“And what will happen to the rest of it?”
He doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. They intend to level it. Take it all down. “No,” I say.
“Kennedy.”
“Joe. No. It’s my house. I say no.” We hadn’t built it from the ground up, but it felt like we had brought it to life. I picture Elliot with white paint on his knuckles, dirt under his nails, his eyes unfocused, his cheeks flushed red from the sun. So different from the Elliot I was used to seeing. I think maybe that’s what Mom meant, when she said it was good for us. In the middle of that summer, it did really feel like a house could change us.
“It’s not that simple—”
“Except it is.” It’s mine—in my name, but in Joe’s trust.
He raises his eyes to mine, and he looks immeasurably sad. Worse than the first day I was here, when he cleared out the TV room, pulling furniture out into the hall to make room for me, while I watched. “Kennedy, who do you think is paying for Elliot’s lawyer?”
I open my mouth, then close it again. I didn’t. I didn’t think about that at all. Elliot gets a lawyer, I testify for the DA; these are opposing forces, opposing motivations. “I don’t…”
“Look, I don’t want you to worry, but…”
“But what, Joe? What?”
He shakes his head at the table. “We need to make a decision here, and we’re running out of time.”
I’m staring out the window when he says it. At the dusk, settling to dark.
“Do you hear me, Kennedy?”
I’m breathing heavily, and it’s the only sound I can hear, and the room feels charged suddenly, like something’s about to burst.
“Did you know he won’t see me, Joe? If we’re paying for the lawyer, shouldn’t he have to see me?”
He freezes. “Why do you know this, Kennedy?”
I can practically see the wheels turning in his head. “Because I wanted to see my brother.” The brother I remember from the summer, not the one stuck inside a cell with nothing to do. I can feel the claustrophobia. My stomach hurts.
He sighs, but his shoulders remain tight, fixed. “That’s not a good idea right now. The trial starts next Tuesday.”
“Well,” I say, “don’t worry, Joe, because it seems like I don’t have a choice anyway.”
He’s looking at me like he’s missed something major, and he has. He’s trying to find out when I went to the jail, and how I got there. What happens in this house when he’s at work. All the things I do when he’s sleeping.
Maybe it was a mistake, telling him, but at least we’re not talking about the house anymore.
“It’s for the best,” he says softly.
“It’s bullshit, Joe. And you know it.” I storm down the hall, and I slam the door. He didn’t even notice that I brought him the world’s best pizza.
I take out the folded-up sheet of paper with the readout, the signal.
And then I send Nolan a text.
What are you doing tomorrow? We need answers, and we’re running out of time.
There’s not even a place to park in front of my house. My parents’ cars are in the driveway, and there are several dark cars parked along the curb, so I end up at the corner of the street, walking the rest of the way home.
“Where were you?” my dad asks as soon as I open the door. There’s a group of them gathered in the dining room—my parents, men and women in suits, Agent Lowell. But no one waits for me to answer. They make a space for me and beckon me forward.
Agent Lowell has a hand on the back of a chair at the table. “Here, take this,” he says.
My mom paces behind me. My dad, in contrast, is completely still. Once I’m seated, Agent Lowell places a photo directly in front of me, on top of the wooden table.
The picture is of my brother. They don’t really need me to confirm this; it’s obvious. In the image, he’s walking sort of diagonally away, but his head is thrown over his shoulder so he’s almost looking straight at the camera. Like someone called his name and he’s looking for the source.
Still, it’s a punch to the gut, seeing this. Something new. A moment, an image I’ve never seen before. I’d just about given up on seeing any such moments ever again.
I lean closer to the image. At the edge of the frame is the solid brown tail and a hind leg—Colby, beside him.
I can’t figure out where he is, though. Only that the dog is with him, and it looks like he’s in the woods. Colby would never leave him, my dad told the investigators, and he’s right. We lost my brother and our dog that day, but I’m really only allowed to admit to missing the one. But here they both are, and something tightens in my throat, seeing them again.
Agent Lowell places a second photo in front of me, this one zoomed in on Liam’s face. “In your best estimation, is this an accurate picture of Liam the day he went missing?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.” I can feel my heart racing.
“His clothes, the details?” he asks, and then I understand my role. I’m confirming the clothes he wore, the dog, the way he’s looking over his shoulder. His dark blond hair is a little longer than it usually was, because he was due for a haircut, so it sort of falls over his forehead from the weight of it, instead of staying up and to the side, like he styles it. Styled it.
The jeans, the long-sleeved maroon shirt, the blue sneakers. All of it is Liam, all of it the details we gave over and over about that day; remembering, pulling things from his closet so we were sure. These details are now ingrained in our memory.
But, I see, there are some things we had forgotten, that I only remember now, by looking at him: the way his left arm bends slightly, held at his hip, from an old injury that never healed right. A broken bone brought to the doctor too late, already starting to ossify around the crack on its own. And a cut against the underside of his jawbone, from shaving. I’d forgotten that, completely, until they show me the photo of his face, zoomed in.
I remembered hearing him hiss in the bathroom that morning, the razor dropping, clattering against the sink. A bead of blood on the porcelain, left behind.
Why did I never mention that, in the days that followed? It’s like that detail completely slipped my mind—like I was too focused, instead, on the feeling in the dream, the knowledge that, somehow, his disappearance was inevitable.
“It’s him. It’s that day,” I say. More definitive now. There’s no best estimation here. It’s him. In that moment. The small, chaotic details leading to only that day, and no other day.
My mother whispers, “Oh my God.” The room has otherwise gone silent.
“Thank you, Nolan,” Agent Lowell says, a hand on my shoulder.
“What does this mean?” my dad asks. I’d leave, but the hand is still heavy on my shoulder, as if holding me in place.
“There’s a time stamp in the image file. The date and time lead us to believe it was taken around four in the afternoon the day of his disappearance,” Agent Lowell responds. “Though we know these things can be fudged with.”
Nothing is definite. Still, it was taken that day.
“Do any of you recognize the location?” he asks.
I don’t. None of us do. It’s just trees, and Colby’s tail, and my brother. “Couldn’t this still be the park?” I ask.
“That would be highly unlikely,” he responds after a pause. “This is almost four hours after he disappeared, and we had plenty of officers patrolling the park. It seems unlikely he would’ve been there all along without giving himself away. Especially with the dog.”
Everything changes. I slip from his grasp, from the table, from that room. Their voices rise, and I continue up the steps, trying to make sense of things.
I feel sick. My brother, in a photo with Colby, at 4 p.m. He’d disappeared around noon—12:10, we decided, the best estimate after going th
rough everything, over and over again, with the police. From the sun in the sky, to the temperature of the food, to the witnesses who saw us entering the park, and the cameras on the road before the entrance. We didn’t have a clock to consult, until my dad went back to the car for his phone, to eventually call the police. It was a rule that we left our phones behind on family outings. It was a rule that we never followed again.
Inside Liam’s empty room, I pace, trying to think.
I remember that night my brother appeared to me, across the living room, a boundary he could not breach. Help us. Please, he said.
When was that?
I stop moving, the room charged. The hair stands up on the back of my neck, because the date…the when…it was when I was sick, with the flu. I remember, I was sick when the news came through about some double murder nearby. I remember, because I was on the couch that day, my computer setup in my lap, the noise of the morning news on in the background—but I had been focused on something else.
I bought this equipment the morning after my brother appeared to me, asking for help. I bought this equipment while the news anchor reported the details about some terrible crime. I remember thinking: At least they know what happened; at least they know.
The phone rang then, because school was canceled—a suspect on the loose—but it didn’t matter anyway because I was sick.
Am I making it up? Putting the pieces together because I want them to connect? The memories blending together in my mind?
I have to be sure before I tell Kennedy.
Back in my room, I log on to my computer and pull up my credit card history, scanning back month by month until I find it. The order for the EMF meter, the Geiger counter, and more. I trace my finger to the date listed beside the purchase: 12/4.
December fourth. My God, I was right. I bought this equipment December fourth.
It has to mean something.
I go to text Kennedy, but I already have a message from her. It must’ve come through while we were all sitting around the table, staring at the image of Nolan.
We’re running out of time, she says.
I can feel it, too. The men in my house, the case reopened. My brother, the sound of his imagined voice whispering in my ear: Help us. Please.
We have plans to skip school. Well, I’m pseudo-skipping school. I showed up for first period, because Joe doesn’t get out of the house until after the bus rumbles by, shaking the thin windows.
I don’t have any finals until next week, and apparently neither does Nolan. Besides, what do finals really matter when there’s something else out there?
He said he’d pick me up out front at 9:30. Which is why I’m standing outside on the concrete pavement with the sun beating down at 9:28, squinting against the summer sun. A teacher walks by behind the glass doors. He looks at me with a face of concern, and I wave. I wave because I don’t want him to think I shouldn’t be doing this. People leave all the time, for appointments. I just don’t want him to see someone definitely not Joe picking me up in the circular drop-off zone.
I look back once into the front office windows to make sure no one is reporting this, and thankfully no one seems to be paying attention. Except for a face at the corner of the window: it’s Marco, standing at the front desk, looking back. And of course, of course, it’s him.
Marco pulled a disappearing act last winter, in the weeks following the crime. When he finally did show up to see me, he pretended he hadn’t gone AWOL, pretended that everything was fine and he was the supportive boyfriend, though by then there was a hard and impenetrable wall between us.
And now finally he’s paying attention, exactly when I don’t want him here. I look away, pretending not to notice.
At 9:29, Nolan’s car stutters into the lot. It’s hard not to notice. It’s not exactly quiet, and it’s not exactly clean. I’m practically bouncing on my toes by the time he makes his way through the lot to the entrance, meeting him halfway so as not to draw any more attention.
“Go, fast,” I say, and he listens.
The humid air funnels in, and it’s hard to hear him when we’re moving fast. “Sorry,” he calls, “the air conditioner didn’t kick in this morning. It’s like that sometimes.”
I don’t complain. I like it, really. Reminds you how fast you’re moving, the air pushing back against you, tears in the corners of your eyes.
* * *
—
The car slows when we pass the sign for Freedom Battleground State Park. “The turnoff for my house is easy to miss,” I say in warning.
“I know,” he says. “Sorry, not to be creepy. But I’ve been taking readings around the park, and I saw your house from the distance. I knew what happened, and I…well, I don’t know what I thought. That maybe I’d sense something? But when my device started picking up the Event, I could only think about the one thing I did differently. So I came back.”
“I see,” I say, though of course, I already knew he had been there. It was my handprints that had plastered his car’s back window, after all—I’d assumed he was the Realtor then. I’m guessing he knows by now that it was me. He passes the turnoff, and I laugh. “Seriously, Nolan, you just missed it anyway.”
He mumbles to himself. “You guys need a sign.”
“Keeps the spectators away,” I joke. Except I’m not. After the killings, people did one of two things: They either avoided our house to an extreme, not even looking as they drove past. Like Joe, going ten miles out of the way so we could pretend the road didn’t even exist. Or they were sucked in like it was a magnet. The horror of it all; like they could taste it in the air. Like they could look at the house, peer in the windows, and see evil as an observer, from a safe distance.
Nolan drums his fingers on the steering wheel, over and over. “I have something to tell you,” he says.
“Shoot.”
“I was going through my credit card statement from last year, because I had this feeling about something that happened. Last winter, when I was sick, I saw my brother, talking to me.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Even to myself I sound disbelieving.
“Right, so, that’s when I decided to buy all this equipment.”
“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say. It seems Nolan believes in ghosts. I don’t.
He sighs heavily. “Anyway, I bought the equipment December fourth.”
“Wait. What?” I twist in my seat, staring at the side of his face. My eyes scan his expression for a tell, for a giveaway. “For real, Nolan?”
He nods, his fingers tight on the steering wheel. “I saw my brother in a dream. Well, I was awake. I was sick. You know, a fever dream? Where you’re not sure whether you’re awake or not? I saw my brother, and I thought he was asking me to help him.” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t really make out what he was saying.”
I can hear my heart beating inside my head. “December fourth, you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. I just double-checked with the receipt.”
This program originated December fourth. Nolan bought the equipment December fourth. That split in my life, through the entire universe.
“Lydia said she heard something,” I say. “When the power rebooted at my house. Something when the audio was hooked up to Elliot’s computer.”
She said she thought she heard me, but I don’t mention that part. She must’ve been mistaken. Imagining me there, and trying to make sense of things.
He slows the car on the drive in, the wheels unsettled over the grooves in the packed dirt and gravel. He brakes suddenly, idling the car before the clearing, the house just visible between the trees. “Someone’s here,” he says.
I have to crane my neck to see, but then I do. At least two people—a man and a woman, from what I can make out—and two separate cars. It seems like someone is pacing, taking measurements. “Ugh, no,” I sa
y.
“Do you know them?”
My hands are clenched so tightly that my fingernails dig into my palm. “Not exactly. Someone put an offer on the house. Well, on the land.” I turn to Nolan. “They want to tear it down. All of it.”
Nolan shakes his head fast. “They can’t,” he says, and it feels so good, so necessary, to have someone on my side, finally. It feels like something else is possible. “Should I say something?” he asks, putting the car in park.
“Like what?”
“Like, get the hell off your property?”
I feel a smile forming, unexpectedly. Then I press my lips together, looking away. “No, if Joe finds out I was here, he’ll flip. Can we head to your place instead? So I can see where the signal was coming from?”
But he stares out the windshield, mouth a straight line. “Depends,” he says, drumming his fingers again.
“On what?”
“On how stealthy you are.”
* * *
—
When we pull up to what must be Nolan’s house, he’s staring suspiciously at the front of the house. “That’s odd.”
“What’s odd?” The house looks so not-odd I worry we’re on the set of some television show. Everything seems fake. The perfectly lined-up yards and shrubs, the fronts of the houses all differing just slightly, but there’s an underlying uniformity to everything. My mom loved houses with character. Which is why we were in an old house in the middle of farmland, with a shed that had once been an old stable. History is important, she always said, and then we lived within it so we wouldn’t forget it.
“No one’s here,” Nolan explains. “Yesterday, we had like half the state investigators at our house.”
I remember the phone message, calling him home. “What happened last night?”
“Long story. Basically, two years later, there’s suddenly a picture that was sent to my brother’s old girlfriend that shows him at four p.m. on the day he disappeared. Which is four hours after he supposedly disappeared.”
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