“Thanks,” Daniela said. “I feel safer already.”
Cadie was as tall as Daniela now. Sitting next to her felt different, yet familiar, as if the cells in her body remembered Daniela’s heartbeat. They watched the shadows without speaking. Moonlight skimmed Cadie’s feet, glancing the tips of Daniela’s toes next to hers. The stone settled into a stationary place in Cadie’s gut, where, over time, she would learn to ignore the weight.
* * *
The following morning before her parents woke, Cadie snuck into the woods carrying the tambourine. The rhythmic trill against her thigh gave her courage as she walked. She imagined the sound forming a protective force field around her. A bouquet of ferns and Queen Anne’s lace lay in front of Friar’s grave. Daniela must have picked them on her way home the previous night.
Cadie knelt on the ground to arrange the ferns in a fan over Friar’s grave. She would miss the individual pieces of this forest. The oaks, beech, and hemlock. Rotting logs, moss, and the dew on spiderwebs. Bird calls she knew by heart. But the forest itself and the secrets it enshrined, she could walk away from.
“I’ll never forget you’re here,” she whispered.
She did not want that ache back. She had mourned Friar. She had let go of Daniela. She had let go of everything. Or at least she had tried.
Cadie collected four rocks from the periphery of the clearing and added them to the stone outline of the rowboat. Over the past two years she had made a habit of adding stones to fill in the gaps. She could tell Daniela had been adding stones too, although Cadie had never seen her do it. Larger rocks had settled into the soil and become a permanent feature of the forest floor. The outline had grown sharper and more defined. Cadie wondered if Daniela would continue adding stones after Cadie moved.
The white speckle of waterlilies, their broad petals already open to the morning sun, greeted her as she pushed through the curtain of dew-covered hemlock branches to step out onto the rock where she and Daniela used to meet.
Her tambourine rang out in a crystalline shimmer above the morning mist on the lake.
Cadie sat so her toes dipped into the water and untied the stiff, sandy rope tethering the rowboat to the birch tree. She wound the rope into a neat coil on the bottom of the boat and straightened the oars, exactly the way she had found them two years earlier.
Cadie tilted her face up to the sun and stuck her tongue out. She focused on the air, but the lemon fizz was gone. She scooped up a mouthful of lake water. The water tasted mossy, the way she imagined lake water had always tasted to everyone else. She swished it around her teeth and spit it out in a stream. Instead of feeling emboldened by the minerals in her lake and the smell of her forest, she felt tied, like a ball to a chain, to the land and stone that underscored every step she had ever taken.
She pushed the boat into the same gentle current that had brought it to her. It twisted until it found its path and slipped away, as if it had never been there. For a moment, she panicked and almost dove in after it. It was her boat. But then again, it had never really belonged to her.
33
PRESENT DAY
Still shaking from her encounter with Clyde, Cadie skidded into her driveway and ran inside to find a flashlight. She rummaged through kitchen drawers.
She had to find Sal before the fire did.
It felt as if time had stopped in those kitchen drawers. Marbles mixed in with grimy pennies, paper clips, and keys that no longer had locks. No flashlights. She dumped the contents of the next drawer on the kitchen counter. Three nickels spun like tops on the butcher block.
As the last coin collapsed on the counter, the lights went out. The hum of electricity fell silent in the walls. No birds outside. No crickets.
The power went out frequently, she told herself. Nothing to worry about.
She grabbed her backpack. The tambourine rattled inside the canvas bag, a sound that had accompanied her up and down mountains. A sound meant to warn wild creatures. A noise that might alert a thirteen-year-old who did not want to be found. Cadie set the tambourine on the counter.
A vehicle with red flashing lights pulled up her driveway. When Cadie got to the door, she found Ryan in full fire gear.
“What do you want?” Cadie said.
“We’re asking residents of the Hook to voluntarily evacuate.” He spoke to her as if they were strangers.
His ugly words at the Deer Park rang in her mind. Pale purple bruises edged in yellow marred Ryan’s cheek and jawline from Cadie’s and Raúl’s fists. Ryan touched his jaw when he noticed Cadie inspecting his injuries.
“You have twenty minutes to gather up any important belongings. If you need a place to sleep, there’s a shelter at the rec center. Can we have your word that you will clear out within twenty minutes so we can check the house off as evacuated?”
“Yes.” Cadie grabbed a coffee mug her mother had made and stuffed it in her open pack.
“Is anyone else here? Does anyone else live here?”
“No. You know no one lives here.” She scanned the shadow-filled cottage. Would this be the last time she saw it?
“I’m following protocol.” He looked at Cadie’s foot tapping against the floor. “It’s going to be okay, as long as the wind doesn’t turn. But we aren’t taking any chances.”
“Got it. I’m leaving.” Cadie walked toward the door. Ryan didn’t move.
“Is Garrett here?”
“I told you I’m alone. Not that it’s any of your business. Why?”
“Nothing, I thought—” Ryan looked embarrassed. “Never mind.”
He took a few steps toward the driveway and stopped. “I’m sorry about last night. Things got out of hand. I got out of hand. I said some stuff.”
“Don’t you have fires to put out?” Cadie pushed past him.
“I didn’t mean anything. I just…” Ryan looked like an overgrown child playing fireman.
“You need to go.” She tapped her boot on the floor. “Besides, I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
He looked at her with his upside-down smile and backed off of the porch without breaking eye contact. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you,” she said under her breath.
Ryan loped off like a high school football player. He would always be a high school football player.
Cadie tried Sal’s phone, but her own phone had no signal. She darted into the trees. It would take twenty minutes to get to the beech tree where she suspected Sal had gone to return the gun. Cadie’s feet knew where to go even if her eyes weren’t yet adjusted to the dark. She could navigate these woods without a flashlight and save her cell phone battery. She could be a squirrel, a deer, like she had been as a girl.
She moved down the path, past the stones marking Friar’s grave. A fern brushed against her leg, and for a moment she thought it was Friar, staying close as he always had.
As Cadie approached the clearing where she had hidden the gun in the beech tree, a feathery chill brushed across her bare arms. Dappled moonlight sifted down between the branches. Footsteps crackled in the near distance. She dropped to her knees and shimmied under a low-hanging hemlock to peer into the clearing. She crouched under the branches, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
She didn’t want to startle Sal.
On the opposite side of the clearing Sal stood about twenty feet away from a man Cadie could not see clearly. Had Clyde gotten there before her?
She resisted the urge to jump out and announce herself to Sal and the man. She fingered a dry oak leaf and listened.
“Tell me why you want it,” Sal said. Shadows defined the sharp bridge of her nose and the angular jawline she shared with Daniela.
“Let me have the gun and I’ll explain.” He took a step toward Sal. His voice sounded strained, ready to explode. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Cadie could almost feel his breath in her ear. On her lips.
The clouds shifted, illuminating the man’s face, Garrett’s face. The fear
prickling up Cadie’s neck melted down her back.
It was just Garrett. Dolores had called him like Cadie asked.
His familiar voice should have eased her fear. But the tension in Sal’s eyes made Cadie pause. Her pulse quickened.
“Don’t come any closer.” Sal’s eyes darted around the clearing. She lifted her arms and pointed the weapon at Garrett.
Cadie crept closer behind the low brush on the perimeter of the clearing and perched on her haunches behind a bush.
“What does this gun have to do with my mother?” Sal held both arms out straight, gripping the weapon. “Did she kill that man they found?”
Could the gun still fire after all those years sealed in layers of Ziploc bags? Was it loaded?
Cadie’s stomach twisted as she tried to push back the memory of Juan’s voice. Don’t point that thing at me. She had to stop Sal, but her joints felt frozen, her lips unable to form words.
Garrett stepped closer to Sal and clawed both hands through his hair.
“I want—” He paused. Moonlight caught the stubble on his jawline. The muscles in his cheek tensed as if he were chewing his words. “You need to put the gun down before you do something you’ll regret.”
Stay calm, Cadie willed Garrett, willed herself. And Sal. Please, Sal, put the gun down.
Sal inched her feet apart and squared her shoulders.
“You don’t want to have to live with shooting someone.” Garrett’s voice quivered like a child’s. “Trust me. I know.”
“Yeah, right. Who’d you shoot?” Sal challenged.
The oak leaf crumbled like dust between Cadie’s fingers; only the skeleton of rigid veins clung to the stem. Cadie put the stem between her lips and sucked on the dry stubble to calm her racing heartbeat.
A twig snapped under Cadie’s foot. She froze, waiting for Garrett to answer the question.
“Is someone there?” Garrett called. His eyes passed over her hiding spot in the shadows. The look of desperation on his face was like that of a scared child.
“Did my mother shoot that man?”
Garrett shook his head.
“Cadie did it, didn’t she?”
Cadie sucked in a sharp breath. How could Sal think Cadie killed someone? The accusation hit the tender spot Cadie had guarded for decades. She hadn’t pulled the trigger, but wasn’t she just as bad for having hidden the truth for so long?
“No.” His voice sounded raspy. “Cadie didn’t do anything.”
Tell her, Cadie pleaded silently. Tell her it was Clyde.
Garrett’s hand moved toward his waistband where the bulge of his holster stuck out from beneath his untucked shirt. In profile, his face looked distorted. Garrett, but not Garrett. The oak stem unraveled in Cadie’s mouth.
“You don’t understand. I panicked.” He slid his fingers under his shirt and wrapped them around his gun. His voice strained with a desperation Cadie had never heard from him, at least not from him as an adult.
There’s something I didn’t tell you.… Garrett had tried to tell her something.
No. There was nothing else to know. Clyde shot Juan. Cadie had been there. She heard it. She heard the shot. She heard it.
But she hadn’t seen anything.
She spat the oak stem out, but the threads coated the inside of her mouth with bitter particles.
He’ll do anything to protect his secrets, Clyde had warned her.
Garrett, with those soft blue eyes, had begged her, Please help me.
Cadie dug her fingernails into her palms to stop the truth from exposing itself.
Had Garrett pulled the trigger? Had Garrett killed Juan?
Her breath felt too fast, too loud. Her insides roiled as if the stones she had been carrying all these years had melted into molten rock. She wanted to reach back in time and shake the little girl with the red braids. How could you not have seen this? How could you not have known?
Had she known all along? Had some part of her known the truth? She reached into her pocket and rubbed her fingers over the coarse stone. The feeling of granite under her fingertips usually soothed her. Steady granite, the one thing she could always rely on. She had almost thrown the same rock at Clyde hours earlier, but maybe it had never been Clyde she needed to fear.
“Please, Sal, drop the gun,” Garrett said, his voice sounding unsteady. “You don’t want to shoot me. It will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“You shot him?” Sal’s eyes widened and she tightened her grip on the weapon that had killed Juan. The weapon Garrett had fired. The weapon he had asked Cadie to dump in the lake. “You killed that guy?”
If Cadie had done what he’d asked and dumped the gun in the lake, none of this would be happening. Or if she had turned him in. But Cadie hadn’t done either and now her secrets had drawn all three of them into the woods at this moment.
Garrett slid his gun from its holster without denying her accusation.
The little girl inside Cadie pleaded with herself to duck behind the bushes, to run back toward the cottage. But she was no longer a child. Sal would not pay the price for Cadie’s cowardice.
Cadie stepped out with her hands over her head. “Garrett. Sal, put the guns down. It’s me. It’s Cadie.”
“Cadie?” A little-boy smile flickered in the corners of Garrett’s mouth, then disappeared. He sounded confused, mounting panic evident as his eyes flashed from Cadie to Sal and back to Cadie. “Stay back. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Why are you here, Cadie?” Sal spoke through a clenched jaw.
Cadie couldn’t suppress a twinge of admiration, maybe jealousy, for the girl’s boldness.
“Cadie.” Garrett’s voice intoned the desperation Cadie had seen in his eyes as he waved her away from his pier that long-ago, but ever-present summer.
Cadie’s feet burned in her hiking boots. Her trembling knees quieted as the heat rose up her legs and filled her chest. Perspiration dripped down her neck, her back, between her breasts.
“Sal’s confused. Tell her to put the gun down.” Garrett shifted from one foot to the other and grabbed at his hair.
“Garrett.” Cadie tried to keep her voice calm. “I think you should put yours down first.”
Twenty feet separated him from Sal. As Sal looked toward Cadie, Garrett aimed his gun at the girl. He took one step toward her. Then another.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“I think I do,” Cadie said.
All the nights she had lain awake reliving the sound of that gunshot, she had wrapped herself in the myth that she had protected Garrett. She had saved the Summer Kid. And she had tried to protect Daniela’s family.
The muscles along his jaw twitched.
“Garrett.” Cadie stepped closer. “Please lower your gun.”
He ignored her and cracked his neck, never taking his eyes off of Sal. His hands trembled as he readjusted his grip on the gun.
Cadie fingered the bumpy stone in her pocket. She held time in her hand. Crystals of cooled magma from another millennium. In a vulnerable moment, under enough pressure, even granite bends.
Cadie hurled the stone toward Garrett’s head just as a gunshot exploded in the night.
34
PRESENT DAY
“Noooo!” Cadie felt a long wail rip from her throat and fill the clearing, although she couldn’t hear her voice over the pounding of her heart and the blood rushing through her ears.
The air above Cadie’s head sizzled. A bullet thunked into the tree behind her shoulder, and the smell of sulfur swirled around her.
Garrett slumped to the ground.
Sal froze with the weapon in her outstretched arms. Her eyes wide and unblinking, she stared at Garrett on the ground in front of her.
“Sal, you need to put the gun down.”
Sal did not move.
“Sal, it’s me, Cadie. Can you put the gun down for me?” Cadie tried to calm her voice.
“I shot him.”
“I need t
o check on him. Okay?” She wanted to run to him, to get there before he sat up and found his gun. If he sat up. Don’t be dead. She forced herself to move slowly so she wouldn’t startle Sal. Garrett, please don’t be dead.
He lay motionless on the ground.
Sal had not shifted her posture. Arms straight in front of her, hands locked on the gun.
Cadie touched a hand to Garrett’s chest, still rising and falling with breath. He moaned, and Cadie recoiled. Part of her wanted to find a bullet wound and press into it so he would feel the pain more acutely. And part of her longed for him to open those blue eyes and reassure her everything was fine.
This had all been a misunderstanding.
A whiff of smoke sifted through the branches, clinging to Cadie’s tongue. She spat in the dirt to keep down a dry heave as she ran her hands over the familiar lines of his chest, abdomen, face, and neck. And the smooth skin behind his ear. Unwelcomed tenderness edged in as she thought of pressing her lips against his neck.
“Cadie.” He grabbed her wrist and held her arm.
She yanked her arm out of his grasp and continued searching for a bullet wound.
Blood trickled between Cadie’s fingers when she touched the soft spot of Garrett’s temple, exactly where Cadie had aimed the rock.
“You didn’t hit him.” She looked up at Sal, who still had not moved. “I did. I threw a rock at his head. There’s no bullet wound.”
Sal lowered her weapon a few inches. “Is he okay?”
“He’s just stunned. But I need your shirt, quick.”
Garrett tried to sit up, but Cadie shoved him back to the ground.
Cadie leaned her elbow into his chest. “Don’t move.”
“Give me your shirt,” Cadie ordered Sal. “We need to stop the bleeding.”
Sal laid the gun next to her feet and peeled off her plaid button-down. She tossed it to Cadie and stood in her tank top, shivering in the warm air.
Cadie crawled past the shirt on the ground to grab the gun by Sal’s feet.
She would have recognized that gun with her eyes closed. She had dreamt of the precise weight, the texture of the grip panel. She touched her fingertip to the muzzle, warm from having been fired.
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