You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  Both Chase and Aidan volunteered with the search parties, which makes sense. It also makes sense that Skylar wouldn’t have volunteered, given what I saw on the posters when I arrived in town and what Aidan told me.

  There’s a note in the folder about some of the things Riley’s girlfriend and her friends have said about Skylar—things that make it look like Skylar cornered Riley and practically assaulted him. Things that make it look like she was obsessed and one step away from building a shrine to Riley in her bedroom. The police interviewed her about it. More than once.

  From what I saw when I’d accidentally touched Skylar on the bridge, Riley had kissed her back just as fiercely, but you’d never guess that if all you did was read the folder.

  Given what was happening to Skylar, it makes sense Joey wouldn’t have volunteered to help the search parties. I want to hold it against him, but as far as I can tell, loyalty to Skylar might be his one big redeeming quality.

  There are also clues about Riley himself in the folder, if you read between the lines—the classes he took, the people he hung out with, the things he was seen doing in the days leading up to his disappearance. I try to assemble a picture from these bits and pieces, but none of the configurations seem right. None of the pictures match the boy in my memories.

  The more I try to make things fit, the more I think about the Riley I knew. And the more I think about the Riley I knew, the more it feels like there’s this weight inside my chest.

  By 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, the temperature has already crept up past scorching, and it’s hot enough that I’m wearing one of my two pairs of shorts and a tank top. Even with the ancient metal fan I lugged up to my room from the basement, my bare legs stick to the hardwood floor every time I shift position.

  I force myself to focus on the papers in front of me.

  The police department organized three search parties in the two months following Riley’s disappearance. The second one—the one they held after the snow had gone down enough to make searching the woods truly possible—focused on a strip of forest that’s bordered by the textile mill on the east and town on the north. Keep going past the mill, and eventually you’ll hit the old logging roads. Cross those, and it’s just you and open wilderness for hundreds of miles.

  I lift one of the crude, hand-drawn maps the searchers had used. It’s not nearly as good as the maps Riley used to make. It shows a few of the main paths, but none of the smaller ones that crisscross the woods.

  It does, however, show the creek.

  The creek isn’t big enough to have a name. Not really. Riley called it the Rio Tiny because it seemed to wind its way through the whole of the woods, shrinking to a trickle in some places, but never completely drying up.

  He had spent an entire week mapping it, plotting the curves and slopes. He wanted to be a cartographer when he grew up, even though Noah told him that cartography was a profession that died out centuries ago.

  “Do you actually like doing this?” I’d asked one day. I had been following Riley along the creek for what felt like hours, occasionally pausing to overturn a rock with the edge of my shoe or to examine webs spun by spiders in hollow places. We were at the top of a steep slope. A place where the creek turned rushing and wild as it plunged down. The falls part of Montgomery Falls.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. His hair stuck up in a dozen different directions in the heat, and there was a sunburn on the back of his neck. Angry and red and peeling around the edges. “Hanging out in the woods?”

  “Mapping them.” It had seemed kind of fun at the start of summer. Like a project. But the longer we did it, the more intense Riley became. Maps that he had spent weeks on—maps that I thought were better than anything you’d find in a book—were no longer good enough. Angles that were close enough before weren’t close enough now. Details that seemed important had been replaced with details I didn’t understand. A broken Coke bottle, an old piece of machinery dragged into the trees from the textile mill, a crumpled wrapper—each of these became a number on one of his maps.

  “Do you want to stop?” A worried expression crossed his face.

  “No!” I said, a little too quickly. “This is fun, this is great.” Because, when you got right down to it, I’d do just about anything he wanted if it meant getting more time with him. As it was, I was painfully aware of how few hours there were in the summer and how much it was going to hurt when it came time to leave. Riley was the only one besides Aunt Jet who had any idea what was going on with me. “Honest,” I said, because Riley was still looking at me with a worried expression on his face, “I’m having fun.”

  I was paying more attention to convincing him than to where I was stepping, and my foot came down on a loose patch of ground.

  I started to fall, but Riley was faster than gravity. He caught my arm, keeping me from plunging down to broken limbs—or something worse.

  And as he touched me, I saw what he was scared of. He wasn’t scared we would get in trouble for being in the woods or that I would be mad at him. He wasn’t even scared I would get hurt—not exactly. He was scared of something bigger. He was scared the forest was going to take me, the way it took other lost things. He was scared it would take me and he wouldn’t be able to find me.

  “You’re okay,” he had said as he glanced past me to the spot where the ground dropped away. “You’re okay.”

  Pain started to blossom across my temples as he touched my skin, but I didn’t want to pull away. I wanted to stay there, close to him, even if it hurt.

  The memory hits me hard. Hard enough that my anger at Noah suddenly seems small. Maybe even a little irrational. Because every moment I stay angry at Noah is a moment I’m not really doing everything I can to figure out what happened to the boy who was scared he would lose me to the woods and not be able to find me.

  Of course, it’s not until I’m through the hedge, ready to make peace and standing in the empty driveway, that I remember the last message Noah left with Aunt Jet yesterday, the one about how he was taking his mother out to their cottage on the lake and would be gone for two nights.

  Aunt Jet’s eyes had been extra reproachful when she relayed that particular message. I think Noah reminds her of what she gave up when she came back to Montgomery Falls.

  Given the state Noah’s mom was in the last time I saw her, I can’t imagine a few days of fresh air and water will help, but at least he’s trying.

  I run my fingertips over my arm, over the spot where Riley’s hand had clamped around me all those years ago as he kept me from falling.

  “You’re okay,” he had said. The same two words Skylar said to me at the riverbank as she hugged me tight enough to bruise. That’s why it had felt familiar.

  And there, again, is another part of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit. The idea that Riley could be with someone as great as Skylar—even for just a few hours at a party—and let her go. I know people change, but that boy in the woods? I think he would have liked Skylar. I know he would have.

  My gaze drifts up to Riley’s window as an idea starts to take shape in the back of my mind.

  I don’t let myself think about whether what I’m about to do is right or wrong as I walk around the side of the Fraser house and head for the back porch. The spare key is still there, still tucked in a small gap underneath the third step. Keeping a spare key in the same hiding spot for five years doesn’t seem like the best idea, security-wise, but since I’m the one benefiting, I probably shouldn’t complain.

  The first thing I notice when I step into the kitchen is that it’s clean. The take-out containers are gone, the pile of dishes reduced to a single plate. Even the floor looks like it’s been washed; it squeaks underneath my shoes as I cross the room.

  Now that I’m inside, it’s a little harder not to feel like I’m doing something I shouldn’t, but I don’t turn around and leave. I just make my way up to the second floor and push open Riley’s bedroom door.

  I expect it to stick—it always
stuck when they first moved in—but it doesn’t.

  It’s far from the only thing that’s different.

  The room I remember had been weird and geeky—like Riley himself. Even though his parents had more money than anyone in Montgomery Falls. Even though his dad made him get up early every Saturday morning for golf lessons at the country club. With his skinned knees and his homemade maps and his lists of forgotten things, Riley had been weird and wonderful, and his room had been a reflection of that.

  But gone are the maps and the Marvel posters and the models of rockets and airplanes. The Star Wars sheets have been replaced with a plain blue duvet, and the walls are dotted with posters of depressingly generic bands and swimsuit models in bikinis.

  I stare at one of the women on the wall. Long blond hair. Toned stomach. Perfect breasts covered by small triangles of red fabric.

  If that’s what he wants to wake up to, what’s the chance he would ever even glance at someone like me?

  It’s a stupid, stupid thought. I don’t know why I think it. I don’t know why it would even matter. Any guy with a room like this wouldn’t be my type, either.

  I pull my eyes away from the poster and force myself to focus on the rest of the room.

  Riley’s laptop sits closed on his desk next to a stack of college brochures and applications. I’ve barely even thought about what I might do after high school, but it looks like Riley already has a whole plan of attack. Lacey is the same way. She’s been stockpiling college brochures since freshman year. Up until a few months ago, every time she got a new one for herself, she made sure to get an extra one for me. She’d even mark off things that she thought might interest me. Little pink and blue Post-its—pink for things like dorms and campus activities, blue for academics.

  I push the thought from my mind.

  Being in here is hard enough without thinking about Lacey on top of everything else.

  I open Riley’s laptop and hit the power button. After so many months, I expect the battery to be dead, but the screen flickers to life. I take a few shots at the password. None of them work. I guess that would have been too easy.

  I slide open the top desk drawer, and my breath catches. I’m not sure what I was expecting—more brochures and applications, maybe—but instead I find a pad of graph paper and the beginnings of a map.

  A strange, sharp ache fills me as I pick up the pad and flip through it. More maps and diagrams. The room may have changed—Riley may have changed—but some things had stayed the same.

  I turn back to the topmost page. The lines aren’t long enough to be streets, but they don’t seem to curve the way the paths in the forest do. Unlike most of the other maps, there aren’t any notations on this one. No clues as to what Riley was mapping. On impulse, I pull the sheet free, fold it, and slip it into my pocket. Noah must have gone through all of this stuff already, but there can’t be any harm in checking the map against the ones used by the search parties or against the area where Rachel was found.

  It’s a stretch, but it’s not like I have any other ideas.

  As I place the pad back in the desk, I notice a small bottle of pills wedged in the corner.

  It rattles as I lift it out. Half full. Riley’s name is on the label, along with the name of the prescription and the dosage. A small orange warning sticker says not to consume alcohol while taking.

  I think about what Chase told me about how everyone but Riley had been drinking the night of the boat crash and try to reconcile that with the taste of alcohol I remember from touching Skylar. I can’t.

  I turn the small plastic cylinder over in my hands. Noah said the pills had helped. Jensen claimed there was nothing to say Riley hadn’t just run away; but if he had, wouldn’t he have taken the pills with him? If I were running, my own pills would be one of the first things I’d grab.

  Heart heavy, I put the bottle back in the drawer and then go sit on the edge of Riley’s bed. It’s getting harder to believe that Noah might be wrong, that Riley might still be out there. The duvet is slightly wrinkled, and I imagine Noah or Mrs. Fraser coming in here to just sit and think about everything they’ve lost. Again, I feel like I’m doing something wrong by being here, but I don’t leave.

  I smooth out one of the wrinkles with the flat of my hand as my gaze drifts to a framed photo on the nightstand. The frame doesn’t match the rest of the room. Pewter daisies and hearts with the word Always in script along the bottom. Definitely something that looks like it was picked out by a girl. Probably the same girl Riley has his arms wrapped around in the photo. I lift it and turn it over. To Riley, Love Amber is written in metallic Sharpie on the back and encircled with a heart.

  I flip the frame back over. I recognize Amber as one of the girls from the drugstore that day I was with Skylar. The one who had been at the counter. The blonde with the tortoiseshell glasses who’d shot me the small, curious look.

  She looks sweet and innocent in the photo. All big blue eyes and bright white teeth and apple cheeks. All glossy smile and shiny hair. She looks happy. Like everything in her world is exactly as it should be.

  But Riley isn’t smiling. His arms are wrapped loosely around her, but he looks stiff and uncomfortable. Awkward and out of place and more like the boy I used to know than he does on any of the posters around town.

  “Where did you go?” I whisper to the boy in the photo. The house around me is silent.

  Seventeen

  WHEN I GET BACK, AUNT JET ASKS IF I WANT TO GO WITH her to church. It might make me feel better, she tells me. I doubt it—Dad’s a hard-core atheist, and while I’m still on the fence about the whole religion thing, I’m probably edging that way—but the alternative is staying here, waiting for Noah, feeling like I should be doing . . . something.

  So I tell her I’ll go.

  I head up to my room, where I slip on a pair of black jeans and a black T-shirt. It feels too casual, but when I meet Aunt Jet in the hallway downstairs, she tells me I look fine.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with me,” she confesses as she pulls a scarf from the hall closet and wraps it loosely around her neck. The strip of fabric is long and silky and covered with small, delicate flowers. The house is filled with things just like it. Scarves and gloves and fur coats wrapped in tissue paper. “Trappings,” my father calls them. Reminders that the Montgomerys once had money. Though the scarf looks nice around Aunt Jet’s neck, there’s something a little sad and faded about it.

  As I climb into the car, I think about the tenants in the rooms and the sell pile in the basement and the fact that there’s old money and new money and then there’s money that’s just lost.

  It’s hard to imagine Chief Jensen would care about any claim he thinks he has to the Montgomery estate if he knew how little is actually left.

  Aunt Jet slides behind the wheel, sighs, and then struggles to move the seat up. As we pull away from the house, she adjusts the rearview mirror. “I wasn’t able to change my shift tonight,” she says, a worried, apologetic note in her voice. “I have to go in at six. I’m going to talk to Marie and see if she can look in on you.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “I know you don’t.” Aunt Jet says the words so quickly that it’s obvious she doesn’t know that at all. “It’s just that with everything going on, with what happened the other night, I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t on your own.”

  As we pass the downtown strip, I catch sight of one of Riley’s missing posters. To be honest, I don’t exactly relish the idea of being alone. Though I’d never admit it, it’s been kind of nice having Aunt Jet hover over me. Dad’s never really hovered much—even those times when someone really should have been hovering.

  It makes me wonder what the past few years would have been like if I had fought Dad about pulling away from Jet and this place. At the time, I thought I was happy to have an excuse not to come back here because, if I did, sooner or later I would see Riley again. But maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe I would
n’t have felt so bad about myself if there had still been one person in my life I wasn’t hiding parts of myself from. If there had been one person who hovered.

  But even though I want Aunt Jet to stay home tonight, I know I can’t be selfish. Her job is hard enough without worrying about me during her shift. “It’s okay. Really. I know you need to work.”

  In response, she shoots me a small, relieved smile as she pulls into the church lot.

  The service doesn’t start for another twenty minutes, but there are so many cars that Aunt Jet has trouble finding a parking spot.

  “Are there always this many people here?” I ask as we make our way toward the church steps.

  “People have been upset since Riley went missing. Coming here can be comforting. And after what happened a few nights ago . . .”

  “People need comfort.”

  She nods.

  I half hold my breath as I step inside. The last time I came close to any religion was Lacey’s second cousin’s bat mitzvah three years ago—between that and the fact I’m a walking abomination out of a scary story, it feels like God and I might not exactly be simpatico.

  While I don’t burst into flames, it doesn’t take me long to feel like I’ve made a mistake. The crowd is so closely packed that not touching anyone is an effort. And if that isn’t bad enough, everyone seems to be whispering about Rachel Larsen and how she was found. They whisper about me, Skylar, and Chase.

  Two men hand out programs. One is young and in a suit the color of a robin’s egg, the other older and wearing a faded pinstripe. They flank a set of polished interior doors that lead to rapidly filling pews.

  As Jet and I join the line, I realize the older man is familiar. Thinning hair, sunburnt scalp, bushy eyebrows—the photographer from the riverbank.