“Yeah, that seems likely,” Tom said, rolling his eyes.
“Guys, would you mind if I grabbed Tom for a second? I just need to talk to him,” I asked.
The guy with the shaved head laughed, his voice surprisingly warm.
“Of course you do. Man, why does Tom have all the luck with girls?” he asked. The other guys laughed as well, but Tom only rolled his eyes again.
“Because I’m the only one who showers,” he said. “And I don’t have that much luck.”
“All it takes is one good-looking girl!” Eyebrow Rings interjected, jerking his chin at me. I felt my cheeks go warm, but it was a pleasant embarrassment. I wasn’t the kind of girl who had been told she was pretty so often that she took it as a proven scientific fact. I knew that the “tall girls with freckles” appreciation society was small, so it was always gratifying to discover a new member.
“I guess you’re right,” Tom said. He was talking to his friend but he was staring at me. I shrugged and walked away. I heard his footsteps behind me.
We followed the trail behind the school, picking our way past a mosaic made of flattened cigarettes and the crumpled soda cans that kids used as makeshift pot-smoking devices. I sat down on a bench overlooking the creek and the woods that cradled it. The creek was still covered in a sheen of ice, though I could hear water gurgling beneath the surface, staging a quiet revolt against winter. Despite the snow on the ground, it seemed as if winter had begun its long, slow bow.
“They seem nice,” I said, trying to gloss over the awkward silence with small talk.
“Yeah, they’re good guys. I like people who don’t worry what other people think of them,” Tom said. I wasn’t sure if that was a veiled judgment of me, or whether I was just committing the cardinal sin of teenage girls—overanalyzing what boys said to find hidden subtext.
“So, what’s up?” Tom said.
“I just wanted to say I was sorry.”
“About what?” Tom asked, feigning innocence. I sighed. He wasn’t going to make this easy.
“I’m sorry, just for, you know, being an asshole the other night,” I said finally.
“Yeah, I’m sorry too. I said some things to you that I really didn’t mean. I do care about what happened to Helen. I also can’t pretend to understand how you feel about Chloe being missing,” Tom said. We sat in silence for a few moments before I replied.
“Look, Tom, Chloe disappearing has been the worst experience of my life. Everything’s so recent—this all happened just a month ago. And I feel like if I don’t keep moving forward, if I look back even once, everything will fall apart,” I said anxiously.
Tom stared pensively out at the creek, his head nodding as he listened. Finally, he responded.
“You know, my first year here, my mom invited me back to Vancouver for Christmas. I’d only been in Thunder Creek for a few months and I hated it. I missed B.C. so much,” Tom said, lighting another cigarette. He was still staring straight ahead, and I couldn’t help admiring the lean angles of his face as the cigarette hung off his full lower lip.
“What was it like going back?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I didn’t go. She’s tried over the years, inviting me out for holidays or during the summer, but I always say no,” Tom said. He turned and looked at me. His words ached with scarred-over loss, and I felt my heart clench.
“Why?” I asked quietly, even though I already knew the answer.
“Because I’d see what I’ve lost. And then I’d have to come back here. It would be like losing everything all over again.” Tom’s voice was neutral, but I could hear it waver. “I won’t leave here until I know I can leave for good. But anyways, I get it, Jenny. You’ll talk when you can.”
“In the meantime, I do have some stuff to tell you about Helen,” I said hesitantly, unsure of whether I should break the fragile reconciliation we’d created.
“Good. I’m listening,” Tom said, inching closer to me on the bench. I smiled and began to talk, because I knew it was true. He wasn’t Chloe, but maybe he could be the next best thing.
Chapter Nineteen
That afternoon, I was hurrying out of English class when I ran right into Liam. I dropped my binder and papers exploded everywhere.
“Oh, Jenny…,” Liam said, smirking. He grabbed my binder and a fistful of papers and held them out to me.
“Go away,” I hissed, snatching the papers from him. “I don’t need your help.”
“Oh yeah, you seem like you really have your shit together. People are saying you’re dating Tom Grey now. Is that true?”
“How is that your business?” I said, shoving my binder into my book bag and picking up the last of the papers.
Liam shrugged. “It’s not, but I’ve also seen you hanging around with some freshman from the reserve. Maybe you’re following in Chloe’s footsteps?” He smirked.
“You really are an asshole. That freshman is just a friend. His cousin was the one who was murdered,” I said. “Not that you’d give a fuck about that.”
Liam glanced at his watch, clearly bored by this turn in the conversation.
“It’s messed up, but I didn’t know her,” Liam said. “Maybe you should keep a lower profile. Everyone’s talking about you already. Don’t give them any more reasons.”
“Yeah, like you really care about me,” I muttered, stalking away. I couldn’t wait until he graduated and left Thunder Creek.
I got to my locker and opened it with shaking hands. Seeing Liam always reminded me of the last night I saw Chloe and filled me with a combination of anger and helplessness. I was so jangled by his presence that I knew I couldn’t face the rest of the day at school. Besides, lately school had felt like an unjustifiable waste of time. I couldn’t imagine going to my grave regretting that I didn’t understand titration formulas or the origins of Quebec separatism.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped.
“Whoa! It’s just me,” Tom said. I smiled in relief.
“Hey,” I said. It was comforting to see a familiar face in a school that seemed more foreign every day.
“Hey! So, I don’t know how committed to education you’re feeling today—”
“Minimally,” I interrupted, thinking of Liam. Tom smiled and jokingly pumped his fist.
“That’s what I was hoping for! Look, I realized there’s something we haven’t done yet,” Tom said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, we’ve been investigating this crime for a few weeks now and we’ve never gone to the crime scene. That’s pretty important, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but are we even allowed?” I asked, grasping for a tangible reason why we should absolutely not go to the scene of a murder.
“The cops are done there, so I’m sure it’s abandoned,” Tom said.
“You’re right,” I said, nodding slowly.
“Do you think that would be too hard for you?” Tom asked quietly, his eyes concerned.
I shook my head. I knew Tom was thinking it might upset me to think that someone might find Chloe’s body dumped in the woods soon, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. The whole idea seemed unsettling, as if we were tourists rubbernecking our way through famous murder spots. I had never been interested in the gory side of life, and visiting a corpse-dumping site seemed grotesque. Still, you couldn’t really investigate a crime if you didn’t visit the scene.
“No, it’ll be okay,” I said finally.
“So, let’s go,” Tom said. “I can drive.”
—
The winding highway led us east out of town. We passed the last gas station and the final Tim Hortons coffee shop, both of which stood like sentries at the gates of Thunder Creek. Then there was nothing but the occasional home to interrupt the monotony of the forested hills. I passed the time by scanning the sides of the road, looking for a pink and blue mitten. Chloe’d had no reason to come out here, but you never knew. Maybe she’d taken the mitt off to thumb a ride. It seemed implausible, but so did
everything else this winter.
Neither of us said much on the drive. We listened to music and stared out at the wilderness as Tom’s truck looped around endless turns. I wondered what we would find out there. I was becoming more invested in the case by the day. Meeting Helen’s mother had made everything so vividly real that I felt I owed it to her to try to find the truth. And I hoped that, somehow, I would figure out more about Chloe along the way. I wasn’t very good at facing up to tragedy, but maybe investigating all of this would make me stronger.
Tom knew how to find the crime scene. He had managed to wheedle it out of Leslie that it was on an old snowmobiling trail. Once we found the trail it was obvious we were in the right place. The snow was tramped down there, a parade of heavy boots in a now-forgotten flurry. We followed the tracks down the path. It was a longer walk than I would have expected. My boots slid around in the soapy spring snow.
Tom walked ahead of me. I knew we were at the right place when he stopped abruptly and glanced down. I took a deep breath and stepped around him.
There was nothing. It was just a wide circle of snow. Endless sequences of footsteps had packed its surface as hard as cement. Beyond the circle, an untouched crust of snow stretched toward the tree-thickened horizon.
A life had ended here. I found myself slowly sinking down onto the ground and felt the ache of hard ice against my denim-sheathed knees. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine what Helen had been thinking in her last moments. Was she afraid? Was she in pain? The knowledge that Helen—who loved historical movies, who volunteered at the hospital, who had a mother, a cousin, a friend and a million ideas and memories—had been wiped out here was overwhelming. The finality of this place made me afraid of death and all the things that I would lose. I wished someone had saved her. I wished I had saved her.
The trees rose above me, the white birches slicing pale cuts across the rich blue of an afternoon sky. No birds were singing in the silent woods. In fact, the only sound I could hear was the crinkle of my jacket against my chin. I stared at the snow in front of me, wondering if Helen had died where I was sitting, wondering how so much craziness could be contained in so little time.
“So, what do you think?” Tom said, squatting next to me and clasping his large hands. I shook my head, trying to dissipate the animal-instinct panic I felt in this place. I told myself that this patch of woods was as safe as any other, but I couldn’t shake the paranoid feeling that the killer was nearby. I imagined what we looked like from his perspective, two defenseless teenagers in the woods. It made me wish that I wasn’t quite so good at imagining things.
“There’s not much to see,” I said finally.
“Yeah, this is dumb to admit, but I thought there’d be police tape and, like, a chalk outline or something,” Tom said. I nodded.
I felt guilty just for being there, for coming in the first place. I’d thought I was secure in the rightness of my purpose, but now I wasn’t sure.
“God, Tom,” I sighed. “What the hell am I doing?” From the corner of my eye, I saw him pull his cigarettes out. I heard the mechanical click of the lighter and the deep, even sound of him inhaling.
“I don’t know, Jenny. Maybe you’re looking for Chloe,” he said slowly.
“Maybe. But then, why are you doing this?” I asked. I wanted to know that this mattered to him, that the time we spent together was meaningful and that maybe I was important to him too. In that moment, I needed to believe that there were things bigger than death and the loneliness of an abandoned crime scene.
“I guess maybe it’s something different. Something other than what I usually do,” Tom said.
I felt a flicker of disappointment that it was just a bit of entertainment for him during his last year of high school. I wondered if he saw me in a similar way. Maybe this was his senior fling with the kind of strange girl who wouldn’t hold his interest for long. It hurt to think that he might not care, but I tried to push the feelings to one side so that I didn’t start crying at a murder scene.
“Have you ever lost anyone?” I asked, turning to look at him. Tom furrowed his brow, the cigarette smoke curling up into the canopied lattice of branches.
“I suppose I lost my mom. But not like how you mean. I lost her when she got a new boyfriend who didn’t want me around,” he said calmly, as if the story was so familiar to him that all of its emotional edges had been worn away.
“Is that why you moved to Thunder Creek?” I asked.
“Yeah. He moved in, I was pushed out,” Tom said, taking one last drag before tossing the cigarette down into the snow. It lay smoldering in the icy heelprint of a boot.
“Huh. When you came here, everyone said it was because you were getting into trouble in Vancouver,” I said. Tom rolled his eyes.
“I guess everyone just assumed that all thirteen-year-olds in big cities get into trouble. Honestly, I never skipped school or failed classes until I moved here,” he said.
“I guess they got it wrong,” I said as he stood up.
“They usually do,” Tom said, pulling me to my feet.
“What about your dad? Is he in your life?” Tom asked. I was walking in front of him, so the question, casually lobbed at the back of my head, took me by surprise.
“Uh…that’s kind of complicated,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the path ahead. I wanted to share things with Tom but he kept picking uncomfortable subjects. Still, it beat talking about Chloe.
“Like a bad divorce?” Tom asked. I laughed.
“No, my mom’s never been married. Look, I don’t have a dad,” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t Immaculate Conception or anything, but I never actually met him.”
“Oh, okay. Does your mom know who it is?” Tom asked. I bristled at the implication. How many guys did he think my mom had on the go?
“Yeah, of course. When my mom was nineteen, she started dating this guy from down south. He was up at the college doing forestry. They only saw each other for a couple months and then they just drifted apart. He got a job in Kenora and was gone before she ever realized she was pregnant,” I said, bundling the words into a tidy package. It was easier to say it all at once.
“She never told him?” Tom asked. I shrugged and focused on the slippery path in front of me.
“No, she didn’t. She felt like she didn’t want to make a life with him and so she didn’t want him to feel like he owed her anything.”
“That must have been a hard choice for her,” Tom said.
“I think it was. I mean, she had me so young, it really froze her life.”
“Do you ever think about finding him?” he asked.
I frowned. I hated when people tried to encourage me to build a relationship with my father. It was almost like they thought one parent wasn’t enough, that somehow a father I had never met was equally important as a mother who had been there every single day of my life.
“Look, I don’t have a connection to him, other than the fact that he gave me his height and freckles. Besides, I know where he is,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.
“Where?” Tom asked. I sighed and stared at the tips of my boots as I walked.
“When I was a baby my mom saw a newspaper article. There’d been a really bad car crash near Kenora. A drunk driver drove into oncoming traffic, killing a family with three children. The drunk driver died a day later in the hospital. The article had an old picture of him, and as soon as my mom saw the freckles, she knew.”
“Jesus Christ, that is grim,” Tom said with a whistle. I turned back and met his eyes. Something in my stare must have surprised him because his features settled into a quiet expression.
“Only if I think of him as my father,” I said flatly. “If not, it’s just a story about a drunk driver who killed a family sixteen years ago in a town over six hundred miles from here. That’s how I think about it—just another stranger in the world doing something terrible.”
—
Tom and I were almost at the truck when I
stopped and glanced back down the trail. I had been thinking about how far we had driven out of town just to tramp around the woods like murder groupies. Then it dawned on me. The important thing wasn’t the crime scene but the drive.
“Tom, do you realize we’re east of town?” I asked, pointing at the highway stretching in front of us beyond the last few feet of trees.
“Uh, yeah…,” Tom said, looking at me in confusion. “I did just drive here…”
I was too excited to care about his sarcasm.
“Everyone assumed that Helen hitched a ride from Birch-Bark Village, right? But Jake didn’t think she’d hitchhike.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, at first I thought maybe someone picked her up, but what if she was meeting them somewhere else?”
“But how did she—”
“There’s a bus that runs from my area out here. It ends about half a mile up the road. A couple of years ago, I fell asleep on a bus to the mall and ended up at that stop.”
We had reached the pavement now and Tom’s truck was in front of us, parked on the edge of the slushy road. Tom frowned and glanced from side to side down the serpentine highway. All we could see was rocky cliffs and tightly knit forest.
“But why the hell would she take a bus out here? There’s nothing around,” he said.
I shut my eyes and tried to remember my accidental bus trip. The driver had woken me up by telling me it was the last stop and that the route was done for the evening. I had climbed off the bus feeling disoriented, unsure of where I was. The stop was just a small sign by the highway. I had checked the hours and realized that this bus stop, like many of the areas on the fringe of Thunder Creek, was only a partial-service stop. The buses were done for the day, and as was the case in so much of Northern Ontario, my phone had no service here. What had I done then? How did I get home?
“There’s a bar,” I said faintly, pointing down the highway, the opposite way from town. “You can see the sign from the bus stop.”
Tom smiled triumphantly. “Okay! So, we know Helen said she was meeting someone. And didn’t Jake say her friend worked in a bar?”
The Lives of Desperate Girls Page 12