Bonfire: A Novel
Page 23
I don’t feel like drinking, but I take a few sips anyway.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me everything.”
So I do. I tell him about Tatum Klauss, and Sophie Nantes, and what I found out from Amy McMann. About the Optimal Stars, and the parties where they were carefully screened, and Misha taking some of the most troubled girls under her wing. I repeat the story she told me about Frank Mitchell, and the so-called hypothetical instance of a man wanting younger girls. By the time I’ve finished half my story, and half my glass, Brent is refilling his for a third time. His eyes are red, and he’s sweating through his shirt.
By the time I get to Kaycee, to how it fits, he can’t take it anymore and stands up.
“I need a minute,” he says, gasping. “Give me a minute.” He hurtles through the screen door. I hear him pacing, spitting out his nausea in the grass. I know exactly how he feels.
The night has come without my noticing; we’ve been sitting in the half dark, and when I stand I can hardly see to fumble on a light. Brent is still outside. No longer on the porch, he is standing motionless by his car, staring out into nothing.
Sudden dizziness forces me to sit again. My mouth is chalk-dry. The scotch doesn’t help. I reach for my bag, and the water bottle inside of it. When was the last time I ate anything? I can’t remember.
I shouldn’t have drank; I need to stay focused. We need to make a plan.
My hand lands on my phone, flashing with new alerts. Three missed calls from Condor. I must have silenced the ringer. He’s sent a text, too, heavy on the punctuation—for some reason it takes me a minute to tack the words down into place, to make them stop blurring together: he wants to know if I’m all right.
Just as I’m about to put the phone down, an e-mail lands. Portland again, forwarding his last message, the one whose subject is Digging. I open it half by accident, squinting at the grid of paragraphs, fighting against a growing blurriness in my brain.
I wanted to be sure you saw this. Could be important.
Below that is his original message. Words leap out at me—Kaycee. Poisoning. Symptoms.
The words circle and I have to pin them down, one by one, staring them hard into place.
I did some more thinking about what you said about Kaycee’s symptoms. You’re right. Her symptoms never corresponded to lead exposure. But they’re identical to the symptoms of mercury poisoning. Check it out.
Tremors.
Confusion.
Aphasia (short-term memory loss).
Balance problems, uncontrolled body movements.
Nausea, vomiting.
Then:
I’m not sure how she could have been exposed, or why she would have been the only one affected. I did some digging and found out that mercury was used decades ago in paint. Didn’t you say she was an artist?
I have to read that line, again and again, before it makes any sense.
Or rather—I have to read it, again and again, hoping it will stop making sense.
All at once Kaycee roars back to life, like I always half expected she would. She is everywhere, urgent and afraid, breathing in my hair, whispering to me, holding tight with sweat-damp hands to my shoulders, willing me to understand, to listen, to see.
Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.
Look, look, look.
See.
See Kaycee, working alone, thumbing paint across a canvas, dizzied by the smell.
See Kaycee, painted head-to-toe in school colors for graduation.
See Misha and Brent, the way his hand tightened on her knee, the way he spoke to her. Reassuring.
In control.
See Brent coming through the woods, his hair wet, his shirt damp, as if he’d been swimming.
See the way he reached out to kiss you.
See flashes behind your eyelids. Firefly bursts, but brighter.
Flashes. Flashlights. People on the water.
No.
Someone in the water.
We have to make sure…
The scene at the bonfire must have stirred up an old memory, the faint words, a scream, quickly stifled, all of it drifting to me dreamlike on snatches of wind…
We have to make sure she’s not breathing.
See the way you stood in front of the mirror later, tracing the places where he’d touched, trying to figure out if it was real, wondering whether he’d left a mark on you.
Wondering whether you still smelled like his fingers.
Like the beach.
Like paint.
Chapter Forty-Two
The screen door creaks when it opens. A warning, but one that arrives too late.
Brent’s footsteps are heavy. Slow. Deliberate.
“Abby?” He says my name casually, all his fake shock and anger discarded. Somehow I’ve made it into my old bedroom. I’m holding on to the door, trying to stay on my feet. But the floor isn’t a floor: it’s water, and it’s breaking up beneath me.
Run. I think the word. I think the word and I break into a sprint. I skim through the house, barrel out the door, sprout wings in open air, and fly. I’m running, I’m sure I’m running, and yet when he edges down the hall and sees me swaying there, I realize I’m still holding tight to the walls, still pinned inside the house.
“You’re still awake,” he says.
Fuck you, I try to say. But the words turn into stone; as they drop, my body collapses.
I don’t even feel it when my head cracks the floorboards. I only notice the dust stirred by my breath, and his shoes coming toward me.
“That’ll be one hell of a hangover,” he says.
He drugged my drink.
I am in a dark sea.
I am on the floor.
I wonder where he got the climbing rope, and why I can’t feel my arms.
And then I lose the rope, and I lose my arms, and I lose my whole body. I fall down into a hole so deep it swallows me up completely.
—
I wake to a slosh of water, and to the steady vibration of an engine. I’m on a boat.
The sky is scattered with stars. A high moon burns through the cloud cover.
Brent is captaining slowly, probably so we don’t make too much noise, and trailing the stink of exhaust behind us on the water.
He’s humming.
Fear rattles through me but I can’t move. There’s a screaming pain in my head, and the burn of vomit in my throat. My clothes are soaked, and my wrists chafed from the nylon cord lashed around them. He’s bound my ankles, too, and wedged me down between the bench seats.
In the distance: the thud of pounding music. The smell of wood smoke carries to me. Someone is having a bonfire.
I need to get out of the boat. But I’ll never be able to swim with my hands tied. I’m not even sure I could tread water, even if I get free—my body feels like a sandbag.
Still, I have to try.
Brent turns away from the wheel, cutting the engine. I can’t begin to reach the side of the boat to roll over. I aim a weak kick with both legs and miss him entirely. The effort blackens my vision. The thud of the music, even from a distance, makes my head throb.
“This would have been a lot easier if you’d just finished your drink,” he says.
“Please.” My voice sounds foreign. I’m not even sure what I’m asking. “Please don’t hurt me.”
I’ve been so stupid. All along I had the answer: Kaycee gave it to me. She left it for me in my locker.
Chestnut’s collar, poor Chestnut, the dog she’d poisoned. She wasn’t gloating. It wasn’t about hurting me. It was about asking for my help. It was a code.
Someone was poisoning her, and she didn’t know who or why, and she couldn’t trust anyone she was close to.
So she trusted me—because I was friendless, because I was innocent, because she thought I would be able to help if something happened to her.
Brent shakes his head. Dismissive. Annoyed. “You didn’t have
to come back here,” he says. “You could have left it alone. You could have forgotten all about Barrens. So why didn’t you?”
“She was my friend once,” I croak out.
Brent stands there, staring down at me. “You’re an idiot. She wouldn’t have pissed to save you. You know that, right?” He has to raise his voice above the noise of the engine, and I have a brief, stupid hope that the people at the bonfire will hear us.
Why isn’t he worried that they’ll hear us?
But immediately I know: he must have built up the bonfire and blasted the music himself. He’s not worried because there is no one there to hear.
He turns away again. Panic seizes me, bringing a fierce tide of nausea: Whatever he drugged me with, it was strong. I need time—to talk to him, to convince him to let me go, to find a way to escape, to get the drug out of my system.
“Why did you do it?”
“You know why,” he says. “You explained it to me tonight. You just got the details wrong. Mitchell never had anything to do with it.”
So Condor was right after all. I should have listened to him. “You were the one who proposed selling the pictures to Optimal, weren’t you?”
“Wrong again. They were the ones who proposed it to me.” He smiles. But he’s not as cool as he looks; when he angles his face to the moon, I can practically see tension oozing off him. “Everyone knew I hung around with all the hottest high school girls. So once I landed the internship, some of the older guys came after me looking for a piece of the action. Everyone loves hanging with pretty girls, and they’re even more fun the drunker you get them. I’ve always believed in sharing.”
I can’t believe I kissed him. I can’t believe I ever found him attractive. I wonder how much Optimal has given him, promised him for his continued loyalty—what final tally of promotions, kickbacks, and perquisites has outweighed all that he’s done.
And even as I think it, another piece of the puzzle falls into place. That must have been why Kaycee threatened to go to the police. Not because she felt bad. Not because she began to regret it. Just another thing I’ve misunderstood. “Kaycee wanted a bigger cut, didn’t she? She and Misha were sharing in the risk, but you were the only one getting all the perks.”
Brent’s smile is like a predator’s: shiny in the dark, all sharp teeth and hunger. “She was always a greedy little bitch,” he says. “That’s why I liked her so much.”
I swallow the taste of vomit. “Did you kill her, or did Misha?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer. I bet Misha has barely blinked in the past ten years without worrying what Brent will say about it.
And now I remember thinking that Misha’s baby, Kayla, was surprisingly blond. Almost as blond, it occurs to me, as Brent.
Does Misha really believe that she might make Brent love her, by doing everything he says, by feeding girls into some sick program where they can be abused and passed around, by covering up for Brent? Does she think he’s even capable of love?
“It was Misha’s idea to put mercury in Kaycee’s paint,” he says calmly. “She thought it would be funny to convince Kaycee she was going crazy. And like I said, she always had a thing for me.”
No wonder I’ve been so sick. Kaycee’s old paintings have been shedding mercury all this time and I’ve been inhaling it.
“We weren’t thinking of killing her then, though.” He sounds bored. “Just making her look like a nutjob, to keep her from going to the cops, and to make sure they wouldn’t listen even if she did.”
Whenever he glances away, I work my wrists back and forth, to loosen the restraints. If I can just get my hands free I can jump, and worry about my ankles once I’m in the water.
I can almost slip a hand free. All I need is another minute.
“So why kill her, if you were convinced no one would listen to her?”
“You,” he says, and I almost forget where we are and what he’s come to do. “The last day of school, you remember what happened? Kaycee put that stupid dog collar in your locker.”
I stop moving. I never knew he knew.
He looks at me as if I’m on the other side of a telescope. “You told Misha that Kaycee had left it there for you as a clue.”
“I didn’t,” I whisper.
But of course I did. I remember now: flying at Misha, trying to hit her, trying to claw my fury at Kaycee out on her best friend’s face. What the fuck is your problem? A cluster of students gathered in the hall to stare. Misha drove me backward against the wall, I wasn’t strong enough to fight her. Are you deranged?
I was screaming at her. Inches from her face. Trying to bury the words inside her skin, trying to cut her with them. It wasn’t enough she poisoned my goddamn dog. She had to leave me a clue, just in case I forgot?
I remember Misha’s look of blunt shock, and thinking, for a second, that I’d finally gotten through to her.
Brent’s right. I am an idiot.
I close my eyes. The boat rocks with a wave, then falls still again. Rise and drop. Kaycee had left the collar as a clue, or as a cry for help—but not to prove to me that she killed Chestnut. It was, I see now, a kind of insurance. If something bad happened, she could be sure I would wonder about the collar and why she’d left it for me. She hoped that I would spot the connection. The common factor—between Chestnut and her.
Both poisoned.
But that day in the hall, I unwittingly revealed to Misha that Kaycee had begun to suspect someone was trying to kill her the same way Chestnut had been killed—with poison. Misha must have been in a panic. If Kaycee had left a clue for me, some loser she hadn’t spoken to in years, who else had she told—and what, exactly, did she know?
“That night in the woods,” I choke out. “When you kissed me…”
“Couldn’t have you getting too close to the water,” he says matter-of-factly. “She made a lot of noise as she was going down. I could have sworn she was dead before we loaded her into the boat, but I guess I was kind of in a rush.”
She won’t stay down.
We have to make sure she’s not breathing.
I remember now. Why couldn’t I remember before? I’d convinced myself my own memories were suspect. I’d convinced myself to ignore the terrible suspicion that something was very wrong in the woods that night.
He moves toward me. When he leans down, I can smell the sourness of his breath. For a terrible second, I think he is going to kiss me again. And now it’s too late—too late to get free, too late to escape, to survive. “But I did always think you were cute. In a pathetic kind of way.”
He seizes my wrists and I shout—an instinct, a useless one.
Too late, I see he has a knife.
“I’ve always liked the broken ones, I guess.” He brings the knife to my wrists. With one clean sweep, he frees me.
Chapter Forty-Three
I aim a punch, but Brent swats my hand away easily, almost amused. He examines my wrists, keeping a grip on me so tight it brings tears to my eyes.
“Good,” he says. “No marks.”
He releases me again and stands, folding up the knife and returning it to his pocket. I haul myself up to sit but have no time to launch into the water. Almost immediately, he straddles me, leaning his full weight on my chest, catching my wrists again with one hand when I try and push him off.
“It’s important there are no marks.” He seems almost as if he’s reciting the words. His weight on my chest is crushing. I can hardly breathe. “It’s important that you drown.”
I spit directly in his face. He jerks back, just an inch, and then the wind shifts slightly in my favor and sends another ripple across the reservoir. The boat rocks and he rocks with it. To keep from toppling over, he releases me and steadies himself against the deck. Just for a second, he has to shift his weight forward, rising onto his knees, giving me space to move.
A second is all I need. I drive both my knees hard at his groin, catching him with just enough force to knock him off balance. Insti
nct curls him up and I twist out from underneath him, clawing for the side of the boat. He launches at me, grabbing my ankles as I hook an arm over the side of the boat, dragging me backward so I crack my jaw against the deck and taste blood in my mouth.
“Bitch.” He flips me over onto my back and slams me down again, sending a shockwave of pain through my body. For a second, everything goes white and I have the strangest memory of my mother. It was the winter before she died; she was still well enough to move around, and my father had made a fire pit in the back, clearing a drift of snow, so that she could have s’mores for her birthday.
The fire was so high at first that we couldn’t get close. We’d stood back, waiting for it to calm, as my dad used a piece of steel tubing to spread the logs apart.
Isn’t it amazing? my mom had said, pointing to the very center of the fire, where it was blue. All of that burning, just because it wants to breathe.
In my memory, her hand is very cool, and it’s clear what she’s really saying: if I don’t fight, I’m going to die.
The pain ebbs. Brent has a rag in one hand. I catch a whiff of chemical scent. Chloroform, or gasoline.
I wrench my head to the side, gasping for clean air, fumbling for something, anything, I can use as a weapon, striking out with my fists, my legs, writhing and twisting, on the slickness of the deck.
He tries to shove the rag into my mouth but I cough it out. I slither away from him. But he’s too strong, and I’m too tired. I’m a fish, lashing out in its last moments still tethered to a hook.
The fish hook.
I’d forgotten the fish hook and lure Condor made for me, still nestled in cloth in my front pocket.
I tug the zipper open just as Brent clamps the rag, wet with chemicals, tight to my face. Instantly, I’m blind; the acrid scent takes over, gagging, the rag suffocating.
And just before I slip entirely, I swing with the fish hook latched between my fingers.
Brent screams and draws back. Oxygen floods my lungs, drives off the darkness, brings the world back into focus. Something warm hits my face. Blood. I’ve slashed him just below the eye, a gaping, ragged cut.