Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  “It’s a Saturday.” Joe smiles at me.

  “Exactly. What are you doing here? Couldn’t resist the Barrens social scene?” I say. A joke—until I realize, from his just-got-laid grin, that he probably spent the day with Raj. Joe can’t do one-night stands. The sex always unrolls into brunch dates and trips to the farmers’ market, Saturday-night Netflix binges on the couch. Joe is one of those people who can be around other people all the time. He doesn’t need solitude to recharge, like I do.

  He’s just easy and malleable and he can make a home everywhere he goes.

  Some of us are out of place even when we are home.

  “I figured I’d have a better shot at going door-to-door on a Saturday.” He shook his head. “But it seems we’ve already overstayed our welcome.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most people wouldn’t even open their damn doors. Not used to a queer black man showing up on a weekend, apparently! One asshole—Paul Jennings, I think? Or Peter?—came to the door with a shotgun. I kid you not. He apologized and said he was jumpy because his wife never came home last night. I wouldn’t, either, if I was married to him. And then a woman named Joanne Farley tried to convince me that—”

  “Wait.” In the flow of his complaints washing over me, alarm bells have started going off. Misha. “What did you say?”

  My pulse is so hot in my ears, I miss Joe’s reply.

  “More important,” he’s saying, “the guy slammed the screen door in my face—my tie almost didn’t make it out alive. So much for small-town hospitality.” He stops when he takes in the expression on my face. “Are you okay?”

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Inside, fear sharpens.

  Misha Jennings didn’t come home last night.

  But I did.

  Wearing her pink shoes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Brent lives on the opposite side of town, past the Westlink Fertilizer & Feed store and the new community center that’s going up, past the newer area that’s been built up to accommodate for what Barrens counts as a population explosion. Ten years ago this was rural open countryside and now it’s all new construction, contemporaries slotted onto pancake-flat plots of land. The houses are bigger and upscale by Barrens standards: two-story, generous lawns, U-shape driveways.

  Brent opens the door almost immediately. Even in slippers and jeans, he looks put together, well rested, and not hungover at all. He’s standing there as if the doorbell has summoned him out of some J.Crew catalog.

  “Hey, Abby. You survived.” He grins at me, but not quickly enough—for a split second, I thought I saw him wince. I think again of the body in the water…a nightmare. Has to be. Surely, if anything bad had happened, if something awful went wrong at the party, there would be signs of it—chaos, tension, maybe even police.

  Unless I’m the only one who knows.

  “What happened last night?” I ask him. My voice sounds distant, as if it’s coming from someone else’s throat.

  “What didn’t happen?” He leans the door open a little wider. “I think I’m off vodka for the rest of my life. Come on in.”

  His ease, his flirtation, the way his eyes sparkle: all of it confuses me. His hallway is clean. Light-filled. Running shoes laced neatly by the door, a key dangling from a peg on the wall, beneath framed photographs of Brent at various stages of his life: Brent trout fishing with his dad, Brent suited up in his football uniform giving a thumbs-up to the camera, Brent getting head-knuckled by a curly-haired guy dressed in a flashy suit against a backdrop of cornfields.

  “I don’t remember getting home,” I say. I meant to ask straight away about Misha, but fear closes my throat. Brent speaks before I can.

  “Really? You weren’t even weaving.” He glances over his shoulder to smile—a slay-them-where-they-stand look I remember from high school, though then it was never directed at me. “Erickson drove us both. He’s on the wagon. I asked you if you wanted help getting inside but you seemed to know what you were doing.”

  It’s a small relief. I hate the idea of Brent seeing all my clothes disemboweled from my suitcase, my mess in the kitchen, the unmade bed. That amount of vulnerability is just too much to bear.

  “This way.” Brent gestures for me to follow him. I take in the muted colors of his house, the orderly lines and the faint medicinal smell of the air conditioner. It’s a grown-up house, nicer even than my condo in Chicago, which looks clean only by virtue of having hardly anything in it. “Misha’s in the back.”

  “Misha…?”

  “Yeah. It was a rough night. We were taking care of Annie until four in the morning. So Misha needed to crash.” Seeing my look of confusion, he adds, “Annie nearly got herself drowned last night. Don’t you remember?”

  “Things are pretty fuzzy.” An understatement.

  Brent’s whole face darkens. He’s almost never so serious, and for a split second, he looks like a different person. “She got it into her head to go swimming. But she was too drunk to make it back to shore. Misha was a hero. She charged straight into the reservoir.”

  Annie. Misha. The girl screaming for help. Relief washes over me. I was all wrong—Misha was trying to help Annie, not hurt her.

  “Annie needs to quit drinking. But we’ve tried to tell her a thousand times…”

  Brent waves me out onto the screened-in patio. There, sitting on the couch in a robe that’s hanging off her shoulder, is Misha Jennings.

  “Abby. Hi.” She looks tired, and while she recovers quickly, she seems momentarily annoyed to see me. “How are you hanging in?”

  “Better than Annie,” I say.

  She sighs. “Brent just drove her home.” Despite the fact that it must be nearly six, she’s wearing a bathrobe, and there’s a towel turbaning her hair. She must know what I’m thinking—Misha and Brent, here together, and both with wet hair—because she unconsciously cinches the bathrobe tighter. “I finally took a shower. I actually feel human again.”

  “Take a seat.” Brent doesn’t sit, though, even when I perch awkwardly on one of the armchairs, wishing almost immediately I hadn’t. “You want a soda or something? I’d offer you a drink but if I ever touch alcohol again, shoot me.”

  “A tranquilizer, if you have one,” I say. Brent laughs first. Then Misha joins in. I quickly add, “I’m joking.”

  “I hope we didn’t scare you away for good.” Misha leans forward and puts a hand on my knee. I clock right away that two of her nails are broken. “I’m glad you came last night. Did you have fun?”

  “From what I can remember,” I say carefully, but I don’t know why I still feel uneasy. “I heard your husband is worried because you didn’t go home last night.”

  Misha’s eyes flick to Brent. A wordless communication passes between them. I’m surprised that I feel a little jealous. Not of them, exactly, but of the easy intimacy, the way they’re playing house. Like Joe spending a lazy Saturday morning with Raj. It seems as if everyone but me can trip and fall into comfortable relationships.

  For the first time it occurs to me that maybe Barrens isn’t rotten. Maybe the problem is me. Maybe the problem has been me all along.

  “Peter and I had a fight and, well…I wasn’t exactly sober,” she says carefully. “Brent was nice enough to offer up his couch.” She emphasizes the last word very slightly. “Me and Peter fight like rabid dogs sometimes. It’s probably my fault…”

  “It’s not your fault,” Brent says quietly. He takes a seat and puts a hand on her leg. That bothers me; I’m ashamed to feel so little sympathy for her. She looks upset—and much younger without any makeup—but I still feel like she’s faking.

  “You must think I’m a mess,” Misha says. I’m not sure whether she’s speaking to me or to Brent, but he gives her knee another squeeze.

  Then Brent turns back to me. “I told her not to marry Peter,” he says. He keeps a hand on her knee. “She never listens.”

  Misha inhales a laugh. But when I look again, she’s
swiping a tear with the back of her hand. “Lies,” she says, half laughing, half crying. “I always listen to you.”

  Suddenly I know what’s bothering me about their pose: I’ve seen it before. Senior year, I stumbled on Misha and Brent sitting together in a knot of woods behind the administration building where I went to eat my lunch sometimes, rather than brave the cafeteria. The Dell, people called it—the smokers went there to get high between classes, and someone had even set up an old table and chair between the felled logs to serve as furniture. But at noon it was usually deserted.

  Not that day, though. As I crashed through the underbrush I remember seeing Brent and Misha just that way. He had his hand on her knee. She looked as if she was about to cry. But when she spotted me, her expression transformed in an instant into one of slick hatred.

  Are you spying on us, pervert? she spat out.

  Leave her alone, Misha, Brent said. And then: She didn’t hear anything.

  Only now does it occur to me it was a funny thing to say.

  “Sorry,” Misha says. Once again, something has changed—an invisible current, a communication between them I haven’t heard. “God, I can’t imagine what you think of us. You must be dying to go back to Chicago.”

  “I’m just glad everyone’s okay. Last night, I thought—” I break off. I can’t understand why I was so scared. Then I realize Brent and Misha are watching me, waiting for me to continue. “I just—I don’t usually get that drunk. It’s not like me. When I woke up and realized I had taken your shoes…”

  This, finally, gets a smile out of her. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says. “We must have swapped. I thought I lost them when I went in after Annie.”

  “Are you okay?” Brent squints at me. “You want a water or something?”

  “No. I’m fine.” But I stand up too quickly and a head rush darkens my vision.

  “Actually, I will take the water. Don’t get up,” I say, when he starts to stand. “I can get it.”

  In the kitchen, I wash my hands, using up the last of Brent’s hand soap. I count my breaths, listening to the murmur of conversation from the other room. But their words are too muted to make out.

  Here, too, everything is clean, pristine, almost unused. Brent has installed a water purifier to the tap, but his sink is perfectly dry and I wonder whether he’s ever run it. Curious, I ease open the refrigerator: the upper two shelves are crammed with pallets of bottled water.

  “Leftovers from a corporate picnic last week. You should see all the Sprite I got stacked in my garage.”

  I spin around at the sound of his voice, closing the refrigerator door; I hadn’t realized he had followed me into the kitchen. But if he notices my discomfort, he doesn’t appear to.

  “If you want ice, it’s in the door,” he offers brightly.

  “Just water’s fine,” I say.

  He crosses to the cupboard, takes down two glasses, and fills them from the tap. He downs his and watches me carefully as I drink, as if my reaction will bring a final and definitive end to our investigation. The water tastes fine.

  Brent’s refrigerator door is cluttered with magnets, and before we leave the kitchen, I notice that one of them bears Aaron Pulaski’s name. He sees me looking at it.

  “Local guy,” he says. “Or as local as he can be. He comes from over in Hanover. I did some work on his campaign.” He says it casually enough, but I’m sure I’m not imagining the new tension in the way he’s standing. “I thought he’d do some good for the district. Turns out he’s just as incompetent as the rest of the pack.” He shrugs. “Oh, well. We all make mistakes, right?”

  “We sure do,” I say. When he turns his back to me, I slip the magnet into my pocket. Weak spots.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Monday morning, Joe and I strategize. We’ve got one chance in a thousand that a circuit court will take our slipshod suspicions for evidence, but all we need to do is file the suit—and hope Optimal is frightened into giving us actual evidence.

  We can’t get a court appointment until Wednesday afternoon, which gives me a few days to put together a cohesive picture and try to find a prosecutor’s office willing to work the criminal side of the investigation.

  Flora and Portland head down to greet the ETL lab techs; they’ve arrived to draw samples from the reservoir and from the filtration plant it feeds to, and I want to be sure no one bothers them while they work. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but given Optimal’s long tentacles, and its grip on Barrens, I can just see some local townies trying to chase them off with pitchforks—or, more likely, .22s.

  I put in a message to the county prosecutor’s office where Aaron Pulaski worked until recently, and kill a few hours researching the bioaccumulation of a variety of types of heavy metals, detailing the evidence found in plants and seedlings—at least we know the foliage can’t be paid to keep quiet.

  Just before lunch my phone blows up, and a woman with the kind of chirpy voice that immediately suggests a pantsuit introduces herself as Dani Briggs, junior prosecutor. “I got your message,” she says. “But I’m afraid we can’t help out. There was a personnel sweep after Mr. Pulaski left.”

  One skill I’ve learned as a lawyer: to make a no into an opportunity. “Why so much turnover?”

  She hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “When Mr. Agerwal”—the new county prosecuting attorney, and a board member of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council—“took the job, he promised to take all the politics out of the justice system.”

  “Like what? Bribery? Corruption? That is politics.”

  Her laugh is surprising—deep and rich and swallowed just as quickly as it comes. “Maybe. But not our kind of politics.”

  “So he purged the old guard.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a purge,” she says. “Given all the scrutiny around police departments and prosecuting offices throughout the country, he felt the MCPO needed a clean start.”

  This is how lawyers confess: by edging just close enough to the issue that you can take a hop-skip-jump to the truth yourself. “Here’s the thing: I’m looking into a donation to Pulaski’s state congressional campaign by a company he had threatened to go after for labor violations. Does that sound like his kind of politics?”

  Another momentary hesitation. Now I understand her silence is code for yes. “I really can’t speak to that,” she says. “What our predecessors do is, unfortunately, kind of a black box.” Maybe she can sense my hesitation over the phone, because she adds, “Let me take your contact info. I’ll talk to Mr. Agerwal when he comes back.”

  I put my head down on my desk, against the cool wood, willing the pulse of so many strains of information to finally hit a rhythm that I can latch on to. Will any of this get me closer to understanding what happened to Kaycee? Will any of it get me closer to answering the question that drove me out of Barrens and to Chicago in the first place? I thought if I could prove that Optimal was making people sick, I could cure Barrens of what had poisoned it—and then Barrens would finally let me go.

  But now, I’m not so sure.

  “Ms. Williams?”

  I nearly punch out of my skin: Portland has returned, soundlessly.

  “For fuck’s sake. We need to install a bell on you or something.” Then, I notice he has the strangest look on his face.

  “You said she was faking it,” he says.

  He slides a photo across the desk, and I’m shocked to recognize Kaycee, painted up in school colors. Graduation day.

  Her arms are what strike me first. They’re skinny—as skinny as a child’s. It could be an effect of the paint or maybe the angle, but her cheekbones are blunt, like two axes that meet in the center of her face. Her clavicle emerges prominently from her neckline. She looks…sick. Really sick.

  It may be the first time I’ve ever felt truly sorry for Kaycee Mitchell. I nearly reach out to touch her face, then remember Portland is watching me.

  “Where did you get this?” I ask him.

  “
I went to the high school,” he says—so casually I nearly wince. I don’t know why, but it disturbs me to think of Portland walking those too-familiar halls—it is further proof that two sections of my life are collapsing. “I figured small town, the nurse would probably be the same a decade later. I was right.”

  It was a brilliant move. Nurses at public schools aren’t bound by laws of confidentiality.

  “Good thinking,” I say. “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

  “Kaycee wasn’t lying,” he says simply.

  “The girls admitted it,” I say, but even I hear it as a question.

  “The other girls admitted it,” he says, in the same soft cadence, as if he knows he’s breaking news I don’t want to hear. “But she was sick. You can see it. The nurse saw it.”

  Just hearing the words like that is like the hard stun of a wave you’ve been watching get closer. It takes my breath away momentarily. Right away I know that this, this photograph right here, is the whole reason I came back. It’s why I could never entirely leave it all behind.

  Another Kaycee surfaces in my mind: the creamy, seamless skin, the curve of her mouth rearranging itself into a wolfish smile—or sneer. Perfect. Suddenly, I realize after all I don’t want it to be true. If it’s true, it means Kaycee is just another one I got all wrong. Not a predator—a victim.

  —

  Frank Mitchell gave up the trailer Kaycee grew up in and now lives only half a mile from his shop. God knows why I felt compelled to bring Portland—it’s highly doubtful that Mitchell will find the sight of a guy who looks like he could be the singer of an indie-rock band reassuring. Maybe I’m the one who needed reassuring.

  The garage door of number 217 is half open. I’m betting that Frank’s one of those guys who drinks five to midnight. It’s only noon, which means he might be sober enough to be reasonable, or hungover enough to be irritable.

  We find him bent over a motorcycle, his back bony beneath a stained white shirt.