You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  That makes him a shitty cop, but it doesn’t necessarily make him stupid.

  Ahead of us, the tunnel branches. I shine my flashlight into each passage. Dust and dirt cover both floors, and footprints are clearly visible in each direction. I walk a few feet into the left tunnel and stop. A faint, dripping sound surrounds me. I shine my flashlight over the walls ahead. Water runs down them in thin rivulets and pools on the floor.

  I turn back to ask Aidan if he thinks the other tunnel would be safer. The passage behind me is empty.

  “Aidan?” I call his name softly, but the only sound is the dripping water.

  I take a step back the way we came and call his name again, a little louder this time. When he still doesn’t respond, my heart—already racing—starts to jackhammer in my chest.

  I slide my backpack off my shoulder and root around inside. Taking a page from Skylar’s book, I’d made like a Girl Scout and tried to prepare for every eventuality. My hand skims matches, granola bars, batteries, rope, and the hunting knife I’d found in the basement of Montgomery House before closing on a lead pipe that’s as long as my forearm.

  I pull the pipe out of the bag and take another step back the way we came.

  A low, pained sound from somewhere behind me stops me in my tracks. I whirl, and the sound comes again, farther ahead, past a spot where the tunnel curves.

  My finger hovers over the switch on the flashlight, but whoever is nearby would have already caught glimpses of the beam. Turning it off won’t undo that.

  I edge forward, flashlight in one hand, lead pipe gripped tightly in the other. I make my way around the curve. The tunnel abruptly ends, emptying into another small storeroom. A dark shape lies crumpled in the middle of the floor: Skylar.

  She’s on her side. Her hands have been tied behind her back, and she’s curled herself into a ball, almost like she’s trying to make herself disappear. Her face looks ashen in the beam from the flashlight, and her brown eyes look almost black. A smear of dried blood follows the line from her temple to her cheek, and a strip of fabric has been pulled across her mouth and tied behind her hair.

  I crouch next to her and set the pipe and flashlight on the floor. Her wrists and ankles are bound with thick blue twine. The same kind of twine Aunt Jet has been using on the boxes downstairs.

  I pull the hunting knife from the backpack and carefully cut through the gag. I snag her hair in the process, and she whimpers.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” I hiss as I quickly move to free her hands and feet.

  When I lift the flashlight to get a better look at her face, Skylar flinches. She turns her head away, but not before I realize why her eyes look black: her pupils are so huge that they practically swallow up all the brown, like maybe she has a concussion or something.

  “Where is he? Is he here?” There’s a raw, ragged edge to her voice.

  I stand and resheath the knife, then tuck the whole thing—sheath and blade—into the waistband of my jeans at the small of my back.

  “Is he here?” Skylar asks again, shivering as I pull her to her feet. Before I can answer, she loses her balance. I try to steady her, but I’m scared and not careful enough and I touch bare skin.

  And then I see him. I see who Skylar is most afraid of.

  Thirty-Five

  “WHERE IS HE?” SKYLAR’S VOICE IS A JAGGED, FRIGHTENED whisper.

  Around me, the whole tunnel seems to pulse in time with the pounding in my head. It’s not possible. It can’t be possible. My stomach heaves and acid rushes up the back of my throat. “Can you walk?”

  Skylar shakes her head and then nods. “Maybe.”

  Maybe is better than nothing. Maybe is definitely better than staying here.

  He’ll expect us to go back the way I came, back through that cavernous room underneath the mill. Instead, I pull Skylar deeper into the tunnels, trusting we’ll be able to find one of the other exits. “Where’s Joey?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. She trips, and I tighten my grip on her arm to keep her from falling. “I swear, I haven’t seen him since the day you guys found the trailer. No one has. Not his parents or his cousin.”

  “He didn’t leave the bruises on your arm, did he?”

  She shakes her head. “I told you: Joey would never hurt anybody.”

  The brick walls of the tunnel give way to solid earth. “Have you been this way?”

  “No.”

  I guide Skylar to the wall. She leans heavily against it. When I’m sure she can stand on her own, I step away completely. I hand her the flashlight and then pull out my diagrams. This tunnel isn’t on any of them.

  “Do you have that map of Riley’s—the one you took from my room?”

  Her brow furrows. “Why would I take anything from your room?”

  Of course. Of course it hadn’t been Skylar. It’s not like the folder would have been hard to find for anyone who had access to Montgomery House and who wanted to snoop through my things.

  “Aidan is the one who left the bruises, isn’t he?”

  She nods. “I thought Joey might be hiding down here. I wanted to tell Chase—I thought maybe he could help me find him—but Aidan said I couldn’t trust him. He said I couldn’t trust anyone. We argued and he grabbed me.” She runs her left hand over her right forearm and then slips her fingers under her sleeve to touch the bruises. “I wanted to tell you, but Aidan said you wouldn’t believe me. Between what happened with Riley at the party and what was going on with Joey, he said no one would believe anything I said. And I was scared about what he might do if I did tell.”

  “And your head?”

  She raises her hand to her temple. Surprise flashes across her face, almost as though she hadn’t realized she’d been bleeding.

  “I came looking for Joey. I didn’t know Aidan was here. He followed me and shoved me into the wall. When I woke up, he was tying my wrists.” Her eyes well and brim over. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “You’re not. He fooled everyone—you, Chase, me.” I try to reconcile the image I saw when I touched Skylar with the boy I kissed in the woods. How could I have stood outside that trailer with him and not have had the slightest clue?

  The trailer. He must have staged the whole thing.

  I think about the photos of Rachel and those other girls. Had Aidan known Harding’s deep, dark secret and stolen the photos from his house, or is Harding somehow a part of this?

  “Come on.” I step back to Skylar and slip an arm around her. “We can talk about it later. Survival first and then self-flagellation.”

  The longer we’re on the move, the more Skylar’s strength seems to return, but our progress is still painfully slow. After what feels like an hour, we make it to another storeroom. My heart leaps and then falls as the beam from my flashlight catches an unbroken expanse of wall and the shattered remains of an old wooden staircase: there’s nowhere left to go.

  Even though the room is a dead end, someone has been here. Recently. An air mattress piled high with sleeping bags lies on the floor against the far wall. Next to it, a Coleman lantern glows. A handful of wooden crates are scattered around the room.

  Just like in the trailer, there are pictures taped to one of the walls. But while there had been hundreds of photos in the trailer, there are only a handful here. Letting go of Skylar, I move closer. All of them are of me. Eight—no, ten—in all. An old family photo, my school picture from the third grade, a snapshot of me and Dad on the porch swing.

  There are newer pictures, too. Photos that have been taken since I arrived back in Montgomery Falls. Pictures snapped inside the house. While I slept. While I helped Aunt Jet in the basement. While I curled up in the library. Each photo feels like some sort of violation: a moment in time Aidan stole from me and pinned down for his private amusement.

  It doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense.

  “The one of you sleeping is my favorite.”

  I whirl. Aidan stands just inside the room.

  “
I wondered if you would find your way here.” He speaks to me, but he glances at Skylar. “You figured it out, but not because Sky told you.”

  I stare at him, unable to follow his meaning.

  “You saw it,” he says. “You saw me.”

  It takes a moment for it to click, for me to fully understand. Skylar didn’t have to use Aidan’s name. I saw his face when I touched her skin. “How do you know that?”

  He crosses the room without answering.

  Skylar scrambles back awkwardly.

  I know I should follow, but I can’t seem to make my legs work. Too late, I realize I left the lead pipe back in that other room, right next to the spot where Aidan had left Skylar bound and gagged.

  Aidan closes the distance between us, but he’s not looking at me. He’s still looking at Skylar, a strange light in his eyes. Before I realize what he’s about to do, before I can try to stop him, he grabs my hand. “Tell me what I want.”

  The things I see are so horrible that everything around me goes black. I think I hear Skylar call my name, once, high and frightened, but the notes are swallowed by the darkness.

  Thirty-Six

  THE FIRST THING I’M AWARE OF IS THE COLD. IT SEEPS through my clothes and into my skin, chilling me all the way through.

  Skylar? I try to say her name, but my throat is dry and my tongue feels weird and big. All I can manage is a croak.

  Images come back to me, flooding my senses. Instinctively, I curl up, trying to escape. I’ve seen the desires and fears of hundreds of people, maybe thousands, but I’ve never seen anything as horrible as the things Aidan wanted when he looked at Skylar.

  Things that make the worst horror movie—that make anything Noah could have imagined doing to Riley’s killer—look tame.

  The images are so strong that just the act of recalling them seems to hit me with physical force. It feels like every muscle in my torso is contracting, like something inside of me is sharp and splintered and digging in. But that’s nothing compared to the pain in my head.

  I roll onto my side and retch.

  Aidan crouches in front of me. I try to scramble away, but he pulls me up to a sitting position. “Drink,” he says, lifting a bottle of Coke to my lips. “You’ll feel better.”

  I’m broken and shivering and there’s vomit on my shirt, but I could swear that as Aidan looks at me, his eyes fill with the exact same heat they held the night he kissed me. Having him look at me that way now, when I’m like this, scares me almost as badly as what I saw in his head.

  Warm liquid splashes down my face and my shirt as I pull away. I glance around. I’m still in the storeroom, still facing photos of myself, but there’s no sign of Skylar. “Where is she?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll head after her in a minute. She won’t get far.”

  “She’s your friend.” The pain in my head makes it hard to speak. “She’s my friend.”

  “Is that why she left you? Because she’s such a great friend?” Aidan stands and then reaches down in a gesture that’s almost gentlemanly. I stare at his outstretched hand. How can he think I’d touch him after what just happened? He stays like that for a few heartbeats, giving me plenty of time. When he finally realizes I’m not going to accept his help, disappointment flashes across his face. He leans down. Grabbing me under my arms, he hauls me to my feet.

  The gratitude I feel at not having his skin touch mine is so strong that it almost sends me back to my knees.

  “I’m beyond friends. And I think you are, too—in your own way.” He releases me and steps back. “On some level, you know that. It’s why you were drawn to me. Why I knew we’d eventually meet.”

  “Why would you want to meet me?” I hadn’t been anyone to him before I arrived. Nothing. This place, these pictures, his fixation—it doesn’t make sense.

  Aidan crosses the room and crouches before a wooden crate. When he stands, he’s holding a bundle of loose pages in one hand and Riley’s old journal in the other. I had been so focused on grabbing the diagrams that I hadn’t noticed the book was no longer in the drawer.

  “Riley told me about you once. At a party. Not right away. I had to get him pretty drunk, but once I did . . .” Aidan shakes his head. “I had other plans for him that night, but he started talking about that day we hopped the fence by the mill and how he couldn’t get the tunnels out of his head. How he had started going down there. All of a sudden, he said, ‘I knew a girl who could see secrets.’” He starts to read. “‘July thirteenth: Cat touched cashier while buying chips. Black horse surrounded by smoke. July twenty-first: Cat touched Noah on boat. Girl in black dress. August second: Cat touched a girl at the pool . . .’”

  As he continues to read, I realize the pages are the ones that had been ripped out of the journal. The charts Riley had kept in an effort to help me figure out the things that were happening to me. The pages I thought he had gotten rid of in an effort to forget I had ever existed.

  He hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t tried to erase me.

  Aidan glances up. “There are dozens. You weren’t as scared to touch people back then.”

  “Yes, I was.” It wasn’t that I touched more people that summer—as careful as I am, I touch people all the time—it’s that I wasn’t scared to talk to Riley about what I saw.

  Aidan slips the pages back into the journal and closes the book. “Did you know he wrote you letters? Years’ worth. All unsent. Actual letters written on paper. All bundled up in the back of his closet.”

  “You were in Riley’s room . . .” I think about the photos in the trailer, the ones taken of me in my bedroom. They were shot from straight on, not from down in the yard. That was what had bothered me about the photo Jensen had shown me of Rachel. The angle was different. “You took photos of me from Riley’s room. His mother said he came home at night. She said she heard him, that he slept in his bed. That was you.”

  “I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to understand him. It’s the same reason I keep coming back here.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Aidan shrugs. “I told him I would help map the tunnels. The staircase collapsed under his weight, and he fell.” As he talks, a light seems to fill his eyes. “He was so, so afraid. I didn’t know watching someone’s fear could be like that. Horror movies try to make you feel it—that rush when someone on the screen is terrified—but it’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”

  Everything in my chest constricts.

  He’s never coming home.

  I have to swallow twice before I can talk, and when I do, my voice shakes. “The fall killed him?”

  Aidan shrugs again. “Eventually.”

  “You let him die.” I stare at Aidan, horrified, as it sinks in. “How long?” My voice fills the space. It’s shaking. I’m shaking. “How long did it take? How long did you leave him down here, dying?”

  Aidan doesn’t answer. He just stares at me, the glow from the lantern emphasizing that light in his gray eyes.

  “You could have saved him. Everyone was looking for him, and you knew where he was the whole time.” I scan the room, and my gaze lands on the pile of sleeping bags. Bile rushes up the back of my throat. Without thinking, I stumble forward. I’m terrified of what I’ll find underneath, but I rip the fabric back.

  Nothing. There’s nothing there.

  “He’s not here, Cat.”

  “Where is he?” I picture Riley in the tunnels. Alone and dying. I picture his body lying abandoned at some dead end, like garbage. I picture all of that, and a wave of darkness rises up inside of me. I’ve been so worried about what Noah would do if we found the person who hurt Riley, but it never occurred to me that I would be just as dangerous. I throw myself forward, desperate to tear at Aidan, desperate to hurt him even if I hurt myself in the process.

  But he deflects me easily. He shoves me back, sending me crashing into the wall of photos.

  I manage to keep my feet. He moves a little to the left, positioning himself between me
and the only way out as I stand there, panting.

  “What about Rachel?”

  “What about her?”

  “It was you, right? You hurt her.”

  “Rachel was an opportunity. I was bored. I took your aunt’s car out. I saw her walking along the side of the road. It was fate.”

  Aunt Jet’s car. A car I’ve been in half a dozen times since the night Rachel disappeared. “That’s all it was? A coincidence? Paul Harding didn’t help you pick her?”

  “You think I was working with Paul Harding?” Aidan bursts out laughing, a short bark of a sound with no humor behind it. It’s indignant. Insulted. “Joey wasn’t the only one he gave private lessons to. He thought I was a kindred spirit. After a while, he showed me his collection. Things he knew Joey wouldn’t understand. He even let me take some of the photos home. He told me it would be our little secret.”

  Aidan lets out a small, derisive sound. “Rachel really was just an opportunity,” he continues. “The fact that she was one of the girls Harding watched, the idea that her murder might make him sweat, that was just a bonus.”

  “But you didn’t kill her.” I try to keep the hope from my voice. If he couldn’t bring himself to kill Rachel, maybe Skylar really did get away. Maybe we’ll be okay.

  “Rachel was tougher than I thought she’d be. I got distracted, and she made it to the river.”

  “And Riley’s medal? Why give her that?”

  “Like I said, she was tougher than I thought. I was wearing it around my neck—I wore it sometimes, to help me remember—and she grabbed it. It was worth it, though, seeing the effect it had on you.”

  I think about the morning in the kitchen, after Aidan had eavesdropped on my conversation with Jensen. There had to have been some sign that I had missed; nobody could be that good of an actor. “And Joey? Did you kill him?”

  “Don’t pretend to care about Joey. You don’t even like him.”

  “Fine. What about me? Are you going to kill me?”

  Shock flashes across his face. It looks genuine, but so many things since I’ve met him have seemed real. “Kill you?” There’s a slightly strangled, almost wounded tone to his voice. “Don’t you understand?”