and I watch a few, but I’m mostly concerned with the comments. I sift through hundreds of them. Contrary to the media’s opinion, most people frustratingly seem to have only positive things to say about him. He’s such an inspiration. So real. A family man. Doesn’t deserve to be persecuted by the media this way.

  But then I stumble upon a comment that makes me raise my eyebrows.

  Mostly homophobic slurs that aren’t worth repeating.

  And there’s a link.

  And I find another reason for Melody’s negative reaction to seeing my camera.

  It’s a chaste photo, really. Just someone giving her a kiss on the mouth. No tongue. But that someone just so happens to be a girl.

  I may not have participated much in society for the last seven years, but even I understand the state of things—being anything but straight in a town as small as this one must have been hell. And Melody’s famous dad got her some national attention, too. Now she’s open to unsolicited opinions about her life from all over the world.

  I remember what I realized earlier, that Ellis had hardly mentioned his daughter in his last book, and I wonder if this is why. If he was ashamed of her.

  And despite myself, that makes my heart break a little for the Bowman with a chip on her shoulder.

  Chapter 18

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, I hear a frenzy of beeping timers, whirring mixers, and running water coming from the kitchen. The Dawn Festival is tomorrow, which means Melody has one night to make the cookies she promised Pastor Matthew.

  Neil warns me not to go in there. “She doesn’t want any help,” he says. “I tried to step in anyway, but—you know that look she gives sometimes? The one that feels like a knife between your eyes?”

  He doesn’t need to say any more. She’s been banging dishes around and cursing under her breath all afternoon, so I think it’s safe to say she’s in a shitty mood. And she barely tolerates me when she’s in a good one.

  All week, she’s been trying her damnedest to pretend that I’m not even here. She always keeps to the opposite side of the room whenever we’re forced to be in the same place. She answers when I speak to her directly but uses as few words as possible, and she’s careful to avoid eye contact.

  You like school okay?

  It’s school.

  What do you like to do?

  Swim.

  Got any friends?

  I asked that one during dinner last night, just to get her to look at me, and when her eyes snapped to mine, I thought she might launch herself across the table and strangle me. And when she didn’t answer, both her parents spent the rest of the evening naming every person who had ever been remotely nice to her while she glared at me with enough intensity to disintegrate a small animal.

  I can’t imagine why she’s not the most popular girl in Jasper Hollow.

  I peeked into her room this morning while she was eating breakfast, just to get some insight into who she is. It was neat. Sparse. The only thing I could discern for certain is that her favorite color is green. Green like pine needles. It’s the color of her curtains, the blanket on her unmade bed, and even the dress hanging from her closet door.

  I don’t know what color I expected her to like. Not green.

  After Melody scared him off, Neil goes to his room to play video games. Jill and Ellis stay up for a little while longer, watching movies while Jill has her head on a pillow in Ellis’s lap, but they turn in before ten o’clock so they’ll be well rested for an early morning.

  After they go up to bed, I hang out on the couch for a few more minutes, watching a game show.

  Something feels off, but I’m not sure what. So I turn down the volume and listen.

  And then I realize that the noises from the kitchen have stopped, which must mean Melody has finally finished her cookies. But when I peek into the kitchen, she’s still in there, sitting on a stool at the counter with her back to me, her head clenched in her hands and her fingers tangled in her curls.

  Every inch of the counter is covered in dishes caked with sticky dough. Stray globs have fallen on the floor, which is littered with eggshells and smears of damp sugar. The sink is a pile of metal trays, mixing bowls, and soap bubbles.

  I watch her for about a minute before I convince myself to step into the kitchen.

  Melody is peering down at a tray in front of her like it’s the gaping mouth of hell. When I peer over her shoulder, I see a swirled mixture of dough and melted chocolate chips. And I realize that this ugly, soupy mess is supposed to be a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies.

  An eggshell crunches under my boot, and Melody’s head snaps up. She shoots a glare over her shoulder at me, but it’s less like a knife between the eyes and more like the growl of a beaten dog.

  She coughs and turns away from me. “I screwed it up.”

  I’m terrified that she’s going to start crying. “I—I’ll go get Neil.”

  But before I can escape the kitchen, she snarls, “Don’t. Tell. Neil.”

  I want to say that it doesn’t matter—lots of people are shitty bakers. But her shoulders are rigid, and that’s enough for me to see that it matters to her.

  She stands up so fast that her stool would have toppled over if I didn’t catch it, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She goes to the sink and starts scrubbing furiously at the crusted dough on the inside of a mixing bowl.

  “I followed the fucking recipe every fucking time, but I’m the only one in this family who can’t fucking bake, and now I have to tell Pastor fucking Matthew that nobody’s going to fucking Uganda because I fucked up the fucking cookies.”

  Her hands are shaking so hard, she drops the bowl in the sink and soapy water sloshes over the counter and down the front of her shirt, but she just picks it up and scrubs harder. I have to pull it from her hands and set it aside to get her to look at me. She turns her eyes on me like that beaten dog again, like she can’t decide if she wants to bite me or limp away to lick her wounds.

  I grip her shoulders. She’s wearing a pale-blue tank top, and my thumbs rest in the hollow dips of her collarbones.

  “You fucked up,” I tell her. “Now it’s time to unfuck it.”

  Her voice is as quiet as I’ve ever heard it, her eyes red-rimmed when she says, “But I don’t even know what went wrong.”

  �
�You’re sure you didn’t forget to put anything in?”

  The look she gives me narrows to that knifepoint that Neil told me about. “You think I forgot it three times?”

  “Let me see the recipe you used.”

  She grabs a piece of paper from the counter, stained with drips of vanilla extract. Someone scrawled directions on it in blue pen.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Annie. She owns the grocery store on the Circle. And she makes the best chocolate chip cookies in Jasper Hollow. Ask anybody.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” I scan Annie’s recipe. When Mom and I still lived in my father’s house, we used to make chocolate chip cookies once a week. Every Thursday night. They were his favorite. Butter, brown sugar, eggs—­

  “Flour.”

  “What?”

  “She forgot to write down flour. Why didn’t you look up a new recipe?”

  Melody snatches the paper from my hand. “I did. And all the other recipes used flour, but I thought—I don’t know. I thought it was Annie’s secret ingredient or something.”

  I stare at her for a few beats. “You thought her secret ingredient was . . . the lack of an ingredient?”

  Her temper flares bright in her cheeks, and she hisses, “If you’re going to be an ass about it, then get out.”

  I shrug. “Fine.”

  She didn’t mean it—I can see the regret instantly change her face. She opens her mouth, then snaps it shut.

  I wonder if this girl has ever been able to say I’m sorry in her life. I almost want to help her through it, like if I pressed my fingers to that hollow dip at the base of her throat, I could soothe the tightness there. It’s okay, Melody. Everyone is wrong. Everyone’s a goddamned idiot, not just you.

  Instead, I leave her to finish her cookies all by herself.

  Chapter 19

  THE KNOCKING HALF AN hour later cuts through a thick, warm kind of sleep. I bury my face in the pillows and grumble, “Too late to ask for help, Mellie.” But the sound comes again, and I realize it’s not coming from the door.