I drove this stretch of road less than a year ago in Mom’s car. Only that time I was alone. I traveled I-17 for nearly two hours—up the switchbacks to the top of a hill called Cleopatra, and straight to the edge of a town that should have burned down three different times but didn’t. I headed for the state park with its museum dedicated to the mining industry, and on to the stamp mill where they used to crush the ore they’d dug from the mountains. That’s where the Yavapai County sheriff found Nell hanging from a tree by her big toe. Three weeks later, the old sheriff decided to hang up his gun and retire, leaving her case unsolved.
I stare at the dotted lines separating the traffic lanes until they start to look like chalk outlines of her body. When I look at the clock on the dash, I’m stunned to find that we’ve been driving for nearly an hour.
“So . . . where did you say you were taking me?”
“I didn’t,” Evan says, smiling slyly.
“Well, can I at least have a hint? Should I have packed an overnight bag or something?” As soon as the question is out of my mouth, I realize the implication and immediately envision any scenario in which Evan and I would be spending the night together. Now I want to hide in the trunk along with those mystery packets that Evan threw back there at the rest stop. I’m guessing Evan is imagining the same thing because he gets super quiet, then starts messing with the radio, complaining about the static even though there’s no static I can hear.
“It’s, well, I wanted it to be a surprise. We’re still about an hour away—I didn’t quite realize how far it was. It’s just that you said you’re into scary movies, and I thought you might like this as a . . . well, a field trip . . . like a date or something.”
My face is so hot, I am sure it’s going to catch fire despite the arctic chill of his freakishly cool AC.
“I didn’t mean to ruin the surprise,” I say, not worried about the surprise at all. Did he just say “date”?
“I thought it would be fun. It’s supposed to be, like, the most haunted place in the West.”
My stomach falls.
“What?”
“It’s this town I read about. They say it’s the . . . what’s the word they used? The most something place in the West.”
My palms are sweating. I can’t feel my fingers.
“Wickedest?”
“Yeah! How’d you know that? Oh man, I guess I’m not that original,” Evan frowns a little. He looks embarrassed. If I look as horrified as I feel, I can pretty much guarantee that this is the last time Evan Gold will take me anywhere.
“Evan, you’ve got to pull over,” I say, not really knowing why until I say it. All of a sudden, I think I might pass out.
“Damn, that lame, huh?” he tries to kid, but I can’t focus on anything except trying not to keel over in his car.
“Seriously, Evan. You need to pull over.”
“Okay,” he obliges. He sounds really worried. We’re conveniently approaching an off-ramp, the first in a series of exits leading to Black Canyon City. Evan’s driving faster than he was on the freeway, and my stomach is lurching trying to fight the momentum of the car.
He makes a quick right, then another immediate right into a parking lot with several motorcycles lined up next to a restaurant advertising “Fresh Homemade Pies Daily!”
Sliding into an open space in the dirt lot, Evan throws the car into park and unhinges his seat belt in one fluid motion, reaching for my shoulder with so much concern that all I can do is put my head between my knees.
After a few minutes of staring at the pores on my legs, I bring myself back to an upright position, wondering how long I can avoid Evan’s worried gaze. From what I can see out of the corner of my eye, it’s pretty intense.
“So, do you want to start or should I?” he asks.
“Start what?” I ask, still avoiding eye contact.
“With the awkward conversation. I mean, somebody has to take the first step and talk about what just happened.”
I laugh a little, and he looks slightly more at ease. Well, he doesn’t know I’m crazy. I suppose it’s just a matter of time.
“Maybe we should get a little food in you first, huh?” he suggests. Just before he pulls his key from the ignition, I see it’s already noon. Since I skipped breakfast, lunch sounds fantastic.
“Come on,” he says, squeezing my clammy hand. I swing my door open to rewelcome the baking sun, and I follow him to his trunk, where he removes a blue-and-white camping cooler. The yellow packages from the rest stop are peeking out from underneath the lid. Peanut M&M’s.
“What’s this?” I ask, genuinely surprised.
“Just a little something I put together. Follow me.”
We hike past the motorcycles around to the side of the restaurant, through some overgrown desert scrub to a clearing with two moldy-looking wooden picnic tables with attached benches. There’s an overflowing garbage can in the corner of the clearing with fat flies circling its contents.
“Not exactly what I had in mind for the ideal setting, but whatever,” Evan says.
I force a smile, feeling guilty for ruining his plan now that the initial shock of where we were headed has finally subsided.
Evan brushes some dirt and crumbs from the bench and starts pulling out a seemingly endless quantity of food from the cooler: two sandwiches wrapped in plastic, grapes, six granola bars, a box of crackers, a long orange block of cheddar cheese, and of course, Gatorade.
“Oh my God, is the football team meeting us here too?” I blurt out.
He laughs easily, his jaw flexing.
“I wasn’t really sure what you would like, so I kind of brought it all. Peanut butter with strawberry jam,” he says, offering me the least dented of two sandwiches, the grapes having squished them both in the cooler.
“Strawberry’s the best,” I say. “Why does everyone go for the grape stuff?”
“I know, right? Only the best for you,” he adds, and my face heats up.
“Glacier Freeze or Riptide Rush?” he asks, holding up both sweating bottles of Gatorade.
I grab for the Glacier Freeze. My mouth is so dry, I feel like downing the entire bottle on the spot. How is it Evan can look so relaxed, even after my epic freak-out just minutes ago? Because he’s perfect, that’s why.
We eat in silence, and I take a look around at the clearing and the back of the little shed that serves pies. With all those motorcyclists, I guess I would have expected loud music and some brawling over a pool table, like I might have seen in a movie somewhere. But the clearing is so quiet, I can actually hear both of us chewing. I’m sure Nell would have something more poetic to say than that.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“Oh, it’s uh . . . nothing. Nothing really,” I stumble.
“You’re a bad liar,” he says through a mouthful of peanut butter—which for anyone else might be gross, but on him, it’s totally adorable. “Like, the worst liar ever,” he keeps going. “You stutter when you try.”
“When have I ever . . . ?”
But before I can finish the sentence, I hear myself on the phone with him, trying to come up with some excuse for why he couldn’t come over—then for why he couldn’t come with me inside Oakside. In fact, it seems like nearly every sentence I’ve uttered to him has been some sort of half truth.
“It’s okay,” he says, then ducks his head a little. “It’s kinda cute.”
I’m suddenly fascinated by my peanut butter sandwich—afraid to look at anything but the strawberry jelly squishing out the sides where I’ve nibbled the crust.
“What happened back there?” he asks, nodding toward his car in the parking lot.
Here it goes. The fantasy couldn’t last forever. What was I thinking, assuming I could have a normal life?
“I’m sorry,” I say, putting down my sandwich in defeat. “I know I totally lost it.”
“Hey, I’m not blaming you or anything. A bad idea is a bad idea,” he says shrugging, but I can feel hi
s foot wiggling really fast under the table. I guess this is what self-conscious is like on him.
“No! It’s not that at all.”
He smiles a little, just so the corner of his lips crease. “So, what was it then?”
I take a deep breath and go for it.
“I know you’re kind of new here, so you’re probably the only person in a hundred-mile radius who hasn’t heard, but my sister . . . my sister, almost a year ago . . . she . . . ”
“I know,” he says, rescuing me. “I know about her.”
I nod. Of course he knows.
“So then you know where they found her,” I say, starting to get a little angry. If he knew, then what was he trying to accomplish by bringing me—?
Oh my God. It’s a joke. This is all just a joke to him. One of his football buddies put him up to it. He’s messing with me.
But Evan just looks at me, puzzled. “Where they found her?”
“Yeah, you know, the police. Where they found her. Her body.”
He shakes his head slowly, never pulling his gaze from mine, and we allow the words to hang in the air for a moment before I come out with it.
“She was in Jerome. You know, the wickedest city in the West? That’s where they found her.” I say that as evenly as possible. I want to see how he reacts.
Evan casts his sandwich aside and drops his head to the table, groaning.
“Shit, I’m such an idiot,” he says, shaking his head slowly. Then he looks up at me, his eyes wide.
“I had no idea. Jesus, Sophie, I swear I had no idea. I just thought it’d be fun to go somewhere with this, you know, eerie reputation. I swear to you, I didn’t know.”
And I believe him.
“It’s okay—”
“No, it’s not,” he interrupts me. “See, there’s more to it than that.”
The reassurance I’d felt a second ago quavers under the weight of doubt. I knew he was too good to be true.
“I had another reason for wanting to go there with you.”
“Yeah, and what was that?”
He pokes at his sandwich, then sighs. He starts to open his mouth, but reaches for my Gatorade instead of his own and takes a long swig. For the first time, he actually looks nervous around me. But it’s not the kind of nervous I feel around him. This is familiar.
And then it hits me. The way he’s fidgeting, the way he won’t look at me—it’s as if I’m two seconds from betraying him or uncovering what a freak he is. He has a secret too. One that he isn’t sure he can share with me. With anybody.
So I take a chance.
“Hey, it’s okay, you know. You can tell me.”
I reach for my Gatorade, and he lets it go like he’s ready to forfeit it to me, but I take his hand instead. Its wet chill from the condensation quickly warms in my hand. I have no idea where this boldness is coming from, but I don’t fight it. And he doesn’t either. In fact, a little smile creeps back to his lips, and his eyes finally meet mine again. I’m liking that more and more—when he looks at me.
“I wanted to find someone,” he says. “In Jerome.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this definitely wasn’t it.
“Who?”
He drops his gaze to the table again.
“This is kind of hard to explain.”
I laugh. “That’s usually my territory.”
He crinkles his brow like he’s about to ask me something, then shakes his head and continues. “I had this cousin—have this cousin,” he starts. “Deb. We were pretty tight growing up. Neither of us has siblings, and our families lived right around the corner from each other, and we might as well have been brother and sister.”
Hearing the word “sister” from his mouth distracts me, but I try to stay focused. I can tell that whatever he’s trying to say means as much to him as what happened to Nell means to me.
“We grew up going to private school together. We were the only kids in my neighborhood who did, so we relied on each other. She’s a couple of years younger than me, but still, she and I were sort of a team, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Nell and I and my mom and Aunt Becca were the same way. We may have gone to public school, and Nell might have been popular, but when she came home, it was just the two of us. Plus, she and I were the only people I knew our age who actually read books for fun—she with her poetry, me with my fiction.
“So anyway, we used to tell each other things. And she told me some . . . some pretty strange stuff.”
I keep quiet. Evan starts squirming around again.
“When we were really little, she used to say that she could see things. Like, things that weren’t there.”
I want to say something but I can’t. This all sounds too familiar, like he’s somehow read a transcript of what Nell used to tell me.
“I’d play along when we were little because I thought we were just pretending. But then we got older, and she didn’t stop. She wasn’t pretending. And when I told her I was, she got scared and told her parents about what she saw.
“So my aunt and uncle started taking her to this doctor. And for a while, we weren’t allowed to hang out together. They made her take medicine. I heard my parents talking about it with her parents. And then I didn’t see her for almost three months straight. They pulled her out of school. I’d ask my aunt and uncle about her, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”
Evan stops and looks at me as though he’s forgotten I’ve been listening the whole time. “Is this too much?”
I want to ask him which part. It’s felt like life in general has been “too much” for the past six months.
“No, it’s okay. Keep going,” I say instead. He looks relieved.
“Almost two years ago, my aunt and uncle moved away. They just up and left their house and moved east, to Florida I think. I asked my parents where Deb was, but they didn’t even know, just that my aunt and uncle must have taken her with them. How could they not? My parents never heard from them after that.”
He nods toward the candy he bought at the rest-stop vending machine.
“They were Deb’s favorite. After she went away, I don’t know . . . I guess I just sort of picked up the habit. Almost like a tribute to her or something.”
I run my finger over the outside of my silver ring. I know a thing or two about tributes.
We let a few more minutes pass with us just looking at our sandwiches. I hear the flies buzz around the trash can a few feet away, and I wonder how long it’s going to take them to make their way over to our untouched picnic lunch, which Evan so conscientiously packed when he thought this might be a somewhat normal date. And it occurs to me—he still hasn’t told me why he wanted to go to Jerome.
“Sorry, I still don’t really understand.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a lot of weird,” he says apologetically, but at least now he’s looking me in the eye again.
“No, I mean, what about today? About—”
“Jerome. Right,” he nods, fishing around in the bag of grapes and plucking a few from their stems. But he doesn’t eat them, just juggles them in the palm of his hand like dice.
“When I couldn’t get any answers from my family, I started doing my own digging to try to find out what happened to Deb. The problem was, I didn’t have enough information. I only knew what she said she was, you know, seeing.”
He finally pops one of the grapes into his mouth, but he doesn’t seem to register that he’s eating. As soon as he swallows, he continues.
“I started searching the Internet. I’d type in her symptoms—seeing things out of the corner of her eye; hearing whispers in her ear. Believe it or not, I found lots of information. And not just what you’d expect about schizophrenia and stuff like that. I mean, that came up too. But there was more.”
Up to this point, Evan’s story about Deb had been the same as mine. But this was new. I might actually start to get answers about what happened to Nell. And even though I know this should make me happy
, part of me feels like I’m in a speeding car headed toward a cliff. I’m not sure I want to hear it.
“What kinds of stuff?” I can’t keep myself from asking.
He leans in a little closer. “Stuff that makes you think maybe she wasn’t imagining it. Like it wasn’t all in her head.”
A shudder runs through my body so violently that I nearly tip backward off of the picnic bench.
“You mean, like what she was seeing and hearing was . . . ?”
He nods slowly. “Real.”
“Oh God.” I wrap my arms around myself. No one has put words to what I’ve felt ever since they started calling Nell schizophrenic—that there was too much that didn’t add up. Schizophrenia seemed too easy an explanation.
“You wouldn’t believe how much is out there. Blogs and databases and websites, all of them saying the same thing. That these people aren’t crazy—that the voices they’re hearing, the things they’re seeing, are real. There are doctors, psychologists who are studying these so-called sick people. And not all of those doctors are good.”
I’m starting to feel like I might pass out again. All I can hear in my mind is the fake empathy in Dr. Keller’s voice, the unidentifiable threat hiding behind his words.
“Anyway, one site gets updated pretty frequently. The guy calls himself ‘the Insider.’ A lot of the people behind these sites are total nutcases, but this one seems like he’s been there. It’s just a gut feeling, but I think he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows where the Insider is hiding out, except—well, I think I figured it out. I think he’s in Jerome. I guess I thought that if I could find him and talk to him, maybe—”
I stand up so fast that I bang my knees on the underside of the attached table. I start pacing in the clearing.
Evan’s voice floats to me as if from someplace far away. “What a lame date, right? Here I am, trying to make it sound like I’m taking you someplace original, but I really had this selfish motive. And then it turns out it’s the place where your sister—oh man, I suck.”
“Evan, stop. Okay? Just—just stop for a second.” My voice sounds low and froglike.
My head is spinning so fast it blurs my vision. Evan thinks the Insider is in Jerome. The same place Nell died after she ran off with—
The Murmurings Page 5