The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”

  Cindy put one arm on my shoulder. “Penny will be staying with us tonight.” She looked down at me. “No arguments.”

  I wasn’t about to argue. The thought of going home and sleeping alone in my cold bedroom, worrying about Dad and trying to shut out the images of the night, was less than appealing.

  “Is it true?” Dex asked. “Was it Bryan and Cassidy?”

  Cindy’s brow furrowed. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “They said on the news that two bodies were found in the woods with a truck. They didn’t give names, but . . .”

  “That was fast,” I said. I doubted the sheriff would be happy that the discovery in the woods was already part of the news cycle.

  “So . . . was it them?”

  “Dex,” Cindy warned. Her hand tightened on my shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, it’s not okay, but . . . there’s no use hiding from it. I’m pretty sure it was them.”

  A sound escaped from Dex’s mouth then, something between a sigh and a gasp. Like the air was being involuntarily pushed out.

  “I think maybe it’s time we all get some rest,” Cindy said. “Dex, why don’t you sleep on the couch and let Penny take your room?”

  “No, really—” I started.

  “Of course,” Dex said, already heading toward the linen cabinet in the hall.

  “You don’t have to go to any trouble. . . .”

  But Dex and Cindy were already moving in tandem, taking sheets out of the closet and arranging pillows on the couch.

  Then Cindy’s hand was on my back and she was ushering me into Dex’s room. Though I hadn’t been here in years, it was almost exactly the same as I remembered it. A small television sat in one corner, surrounded by a variety of game consoles and clusters of wires. The walls were covered in posters from sci-fi and fantasy television shows and movies. A line of dusty action hero figurines lined one shelf near the door.

  Dex’s bed was the only thing that was truly different. Instead of a narrow twin bed covered with a bright Pokémon spread, there was a larger queen with a dark blue bedspread pulled aside to reveal twisted maroon sheets. It didn’t look like a child’s bed anymore, but like somewhere an adult would sleep. It was disconcerting, suddenly, to picture Dex in that bed. Alone, or maybe even with a girl . . .

  “You’ll be okay in here?” Cindy asked me gently. I turned to look at her and managed a smile. I wanted to talk—about what I’d seen, about how scared I was for my dad, but she looked so tired in that moment as she pulled her robe more tightly around herself.

  “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”

  Cindy nodded and left, easing the door half-closed behind her.

  I sat down on the edge of Dex’s bed and looked around the room. There was no way I was getting any kind of sleep tonight.

  A shadow passed by the door.

  “Dex?” I called softly.

  After a moment, Dex stuck his head in.

  “Everything okay?”

  “It’s my dad,” I blurted.

  Dex’s features softened and he stepped into the room, lightly closing the door behind him.

  “People are showing up dead in the woods, and he’s out there. I don’t know if he’s camping, like the sheriff said, or chasing down a lead like you seem to think, but he is out there. Somewhere.”

  Dex took a step toward me and sat down next to me on the edge of the bed. He smelled like shampoo and sleep and boy.

  “Before tonight, I was worried about Dad. But I was also mad at him. I really thought I might be able to find him, and he’d have some lame excuse . . . but what if something happened to him? Something really bad?” I asked. It felt awful, saying the words aloud. It gave them more weight, more meaning. More of a chance they were true.

  Dex was silent for a long moment.

  “You think something did happen to him,” I pressed. “You said that from the beginning.”

  Dex sighed and shifted on the bed. “I know . . . but I am wrong about most things, remember? You’ve said that from the beginning.” He gave an attempt at a smile. “I’m sure he’s okay.”

  “Do you really think that, or are you lying to make me feel better?”

  Dex sucked in his bottom lip and fixed his eyes on the floor, as if he was seriously considering my question. Finally, he shrugged. “Maybe I’m lying to make myself feel better.”

  I thought his answer would make me feel worse, but it did the opposite. The sheriff had done little more than shrug off my concerns, but Dex was here, sharing them. He was just as worried as me.

  “Do me a favor, okay?” I asked. “No lying. Not even to make us feel better. If something did happen to my dad, we have to face it. We have to figure out how to find him.”

  Dex nodded enthusiastically. “Deal.” He paused. “Does this mean I can talk about the Visitor theory again?”

  “No.”

  “Because if what happened to Bryan and Cassidy is the same thing as what happened to that hiker—”

  “Dex,” I said, my voice a warning. “Let’s stick to the facts.”

  “Facts. Got it. I can do that.”

  He didn’t sound totally convincing.

  “I mean, I can try,” he said.

  I smiled a little despite myself.

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked, pulling my legs up so I sat cross-legged on Dex’s crumpled sheets. “The sheriff said he’s going to look for my dad, but I can’t just sit around and wait.”

  “How about first thing tomorrow morning, we stick to our plan of looking through your dad’s important files, the ones in the safe. I don’t know the combination, but maybe we can figure it out together. And maybe there’s something he left behind, some clue to tell us which direction he went in at least.”

  “Okay.” I sat up straighter, my breathing more normal. “It’s a place to start, anyway.”

  Dex sat next to me in silence for a few more moments, as if unsure what else to say. His fingers drummed a beat against his knees. “Do you want some company for a while? We can watch a movie or something. Something light. Like Pixar, maybe.”

  It was almost tempting, and I wasn’t eager to be alone. But I didn’t want to lose myself in a fantasy world, either. I wanted to stay in this one. I wanted to sort through all the weird facts twisting through my head until they came together in a clear pattern. Until they revealed something true.

  “I’ll be okay, Dex. Thanks, though.”

  “Right,” he said, pushing himself up from the bed. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  As soon as the door was closed again, I lay back down against Dex’s pillows. I shimmied out of my jeans and put them on the floor next to my purse. I took out my phone and checked the time—1:13 a.m. I wondered if it was too late to text Micah. He probably wasn’t sleeping, either. But what would I say?

  Thanks for getting me out of that pit full of bodies?

  Sorry your friends are dead?

  Are you okay?

  He wouldn’t be okay, I knew that. And no text could make what happened tonight any better. I set my phone down on the floor and leaned back in the bed.

  I kept telling myself to reach up and turn off the lamp on the nightstand, but dreaded the moment that the room would plunge into darkness. I left the light on. But my mind kept going back to the woods, to the leaves and darkness, to the charred skin and fingernails of kids I once used to pass on the playground every day.

  To my dad.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness, but didn’t really get more than ten minutes of sleep at a time. The light burned red dots through my eyelids, but still I didn’t reach up to turn off the lamp. After what felt like several hours, I heard a familiar chiming noise and jumped nearly a foot in the air. I reached over the side of the bed and picked up my cell phone, sighing heavily when I saw it was only 4:00 a.m. The chiming noise had been my email notification.


  I lay back on the pillows with my cell phone in my hand. It wasn’t like I was going to get any real sleep that night, anyway.

  I clicked open my email to see I had one new message. And then I stopped breathing.

  It was from my dad.

  Fourteen

  Penny,

  I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to reach you these past few days. I really meant to be there to pick you up from the airport, but this story I’m chasing in Saskatchewan turned out to be bigger than I expected, and I had to stay for longer than I meant to. Like an idiot, I forgot my phone charger, and my cell died on day two. I’ve been out in the backwoods, far away from civilization. But I finally drove forty miles just to find internet to send this to you. I’ll be in touch soon to let you know when I’m coming back.

  Love,

  Dad

  “Well . . . that’s a relief, at least,” Dex said, rubbing his eyes and leaning back on the living room couch, which was covered in sheets and blankets. He smiled up at me, where I was perched on the cushion next to him. It was still dark out, but I hadn’t been able to wait to show him the email.

  “This is great news, Penny. Ike’s okay.”

  My eyes ran over the first line of the email again.

  “I don’t know where my dad is, Dex. But he is most definitely not okay.”

  Dex sat up, blinking. “What do you mean? He says right there—”

  “Read it again. Really read it.” I thrust the warm phone into his hands and watched as his eyes skimmed the screen.

  “Does that sound like my dad to you?”

  Dex just scratched his neck as he read the email. I sighed in frustration.

  “First of all, my dad would never start out an email like that with an apology. If he knew he’d let me down, he’d find some way to frame it like it couldn’t be helped. And he wouldn’t get angry at himself for forgetting his phone charger; he’d get angry at his phone for dying in the first place.”

  “Yeah . . . that’s probably true. . . .”

  “And look at this,” I said, pointing out the first line in the email. “Penny. He said he named me Penelope for a reason, and he hated Penny, remember? He and my mom used to argue about it sometimes.”

  “I remember. . . .”

  My eyes locked on to Dex’s, which were filling up with confusion and fear.

  “Oh my God,” Dex said, jumping off the couch. He started to pace back and forth in front of the coffee table. “So what does this mean? Maybe . . . maybe the email is in code, and he’s trying to warn you of something? Or maybe someone broke into his email account so you’d stop looking for him. Or maybe . . .”

  The more Dex spoke, the more uneasy I felt. It should have been easy to dismiss his half-baked theories, but when I’d opened the email, I’d wondered the same things myself. I’d had the same thoughts as Dex, someone who had five—five—different books on Area 51 on his bookshelf.

  But there was something wrong with that email. And it wasn’t a hunch—it was a fact. Dad would never call me Penny, not ever.

  Dex was still pacing in front of me. His blue-and-red Spider-Man pajamas passed by in a blur. I reached out one hand to stop him, and he came to a halt right in front of me, his knee hitting the palm of my hand.

  “Dex,” I said. “Let’s think horses, remember? Not zebras.”

  Dex looked like he was going to argue for a second, but then changed his mind. “Okay. So where do we find the horses? Or . . . the facts? I’m kind of losing hold of your metaphor here.”

  “The horses are the truth,” I said, taking the phone from Dex’s hand and scanning over the email again. “And I have no idea how to find them. I have no idea what’s going on, or where my dad really is.” I looked up and caught Dex’s eye. “But I bet you a million Canadian dollars he’s not in Saskatchewan.”

  I twisted the dial of the lock for the fortieth time, listening to the click-click-click noise it made under my hand. My dad’s safe was about half my size and pushed into the corner of his tiny office.

  Dex riffled through my dad’s desk, which was covered in folders, old copies of Strange World, case notes, and bills. They were mixed in with snapshots of me at various ages, which had been handled with various degrees of care.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “No. Not yet,” Dex said.

  I leaned my head against the cool metal of the safe and sighed. “There’s got to be something in here. Something worth locking up, at least. But I have no idea what the combination is. It’s not my dad’s birthday, or my birthday, or either of my grandparents’ birthdays.”

  Dex bit his lip, staring at the combination lock. “Let me try something.”

  He came over the safe, and I made space for him. He crouched down low and used his long fingers to spin the combination lock this way, then that. He pulled on the lock, but nothing happened.

  “What did you try?”

  Dex shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It was a long shot, anyway. Do you think your dad wrote the combination down somewhere?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe? I mean, did my dad ever mention being paranoid about his work, or thinking someone was after it?”

  Dex shook his head. “No. He mostly thought no one believed him. Even his editor was a skeptic when it came to Ike’s investigation into the Visitors.”

  I sighed, and my eyes skimmed upward to my dad’s corkboard. The top right corner was devoted to pictures of aliens and UFO landings. In one faded photo, a white creature with a bulbous head and round, coal-black eyes stared blankly into the middle distance. The photo had been there for as long as I could remember, longer than almost anything else in the room.

  Was it possible my dad really did believe in the Visitors? Even if he didn’t actually believe in any of the other stuff he sold to Strange World for a little bit of cash . . . aliens were the one thing he kept coming back to, again and again.

  For the hundredth time that morning, my mind drifted to what I’d seen in the woods the night before. The remains of Bryan and Cassidy, twisted and charred. But the ground beneath them had been untouched. There were no other signs of a fire. . . . What could have done something like that?

  I stood up quickly. “I’m going to check his bedroom, see if maybe he wrote the combination down on something in there.”

  Dex nodded absently from his position at the desk chair.

  My dad’s room looked exactly as it had the last time I’d checked in on it. I stepped in carefully and looked around at his half-opened closet, the socks spilling out of one drawer, the dirty plate on the nightstand. I felt like I was trespassing, like at any second, my dad would come in and ask me what I was doing in there.

  But I just took a deep breath, walked over to the nightstand, and opened the top drawer. I moved through some of the items inside—a crossword puzzle book, various pens, an old glasses case, movie ticket stubs. I moved aside a packet of Kleenex and underneath found—

  Condoms.

  I slammed the drawer shut quickly, catching my pinkie finger in the process. Without thinking, I yelled out.

  “You okay?” Dex came running into the room to find me standing by the nightstand, my pinkie finger half in my mouth.

  “No. I mean, yeah. I just slammed my finger in the drawer, that’s all.”

  “Anything good in there?” Dex moved toward the nightstand.

  “No!”

  Dex stopped abruptly and gave me an odd look before reaching for my hand. “Let me see.”

  He took my hand before I could do or say anything and turned it over carefully. He ran one of his fingers gently over the newly reddish skin on my pinkie, examining it. As his skin moved slowly against mine, the hairs on my arm began to rise.

  “Just a bruise, I think,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling my hand back quickly. Dex blinked, and for a moment he looked like I’d just thrown cold water on his face. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,”
I said. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything in here, though.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” Dex said, taking one hand out of his pocket and running it through his hair so it stood up on end. “Your dad kept files on every story he was working on, but I can’t find many for this latest one. They have to be in that safe.”

  “Well, unless you’re an expert at safecracking . . .”

  Dex shook his head.

  “Yeah, me neither. But we don’t just stop because we hit one dead end. If you’re trying to uncover a story and one path turns up nothing, you just start again with another.”

  Dex leaned up against the doorjamb, watching intently as I started to pace around the room, thinking.

  “So what’s the other path?” he asked.

  “We ask for help.”

  Dex raised an eyebrow, and I sighed. “I can’t think of any other option right now. We know that my dad’s out there somewhere, and that he didn’t send me that email. Which means he could be in trouble. But since we have no idea where to start looking for him, and just the two of us could never comb the whole woods alone . . . we need to get the help of someone who can.”

  “Someone like . . .”

  “The sheriff.”

  Dex screwed his mouth up to the side. “You think he’ll believe you? About the email?”

  “I think I have to make him.”

  Fifteen

  AS SOON AS we rounded the corner onto Main Street in Dex’s car, I heard insistent honking and the jumbled voices of a crowd, two things that were completely out of place on an early summer afternoon in Bone Lake.

  Once we parked, the source of the commotion became clear. Three large vans bearing the logos of various news stations were parked along the sides of the street, in one case blocking off access to the community bank. A crowd was gathered in front of the police station. I recognized a few of them as the parents of kids I’d gone to school with: Mrs. Chidester, who used to babysit me, and Mr. Harlan, who owned the shooting range. Hector was there, and Mrs. Anderson. Some people I recognized from the bonfire a few nights before were there too, though I didn’t see Micah anywhere. I felt a small pang as I imagined what he must be feeling right now. I hoped he wasn’t alone.