She cupped Tom between his legs with one manicured hand, and the breath went out of him. Her fingers kneaded his shorts and Tom seemed to look down upon himself from a great height.
She grabbed his hand and placed it on her right breast.
He held it there loosely, as if moving even a fingertip might rupture it.
“Squeeze it. Feel it,” she said.
He did. They were heavier than Emma’s, her nipple thick and hard. Nerve endings from his palm to his brain caught fire and blazed away.
She moved his other hand onto her other breast. “I’m beautiful, Tom.”
He knew this. It was undeniable.
She clenched him hard enough for him to jump. “Don’t you want it?”
“No.” His voice was only a breath louder than a whisper because he wasn’t sure. Maybe he did.
“You should,” she sighed into his ear.
Tom knew he had to pull away from her, but he couldn’t. “Nate,” he gasped. She was squeezing him so hard. “He would totally—”
“But this is all about Nate,” she said.
He didn’t understand.
She was close enough now that her lips grazed his ear. “Because being with me is the closest you’ll ever get to being with him.”
Tom took her words. He parsed and split and reassembled them into every meaning he could conjure. He stared at her smirking face. Her laughing eyes and her mocking lips. Hate soaked him like a plunge into ice water. He shuddered under the touch of this creature. This monster.
His hands were still on her breasts. Without thinking, he pushed her away with all of his strength.
She was through the railing and halfway to the water before either of them remembered to scream.
Fourteen
“I called for her. I screamed for her, but she didn’t answer. I ran down to the undercroft, opened the launch, and jumped in the water, but it was so dark I couldn’t see my own hands. I swam and dove for as long as I could but I couldn’t find her. I kept calling for her, but she must have hit her head against the pilings. I didn’t mean to. I swear to God I didn’t. But I know it doesn’t matter what I meant.”
Nate could not find words. The man in front of him looked like his Tom, but this didn’t make sense, because how could his Tom have killed Lucy?
Tom took his gun from its holster. The room was dark, and the pistol was a wedge of obsidian.
“I tried to do it before.” He looked at the gun cradled in his hand. “I thought about it so many times.”
“Tom.” All other words were still lost to him.
Tom dropped the weapon into Nate’s hand. In his palm it felt heavy and cold and alive.
“Do it, Nate. That’s why you came back here, wasn’t it? To find out who killed Lucy and make them pay? The equations of pain have to be balanced. Murder makes it easy math.”
Nate lagged behind the scene like thunder from distant lightning. He tried to see what Tom had seen. He tried to reconcile this with the countless ways in which he’d imagined their graduation night unrolling and with what he’d learned from the chief’s files. When Tom’s words filtered through the maelstrom of his mind in a way that he actually understood, he tossed the gun onto the couch like it was on fire. “I’m not going to kill you, Tom. Christ. What’s the matter with you?”
“Dad must already have all the evidence somewhere in that closet. Jesus, maybe he’s known this whole time!” Tom went to retrieve the gun. “You’d be doing me a favor. You don’t know what it’s been like, Nate. You can’t imagine. And the equations of pain. You always said that—”
“Listen, Tom—”
“You listen to me!” Tom screamed. He threw himself into Nate, pushing him hard enough to send Nate’s elbow through drywall. The bottle of bourbon shattered against the floor.
“Tom.” Nate heard something dangerous in his voice. It was a tone that should have warned his friend away, but then it might have been exactly what Tom hoped to hear.
Tom threw a punch, and Nate caught it with his palm. He twisted his friend into a choke hold and they both fell backward onto the coffee table, snapping two of its legs. Books and empty beer bottles crashed with them to the carpet.
“Stop it, Tom.”
Tom kicked at the air and sent the TV stand careening. The flat-screen tumbled and then broke against the floor. He jabbed backward with his elbows at Nate. The two of them struggled in a tangle on the shard-spangled floor, and it became hard to remember who was trying to hurt whom.
Tom had a few pounds on him, but Nate had strength and leverage on his side. He pinned his friend’s arms down and let him kick and writhe and yell.
Medea battered the windows as Tom slowly exhausted himself.
Even after his body went limp, Nate held him tight. The birdcage of Tom’s chest heaved in his grip. “You didn’t kill her,” Nate said, now sure that Tom could hear him.
“I did,” he panted. “I told you—”
“You said you couldn’t find her. But someone hid her in the headlands.”
Tom hesitated. “Someone must have found her body along the shore and panicked. They hid her so no one would blame them. It doesn’t matter how she got to the headlands. What matters is who killed her in the first place.”
“She didn’t drown, Tommy. She didn’t hit her head. She was strangled.” Nate loosened his grip and nudged Tom off him.
“Maybe I strangled her, too. Maybe I put my hands around her neck and squeezed right before I pushed her into the lake. I don’t know. I was so goddamned mad, Nate, I could have done anything. And MEs can get things wrong. Especially if the remains have been in the wild for so many—”
“She was raped. Her underwear was torn and stained with blood and semen. Did you rape her, Tom? Did you brutalize her so badly that you broke both of her wrists? Would you remember something like that?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Someone raped her, strangled her, then hid her body in a place where she wouldn’t be found for a long time. And that person wasn’t you. It wasn’t.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. Her postmortem report’s in the locked closet in your dad’s office. Read it yourself. Your birth date’s the pass code.”
They lay on the floor in silence for what felt like a long time. Thunder shook the windows in their frames, and rain drummed their glass.
Tom’s eyes were wet, his eyes wide, his forehead creased. This morning, Nate would never have guessed Tom could keep a secret like this for so many years. It must have festered inside him like a malignant growth. No wonder he’d lasted only a semester at NYU.
Tom finally broke the silence with a noise like he himself was being choked. His body started to shake, and he rolled into Nate’s shoulder. He sobbed into Nate’s suit and the filthy carpet.
For fourteen years, Tom had been punishing himself for something he hadn’t done. He wept himself dry.
We are all strangers, Nate thought. Even to ourselves.
The walls glowed and dimmed. Through the windows, Nate watched Medea’s layers spiral across the sky. The shadows around the room shifted and deepened. Nate thought about how he’d gotten here, onto this stained carpet with the wreckage of his best friend beside him.
It’d be easy to stay here and wait for the hurricane to pass. But the real storm that plagued the Lake wasn’t the sort that would dissipate on its own. Taped windows and sandbagged doors wouldn’t be enough to keep the ones who mattered to him safe.
“I’ve got to go, Tommy.”
“Where?” Tom’s voice was small and muffled by Nate’s sleeve.
“Things to do.”
“Adam Decker?”
“I guess.”
“It wasn’t him.” Tom pulled his face away from Nate’s suit jacket. “He lied to my dad about where he was. That’s why his statement didn’t check out. He was with Emma. He knew we were dating, and he didn’t want to tell Dad she cheated on me.”
“H
ow do you know?”
“She told me before I left for school. It was a onetime thing. He was all messed up after the fight, and I guess she felt bad for him. She was drunk and used to have a crush on him.”
“You’re sure?” This wasn’t at all what Nate wanted to hear.
“It wasn’t Adam.”
There would have been such pleasing symmetry to linking his old enemy to Lucy’s murder. Finding out that Adam had lied in his police statements had given Nate direction, and now he was back to where he started. He got up, brushed the dirt, lint, and fragments of glass from his pants and jacket, and slid into his raincoat.
“Where’re you going?”
“People to see, Tommy. Places to go.” Secrets to find.
“I’ll go with you.” Tom started to get up.
“Not this time.” Nate knew where he had to go, and he had to go there alone. He picked Tom’s phone off the floor and tossed it to him. Its screen blinked with texts and missed calls. “The Lake needs you.”
Tom sat amid the broken and sparkling ruins of his living room and stared up at him. Nate wondered what Tom saw when he looked at him. Did he see his friend, or did he see the Storm King? Did he see someone to love or someone to fear?
“I’ll have my phone if you need me,” Tom said.
“Okay.” Nate didn’t remind him that his own phone was dead. He stepped over the shattered coffee table and past the kitchen to the front door. With a turn of the door handle, the wind burst into the room. The rain had let up for now, but the sky was a fury of thunderheads. Branches tumbled across lawns, and dead leaves swarmed like locusts above fallen trees.
Tom had followed Nate to the door. Nate handed over the car keys he’d pocketed. In the storm light, Tom’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin a patchwork of flush and pallor. But his voice was the same as it’d always been.
“Be careful,” he said.
Fifteen
This was supposed to be the lull in the hurricane, but Medea still dismembered Nate’s umbrella within minutes, pinwheeling its cap down the street like a tumbleweed. He shivered within the carapace of his raincoat as the storm lashed him.
Fallen trees, downed power lines, and the barrage of the gale made his trek to the water’s edge twice its fair-weather length.
In her hospital in Gracefield, Grams was cut off.
Without his phone, Meg and Livvy were unreachable.
But shrunk in her casket, Lucy was less lost than she’d been. The fractures of their graduation night had shifted, and new gaps in its story were exposed. These would have to be delved into no matter where they took him. No matter what they revealed. The way out was the way through.
Tom’s secret had unnerved Nate. Of everyone from the old days, he’d thought Tom was the one he could most count on.
What else had he gotten wrong?
The problem was that people were capable of anything. Horrors and virtues churned inside us, and to know which of these trumped the others at any moment would be to sense every texture of the future. Nate used to know this.
Translucent dapplings of purple and red petals covered the base of the Night Ship’s barricade like fragments of a destroyed mosaic. The deluge had displaced husks of dead glow sticks from the children’s shrine. They bobbed in troughs of water that swelled above an overflowing storm drain.
If Emma was with Adam back on graduation night, then Nate’s old enemy had an alibi. The files in the chief’s closet might hold clues to other suspects, but Nate would need Tom to go back there, and his friend was currently in no such condition.
This left only one place for Nate to look for the answers he needed.
His wingtips slipped and skidded as he scaled the barricade. The old wood was soft under his feet. More of the pier’s planks had fallen away since Nate had last been there. The boardwalk was as buckled and gapped as a brawler’s smile. The season had brought slick moss to its boards, so he took his time crossing it. He still didn’t like the lake.
The froth of the gray water resembled fins and spines of creatures thrashing just below its surface. It was a longer walk than he remembered. The hurricane, his exhaustion, the events of the morning, and the way memories of the past bled into the present gave the world a hypnagogic quality. Nate imagined walking these broken planks across the decades. Into not only his own past, but the history of the Night Ship itself. Back to the bloody days of old Morton Strong. Back to the cruel heart of Just June’s Century Room. Into whatever terror struck Lucy in her last moment. Walking to the Night Ship was to be caught in a purgatory between land and sea, history and future, suspicion and knowing, without ever getting an inch closer to home.
Then he was there, in front of the warped and broken door to the Night Ship’s promenade.
The hall was a cacophony of dripping water, whispering drafts, and all the familiar echoes of the ruined place. The old pier’s damp, rot-steeped air embraced Nate like he was its own wayward son. He hadn’t been here since the day Lucy had vanished.
That morning, Tom had pulled Nate from the lake. Dragged him to the boat launch as if he were himself a drowned body. Every bit of energy Nate possessed had been spent diving and screaming for Lucy. Tom was able to heave him onto the launch’s steps only when Nate had nothing left.
He remembered some things with intense clarity: the chill of the lake on his skin, the sway of the canoe beneath him, the look on Johnny’s face when he first saw him.
After hauling Nate to the launch, Tom had made him wait in the boat as he loaded it up with the lanterns, sleeping bags, and coolers they’d kept at the pier. Dawn had fully broken by then, but light never reached the waters under the Night Ship. Nate stayed in the canoe, clutching the wet kimono wrap, staring at the ink-black surface of the lake, willing Lucy to emerge and knowing with absolute certainty that she would not.
Once Tom gathered their things, he paddled them back to the Vanhoutens’ dock. He seated Nate in the gazebo while he woke Johnny. When the chief returned to pick them up, Tom spun a story about how they’d decided to search the shore with the canoe, just in case, and that’s when they’d found the kimono wrap. The official account of the disappearance of Lucy Bennett began.
Knowing Tom’s secret now, Nate marveled at how composed his friend had seemed. Tom thought he’d killed his best friend’s girlfriend just hours earlier, and there he was, lying to everyone and covering his own tracks with the talent of Greystone Lake’s villains of lore.
We are truly wonders.
The shrouded sky allowed a faint glow into the interior. Wreckage from the abandoned shops and cafés that flanked the promenade littered the place like grave markers. Nate expected it to feel strange to return here after so much time. He thought he might notice something different with his older eyes, but the promenade looked and smelled and felt the same. Impossibly so. Being there felt as familiar as if he’d walked this hall this morning and every morning that had preceded it. There was something immutable about this place. In the last age, when the world turned to ash, he could believe the Night Ship would endure, still groaning under the burden of its secrets.
But Nate revised this fantasy when he reached the sign with the galleon speeding for the harvest moon. The doors to the old nightclub were warped to the same spare width they’d always been stuck, but a spike of bloody light from the interior lanced the shadows of the hall.
Nate slipped inside. A lantern was lit on the corner of the bar, its glow muted by a scrim of red fabric. The dusty dance floor had been swept clean and was studded with neatly organized piles of gear. Coolers, cooking supplies, sleeping bags, books, and bottled water, their shadows casting totem silhouettes against the peeling crimson walls.
“Took you long enough.”
A lean shadow separated itself from the threshold of the velvet-cloaked staircase.
“James.” Of course these vandals had made the Night Ship their home. “Long time.”
“Where’s Pete?”
The missing boy. “I
don’t know,” Nate answered.
“Did you kill Maura?” The thin young man paced the edge of the dance floor, his gaze never straying from Nate. Nate had known James as a boy, but not well. He and Lucy both had good reasons to keep their romantic and family lives separate. The odd light and broad shadows of the room gave the bones in the young man’s face a delicate geometry.
“No.”
James wheeled on him. “Lucy?”
“No.” Nate had questions for James, too. Just the sight of the young man in this place made the thing inside of him wrench itself with blood hunger. Grams was in an ICU, and there was no question this boy was somehow responsible. But the circumstances required the finesse of a surgeon, not the black rage of the Storm King.
“She said you were a good liar.”
“Lucy told you that?”
“She told us everything.”
“I doubt it. You were what, five years old?”
James circled around the far end of the bar, careful to keep his distance from Nate. His face shone like a stoplight in the lantern’s glow. Nate heard him open a cupboard or a drawer, and a moment later he dumped a thick stack of documents fastened with binder clips onto the scratched bar. The packets slid across the black wood like a deck of cards.
Nate approached the bar and picked up the first sheath of paper. As he did, James backed away. As though they were two magnets with the same polarity, an invisible barrier repelled the young man.
The pages of the document were filled with lines of strong, confident script. Nate flipped through enough of them to be sure. They were photocopies of Lucy’s journal entries. From the heft of the packets strewn across the bar, Nate guessed these were the complete contents of the journals the chief had shown him this morning.
These journals were how James and the others had learned about the Storm King, the Thunder Runs, and all of Lucy’s high school friends and enemies. This was how they’d made their list of suspects, and this was how their list of suspects became a list of targets.
The Storm King: A Novel Page 24