by Kaitlin Ward
“And will do a better job than whoever he was going to refer her to, anyway,” Mom adds.
I’m too busy appraising my wrist to care about any of this right now. I’m relieved when we get home and I get the thing cleaned up so I don’t smell like old cheese anymore, but my skin is sensitive, and I hate that I can’t bend my wrist the whole way yet and that even without my cast I still feel delicate and damaged. Back in my room, I text a picture of my freed arm to all my friends. The responses range from wow, so you CAN be whiter (Roman) to lookin good (Grace) to can I come see that liberated arm after school? (Liam).
I text of course to Liam and then wait impatiently in the living room for everyone to get home. Hunter and Sky arrive first, and I hold out my arm like it’s a totally new limb no one’s ever seen before.
“It looks skinny,” says Hunter.
“It looks great,” says Sky.
“It’s looked better,” I admit. “But it’ll come back to life now that it’s, like, exposed to oxygen again.”
“I’m happy for you.” Sky hugs me. “I know that cast really sucked.”
“Yeah, I hope I never have to have one again.” Now if I can just get my brain to stop having its occasional headaches and dizzy spells, everything can go back to normal. Normal-ish. “And I would recommend neither of you ever get one, either.”
“Noted,” says Hunter.
“What are you doing now?” Sky asks. “Want to hang out with us?”
“Liam’s coming over, but we could all—”
“No,” Hunter interrupts immediately. “I am not hanging out with Liam.”
“Seriously? You can’t be pleasant to him for my sake even for one afternoon?”
“Nope.”
Sky rolls her eyes but doesn’t step in.
“Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys whenever, then.”
I turn away from them both and go out on the porch to wait for Liam. Sky never comes out to apologize or to see if I’m okay or anything, so I’m fuming by the time he pulls in, but I don’t want him to know that. I siphon my rage energy into trotting over to his car and greeting him the moment he steps out.
“Nice arm,” he says, running his fingertips over my skin.
“I’ll keep it.” I grin, and then kiss him. “Come on, let’s go in my dad’s shop. I’m annoyed at Hunter and I don’t want to be near him.”
He doesn’t protest, though I’m sure my dad’s shop is not his ideal environment. The shop has bays for two trucks, the floor is stained with oil spots, and the whole thing has a hint of diesel smell that never dissipates.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think … I won’t touch any of the walls.”
I laugh. “It’s not actually that filthy, you know, it’s just … it’s a shop.”
He walks slowly through it, eyeing some of the tools and barrels of oil and my dad’s neatly organized array of filters and greases and windshield fluid. “Never really thought about how much it takes to keep one of those things running.”
“Yeah, they put on a lot of miles compared to, like, a regular vehicle, and they’re dragging heavy trailers behind them, so it’s a lot of wear and tear. Seems like one of Dad’s trucks is broken about every single week. He loves having a trucking company, though, so I guess that’s good?”
“Always important, I think. My dad always hated his jobs. Even working from home didn’t seem to make him any happier. And working from home means he never has to talk to people, which is his ideal. Especially with how people think of him around here.”
“Is … it wrong, how people think of him?” I ask hesitantly. Liam’s so closed off about discussing his family, but he brought it up. He seems defensive of his father, while simultaneously … hating him? I can’t figure it out.
Liam shrugs. “People always think they have such a good read on situations, but they really don’t know anything. My dad’s not great; I don’t think you’d believe me if I said he was. But my mom wasn’t exactly innocent. I’m glad she’s been gone so long. She was …” He trails off and looks at me with fire in his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
Nothing is the answer, but he doesn’t say it aloud. He says it by cupping my face in his hands and kissing me. Kissing me with force. I wrap both arms around his neck, happy I can do this now without risk of knocking him out with my cast. His hands move to my waist, holding me close. He kisses me so hard I can barely breathe. I feel wanted, and I like that feeling. It chases all the other things away. The fear and the pain and the creeping worry that Sky will start liking Hunter more than she likes me. I brush my recently uncasted hand along Liam’s cheek, enjoying the feeling of skin on my long-deprived skin.
He reaches for my hand, runs his fingers down my wrist. Presses his lips to my pulse.
“Have you done anything about that man yet?” he asks. “Your creepy neighbor?”
I shake my head. He and I have barely talked about solving the mystery of my accident since we started dating, and he wants to talk about it now?
“I can help you,” he whispers, his lips grazing my earlobe. “I can help you figure out how to get him to stop staring at you so much.”
“Please do.” I hold very still, closing my eyes and tilting my head while his lips trail down the side of my neck.
“No one should stare at you as much as he does.” Liam’s hand slides down my arm, back to my newly freed wrist, which he grips loosely. “No one except me.”
I smile, and he kisses me again. His grip tightens on my wrist, which protests.
“Liam,” I mumble against his mouth. “That hurts.”
“Does it?” He loosens his grip, pulls away, and holds up my arm. “I thought it was supposed to be healed?”
“Well, yeah, the bone is, but it hasn’t been exposed to the elements in a while. The muscles are a little atrophied and stuff.”
“Oh.” He rotates my hand slowly, watches me grimace when he hits its limits. Then he holds it to his mouth. “I’ll be gentle.”
“Starting when?” I ask as he presses his fingertips into the sides of my wrist, eliciting another pain response, which I’m sure shows in my face.
“Now,” he says, and drops my wrist.
We stay in the truck shop for another half hour. And he does keep his word.
* * *
U around?
This text from Grace interrupts me in the middle of a YouTube video I’m watching about bullet ants later that night.
Yes why??
And then my phone rings.
“I think someone’s … watching me,” she says, without preamble.
“What do you mean, watching you?”
“Like, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being crazy, but there have been several times over the past couple of days when I felt that, like, skin-crawling sensation where there are eyes on me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“All too well, unfortunately.”
“Do you think I’m being paranoid?” There’s desperation in her voice. She wants me to say yes, but …
“No. I don’t.”
Silence.
“Grace?”
“I’m just … processing. It’s connected to you, isn’t it?” The unspoken actual question: It’s because someone knows how you feel about me, isn’t it? “Your fall was no accident, right?”
I move my glasses, folded on my nightstand, in a slow circle. “I can’t tell you that for sure, but … it’d be my guess.”
Again, silence.
“Grace, if you want to distance yourself from me for a little while, I would completely understand, and I—”
“No,” she says stubbornly. “Absolutely not.”
“But, Grace, if I’m—”
“Look, I don’t think I’m in danger, exactly,” she says, even though she obviously wouldn’t be calling me to talk about this if she didn’t think that was a possibility. “Someone could be watching
me for a lot of reasons, or no one could actually be watching me at all. I just have to be careful for now, until I figure it out. Please don’t be worried, and please don’t feel guilty.”
“I’m going to worry about you. I didn’t want— You shouldn’t be involved in this at all.”
“I shouldn’t? Well, neither should you,” she says.
I can’t argue with that, but I need to say something. “I’m going to figure out who might have tried to hurt me, okay? I will figure it out.”
“I know you will.”
I can hear it in her voice, that she really does believe in me. But instead of making me feel buoyed, it makes me feel burdened. If I don’t figure this out, I’m letting her down. Or worse.
After we hang up, I pull out my laptop and open up a search engine. I told Liam that Mr. Omerton was at the top of my list, and I didn’t really think about how true that is. He’s the most obviously suspicious person in my life. He used to just be an average parent-aged single guy, but he’s gotten so weird lately. Staring at me all the time, telling me to smile, trying to lure me over to his house. And what do I even know about him, beyond surface things?
I search his name and come up totally empty. No social media profiles, no articles, no anything. Strange. He’s too young to be so off the grid. If he were in his fifties or sixties, maybe. But it’s uncommon for someone his age to have absolutely no online footprint. I pull up Maple Hill’s town page on Facebook and scroll through recent event pictures until I find one that he’s in. I crop the picture to remove extraneous faces, and then drop it into the search engine.
Nothing.
How has he stayed so anonymous? And more importantly, why?
I’m frustrated that once again, I’ve come up completely empty on information. How am I ever supposed to figure this out when nothing at all goes my way?
I slam the laptop shut and move to my window. His car’s not there, and all his lights are off. I know he was home earlier, because Liam and I saw him when we left the truck shop. But it’s been hours since then. He could have gone grocery shopping, or he could be at work. I have no way of knowing when he might be back.
But I feel reckless. My wrist is itchy and sore, I’m getting a headache, and I’m furious that someone is frightening Grace. It’s only nine thirty, so Mom’s still downstairs and Hunter’s playing Fortnite in his room. It’s impossible to creep past Mom with our house’s layout, so I tell her I heard that a rare type of locust changed its migration pattern and they only travel at night, and that I want to go see if there might be any in our field.
She knows nothing about insects, so she accepts this easily even though it’s freezing out and just tells me to make sure I use a flashlight.
I do use a flashlight, till I get near the road, where I switch it off. If Mr. Omerton comes home while I’m snooping, I don’t need a giant beacon announcing my presence.
Also, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t break into his house because not only is that illegal but also I don’t have the skills and don’t even know exactly what skills I would need. He lived somewhere larger than Maple Hill before he moved here, and he definitely is not the type to leave his doors unlocked.
His garage, however, is unlocked. It’s not attached to his house, and there’s a door near the back that allows me to slip inside. I hold up my phone, letting the light from my screen illuminate the darkness a little bit. Nothing to see here, really. It’s packed with things like a lawn mower and a snowblower and multiple chest freezers and a bunch of Christmas decorations—he goes all out on the Christmas decorations. I now understand why he parks his car outside. There’s absolutely no room in here.
I pull my jacket sleeve over my hand and lift the lid on one of the freezers. Deer meat, mostly. I look in the other chest freezers, too, and find frozen veggies and pizzas and things like that. Nothing sinister. I don’t know what I expected or what I would even have done if I’d found a chopped-up body, but thinking about that reminds me that I am snooping around my next-door neighbor’s and that I should not linger. Carefully, I shut the door of the garage and sneak around the back of his house. I have to turn my phone’s flashlight back on to see anything, because every single light in his house is off. I look in each window I can get to, and nothing seems out of the ordinary, until I come to a room that looks like an office. A laptop sitting on a desk with papers stacked around it. And there’s a picture peeking out from the stack of papers. It’s a school picture, I can tell by the background, even though it’s only the bottom couple of inches.
It’s my school picture, from last year. I was wearing a light blue shirt and, as always, my necklace.
I jump back from the window and hurry to my house, beyond creeped out. What is he doing with a picture of me? How did he get it and why and—I think I have to tell my parents now about his creepy behavior, but I have to figure out a way to do it and have them take me seriously without admitting I went over there tonight and snooped around, because they will not approve of that.
Back in my room, I peer out my window. His car pulls in; I left just in time.
I reach up to pull down my shade but as I do, I swear, he is once again looking directly at me.
I’ve started to become kind of obsessed with Calvin Omerton. All the things I know about him (not many things) keep running through my head—and all the things I don’t know, too. I need more information, so much more, and I don’t have the means to collect the information. I should tell Mom. I have to tell Mom.
He basically is my Suspicious People list now. I mean, he certainly doesn’t have my school picture just for the fun of it. I will tell Mom after school today, whether or not that means I have to admit to snooping over there. It’s too important to keep to myself.
“Amelia?”
I’m totally caught. Liam obviously asked me something, but I was so not listening.
“Sorry … what?”
He laughs, pushing my math book out of the way so he can sit closer to me on the couch in the school library. “I said, we should have dinner out on Friday. At six?”
“Sounds awesome.”
“Okay, good.” He pulls out his beloved thick, leather-bound planner from his backpack and starts scribbling.
“Are you … writing that down?”
His pen stops moving, and I swear he pulls his leather monstrosity closer like he’s protecting it from me. “Uh, yeah. Why?”
“No reason.”
He glances suspiciously at me, then snatches my planner—thin and flimsy, school-provided—from where it peeks out of my open backpack.
“Hey!” I protest when he starts skimming through it.
“This is empty. How do you know when assignments are due? When you have tests? When games are?”
“I just … remember? We always have those papers that tell us when tests are …” I rummage through the mess of papers in my bag, holding up the first one I find that proves my point.
He just stares. “Give me that. And find me the rest of them.”
I hand it over with more than a little trepidation and watch as he spends the next ten minutes writing down all my assignments and tests. And not only that but little blocks of time on Saturday mornings that he labels “hanging out with Liam,” and also our Friday date.
“What if I don’t want to hang out with you every Saturday?” I joke, feeling scarily organized. “What if I want to hang out with Hunter instead?”
“Go for it.” He frowns, looking a little hurt.
“Oh, come on. I’m just teasing you.” I lean over and kiss him on the cheek. “I think it’s cute.”
He nods, still looking sullen. And now I feel bad.
“It really will help me to have all this written down.” I take my planner and shove it into my backpack. “I think sometimes—”
We’re interrupted by the librarian, who bustles over with a serious expression on her face. We’re not doing anything wrong—we aren’t even touching at the moment—so her expression m
akes me very nervous.
“The headmaster has just called an emergency school assembly,” the librarian says. “So you’ll want to head over there right away.”
I can’t speak, but Liam thanks her. An emergency assembly is never good. I have the horrible feeling it means someone else has died.
“You okay?” Liam asks as we step outside of the library. “You look pale.”
I slip my hand into his as we walk. “No, I’m fine. Just anxious to hear what this is about.”
The assembly hall is a square building with seating leading up to a stage at the front and more seating in an upper level at the back. It doubles as a theater for plays and other performances. For our daily morning assemblies, we have assigned seats, but when we arrive it’s all chaos, so Liam and I sit together near the side exit that connects to the math building.
Liam doesn’t stop holding my hand even though my fingers are sweaty. He doesn’t stop holding my hand the entire way through the emergency assembly. While the headmaster stands next to a state cop and tells us that a student went missing last night. While he tells us that her body was found today after a thorough search of the Connecticut River, on the Vermont side of the Comerford Dam, and that foul play is suspected. While he tells us that it was Lydia Kormel, Alec’s sister. While he tells us that we are having this assembly because there have been other incidents that are now considered possibly suspicious as well. While he asks us to be understanding and respectful of the family during their time of loss.
By the time it’s over, I feel dizzy and sick, and I realize I’ve dug crescents into Liam’s hand with my nails. He leads me out, down the hallway through the math building and into the closed stairwell on the other side.
“Are you all right?” he asks, and immediately I burst into tears.
He wraps his arms around me, and I sob helplessly into his chest, frightened and unashamed. Am I one of the other incidents? Or is he only referring to Maria? I’m relieved—kind of—that something’s suspicious this time, but I’m terrified by the implications, and horribly, horribly sad that this has happened again.
“You’re kind of scaring me, Amelia,” he says, but he holds me tight and it’s what I need.