“I didn’t know that,” I finally managed. I’d never thought about how much pressure must have been on him, to make up for his dad’s perceived mistakes in the eyes of all of Bone Lake.
“No one really does. I don’t talk about it much,” Micah said. “Not really sure why I brought it up, actually. Not exactly great first-date material.”
“It’s okay. I’m glad you felt like you could tell me about it.”
Micah turned to look at me, and his eyes were soft. “Yeah. So am I.”
The insides of my chest suddenly felt warm, and I was glad that Micah felt he could trust me enough to tell me something so personal. Of course, my next thought after that was how much Micah’s story about his dad would add to my article. There it was again—a jump of excitement, followed by a flash of guilt. He’d opened up to me not because I’d asked him questions as a journalist, but because I’d asked him questions as a friend—as maybe something more than that. Suddenly, my decision to put off telling him about the article felt less strategic, and more like a lie. Like I was taking advantage of his trust. If he’d been so honest with me, it was time for me to return the favor.
“Micah, I should tell you something. . . .”
When I looked up, I saw that Micah’s face was closer to mine than I’d realized.
“What’s that?” he asked, his voice a low rumble in his throat. His eyes focused on me, and I could practically feel his gaze lighting up my skin. His eyes roved over my face, and my head cleared of everything except for the sight of him.
“Um.”
Then Micah was leaning closer. His features turned blurry as my eyes half-closed, and I could feel his breath hit my lips. I lowered my eyelids completely and closed the centimeter of space between us. . . .
Crack.
I jerked back. Micah’s momentum brought him forward a little, but then he caught himself and opened his eyes.
“Did you hear that?”
Micah looked around. “What?”
“That noise?”
I looked out into the darkness around us and heard another snapping sound—it sounded closer this time. Micah’s eyebrows knit together, and I knew he’d heard it, too. He scanned the space outside the truck bed.
Another cracking noise, then another. They weren’t just coming from one location, but from all around the truck, from every direction. And they were getting closer. I reached out and gripped Micah’s hand without even thinking about it. He squeezed back but didn’t look at me. His head whipped from one side to another, trying to track the sources of the noise.
Then we saw the lights. Bright, white circles that caught on the ground, on tree trunks, on the surface of the lake. They moved and spun, beams of twirling light.
“What is it?” My voice was high and strained, and I moved closer to Micah’s shoulder, pressing into him. When one of the lights flashed across his face, I recognized his tight, clenched expression as fear.
A dark figure stepped toward us. It moved between the truck and the lake’s edge, and was coming closer. Soon, another joined. And another. In the swirling, chaotic motion of the lights, they appeared to move slowly, and I could only make out pieces of them at a time—a torso, a leg, a hood.
Panic pumped through me, a stream of it, a flood. I screamed.
Then, I reached down to the bottom of the truck bed, grabbed the first object I could find, and hurled it out at the figures with all my might.
“Ow! What the hell was that?”
I recognized the voice. The pounding in my heart didn’t lessen, but all of the fear that had coursed through my muscles transformed into something else—anger. Next to me, I could feel Micah’s shoulders relax.
“Seriously, what the hell did she throw at me?”
One of the lights came up off the ground and focused on the figure in front of me. His face was half-hidden behind a dark hoodie, which I could now see read Old Navy in faded type. He was looking down at the ground, half smiling.
Kevin.
He knelt down and picked up a half-eaten corncob.
Someone else behind him laughed, and my spine went cold.
“Reese?”
She moved the flashlight up to her face, illuminating it from beneath.
“Boo,” she said.
Two more figures moved from the darkness, though they didn’t hold their flashlights still long enough for me to see who they were. Like Reese and Kevin, they wore dark pants and hoodies. They laughed as they drew near.
“Did we interrupt anything good?” Kevin asked. “I can’t tell. Micah, is her shirt still on, man?” His smirk banished the last bits of fear from my system. I could feel my face starting to flush red, and from the gloating expression on Reese’s face, I knew she could see it, too.
“God, I hope so,” she said, her voice low. “No one needs to see those floppy things.”
“I do,” Kevin said. “Least I deserve for loaning out my truck.”
Micah made a light sound next to me, and at first I thought he was going to defend me, or tell Kevin to shut up, or to ask what they hell they were doing out here. But as the flashlights flicked over his face, it was clear he wasn’t about to do any of those things.
He was smiling. It was a sheepish kind of smile, a come on guys, be cool kind of smile. But it was a smile. It occurred to me, in one blindingly humiliating moment, that Micah’s friends must have known we were coming out here tonight; they must have planned this whole thing. . . .
“Micah?” I choked out.
He looked at me, and he must have seen the confusion and anger on my face. For a brief moment, he looked concerned. But then he bumped his shoulder into mine, playfully, and laughed.
“Come on, Penny. They’re just playing.”
I scrambled out of the pickup truck bed so fast, I scraped my shin on its edge. I bit down on my lip and tried to ignore the pain as I pushed through the circle of hoodie-wearing figures and started to run in the opposite direction from the lake.
“Hey, where’s she going?” I heard someone say, but I couldn’t tell who.
“Penny! Wait!” Micah.
I didn’t turn around.
“Come on, stop!”
“She never did have a sense of humor.” Reese.
I ran without thinking or planning, my only instinct to get away. I moved through the trees until I could no longer hear their voices behind me, and I kept going. In the daylight, I might have been able to find the path that led around to the other side of the lake, but in the darkness of night I saw only branches and shadows and fragments of the night sky. The old fear crept back into me, the one instilled through years of stories of lake monsters and boogeymen and aliens with smooth, domed heads.
Hollowed eye sockets.
Claws.
Teeth.
But I pushed it all down. None of that stuff was real. There was nothing out in these woods except for trees and bushes and dirt.
And assholes, apparently.
I could still hear Micah’s small laugh in my ear. I remembered his lips, moving closer and closer to mine, and my face burned. I ran harder, slowing only when branches scraped against my face or when I stumbled against a root.
“Penny!” I heard Micah scream out, but his voice was a long way away. Was he following me, or was he still at the lakeside, laughing with his friends?
I pushed forward, though I knew it would be smarter to stop and catch my bearings. But I would rather run through the woods alone than turn around and head back to that truck.
After a few minutes, I began to feel a little winded. I slowed my pace and tried to hear whether someone was following me. I heard only crickets and wind, the rustling of leaves.
I started walking again, trying to pick out a deer path in the woods. I’d been back here a million times with my dad, and I knew if I just kept going I’d eventually run into something familiar. I crested a ledge covered with a fallen log, and there, sitting across from me in a clearing, was a small two-door truck.
&
nbsp; My breath caught in my throat. I wondered if maybe this truck belonged to Reese or one of the others. But I knew if the truck was here, the road couldn’t be far away.
I climbed over the fallen log and started across the clearing. I hadn’t made it two steps before I stepped on something that crunched softly under my foot, its edges poking up into the bottom of my shoe as it broke. It felt hard yet oddly fragile, like a stick covered in ice. Except there wouldn’t be any ice out here, not now. Not in June. I looked down and saw the object illuminated in the moonlight.
It was a human hand.
Charred, burned, and gnarled, but unmistakably human, with five fingers twisted toward the dirt.
I jumped back, and my hands flew to my mouth. The hand was connected to a dark, misshapen mass that was pushed up against the fallen log I’d just climbed over. I stumbled backward and away, but not far away enough that I couldn’t make out the figure lying there. I tasted chicken and corn and bile rising up in my throat, pushing against the sides of my mouth.
“Penny!”
Hearing my name yelled out in the clearing, so close, set off my jagged nerves. I jumped and whirled around. Micah was pushing through the woods into the clearing, close to the fallen log. I could only see his dark outline as he moved closer. I wanted to call out to him, to warn him, to scream, but when I opened my mouth, I felt bile rise up instead. I hacked and coughed, my hands on my knees.
I straightened and moved toward Micah, hands out, to stop him in his tracks. Instead, I tripped over something else on the ground and fell down, hard. I landed on my hands and looked behind me to see what I’d stumbled over. It was another body, charred black, nearly hidden in a small recess in the grass.
How many bodies were out here?
“Penny, what . . .” Micah stopped on top of the fallen log. He was looking down at the form lying below. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his expression.
I finally heard a noise escape from my throat, but it was only a whimper. I scrambled to get up, to get as far away from the second body as possible. As I pushed myself up off the ground, my arm slid against something hard and scratchy. Another hand.
The ball of terror in my throat finally loosened, and I went down again, retching into the grass. As everything inside of me came up onto the forest floor, I could still see the charred hand through the corner of my eye. This one still had fingernails, painted blue and gold.
Thirteen
HOURS LATER, I could still taste acid in my throat.
I sat on a plastic chair under a set of stark fluorescent lights. A thin gray blanket was spread over my shoulders. It scratched my neck whenever I tried to crane my head to see what was happening around the corner in the small workspace shared by the town’s deputies. The room was full now; it looked like every deputy and secretary in the force was on hand; plus, Julie Harper was pouring coffee in one corner, and a few townspeople milled about, having wandered in to see if they could lend a hand—or just to find out why the sheriff had been called to the woods at ten o’clock at night.
Sheriff Harper himself was on the phone, calling in for more reinforcements to scan the woods near the “scene.” And to collect the bodies.
He hung up and made his way over to the small hallway where Micah and I were sitting. Micah was hunched over in his own plastic chair, staring at his tennis shoes with wide, unblinking eyes. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other since he’d picked me up off the clearing floor and led me to the small access road by the lake. He’d been the one to call the police and explain what we’d found. He’d stood silently by my side as we waited for the squad car to drive up the dirt road and take us back to the station.
Micah barely glanced up as the sheriff came our way. Micah’s face was bone white against the shadows made by the harsh lighting of the hallway. The anger I’d felt toward him just an hour before felt so far away I could barely remember it, like trying to recapture the emotions of a dream. I had an idea of what was running through his head because it was the same thing running through mine—the smell, the darkness, the misshapen lumps on the forest floor that used to be parts of people. People he knew.
Sheriff Harper looked to me, then to Micah, then back again. He had bags under his eyes, and I wondered if he’d been sleeping when the deputy’s call came in. I pictured him on the brown La-Z-Boy where he used to fall asleep watching baseball games while Reese and I played in her bedroom as kids. Maybe the jangling phone call had startled him out of sleep, or maybe it had been a gentle nudge from Julie, waking him to let him know what had happened.
Either way, he couldn’t have been prepared for it in the slightest. Teenagers never died in Bone Lake. Not like this.
“Your mom is on her way to come get you,” the sheriff said to Micah. He turned to me. “And Cindy Wallace is coming for you.”
I gave a small nod.
“We have your full statements, so the best thing you can do now is go home and try to get some rest,” the sheriff continued. When neither of us responded, he cleared his throat and shuffled awkwardly in my direction. He put one hand on top of the gray blanket on my shoulder and patted it once, then twice.
“It was Bryan and Cassidy, wasn’t it?” Micah’s voice was flat and lifeless.
“We can’t know anything for sure until we identify the bodies.”
The sheriff’s words bounced around my skull. The bodies.
Micah just shook his head, slowly. “It was Bryan’s truck. I recognized it.” His voice lowered, so I could barely hear him when he added, “I was there when he bought it.”
The sheriff inhaled deeply before speaking. “I know you’ve both been through a trying experience. But we should really be careful not to jump to conclusions on what happened tonight until all the evidence from the woods is collected. There’s no need to upset folks until we know for sure, do you understand?”
Micah didn’t move or say a thing. I couldn’t stop seeing that burned hand, the one with the blue and gold nail polish. The colors of Bone Lake High School. The colors worn by cheerleaders like Cassidy.
For a moment, I thought I might be sick again. But some of the sheriff’s words got caught among the swirl in my brain and stuck there.
. . . until all the evidence from the woods is collected.
I thought of my dad’s photos. Shot after shot of trees, grass, and sky. And my dad was probably out there, right this moment. . . .
I shot up out of my chair, barely noticing when the gray blanket fell from my shoulders. Surprised, Sheriff Harper took a step back. Even Micah whipped his head up, seeming alert for the first time in hours.
“My dad,” I croaked. My voice sounded stiff. “He’s out there. He took his camping stuff. He’s in the woods—”
“Now, Penny—”
“Sheriff, what happened to those . . . what happened to . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say Bryan and Cassidy. Even more, I couldn’t bring myself to say the bodies. “. . . And then, the hiker that was found a few months back, and the deer . . .”
“Slow down, now,” the sheriff said, reaching out for my arm. I yanked it back, feeling panic course through me. Blackness swirled at the corners of my eyes, and a vibrating noise grew louder in my ears. If I didn’t sit down soon, I knew I would fall.
Sheriff Harper reached for my arm again and helped me down into my seat. Dimly, I could tell the workspace around the corner had gone quiet, and I wondered how many people had heard my little outburst. Micah reached out with one hand, his long fingers brushing briefly against my shoulder before falling away. I sat back in my chair.
“I understand you’re upset, Penny,” the sheriff said. His voice sounded smooth, his words logical. “We’re going to have to close off North Lake while we investigate this, and bring in reinforcements from other counties to search the area. We’ll find your dad.”
He sounded so sure. I managed a small nod, but the blackness stayed in the corner of my vision.
“I’ve known Ike for a long time, and I’m
sure of one thing—that guy can take care of himself. I’m sure he’s over in Cheboygan or even up in Mackinac as we speak. He’s probably popping open a cool beer, sitting by the fire—”
I flinched at the word fire, and the sheriff caught himself.
“Don’t you worry about it,” he said.
But I was already beyond worry.
“Penny?”
I turned to see Cindy half jogging, half walking down the hallway. She was dressed in flannel pajamas and an orange robe, and her tennis shoes slapped against the linoleum floor. She gathered me up in a hug, squeezing me as if she hadn’t seen me in weeks.
“Are you okay?”
“She’s had a pretty big scare,” Sheriff Harper said. “Thanks for coming to get her, Cin.”
“Of course.” Cindy kept one protective hand on my arm. She lowered her voice. “Any luck reaching Ike?”
My stomach twisted.
“We’ll get hold of him soon. I was just telling Penny,” the sheriff said. But he was looking down at his hands instead of at Cindy or me.
Cindy nodded, then looked to Micah. “Do you need a ride, hon?”
Micah shook his head. “My mom’s coming.” His voice was stilted, robotic.
Cindy looped an arm through mine and led me away from the room, keeping me close to her side as if I were suffering from hypothermia and needed body heat to survive. I looked back at Micah to say goodbye, but his eyes were once again open wide and fixed on the ground. He seemed far, far away in that moment. Too far for me or anyone else to reach.
Dex was waiting up for us to get home. As Cindy and I came in through the front hall, I saw him pacing the living room in an old T-shirt and Spider-Man pajama bottoms that were at least three inches too short. He noticed us come in and took two giant steps in my direction, as though he was going to pull me into a hug. But right before he reached me, he stopped abruptly, his arms falling awkwardly to his sides instead of wrapping around me. He cleared his throat.
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