by Elise Broach
I walked down the dark hallway. I could hear Kit in the kitchen, drawers scraping and rattling. It was a tiny house, not much bigger than an apartment. There were two bedrooms, but one was filled with junk: an old fan, luggage, cardboard boxes, the kind of stuff you put in a basement. The other one was his. The bed was unmade, a clump of sheets, with the bottom sheet pulled loose from the mattress. There were dirty clothes in a pile on the floor, an empty bag of chips on the nightstand. I tiptoed through the mess, looking around. I knelt on the floor and peered under the bed. A shoe, a magazine. I pulled open the drawers of the long bureau and cringingly felt through their contents, trying not to disturb anything.
Kit appeared in the doorway, shooting a quick glance out the bedroom window. “Six minutes,” he said. “See anything?”
I shook my head. “Did you find anything in the kitchen?”
“Nope. All his stuff, nothing with a girl’s name on it. He’s a mechanic.” Kit held out a small white card. “Has his own business.”
“Put that back,” I said, pulling away. “And can you check the storage room? Maybe he hid something in there.” I closed the bottom drawer of the dresser. Only the closet was left.
I looked outside again; still no sign of anything. The road was empty. Pushing open the closet door, I scanned the rack of hangers. Jeans. Plaid shirts. A sweatshirt. Who was this guy? It was impossible to tell. It felt so odd being in his house, such an invasion of his private world. Except this world didn’t seem private at all. Just blank and impersonal.
The shelf was too high for me to see what was on it. I reached up and groped along the edge. It was creepy, going through his things like this. I imagined his pale eyes watching me. I shivered. More clothes, a sweater. Then something hard.
I stopped. Stretching as high on my toes as I could, I pushed my fingers further onto the shelf.
There it was. A hard corner. It felt like a box.
“Kit,” I called. “Come here. There’s a box, but I can’t reach it.”
He came to the doorway, looking nervous. “Yeah? What is it? Time’s up. We have to go.”
“Help me get it down.”
Kit reached up easily and grabbed it. A brown shoe box. He set it on the mattress. We looked at each other. “It’s probably just some shoes,” he said.
“Yeah.” I sat down, lifting the lid.
It wasn’t shoes.
It was a bright clutter of objects. At first it made no sense. A gold button. A dangling earring studded with turquoise. A purple barrette. Little things. Girl things. The kind you lose or leave behind. It made me feel strange, sorting through them. In fact, it felt stranger and stranger, like they weren’t forgotten things at all. They were things that had been taken.
On purpose.
I froze, looking at Kit.
“What the hell…?” he said.
Two more earrings, without matches. I touched them, brushing them aside. A pretty decorated hair comb, wooden, with flowers painted on it. “This looks like what that waitress, Elena, had in her hair, doesn’t it?” I asked softly.
Kit frowned, taking it from me. “Yeah, it does,” he said.
I felt like we’d stumbled into the cave of an animal. A secret nest scattered with bones and fur, the remnants of lives.
Then I saw it. A tiny silver shoe, covered in red sparkles.
I picked it up, staring at it. It dangled from a broken link.
“Shit,” Kit said.
29
I dropped it as if it were on fire. The charm clinked when it fell, hitting an earring.
“It’s hers,” I whispered.
“Maybe not,” Kit said.
“Kit, it’s hers! It’s from the bracelet. Remember the other charms? They had links just like this.”
He nodded slowly, running his fingers through the jumble in the box. He picked up a small plastic vial. “What’s this?”
It was a medicine bottle, unmarked, half-filled with pinkish-white tablets. I took it from him and unscrewed the cap.
“Aspirin?” I asked.
Kit shook his head. “We need to get out of here.”
His fingers closed over my hand. “Luce, we shouldn’t even be touching this stuff. If this guy is some kind of pervert, I mean, if he did something to these girls, and that’s how he got their stuff … well, this might be evidence or something. And we’ve put our fingerprints all over it.”
I pulled my fist free and dumped a pill into my palm, slipping it into the pocket of my jeans. “I know. You’re right. But we can take this to the police. Maybe it’s cocaine.”
Kit just looked at me. “You think that’s cocaine? A pill?”
“Well, something else then. Something illegal.” I stared at the box again. “This is the guy, Kit. I know it. He did something to her. We’ve got to call the police. When they see the charm, they’ll know—”
And then I stopped. The police didn’t know about the charm bracelet. They didn’t know because I’d taken it off the girl before they’d had a chance to see it.
The charm would mean nothing to the police.
I turned to Kit. “The bracelet,” I said. “They don’t know about the bracelet.”
He looked at me, a long steady look, and took the bottle and cap from my hands.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Luce.” When I lifted my head, he was watching me with an expression in his eyes I didn’t recognize. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “But we have to go. Now.”
I stood numbly by the bed, barely able to nod.
Kit screwed the cap back on the bottle, wiped it on his T-shirt, and dropped it in the box. Then he set the lid on the box and carefully put it back on the shelf, arranging the pile of clothes to cover it. “Is that right? Is that how it looked?”
I knew he needed me to answer. I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Luce, come on. We have to get out of here.”
He tugged me away from the bed, and then there were things to do. It was good to have things to do. We moved quickly through the house, making sure it looked just the way it had when we came in. I let Kit out the front door and bolted it, then went back to the bathroom to climb through the window. Once I’d squeezed through, breathless and aching from the pressure on my ribs, I squatted on top of the propane tank. I slid the window back to its original position, then replaced the screen. Kit rounded the corner of the house. “What’s taking you so long? Come on!”
“Okay, I’m done,” I said.
We ran across the yard and scrambled into the car, flooring it out of the drive. A fog of dust rose in our wake, blocking the house from view.
30
We sped up the dirt lane toward the main road.
“We’d better not run into him here,” Kit said. “I mean, the guy’s a freak. And he knows what our car looks like.”
I twisted to face him. “Kit, what are we going to do? The charm—it’s the thing that proves he was with her. It proves he left her there.”
Kit shook his head. “Not without the bracelet.”
“But what can we … how can we explain it to the police?”
“I don’t know.”
We bumped onto the highway, heading back the way we had come. I looked out the window. I thought of him leaving her here, in the middle of this vastness, where he knew no one would see him.
“He can’t get away with it,” I said.
Kit stared straight ahead. “We don’t even know what he did.”
“We do,” I said. “We do know. You saw the stuff in that box. Those things didn’t belong to him. Kit, he took that charm from her, like some kind of sick souvenir.”
“Like you took her bracelet.”
“No!” I cried, stung. “No, it wasn’t like that.”
He glanced at me. “Listen, I can’t think about it now. Let’s just get away from here.”
“Okay. We’ll go back to Kilmore. We can stay there tonight. We know he goes to that diner.”
Kit shook his head. �
�We should go back to Beth’s and call the police.”
“And tell them what? That we broke into some guy’s house and found a box full of junk that proves he was with the girl? It won’t mean anything to them. Kit, please. Can’t we stay in Kilmore?”
“At that motel? What’s the point?”
I was silent.
“It’ll cost money.”
I shrugged at him. “We were going to stay at the hotel in Albuquerque anyway. This is no different.”
“That was on the way to Phoenix! That was part of the plan.”
“Well, the plan changed. Kit, please. Just give me a chance to figure out what we should do.”
“Yeah, you’re great at that. You’re full of brilliant ideas.”
I stared at the hard line of his jaw. “Stop.”
He looked at me, quiet.
Then I remembered the pill. I dug it out of my pocket and turned it over in my palm. It was large and circular, with the letters PAX on one side. “It says P-A-X on it,” I told Kit, holding it out for him to see. “Have you ever heard of that?”
He glanced at the pill but didn’t say anything.
“Well? Have you?”
“It’s E,” he said finally, his eyes on the road.
“E?”
“Ecstasy.”
“Oh.” I knew about ecstasy, a little, from the drug awareness talk at freshman orientation. “But that’s, like, a party drug, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would he have a bottle of that?” I didn’t understand.
Kit was quiet for a minute. “Didn’t Mrs. Corell talk to you guys about that stuff?”
Mrs. Corell was the Health Ed teacher. Everybody made fun of her droning lectures on sex, alcohol, and drugs because they were full of oddly specific instructions for the many ways Westview students could screw up their lives.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But I forget. What does it do again?”
“It’s a sex drug,” Kit said flatly.
I stared at him. “You mean, like, date rape?”
He shrugged, his face grim. “Maybe.”
“So all that junk in the box … Wicker must have…” I stopped, thinking of the girl. And the other girls. “Can it kill you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“But, Kit, there was something wrong with her heart, remember? Beth said she had congenital heart disease. Do you think he gave her the pill and it caused a heart attack?”
“I don’t know.”
I shuddered, rubbing my arms. “Kit, if he gave her that pill and it killed her … that’s murder.”
Kit said nothing, staring straight ahead at the long, gray ribbon of road.
31
It was mid-afternoon by the time we got to Kilmore. Kit parked at the motel with the neon cactus, the Desert Inn. The parking lot was empty except for a station wagon and a minivan. When we walked into the small front lobby, a bored-looking guy not much older than we were said, “Yeah? Can I help you?”
“We need a room,” Kit said, “just for one night.”
“Two beds,” I added quickly.
The guy scratched his neck and took a key from the rack behind him, sliding it across the counter. “Here you go. It faces the pool. You got a credit card?”
* * *
The pool turned out to be a small turquoise rectangle enclosed in chain-link fencing, with a narrow diving board at one end and scuffed plastic deck chairs scattered along the edge. Kit eyed it as we walked past.
“We could swim,” he said.
“Now?” I looked at him in amazement.
“Why not? It’s hot enough.” He stopped in front of a blue metal door and pushed the key into the lock. The room, cramped and ugly, made me wince. It had two double beds, tan carpeting spotted with stains, and a laminated, fake wood nightstand with a lamp on it. The bedspreads and drapes looked shabby. A large, garishly colored mountain scene, drenched in orange and purple, hung on one wall.
“Christ,” Kit said. “Now do you want to swim?”
“I want to figure out what we should do. I want to talk.”
He nodded, looking around. “We can talk at the pool.”
I sighed. The room was depressing, and suddenly I did want to swim, to do something normal and mindless for a change. “Okay.”
We’d brought our swimsuits because my dad’s condo complex in Phoenix had a pool. I took my backpack into the bathroom with me and closed the door, slipping off my flip-flops and standing nervously on the cold tile until I heard Kit cross the room and start rustling in his own bag. I stared at my face in the mirror over the sink. In the harsh fluorescent light, it looked different to me. Sharp and serious, bruised by shadows. The skin under my eyes had violet smudges. It had been days since I’d really slept.
I stripped and pulled on my swimsuit, wrapping the thin, white bath towel around my waist and knotting it.
When I opened the door, Kit was sitting on the edge of one bed in his swim trunks. He watched me walk across the room. I pulled the towel tighter around me.
“Cut it out,” I said.
“Oh, relax.”
We were the only ones at the pool. The white concrete deck blazed in the sun, scorching my feet. I hesitated at the edge, but Kit ran past me, soaring laterally through the air and diving into the water. I secretly wanted him to look awkward, but his dive was smooth and graceful. His body knew exactly what to do.
The splash sent a cold spray over me and I jumped back. He burst through the surface, shaking hair out of his eyes and laughing. “Wooo-hoooo! Come on, get in.”
I lowered one foot into the water, and the shock of the temperature made my toes curl. “It’s too cold!”
“No, it feels good. Dive in.”
I crouched on the edge, leaning over the water. I dipped my fingers in it. I thought about the girl, how the rain streamed over her face. “Kit, what if that guy—”
Kit shook his head firmly, swimming toward me. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just forget about it for a while.”
We can’t, I wanted to say. A girl is dead, and we’ve found the guy who did something to her. But I looked at Kit’s shining wet face, at the hopeful expression in his eyes. I felt tired of it, too, overwhelmed.
“Dive in,” he said again.
I shook my head. “I don’t know how to dive.”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I really don’t. I’m not a good swimmer.”
“Then jump in.”
I sighed, dropping my towel on the concrete. I took a deep breath and jumped in.
The cold water hit me like a slap, rushing over me and making my heart seize. My feet hit the bottom, and I came shooting back to the surface. The chlorine burned my eyes. “Oh!” I gasped. “It is cold.”
“Move around.” Kit swam closer, grinning. “You’ll warm up.”
I shivered in the water, kicking over to the side.
“So how come you don’t know how to dive?”
“Nobody taught me. My parents don’t swim much.”
“Jamie’s a good swimmer.”
“Yeah. Jamie’s good at most things.”
Kit was treading water a few feet away. “Does that bug you?”
“No.” I shook my head quickly. “I like it that he’s good at things. I mean, I’m good at things, too.”
“Such as?”
I frowned at him, because of course I couldn’t think of anything right then. “Well … drawing,” I said finally.
Kit swam closer, his hands moving easily through the water, cupping and circling, trailing pretty streamers of turquoise light. “Yeah, drawing. You’re good at drawing.”
A nervous warmth crept through me, like blushing on the inside.
“And something else,” he said. His face was so close I could see the tiny drops of water beading along his eyelashes and brows. They sparkled in the sun.
“What?”
He smiled at me.
My pulse quickened. I remembered the feel of his mouth, the taste of it. I pushed backward, widening the channel of water between us. “Not as good as Lara,” I said, trying to make my voice cold.
But Kit just grinned at me. “Well, Lara. She’s a lot more experienced. But you’ll get there. With practice.”
He glided over to me. Suddenly I was backed up against the wall of the pool, and he was close enough to put his arms on either side of me, his palms resting on the edge.
“Kit,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t.”
“Why?” He lifted his hand to my cheek, sliding his fingers into my wet hair, moving my face closer to his.
I started to say something—I don’t even know what—but then his mouth covered mine, sharp with the taste of chlorine, but gentle, even slow. His arm circled my back, pulling me tight against him, against the hard, damp wall of his chest. I couldn’t help it. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him back, breathing him in, touching his shoulders. His lips moved against my cheek. “Luce. Take a deep breath.”
And then his mouth was back on mine, firm against it, and we were sliding under the surface in a whoosh. The water was everywhere—cold and quiet—a dense underwater soundlessness that filled my ears, lifted my hair, cushioned us in a silent bubble. It felt like we were trapped inside one of those plastic snow globes, suspended in a place without sight or sound, with the storm whirling all around us.
All I could feel was his mouth against mine. Then he pulled us back up to the surface. When I felt the warm air on my face, I was dizzy and breathless. I pushed away from him.
“What are you doing?” I said, panting for breath.
“Kissing underwater.” He grinned at me. “Chick trick.”
I stared at him. I felt my cheeks flush, a rising tide of shame. Of course that’s what it was. That’s what everything was: a chick trick. The little jokes and compliments, the way he touched my hair or rubbed the back of my neck. I thought of Wicker and the girl. What trick had he used to get her into his truck?
“Well, stop it. I don’t like that,” I said. “Save it for Lara.” I swam across the pool, feeling his eyes on me.