There wasn’t one always missing and one always nagging to be driven to this girl’s house or that girl’s house or the new shopping center only thirty miles away, and could they pick up Kim and Erica on the way?
Tim was stretched out on the leather sofa in the den late one evening when he noticed Mally slip into the room and sit down beside him. He made room for her by swinging his feet over the back. They watched the Stanley Cup playoff game together. They hadn’t done that since Mallory was eight years old.
The girls didn’t mind the period of restfulness, either.
There were no dreams.
Merry told her friends that all the garbage with the fire and everything meant she had to really book for finals. Mallory told Eden, who called, worried, that she was just kicking back for a while. It had been a weird year.
One day, they went with Drew to Burger Heaven. He never got the true story the day he found them in Crest Haven. But later, what they told him was almost the truth. There was no point in trying to fool him. And there was no point in going further than they had to.
Mallory played with her soda straw until he took it away. Then she said, “Drew, whatever we say now never goes anywhere but here.”
“I mean no matter what,” Merry added. “No matter what you hear about us. You’re our oldest friend. But if our parents or your parents find out . . .”
“They’ll put you in a pretzel factory,” Drew said.
“No doubt,” Merry agreed.
Mallory began, “Identical twins, some identical twins, have what’s called—”
“Telepathy,” Drew said. “I always saw you do that. You would say you wanted a plum and she would come out of the house with a plum. Now tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Mally said, hoping for an easy fake, the thing she did so well on defense, that Drew would accept. “That’s how we figured out that David wasn’t okay. We talked back and forth in our minds about how weird David was, how he yelled at Deirdre, and about how he buried the Scavos’ dog.”
“Why did you talk in your minds?”
“We couldn’t say it out loud. It was too freaky,” Merry said.
“And none of that links up with him killing the dog or hurting Deirdre,” Drew said.
Mallory took a deep breath. This was true-blue Drew.
“I dreamed that he was going to kill the dog,” said Mallory.
“And I dreamed that he had,” Merry said. “I saw him bury her. In my dream.”
“You dreamed it?”
“Yes,” Merry said.
Silence huddled around their booth—while all around them, the bursts of laughter from kids and teenagers, the clink of dropped silverware and shouts of the short-order cooks seemed to fade. Instinctively, Mallory moved closer to Meredith on the plump red plastic bench.
“Did anything like this ever happen to you guys before?” asked Drew.
“Not until just before the fire,” said Meredith. “We don’t know why it was then and we hope that it will never happen again.”
“What did he do to that girl out there?”
Mally said, “He scared her. But I think he would have raped her.” He would have murdered her, she thought, hearing Meredith think the same thing.
“I don’t know how to take this,” Drew said.
“Seriously,” said Mallory. “We think David set the house on fire at our uncle’s on New Year’s Eve. We think he’s the one who was banging on the door when I was home alone.”
Drew raked his reddish hair. “It’s like part of me wants to believe you, and part of me can’t.”
“If I told you we felt like that, too . . .” Mally said.
“Then I would believe you,” Drew said. “Brynn, what are you going to do now?”
“Nothing. Sleep and not have dreams.”
“Nothing since that night?”
“No,” said Merry. “Except I dreamed about the girl we saw out there on a bus.”
“Did you ever think about me telling him that I know?” Drew asked, making a sculpture on his plate with his fries, a house and, behind it, two rectangular squares. Tennis courts.
“That’s great!” said Mally. “That is a great idea! Tell him you know. He’s scared of you. You’re big. You’re our friend. You wouldn’t be scared he’d cut your tires or anything?”
Drew lounged in the booth. “You’re such a kid, Brynn. If he did cut my tires, do you think I’d have to think twice about who did it? And if he would have done anything really bad out there, they could have practically followed the trail of breadcrumbs to his house. Tire marks. Fingerprints. Hair and blood. He left everything but his name written down.”
“I never thought of that,” Merry said.
“That’s why you have me.”
But one day, Kim pulled Merry aside and said, “I have a message from David for you.” Merry’s stomach turned to frost.
“What?”
“He says he’s sorry he scared you that time. He was being weird. That’s what he said.”
“Okay.”
“What did he do?”
Siow, Merry thought to her sister. And with Mallory’s words in her mouth she said, “He should be sorry. He splashed me on purpose with mud when I was running. I didn’t even know it was David. I just heard this car behind me and thought I was going to get run over!”
“Oh, that sucks,” Kim said.
“Maybe all guys are idiots at his age. It made me get over liking him, though.”
“Drew isn’t an idiot,” Kim answered.
“Drew’s not a guy to us. He’s our friend.”
To Drew, they were grateful, forever, for their freedom. When the Brynns ran into David at the multiplex, he was with a group of guys and merely smiled briefly at Tim before slipping into another line to buy tickets. He looked away when Mallory stared at him, his jaw flushed.
The girls no longer saw David cruising when they ran. He seemed as eager to avoid them as they were to avoid him. They ran together in the mornings now—Merry moving the ritual of choosing her clothes to the night before. Each day, they pushed themselves a little farther up toward Crying Woman Ridge.
Their legs grew chiseled.
Mallory soared down the field.
Merry’s tumbling was spectacular. Cheerleading tryouts for high school were only a month away.
Merry knew that Kim couldn’t understand why she didn’t hang out after practice as she had last year. And it wasn’t easy for Meredith to go home on the beautiful long spring nights after practice. But she had a strange sense of the world holding its breath, as if what seemed to have ended would come with a final symphonic note, a final clap of thunder after a rain shower. After a taste of adulthood, which she imagined as a daily confrontation with life-changing choices, she felt safer being a little kid.
Kim asked her, “Is it because of how David acted? He’s acting so freaky. He’s barely speaking to me, Merry. Is that why you don’t hang out?”
“It’s not, Kim. That was my fault,” she said, the words sour in her mouth. “I had this little-girl crush and it wrecked his relationship. That’s not why I’m not hanging out.”
“Then why? I mean, I completely understand you not wanting to be at my house, but you don’t do anything!” Kim said. “Everyone asks. Caitlin and Erika and Crystal and Alli, everyone.”
Meredith pretended to be ashamed. She finally lied, confiding that she was grounded until the end of school, except for cheering practice.
“I told you about studying. Well, my grades were crap. If I’m going to try out in the fall, I had to raise them to be eligible. And of course, my perfect sister got nearly straight A’s.”
Merry made Kim promise not to tell, and recognized sadly as she did that telling Kim to keep a secret was a guarantee that she wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone else.
Sadly, also, she told Will Brent, who now seemed terribly sweet and safe to her, the same thing. She had to work on her grades. She goofed
off too much. High school was coming. They would both meet other people. He was puzzled and hurt. Merry thought, This is so great. I really like him. We’re so lucky we can see the future and the past.
She wished the school year would wind up fast. The second semester had been the longest two or three years of her life. Although she looked forward to high-school tryouts, there was a veil over even that. She wasn’t a tough girl. She wasn’t the kind who went looking for trouble. Why, she thought—as Mally had months before—did she have to be this bizarre way? One night, as she was reading—God! She, Meredith Brynn, was reading a novel her mother had given her, and because she didn’t feel like doing anything else!—Merry realized that she and Mally had closed themselves into a cocoon.
It was much safer.
It was much lonelier.
She wondered if a point would come when they knew for sure that they could venture out.
The late April day of Mally’s first game—at home—finally arrived.
Eden let the coach know she needed a family-related absence that day, which didn’t go down too well. He told Mallory she would have to be at forward, so she sank deep into practicing shot drills. She thought of those who called her the Quitter. So on the nights when there was no formal practice, she spent hours passing and kicking in the backyard.
The night before, Tim worked with her until he gave in, saying Mally had worn him out. And Mally was bushed, too, and chilled, as though she were coming down with something. She woke every hour that Friday night, annoyed by the slow crawl of the red digital numbers of the clock. If she couldn’t get some decent sleep, her reactions would be slow, her understanding of the scope of the field—Mally’s best gift as a player—would be blurry. Finally, at four a.m., she got up in disgust, brushed her teeth, and sat in silence on the back porch, cross-legged, for hours, visualizing plays.
Just after seven, she made coffee for her dad.
“Jitters?” he asked. Mallory nodded. It was more than that, though. She hadn’t dreamed, but something was nagging at her.
“You’re ready, superstar,” Tim said. “You own that field. It’s your home turf.”
“I know, Dad. Where’s Merry?”
“Took off on her run already. She told you to hit ’em.”
“Merry got up at seven o’ clock to run?”
“Don’t have a heart attack,” Tim told her. “She wants to catch most of the game. She’ll come later with Mom. Ready?”
“Ready,” Mallory told him, but her body was disconnected from her head.
Adam climbed into the backseat of Tim’s truck with its stencil of soccer balls on the side, lined up like dominoes.
Meanwhile, Merry was still running. She felt happy and strong, even though she was alone. Although her mother had offered the night before to come with her, Aunt Karin had called first thing in the morning, asking if she could possibly bring baby Timothy over to see if he had an ear infection or a virus. The poor kid had been up all night sobbing. All in all, Merry thought, it was just as well. She needed to finally accept that she was safe—anywhere in Ridgeline, her sleepy little town with its nightmares washed away.
When she got to the foot of the hill path, she had a strong desire to see if she could make it up past where she and Mally had turned back the day before. And so she began to climb up toward Crying Woman Ridge, up to the opening of Canada Road. Her legs wanted to quit on her. Her lungs wanted to quit on her. But it still felt good, pushing herself to the wall, thinking of Mally running nonstop for almost two straight hours at her game. Finally, she hit the top of the path. On impulse, though she’d already run two miles, some of it uphill, she turned and headed toward their family camp. A little fire road she’d never noticed looped away off “their” road, directly under the rocky shoulder of the ridge, and seemed a natural place to make her turn.
So, barely running now, Merry slowly gave herself over to the pleasure of thinking about how great it would feel to head downhill. She nearly passed the odd, rectangular clearing at the back of the loop, where someone had cut and piled brush to make a clear space probably ten by sixteen feet wide. Stones were placed at regular intervals—some smaller mounds were encircled by little stones, larger ones marked by stones taken from the ridge, from the top where the ridge dropped away sharply to the Tipiskaw River that ran through the New York State hills surrounding Deptford and Ridgeline. From the Brynn camp, a long path veered back and forth to take walkers down to fish or swim. But the bigger kids—although they were routinely forbidden—loved to climb up and look over at the places where the sheer drop was sixty feet.
Merry stopped, lunged into a stretch, and stared at the stones.
When she realized what they were, her throat closed as though she were swallowing her own heart.
She turned to beat it back down the hill.
But David stepped out from behind the brush pile and said, “Hi, Merry. I know it’s you, because I passed your sister, the Terminator, at Memorial Field on the way here.” Paralyzed, Merry listened as David said, “So, you see, it’s just you and me, Meredith. I knew that eventually the two of you would make it up here. And someday, it would be only one of you. Like when that bitch Mallory had a game. I can explain how you followed me up here and told me how depressed you were. I tried to stop you. I tried to grab you, but you were too fast for me.” He made a sad clown face.
Meredith began to run, but she was tired and David gained on her in an instant. He grabbed her shirt and then her hair.
“My mother knows where I am,” she said.
“So what?” David asked, letting go of her hair and then twisting her arm up behind her back until she cried out. “It’ll all be over by the time she gets here.”
“David, why?” Meredith pleaded. “Why?” She had to buy time. “You’re not a bad boy. You can get better.”
“Are you saying I’m sick?”
“David, you know you’re sick!”
“You stupid cow. Remember how Mallory felt when she held that nail gun on me? I feel that way all the time.”
“No, you don’t!” Merry said. “You’re sweet to Kim, and to your mom!”
“Only because I have to live with them,” David said.
“So the girl at the tennis courts? She wasn’t the first?”
“You don’t need to know that. But, okay, what does it matter? She wasn’t. Not by a long shot.”
“None of them is . . .”
“Yes, one of them is! And no one knows where she’s buried,” David said cheerfully. “Or even who she is.”
“Please let me go,” Meredith said. “Please think of Kim! Kim loves you! You can’t do this! Let me go. I won’t tell. I didn’t tell before, did I?”
“Not a chance,” David said.
“Then let go of my arm so I can pray.” She fell to her knees on the hard ground. “David, you’re a Catholic, like us. Don’t you know that—”
“Do you think I’m afraid of hell, little troll? I am hell,” David said.
Meredith dropped her head on her hands. Siow, Mal, she whispered in her mind. Siow, I’m afraid. I hurt.
Across town, Mallory sneaked the shot into the net after the tall forward, Trevor Solwyn, faked a shot and passed to her. But Mallory didn’t get up from her slide and do the happy dance.
Trevor, for weeks regretting her snarky comment, jogged to her side. “Mally? Mal?” Trevor said, and shook Mally’s shoulder. Mallory’s eyes were half closed, her lips pale. “Coach!” Trevor shouted. “Mally hit her head! I think she’s knocked out!”
Tim was down four tiers of bleachers in four seconds, Adam scrambling behind him. Madison Kirkie’s mother, a doctor, also jumped down onto the grass, all 180 pounds of her, and trotted over to where Mallory lay. In a row, like young deer, the two teams of leggy girls stood with their arms linked, silent with fear. But before Dr. Kirkie could get there, Mallory was awake, then quickly up on her knees, screaming, “Meredith! Meredith!”
When Tim got to her, she grabbed
him with all her strength, almost ripping the sleeve from his windbreaker with the team logo from Domino Sporting Goods.
“Daddy!” she shouted, not caring who heard. “Daddy, we have to leave right now! We have to leave right now.”
The coach said, “She needs to see a doctor, Tim. She conked herself a good one!”
“Mallory, settle down, honey. I’m going to take you in to urgent care. It’s our second home now,” Tim said. He had to drag Mallory toward the car as she protested.
“Be okay, Mally!” called Madison and Casey. Trevor bit her lip.
Mallory was already pleading with her father. “Dad, please! This is like the other time! At the cheerleading meet. I didn’t hit my head, Dad! Meredith is in trouble! Please, Daddy, listen. Remember when we were little and she was lost in the woods? This is like that! Daddy, please!”
An electrical prickle ran along Tim’s palms. “I’ll call your mother,” he said, and did. They spoke briefly. When he snapped the cell shut, he said, “Meredith should be back from her run any minute, and your mother thinks you may be having little seizures—”
“Daddy! Merry left before us! That was hours ago! Our run takes forty minutes. Call home. Call Merry’s cell.” Tim did, and listened to his own voice answer the home telephone. He was frightened then, unsure what to believe. Merry’s cell rang and he heard her message: “Merry Brynn! Your turn!”
“She’d answer! She always answers! Always! You know Merry would rather cut her finger off than miss a phone call! Please listen,” Mallory begged. “I’ll go to the hospital. I’ll have my brain scanned. I’ll let you check me in. But first drive up to where we run, almost to the camp. Please, Daddy!” Tim hesitated. He would never forget the time that Mallory “talked” tiny Merry out of the woods.
But Campbell told him to meet her at the hospital. “Oh God!” Mallory screamed, throwing herself around in her seat belt like a chained animal. “Give me the phone, Dad! Give me the damn phone! At least that.”
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