“It could be here, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Seems like you can’t count on much tonight, Baden. And I can’t count on you. That’s why we’re going to find her.” The second voice. Deeper. Still scratchy. And totally unrecognizable. “She’ll help us figure this out.”
“I told you already, dude. She doesn’t have a clue. We need to get our hands on Josh Lane.”
In spite of those pictures, I silently thanked Ben. He was trying to protect me.
“Look, Baden, you’re not in charge here. Not since you lost my shit. Trust me, we will find Josh Lane. And we will deal with him. But we’re also going after that little bitch you call a girlfriend. Because I don’t care what you say. She knows something.”
“Bro, chill already. She’s harmless. It’s not like she’s going to—”
“She’s not going to do anything. Because I’m taking over, you hear? And I’m not going to chill, either, you rich little prick. You think money can solve all your problems? Not this one. This is about more than money. This has to do with respect. And facing consequences. This is about protecting the game.”
I expected Ben to explode, to hop into the driver’s seat of his BMW and pull away with a squeal of his expensive, high-performance tires, leaving this guy behind. No one talked to Ben Baden that way. Ever.
But all I heard was silence.
The shuffling of feet.
“There’s nothing here, Baden.”
“I told you it was a slim chance.”
“Where did you get your little tip?”
“One of her best friends.”
“Because best friends always rat each other out? That was clever.” The guy with the scratchy voice had an even scratchier laugh. “And what, exactly, did she tell you?”
“Mia—the chick she ran with—had to pee, so they stopped for a few here at the tower before they headed back to the party.”
Brooklyn. Ben had talked to Brooklyn. I wondered what she had spilled. What she was able to keep to herself. How worried she was when she heard about how Mia and I had disappeared.
“There’s nothing over by the memorial.” Ben’s voice was weary. I wondered what he’d gotten himself into. I even felt sorry for him for a sliver of a second. Until I remembered the pictures he had stored on his phone.
“Where’d they pick up Josh Lane?”
The anger that surrounded the question scared me.
“They saw Josh back at Circle K.”
“Well, then, that’s our next stop. Let’s hit it.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Let’s hit it.”
I pulled away from Mia slowly, creeping my fingers up the wall and grasping tightly onto the edge. My legs were shaky and unstable as I raised myself and peered over the cool ledge of rocks.
I wanted to know exactly who I was up against. Who it was that felt so sure I knew the truth behind whatever big, dark secret I’d tripped into.
But I caught only a flicker as Ben backed away from the pull-off and headed toward town, to the Circle K, where Brooklyn had been smart enough to misdirect them.
As I watched the red taillights of the BMW flow around a sharp curve, I counted the things I had just learned about my new enemy:
He had a voice as rough as sandpaper.
He was wearing a dark pair of jeans and a gray hoodie with the hood up.
He was holding a small, sturdy object in his lap, his fingers curled tightly around the base.
As the sound of the car’s engine faded into the night, my mind tried to make sense of what I’d seen.
I felt it was important—something I needed to understand.
But I’d only seen a flash, just bright enough to spark and flare in the light of the moon.
16
JUST NORTH OF LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY – 1:27 AM TRIP ODOMETER – 128 MILES
JOSH AND I had been silent for a long time. I was confused about a lot of things but especially the way he’d mentioned my relationship with Ben. I wondered if Josh had ever cared. About me. About us. Or had it all been a lie?
I pressed my lips shut, not even glancing at Josh’s profile while he steered the car around the hilly terrain of northern Kentucky. The quiet darkness of the late-late night and the steady hum of the tires lulled me into a false sense of security. As if we could stay that way, silent but together again, forever.
The thing is, nothing lasts forever.
Just north of Lexington, Kentucky, Josh veered onto a ramp that led to a rest area. He eased into an open space and put the BMW in park, leaned his head back on the headrest, and closed his eyes. I thought he might drift off to sleep, leaving me essentially alone and totally unsure what to do.
He spoke, shattering the silence. “Look, Hadley, I don’t like this situation any more than you do. But we’re stuck together, so we have to make some decisions.”
With his eyes still closed, I took the opportunity to look at him, really look at him, for the first time since Penny died. Everything felt familiar—the freckles that dotted his nose, the way his lips were slightly parted, the curve of his cheek running into his chin.
“Like what?” I finally managed to ask.
“How about where are we going? What, exactly, is the plan?” Josh opened his eyes and tipped his head toward me, soft wisps of hair falling across his forehead, the lights from the dash illuminating his face. “And then there’s that paper bag to consider.”
“Right,” I said. “The bag.”
“It’s not smart to have it in the car.”
“So, you want to just throw it out?”
“Well, yeah. But I’m not so sure that’s the best idea.” He yawned. “We will have to deal with Ben. Eventually.”
“Right,” I said. “Ben.”
“I have an idea. But I don’t know if you’re gonna go for it.”
“Try me.”
“First, we have to figure out what we’re doing. Where we’re going.”
“We’re going south,” I said, as if that answered everything.
Josh grunted and shook his head. “But what’s our final destination? I mean, Kentucky’s great—it’s not Ohio, specifically not Oak Grove, Ohio—but we’re just driving around aimlessly.”
“We’re not driving aimlessly. We’re driving—”
“—south. I get that part. And I know what we’re running from. But we should be running to something, shouldn’t we?”
“I hadn’t thought of that part yet.”
“Well, it’s time.” He sighed. “Where do you want to go?”
“We’re almost to Lexington?” I asked.
Josh nodded.
“It doesn’t feel like it took too long to get here.”
“About an hour and a half.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like it. And it is spring break.” Josh raised his eyebrows. “We could go a little crazy.” I laughed, but the sound was dripping with nervousness. The next few minutes would determine everything. “Won’t I-75 get us to the ocean?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I vote for a beach,” I said, channeling my inner Penny. I had no doubt that she would take this thing all the way. “We could kick off our shoes. Run through the sand.”
Josh nodded, slowly. “That does sound pretty tempting.”
“We have a car.”
“Okay, I’ll play along. What about cash? That’s a lot of gas money. And food? Not to mention, where would we stay?”
“You think too much. I have one of my mom’s credit cards for emergencies. This is an emergency, right?”
“I guess if you kind of squint your eyes until your lashes blur everything together, it might look that way.”
“As for the rest, who cares? I’ll sleep in the car if I have to.”
“What about your mom? Won’t she freak if you’re not home by curfew?”
I looked at the clock on the dash. 1:33 AM.
“She thinks I’m spending the weekend at Brooklyn’s. I can always call and say I’m staying an
extra day or two since we’re on break. What about your parents?”
“Mom’s working the graveyard shift in the ICU now, so I hardly see her anyway.” Josh’s eyes dropped to the steering wheel. “Dad … well, he’s around. But kind of not at the same time. He won’t notice if I don’t make it home.”
I wondered what he meant but decided not to ask. “So we’re good?”
Josh looked out the windshield, his lashes sweeping up and down. When he nodded, I reached across the console and grabbed his arm, squeezing.
“Good.” I wanted to thank him. But I couldn’t get the words out.
“Right. Because stealing a car and driving it from Ohio to Florida makes so much sense.” He looked down at my hand, which was still gripping his arm. I let my fingers melt off his skin and drop away.
“So, what’s your idea for Ben’s little bag-o-drugs?” I asked.
“We stash them.”
“Stash them?”
“Yeah. I’m thinking here.”
“At the rest area?” I looked out Josh’s window, watching a man with a scruffy face and puffy eyes ease his way out of a red truck and start toward the vending machines standing like soldiers in the bright lights of the welcome center.
“Not on the counter of the ladies’ room or anything. We hide them. Back in the woods. Bury them at the base of a tree, mark the trunk, and head out. I don’t want them near us. With that load of party favors, if anything goes wrong, we could get busted for distribution.”
“It could work. But there’s one thing.”
Josh looked at me. “What?”
“I want to know what’s in that bag. Exactly what every pill is. We’re not going to be able to find that out unless we take a few.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to swallow any of that crap. It’ll make you feel like a zombie. And zombies don’t make good drivers. There’s no way I can get us all the way to Florida, so you’re going to have to drive, too.”
“Not taking as in swallowing. Taking as in what we did with this car. Borrowing. There’s gotta be someone who can identify them.”
“Even that’s a risk, especially if we’re driving so far.” Josh pulled his phone from his pocket. “But we might be able to figure out what everything is without having them in the car.”
“How?”
“I know someone who might be able to help.” Josh motioned for me to grab the bag from under my seat. “Pull one of each pill out and put them on something flat and dark so they’ll be easy to see. Then take a picture.”
I leaned down and started unrolling the paper bag, reaching in to pull out the largest plastic bag. My hands were shaking. It might have been the middle of the night, but the rest area’s parking lot was brightly lit. The man with the scruffy face and puffy eyes was walking back toward us, a steaming Styrofoam cup in one hand, his keys in the other. He got into his truck, nodding to Josh and me with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
Josh yanked on the driver’s-side door handle and shoved his way out of the car just as the man revved his engine and pulled away. The scent of exhaust filled the BMW.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Gotta take a leak. While I’m gone, I’ll look for a place to bury the package. In the meantime, you might want to think about getting in the backseat so you’re not so visible.”
Just then, a car pulled into the empty space next to my side of the BMW, a minivan spilling out a weary-looking mother and father and two sleepy-eyed children wearing pj’s.
Josh ignored them and walked toward the restrooms. The mother wobbled behind him, pulling her children alongside her, the father trailing them all. I hit the lock and climbed into the backseat.
It didn’t take me long to separate the smaller bags. I took one pill from each and lay them a few inches apart on the black leather of the seat. When I finished, I stared down at an oblong white pill, a round yellow one, a deep-blue capsule, and two different sizes of round white discs. They all had some kind of code depressed into or stamped on one side. I’d made sure the number/letter combinations were face-up.
I leaned back to the front of the car and grabbed my phone. It was vibrating, but I didn’t care. I’d turned the ringer off after my last chat with Ben. It felt strange to think he was still calling. When the buzzing stopped, I woke up the phone. I had thirteen new voice mails, seventeen texts, and eleven new Facebook notifications. I ignored them all and took a picture, the flash lighting up the whole car.
In the glare, I saw Josh’s backpack lying on the floorboard, right beside my foot, shoved halfway under the driver’s seat. I glanced through the large windows that fronted the welcome center, toward the entrance to the men’s room, and then again to the backpack, wondering what a guy like Josh Lane carried around everywhere he went.
I almost reached down to grab it. To slide the zipper of the main pocket open and dig around for some answers.
But a car eased into the empty space next to the driver’s side—some kind of sedan, which was better than a truck or SUV. Lower to the ground meant less opportunity to peer in and see what I had spread out in front of me.
The front of the car was black.
But then I noticed something strange.
The passenger door was white.
And smack in its center was the decal of a large star.
Parked beside me, stepping out of his car and hiking up his heavy-duty utility belt, was a trooper, a member of the Kentucky State Police.
17
THE WITCHES’ TOWER – 11:37 PM
“THIS IS bad, Hadley,” Mia said, her voice a shrill whisper.
“This is bad,” I agreed.
Mia stood from her crouched-down hiding spot, her hands gripping the ledge of the tower to steady herself. “This is really bad.”
“But we can handle it.”
“Handle what? The part where you decided to pick up the guy who killed Penny and—”
“Josh didn’t kill Penny. Not like everyone makes it seem.”
“He hit her with his car. She died. Broken down to its simplest form, it goes a little like this: he killed her.”
“It was an accident,” I said, feeling a need to protect Josh. Finding him at the top of the tower earlier, hearing his voice and looking into his eyes, being so close again after so long—that had all thrown me off balance. But seeing the football team attacking him, hearing Ben and whoever that guy he was with say they were after Josh—made me want to put the past aside.
“You’re still defending him? After all this time?” Mia dropped her hands to her sides, curling them into fists as she took in a deep breath.
“You would, too. If you could step back for just a second and see the whole picture.”
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a little out of my element at the moment. Being chased away from a party for God only knows what reason, running through the woods, and then finding myself here of all places.”
“The tower saved us.”
“Yeah, but there are still those pictures. And that guy with the chainsaw voice. And the little fact that I have to pee.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again. If you’ll kindly walk down the creep-show staircase with me so I don’t die of fright before I can empty my bladder, I’d appreciate it.”
I was glad I’d kept the pictures of Penny a secret so Mia couldn’t add that item to her list. “We need a plan.”
“Obviously.” Mia’s voice softened. “But where are we supposed to begin?”
“Maybe with a pee break?” I smiled.
Mia rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I love you.”
“Obviously.” I grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the doorway. The staircase creaked as we raced down the steps, past that old umbrella that belonged to no one and everyone at the same time.
“Come on,” I said, leading her to the trails. “Back to the woods? Do we have to?”
“Well, I can think of a million reasons why we can’t go traipsing down
Old Henderson Road.”
Mia groaned, and I wasn’t sure if it was from irritation or the pressure on her bladder. We followed a curving trail that took us away from the tower, past the braided sister trees, and down a steep hill.
When Mia and I got to a flat patch, she ducked behind a tree. As I waited for her, I tried to calm myself. I’d made it this far, and I’d get through the rest just fine. Somehow.
“So,” Mia said, rounding the tree and making her way back to me. “What do we do next?”
“We have options.”
“Do we? Because it kinda feels like we’ve run out of those.”
“There are always options. Shall I list the ones I’ve come up with?”
“Please.”
We walked down the trail, moonlight flickering through the leaves and dancing on the path before us. “The way I look at it, we have a few issues that need to be dealt with.”
“I’m thinking you might be right.”
“First, there’s Josh.”
“An issue if there ever was one.”
“He took something from Ben.”
“I gathered that from the little tête-à-tête we just overheard.”
I veered off the main trail, taking a fork that led us down a path shadowed by tightly woven pine trees. The trail would widen as we made our way to the place I knew I needed to be. Mia followed willingly. I took that as a very positive sign.
“We have to find Josh. We need to know what he took from that car. It’s the only way to be sure about what we’re up against.”
“Agreed,” Mia said, “but how do we even begin to look for him? He’s practically a nonentity. Other than slinking around school, trying to make himself invisible, no one knows what he’s been doing the past year.”
“You’re forgetting that we have history, Josh and I.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Mia said. “You think you can find him?”
“I hope so. But before we can focus on that, Brooklyn needs to pick us up.”
“I like that idea.” Mia pulled her phone out of her pocket. “Why the hell didn’t I think of it?”
“Little sidetracked, I’m guessing, but before you call her—”
A Million Times Goodnight Page 9