Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  Hunter missed Kat.

  “Have you heard from her yet?”

  He shook his head and sipped his Chardonnay. He’d been trying to stay calm about her absence, but it was getting harder by the day.

  Erika reached over the bar and pulled up the full bottle and a glass for herself. She poured and drank. “You haven’t told me where you think she is.”

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I think she probably decided that there was nothing left for her here, now that the glass shop is gone.” That isn’t what Hunter thought, but it was the best lie he could come up with. What he really thought was that Kat had taken his father’s money and left town before Ashley led the cops to them. She was gutsy enough to do it, he knew that. But he was surprised that she’d be selfish enough to do it without so much as a goodbye to anyone. It was a deserved selfishness—self-preservation, really. But it was uncharacteristic.

  Erika drank. “Doesn’t sound like her. I think she’s coming back. It’s only been a week.”

  “Week and a day. Did she leave anything at the apartment?”

  She shrugged. “She didn’t really have anything to leave.”

  She does now, Hunter thought. She has more than a million dollars...somewhere.

  “All she said was that she was going away for a few days. But it’s been more than a few days now...” Erika bit her nail. “By the way, I know you guys had a thing.”

  “What?” Hunter was shocked. They were close, but he assumed Kat didn’t tell anyone about that night, because of Sean.

  “I mean, I don’t really know, but I could tell. You’re, like, her favorite person...aside from me.” Erika tipped the wine bottle toward him. “You want the rest of this?”

  “Sure... But what about Sean?”

  “Sean’s great. Everybody loves Sean.”

  The wine tasted cheap and floral upon further consideration. “Yep, everybody loves Sean.”

  Erika stood up and went behind the bar to get her purse and coat. She didn’t like hanging out there once her shift was over.

  Hunter stood up from his bar stool. “You need a ride home?”

  “No, I’m going over to Buzzy’s for dinner.” She touched his arm. “Don’t worry. I think she’s gonna show up.”

  Hunter nodded solemnly and followed her out to the street. There was one hour of daylight left, but the canopy of clouds made it feel like nighttime.

  “Sure you don’t want a ride?”

  “No, I’ll see you later.” Erika walked in the other direction, and Hunter went to his car.

  The interior leather of the BMW was cold as he slid into the driver seat. It had been ages since Hunter had driven home from a bar. Under difference circumstances, it would have seemed like a real victory to leave with nary a buzz. But the circumstances hadn’t been normal for a while and there was nothing to celebrate.

  As he drove along the empty winding streets, Hunter remembered the chore he’d been working to forget. He needed to clean the boat. Night after night, he’d resolved to go down to the dock after dark and give the boat a proper cleaning so that his father could sell it. He should have done it by now. If Ashley was working with the cops and Kyle’s case was still open, someone would be knocking on his door any day now to take a look at that boat. He needed to be sure there were no remnants of Kyle’s scarf in the motor, no empty bottles from The Undertow in the garbage. He needed to check every corner of that godforsaken boat until he was sure there was nothing left of Kyle in it.

  Hunter had already promised Kat and his father that it was done. Weeks had passed since then. But the last time he attempted to clean the boat, Sean and Ashley had found them. And Ashley got suspicious, and Sean accused Kat of cheating, and Hunter got a black eye.

  He’d almost finished the job, and now he was afraid to go back. Anyone could be watching that boat now, just waiting for him to go down there and give them proof of his guilt. Ashley could be down there. The ghost of Kyle could be down there.

  Hunter imagined Kyle’s body, still tethered to the murderous machine as they drove back to shore. They’d dragged him for a few seconds. Hunter had felt it, though he didn’t know what the drag was at the time. It wasn’t he who had killed Kyle, and it wasn’t Kat. It was the fucking boat. He couldn’t bring himself to be near it.

  Hunter considered all of these things as he drove along the winding road in the fading daylight, with the heat blasting onto his cold hands. He hated the boat. The boat was holding so many bad feelings from those months that it was a wonder it hadn’t sunk to the bottom of the ocean with everything else. With Kyle. Hunter could almost forget about the specific person named Kyle Billings when he wasn’t thinking about the boat. He was always thinking of the distant abstraction of his guilt, but he didn’t often think about Kyle’s face, his mannerisms, the way he died and the fact that he was a real human people had known—until he remembered the boat. Then it all came back. If he could set the boat on fire and push it out into the waves, he would. But that would look suspicious, so he couldn’t do that.

  Hunter pulled the car into his driveway and walked into the dark house through the back door. He’d get to the boat tomorrow.

  Chapter 19

  Kat watched as a family of six pulled overstuffed suitcases onto the bus and negotiated the dispersal of their children and luggage. The Greyhound was nearly full. She turned her attention back to flattening her map on the empty seat beside her and avoiding eye contact with the new passengers. She couldn’t spare the seat.

  “No, honey,” the mother whispered to her daughter as they walked down the aisle. “I don’t think that seat is available.”

  They had forty-five minutes to go before the Tampa stop and, although it was rude, Kat couldn’t spare the space that her maps, notepads and granola bar wrappers now occupied. She clutched the duffel bag in her lap and tried to look busy.

  The person in the row ahead opened a window, sending a blast of hot Florida air back into her face. They weren’t supposed to open those sliding windows—because of the air-conditioning—which didn’t make any sense because the air-conditioning wasn’t working. The driver had been scolding people about it since Jacksonville. Kat leaned forward and took a long gulp of the warm air. It was unseasonably hot, even for Florida.

  Kat could have hired a driver for this journey. She had a million dollars now. No, she’d had one point three million dollars. Then she bought and began renovations on an antique barn on Martha’s Vineyard to give to Orla. Now she had five hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. In a day, half of her new fortune disappeared, and what a relief it was. It wasn’t just the pleasure of giving it to Orla and Sean. It was also that she didn’t feel right walking around with the money to her name. It compounded her paranoia and guilt. So she felt a little lighter on this day than she had a week before. But she wouldn’t feel right until she accomplished her full plan.

  “Next stop, Waldo,” the driver announced, just loud enough for the first five rows to hear.

  Kat looked at her map. She was close—not as close as she’d be if she’d hired a private driver with her secret fortune, and she didn’t have to stop at every depressing outpost in northeastern Florida—but close.

  She didn’t mind the bus. It was unpleasant, but it was a familiar unpleasantness. Kat thought of her many Greyhound rides from Buffalo to Cleveland when she was thirteen. Her mom’s boyfriend at the time had moved there for a supposedly lucrative job, and so they went to meet him on weekends for several months. Eventually, one of them did something terrible to the other that Kat never knew the specifics of, and that guy disappeared from their life, along with the Greyhound trips.

  The last Greyhound bus Kat had taken was from Buffalo to Martha’s Vineyard—one way, seven years ago. That one took a long time. They always took longer than you thought because of all the stops, and the stops were the worst. When the driver allowed
, Kat knew enough to stay on the bus during the stops. A bus littered with fast-food wrappers and stinking of a full toilet tank was still better than most of America’s bus stops. The stops didn’t used to be so bad, she recalled. Not all of them. Now, though...now they were unofficial homeless shelters, drug markets and bustling intersections of unregulated economies. Don’t look at the girls who look too sexy—that’s what Kat’s mom had told her years before. She’d forgotten about that rule and how much it had terrified her, until now. There weren’t any sexy girls on this bus for this trip, just people who looked hot and worn-out from trying to get by with what they had.

  Kat reached into her pocket and unraveled the note she’d been carrying since Jasper: “22 Juno Lane.” That’s all it said. Kat didn’t need to read it anymore. She’d looked at that piece of paper so many times already that she’d probably never forget it again. But she liked to take it out and read it every now and then to make sure her memory of it hadn’t changed—22 Juno Lane.

  The whole trip was only supposed to take a few days—and it wasn’t supposed to involve the bus. Kat was going to rent a car in Boston and drive down to Jasper with just one overnight along the way. She was going to knock on doors on Kyle’s old street, maybe ask around at a few local establishments, and then find Kyle’s mom.

  It didn’t happen that way. And eight days into this ordeal, Kat wasn’t sure if she was any closer to her goal.

  Kat leaned her head back into the soft cushion of the bus seat and ran through the events of the previous days, taking stock of her failures.

  It took several days to drive down to Jasper, including the necessary overnights in cheap hotels. She could have stayed in nicer ones, but it didn’t feel right to Kat. This wasn’t a vacation.

  When she finally arrived in Florida, she’d gone straight to her first destination: an address she’d found through free internet search sites for tracking people down. It came up twice with Kyle’s name, which seemed promising. But Kat arrived to find the house unoccupied, boarded up and stripped of anything useful. She would have knocked on a neighbor’s door, but only two other houses on the foreclosure-ridden street seemed currently occupied, and there was no one home at either. So she found a motel right off the highway and spent the evening planning her next move.

  The following morning, Kat went to a diner in the strip mall closest to the original house and asked the waitress if she knew Kyle. The lady told her that she did not, and that Kat should mind her own business.

  From there, Kat drove to the offices of a local construction company, the name of which she’d seen on a T-shirt Kyle was wearing in one of his high school yearbook photos. She figured he, or maybe a relative, had worked there at some point. The large man at the desk with hands that looked like burned roast beef told her that the business had been bought and sold twice in the last ten years and that no one there “knew anything about anything.”

  As she walked to her car on that fruitless morning, fighting back tears of defeat and frustration, Kat stopped at a parked van with the company’s logo printed on the side. She knocked on the window at the man in the driver seat. He rolled it down slowly, taking in her whole body as he did. Kat asked him if he knew Kyle. And the man said, “How ’bout you get in and we drive around a while to find him?” He had a gold tooth that shimmered as he flicked his tongue suggestively at her.

  Kat turned on her heel and went quickly back to her rental car, taking not a moment to look around before she peeled out of the parking lot. She drove fast down the highway, her breath quickening with the accelerator. Kat was alone and frustrated and at a dead end. She couldn’t go home without doing what she needed to do, but she was running out of leads. She breathed faster and faster, her fingernails digging into the steering wheel. Then her breathing became uncontrollable and her vision began to blur, and Kat realized she needed to pull over. She was having a panic attack—her second, after the one on the sidewalk back in Addison.

  It took a few minutes to recover and then, although her body was still trembling, Kat pulled back onto the highway and drove to her motel. She didn’t have the luxury of attracting the attention of drivers or police.

  The next morning, Kat decided that she couldn’t drive anymore. It was too risky in her state. So she returned the rental car and bought a Greyhound bus ticket bound for her next, and likely last destination: Tampa, Florida. The Tampa lead came from a photo posted online that Kyle was in. Whoever posted the photo had it geotagged to 22 Juno Lane, Williamsville, Florida—a small Tampa exurb. All it meant was that Kyle had been there once. It wasn’t a great lead, but it was all she had, so Kat decided to follow it.

  Kat spent several long days watching television in her hotel room, waiting for her scheduled bus trip. The only person she spoke with in that time was the young woman at the front desk. She’d been tempted to call Erika, just to break up the monotony and hear a familiar voice. But if she spoke with Erika—or Sean or Hunter—they would ask her questions about what she was doing, and she didn’t have any answers for them yet. So she turned her cell phone off and kept it off. She planned to explain everything later, after she accomplished this mission. If she did.

  It would have been faster to just hire a cab for the ride down to Tampa. It would have felt more private too, less annoying. But Kat didn’t think a cab was safe. So many hours alone with a chatty driver would leave a trail. Someone would know that she was in Florida and they would know something about what she was doing. That wasn’t an option for this trip.

  Which is why, eight days into this ordeal, Kat was sitting on a Greyhound bus, listening to babies cry and teenagers text and the bus driver bitch. Kat closed her eyes and leaned back. She was tired, but too nervous about letting go of her duffel bag to nap. That was another thing she remembered about the bus: if you pretended to sleep for long enough, sleep would eventually come, so be sure that was what you wanted. Sleeping on the bus was risky business for anyone traveling alone—even people who weren’t carrying half a million dollars in cash.

  God, she wanted to get there and get off that bus. She wanted the entire trip to be a distant memory, a successful mission that she could leave in the past. But nothing was unfolding as she had planned it. Nothing ever did, she supposed. The panic attacks were a real curveball, even more so than her bad leads. Because now she was at the mercy of public transportation, brushing up against all those strangers and their multitude of desperations. There was just no fucking way that walking around with a duffel bag of hundred dollar bills was a good idea. But what option did she have at this point?

  Kat chugged water and wiped the sweat from her brow with the edge of her shirt. She’d been wearing the same clothes for three days and they were beginning to stink enough for casual passersby to notice. She’d left her other clothes behind in Jacksonville as a matter of strategy. Her pizza sauce–stained jeans and sweaty T-shirt were going to get her through this.

  Kat didn’t have much practice at criminality, but she knew how to move invisibly through the world. Looking poor and just a little bit nefarious granted her some distance from strangers. People made up their own stories from there. Maybe she was homeless, mentally ill or generally antisocial. She was certainly too unsavory for men to hit on or children to be allowed to sit beside. And in this costume, her behavior changed too. Kat was riding the bus as a guarded, streetwise loner. She was playing a role she’d watched as a spectator many times before.

  “Tampa,” the driver announced. “Last stop on this run.”

  The bus lurched to a halt and everyone stood to collect their things.

  Kat quickly stacked her notebooks, stuffed her printouts and maps between the pages, and zipped them into her duffel bag. She could feel the bricks of fresh hundred dollar bills wrapped in a clean T-shirt at the center of the bag.

  It hadn’t been easy to get the cash. Kat knew enough not to just go to the bank and ask to withdraw it, which the bank wouldn
’t have accommodated even if no one reported it as suspicious. No, she’d had to ask Hunter’s father’s fixer—Lars, with the white arm hair—to get it for her. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but she’d been prepared with an elaborate story about how she was planning a long African safari trip. She’d told him that US cash was more reliable in the countries on her itinerary. It was recommended by the State Department, she’d said. Sure, until you get murdered for it. That’s what Lars had said without a hint of irony. It occurred to her that perhaps that was a desirable outcome to Lars, considering the headache and expense she’d caused the senator. She’d laughed nervously at the grim joke, which wasn’t really a joke.

  Only now, as Kat stepped off the bus into the Florida sun, did she realize what an improbable story her African safari trip had been. Lars didn’t really believe or care what she did with her life as long as she stayed quiet.

  Kat felt someone shove her from behind. “Keep moving!”

  She turned around and snarled like a wild animal. A bald man curled his lip in disgust, and they both kept walking.

  Kat followed the crowd of passengers along a sidewalk as cars whipped by and palm trees moved lazily above them. The bus stop was located on a grassy median between two four-lane highways, which left them unnervingly exposed. Could have been worse. Benches were lined up around the center, which some passengers went to. Others got into idling cars. Kat walked toward the line forming at the cabstand.

  In line, a large woman wearing a giant straw hat gave Kat a long once-over to indicate her disapproval, and then turned back around. Kat held tight to the faux leather handles of her worn-out duffel and watched as people got into sedans and minivans bearing signs for local taxi companies.

  When it was her turn, Kat took the back seat of a teal Chrysler Neon.