I didn’t scold him for swearing that time. His despair was so raw that I rested a tentative hand on his shoulder. His muscle was hard, tense under my fingers. “Tristen? What’s wrong?”
He looked up, misery in his eyes, and I wished I had the courage to be even bolder, maybe take his hand. He was scaring me.
“Oh, Jill,” he groaned. “It’s all pointless. The experiment can’t cure me.”
My heart jumped at the unexpected announcement. He said he’d kill himself . . . Whether or not I believed in the “beast” we had to at least try . . . “Why not?” I asked, mouth dry.
Tristen picked up the book again, leafing through, fingers tearing at the pages until he was almost at the end of the novel. “Listen,” he said, reading. “‘My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it, and it was without efficiency . . . I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.’”
Tristen slammed the cover shut. “Jekyll tried to recreate the formula to kill Hyde once and for all, only to learn that the original potion contained a tainted salt. The formula could never be repeated. That’s why he could never destroy Hyde. It’s such a brief passage . . .” He gestured to the box. “But it means this is all worthless for me.” He buried his face again, his voice muffled by his hands. “How could I have forgotten that? I suppose I got so excited by the idea that the formula even existed . . . I’m such an idiot. It’s all pointless.”
“No, Tristen,” I said with more conviction than I felt. “We’ll find an answer. We can read the passage again. Maybe you’re wrong—”
“No. I’m correct.” He dropped his hands and fell silent, staring into the distance.
I started to reach out to him again, but he seemed so distant, so isolated, that I let my hand fall to the table.
Yet a few seconds later Tristen turned and reached out to me, grabbing my wrist and squeezing it. “Jill,” he said, and I saw that his brown eyes were gleaming again—almost fevered, like Mom’s had been. “The list of altered salts . . . his last list?”
“Yes?”
“What if . . . What if your father was working on the formula, too?” he suggested. “I thought the old lock on the box gave too easily. What if your mother saw some list he was keeping just before he died . . . ?”
“But why?” I asked, confused. He was grasping at straws. “Why would Dad work with the formula?”
“I’m not sure,” Tristen admitted. His eyes clouded. “Perhaps . . .”
I waited, but he seemed to change his mind about speculating, saying only, “Who knows? But the coincidence is a strange one, isn’t it?
“Yes, but . . .” There was an element of coincidence—tainted salts in the book, my mom’s talk of altered salts—but it was thin at best. “I don’t think you should get too excited,” I cautioned.
“Perhaps.” Tristen absently rubbed my wrist, too hard, because in spite of my warning he was excited. “We need to find that list,” he said. “We need to find that ‘compartment.’” He met my eyes, shaking my arm. “You’ve got to ask your mother if she recalls what she said.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Tristen released my wrist, incredulous. “Jill, this is life or death for me.”
I rubbed the spot he’d clutched, feeling sick to my stomach. “I don’t have to ask, Tristen, because I already know.”
If a list of altered salts existed, I was pretty sure where it was hidden.
Oh, but I didn’t want to go to that terrible place.
Even though it was right in my own backyard.
Chapter 29
Jill
“MOM ALWAYS COMPLAINED about Dad’s messy car,” I said as Tristen pulled the school door shut then replaced the padlock. “He never carried a briefcase, so he just threw loose papers on the seats.” I smiled a little at the memory of my dad’s “filing system,” adding, “Unless it was important. Then he would jam it in the glove compartment ‘for safekeeping.’”
“So you really think this list—”
“If it exists,” I cautioned, “which I doubt.”
“If it exists,” Tristen conceded, leading us across the parking lot and toward the sidewalk, “it might be in the car?”
“Yes.” The night was chilly, and I rubbed my arms, wishing I’d brought a jacket. “But this is such a long shot, Tristen—”
“Are you cold?” he interrupted, looking down at me.
My teeth chattered. “A little.”
“Here.” Before I could object or even grasp what he was doing, he stopped walking and shrugged off an old striped dress shirt that he wore unbuttoned over a T-shirt almost like a jacket and held it out. “Wear this.” Tristen taking control as usual.
“No.” I raised my hands, pushing the offering away. “I can’t take your shirt!”
“Just wear it, Jill.” He sidestepped me and draped it over my shoulders. “Put this on and let’s get moving.”
“Okay . . . thanks,” I agreed. As we started walking again, I put my arms in the sleeves, which dangled past my fingertips. The shirt still held the warmth of Tristen’s body and smelled like the soap I associated with him. Wrapping myself inside, I inhaled, feeling not just warmer but somehow braver, like I’d donned armor or borrowed some of Tristen’s swagger.
Maybe I could do this: face my Dad’s car . . .
“Wouldn’t someone have noticed this list?” Tristen mused aloud as we moved across the parking lot side-by-side. “Surely you’ve used the car since your father died?”
“No, we haven’t,” I said. “We had it cleaned to get rid of the blood on the seats.” I flinched to say that out loud and kept talking to erase the image. “And then Mom parked it in the garage, threw a tarp over it, and never drove it again. It’s like we don’t know what to do with it. I mean, who would even buy it?”
Tristen halted again, seeming taken aback. “Your father was murdered in the car?”
“Yes, I thought you knew. It was all over the news.”
“I seldom watch news,” he said grimly. “Especially not that type. The grief others suffer is not my entertainment. I’ve misery enough of my own to keep me quite diverted.”
We continued walking again in silence, Tristen probably lost in the past, in thoughts of his mom, and me trying to face the future, where the interior of that car waited. It had been detailed, but what if it somehow smelled like blood? Like . . . murder?
We passed under a canopy of trees, both staring at the shadowed pavement when a voice broke the silence of the sleepy street.
“Tristen? Jill? Is that you?”
Chapter 30
Jill
“WELL, WELL, WELL.” Todd Flick laughed, strolling up with Darcy, who had called to us. “What’s going on here?”
“What do you want, Flick?” Tristen demanded, already sort of squaring off against Todd, who still wore a soft blue cast on his arm. “We’re busy.”
“Doing what?” Darcy asked, clearly suspicious. “Why were you in school after hours?”
My heart sank. We were busted. In so much trouble.
But Tristen didn’t seem nervous. “What we do in or out of school is not your business,” he said levelly.
“It is if you just broke into a locked building,” Darcy said, but with a hint of laughter, like she thought the idea was ridiculous. “That’s illegal!”
Oh, we were going to jail . . .
“You’re here, too,” Tristen pointed out with a shrug.
“Walking past,” Darcy countered, “on the way to my house. But you guys came out of the school. I saw you.”
“Yeah.” Todd draped his broken arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you two were fooling aroun
d in there or something. A little action on the wrestling mats, maybe?”
“You’re pushing your luck again, Todd,” Tristen cautioned. “Don’t go there.”
Todd ignored the warning, snorting a laugh. “Hey, Hyde, if you’re hoping Jekel will put out, you’re gonna be disappointed.” He withdrew his arm from around Darcy, smirking. “Good luck getting those skinny legs apart!”
“Todd,” Darcy snapped at him. “Stop it.”
I wasn’t sure if she was defending me or trying to save her boyfriend. If it was the latter, she was too late, because Tristen’s hand had already darted out, and before I knew what was happening, he’d grabbed Todd’s shirt and was twisting it in his fist, dragging Todd toward him, so in a split second they were nose-to-nose, Todd up on his toes, Tristen glaring down at the shorter quarterback. “Talk about Jill like that again, and I won’t bother with breaking your arm,” he snarled. “I’ll rip your whole damned, empty head off.”
There was something so menacing in Tristen’s voice that even Todd suddenly looked nervous. And I was scared, too. Terrified and flattered at the same time. Tristen was defending me. But was this the other side of him? Was I seeing it right there? He’d changed so abruptly, seemed so different. “Tristen?” I squeaked. “Um . . . Tristen?”
“Come on, Todd.” Darcy intervened more forcibly, tugging at Flick’s sleeve. She appealed to Tristen. “Tristen, let go. Please. This is stupid.”
I stood by, mutely helpless. Please, Tristen. Please . . .
Tristen remained tense, clutching Todd’s shirt, jaw set, eyes fixed on Flick’s. Then he suddenly shoved Todd away, stepped back, and to my complete shock, sought my arm, slipping his hand up under the long sleeve of his own shirt, twining his fingers in mine, and pulling us both back a step.
“Don’t ever make a crack like that again, Flick,” Tristen warned more calmly. “Not unless you want to answer to me.” He paused, then his voice dropped back to a low growl. “And god help you if you ever touch a hair on Jill’s head. They’ll find yours in a gutter somewhere.”
Without waiting to see if Todd replied—and I thought even Flick was smart enough to keep silent—Tristen pulled us both down the sidewalk, clasping my hand. I could feel Darcy’s and Todd’s eyes on us following our progress, probably staring at the point where we were joined: the hot, hot press of Tristen’s palm against mine.
I should have been terrified. Maybe horrified. Did I hold the hand of a . . . beast? Was it possible?
Tristen’s fingers clenched around mine.
But I wasn’t really scared. Mostly confused. Why did we hold hands at all?
When we reached the corner of Pine Street and turned toward my house, Tristen let go of me, and I realized that my palm was soaked with sweat. I wiped my hand on my jeans, wanting to ask what had just happened.
Had Tristen felt the monster that he swore lurked inside of him coming out?
And just as much, I wanted to know why he’d defended me at all.
But of course I already knew that answer. He’d protected me because I had the potential to help save him. I was serviceable, just like I was to Becca in the lab.
Jill Jekel: always needed, never really wanted. I should have had that pathetic slogan tattooed across my body—assuming I was ever allowed to alter my un-pierced, untouched flesh in any way.
We were still about a block from my house, but I pulled my arms out of Tristen’s shirt and held it out to him, forcing a smile. “Here. I’m not really cold anymore.”
“Are you sure, Jill?” He seemed distracted, already accepting the shirt before I even answered.
“Yes,” I assured him anyway, shivering.
We walked along shoulder-to-shoulder, me and a boy who might have just become part monster, until we reached the garage behind my house. The dark, dark garage where the bloodstained car, and so many old hurts and fears . . . and maybe one soul’s long shot for salvation . . . waited.
Chapter 31
Jill
“YOU’VE HEARD OF BROOMS, right, Jill?” Tristen asked after I’d switched on the single bare bulb that struggled to light our big sway-backed barn of a garage. “This place is in desperate need of a cleaning—or better yet a bulldozing.”
I didn’t bother to remind Tristen that maybe I’d have more time for sweeping garages if I wasn’t trying to save his life. I was too busy staring at the hulking silhouette of my dad’s old Volvo hunkered under the dirty tarp like a gruesome gift in filthy wrapping. I didn’t want to go any closer.
“Jill?” Tristen asked, checking my face. “It was just a joke . . . gallows humor . . .”
“This is even harder than going into his office,” I said, eyeing that vehicle like the killer might still be hiding inside. “Dad died in there, Tristen. He suffered.”
I expected Tristen to sympathize like he’d done in the past. But he didn’t. He just stepped past me and, like a magician unveiling his latest trick, stripped the paint-spattered canvas right off the car, tossing the tarp to the ground.
And there it was. The car in which my dad had been butchered, looking surprisingly normal.
“Like ripping off a Band-Aid, Jill.” Tristen clapped some dust off his palms. “Best to get these things over with. After you’ve sat inside, perhaps you’ll want to drive it.”
I stared at him, incredulous, not moving toward the car. “Drive it?”
“Why not?” He shrugged. “You don’t have a car.” He tapped the side of the Volvo. “And yet you do.”
“Tristen . . . I don’t even want to open the door.”
“Then I will,” he said, opening the driver’s side. He nodded toward the passenger side. “Your turn.”
I hesitated.
“Jill, I am very impatient to look in the glove box and will do so myself in about ten seconds,” he said. “But I honestly believe you should open the door. This effort to hide, to pretend the murder never happened, it’s not healthy. You’ve been in your father’s office. You know you can face this.”
I got a little upset with him then. “I thought you said you weren’t a psychiatrist like your dad,” I reminded him. “Maybe my mom and I are just dealing with things in our own way.”
“Your mother fell apart, Jill,” Tristen said.
I got really angry when he said that. “You don’t know what caused her breakdown!”
We stared at each other by the light of the bare bulb, Tristen resting one hand on the Volvo, me standing near the door of the garage. A part of me suspected that he was right. What Mom and I were doing—locking Dad away, pretending he didn’t exist—probably wasn’t healthy. But I didn’t have the courage to do anything else. How we dealt with Dad’s murder—it was like another rule, an unspoken code, that I followed.
The autumn wind blew, the rafters creaked, and Tristen ended the standoff, moving not toward the passenger door, which I knew he was itching to open, but toward me. He leaned down so we were eye-to-eye, and I saw again the soft side of him that I liked. Too much.
“Jill,” he said, “I’ve never told a soul this, but when my mother disappeared—when I knew that she was dead—I forced myself to go into my parents’ bedroom, and I lay down on her side of the bed, my head on her pillow, breathing in her perfume. The scent that she’d worn my entire life. I stayed there, choking on what had once been comforting and pondering what hell Mom might have suffered in her last moments. All the awful scenarios that had played around the edges of my imagination—I faced them head-on. And the strange thing is when I smell that perfume now, it’s okay again. Almost . . . welcome.” His gaze flicked to the car. “If you take this out in the sunlight a few times, you’ll get past the murder and start moving on to the good memories.”
I didn’t know what to say. I still wasn’t even sure how I wanted to remember my dad. My horror over his murder was mingled with my outrage over his deception, like oil and water that kept mixing and separating again and again.
What I did know was that I didn’t want to move. And
not only because I didn’t want to enter that four-door chamber of horrors that crouched on deflating tires just a few feet away.
No, I didn’t want to break the moment that Tristen and I were sharing. That communion of grief, it was getting stronger. And for me going beyond a shared misery. He was so strong. Not just physically but emotionally. He would kill himself if he had to . . .
I stared into his eyes and he watched mine, and for a split second I could have sworn, for the second time that night, that I saw my own growing feelings for him reflected there. Or maybe I was mistaken, because the wind blew again, the rafters groaned, and Tristen slowly straightened, distancing us. “Do it now, Jill,” he said. “Don’t hesitate longer.”
Listen to him, Jill. He understands this . . .
Taking a deep, ragged breath, I inched toward the Volvo, aware of Tristen trailing behind me, practically feeling his renewed eagerness as I fought my profound reluctance.
When I reached the side of the car, my hand stretched toward the door handle, and images, horrible images, began to chase through my brain. Dad . . . The flash of a knife blade . . . My father screaming . . . Blood coursing from a wound in his throat as he was dragged from the car . . .
But I kept moving, tugging on the handle, swinging open the door, my eyes darting around the interior, hunting for flecks of blood by the glow of the dim dome light.
Nothing. There was nothing.
I slid into the once-familiar vinyl passenger seat and snapped open the glove compartment. Papers and napkins spilled out, and Tristen, who had been looming above me, hands braced on the door frame and the roof, couldn’t check his impatience any longer.
“Well, Jill? Well?”
“I . . . I don’t see”—my hands flew through the mess. Why had Dad kept so much junk?—“anything.”
But then I noticed it.
The blood that I’d dreaded. Old and black but somehow distinctive, like only blood can be. A stain on a creased and crumpled and worn paper. A sheet that looked like it had been crammed into the compartment by somebody in a hurry.
Jekel Loves Hyde Page 10