by Kara Thomas
“About what?” I ask. I know exactly what she’s here to talk about. But I need to hear her say it. We weren’t supposed to discuss the trial while it was going on, so our mothers kept us apart. By the time it was over, there was some sort of seismic shift in our friendship. On the rare days when Callie felt like having me over to play, Maggie was always within earshot, hovering as if we’d disappear the moment she turned her back.
Even if I’d had the nerve to ask Callie if she’d really seen the face of the person in her yard that night, I never would have gotten her alone to do it.
“About what Ryan said in the car.” Callie squeezes her eyes shut. Collects herself and exhales. “It could still be a coincidence.”
“Maybe,” I say quietly.
The clock on the wall ticks, filling the space between us. Callie hugs her knees to her chest. “I looked up his appeal….A lot of people really believe he didn’t do it.”
“I know.” I’ve known since I was old enough to search for the answers. As soon as I could use the Internet on my own, I knew that there were people who believed Wyatt Stokes wasn’t the Ohio River Monster.
Callie casts her eyes down, picks at a chip in the polish on her big toe. “He could get a new trial this time. If there’s a link between Ari and the other girls…he could get out.”
Wyatt Stokes, out of prison. Wyatt Stokes, who knows our names.
“My parents can’t afford to move again,” Callie says. “I’m going to Stroudsburg, but they can’t leave Fayette, and my dad’s job.”
“Callie,” I say, her name feeling unfamiliar on my lips. “What did you really see that night?”
A tear snakes down her cheek. “I didn’t lie.”
“I never said you did.”
We just sort of stare at each other for a bit.
“Did you really see his face?” I finally ask.
I expect her to get angry. Storm out on me. Instead, her voice goes soft, and she says, “I don’t know anymore.”
The silence in the room is loaded; the sound of the clock’s second hand hangs in the air like a bomb ticking.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I was just a little kid, and I could have been wrong about seeing his face. Of course, I thought I did—Stokes was like the bogeyman, and I was so scared that he’d come after Lori after what he’d said to her.”
Angry tears stream down her pink cheeks. She’s not looking at me anymore.
Is that why you shut me out? I want to ask. You thought I knew you lied?
“Even if I was wrong,” Callie says, “there was evidence he killed those other girls. He didn’t even get up on the stand and deny it. They had enough to convict him.”
“Maybe,” I say. But I don’t know if I’ve ever fully believed that. Not with the things I know about how that night really went down.
The things that the jury didn’t hear. The things that Callie still doesn’t know.
I swallow and bunch up the comforter in my fist.
“What did you tell them?” Callie whispers. “When they asked you what you saw?”
“I said you woke me up and said someone was outside,” I say. “The person ran around the side of the yard. I had heard you say it was Stokes, and the police kept hammering it into us that our stories had to match.”
I pick a pill of fleece off the comforter and flick it away. “So I said it was Stokes. Even though I never saw their face.”
“His face,” Callie says.
I’m quiet for a beat.
“You don’t think Stokes did it,” Callie finally whispers. Her face says what I feared, that this is the ultimate betrayal of the Greenwoods. It’s one thing to question what we saw that night, but in this house “Wyatt Stokes is the Ohio River Monster” is an irrefutable fact. Y equals y.
“I just want to know what really happened,” I say. The truth is, I have to know. Some days I think I’ll explode from not knowing.
“If this means the real Monster is still out there, we have to figure out what really happened,” I correct myself. “He could go after other girls. Maybe he never stopped, and the police just haven’t found those girls yet.”
I swallow away the sick taste in my mouth. I think of all the girls no one would miss, what’s left of them washed away with the detritus from the river.
“You mean we have to take back our statements,” Callie whispers. “My family would never forgive me.”
“No. We can’t do that unless we’re absolutely sure,” I say. “We have to be sure.”
“How are we going to do that?” Callie wraps her arms around her middle. “It happened almost ten years ago. If someone besides us saw something, they would have said something back then.”
The pit in my stomach grows. “Unless they had a reason to stay quiet.”
“Where would we even start?” Callie says. “You’re talking about finding a murderer.”
Or murderers. I don’t dare say it—that it’s possible Lori wasn’t killed by the Monster at all, but by someone who wanted to make it seem that way.
I wipe my palms on the knees of my pajamas. The room feels like a sauna—small, suffocating. “We were there when Lori was taken. There has to be something we missed…something that could help us put everything together.”
“But you’re going home tomorrow,” Callie says.
It feels weird, hearing someone call Florida home. For me, it’s always been where Gram’s house is. A pit stop along the way in this giant circle I’m walking.
Because Fayette isn’t home either. It’s just the place where I started. The place I’d do anything to leave behind for good. And if Callie and I make this whole thing with Stokes right, then maybe I’ll be able to.
“I’ll reschedule my flight,” I say.
“Okay.” A breath leaves Callie in a low hiss. “So where do we start?”
“I don’t know yet.”
It’s a lie, spun out of the truth I’ve been holding on to all these years. The part of the story I didn’t tell the prosecutors because I didn’t want her to get in trouble and get taken away from me. The part that I had almost convinced myself meant nothing, until now.
My sister knows something about that night. She knows who besides Wyatt Stokes would have wanted to hurt Lori.
I know, because an hour before we finally went to sleep that night, I heard Lori call Joslin and tell her to stay the hell away from her.
Yes, I am a liar, but there are a couple of things I feel the need to say about that.
One: I come from a family of liars. My father was probably the worst of us, calling the credit company and swearing his card had been stolen, just to get twenty bucks wiped off his bill.
My sister was a liar too. I heard her when the police came to our house asking when the last time was that she’d seen Lori. I watched Joslin stand with her hands in her back pockets and tell them she hadn’t talked to Lori since the previous morning, even though I knew she’d talked to Lori the night Lori went missing.
Two: I was eight years old. I didn’t know much, but I knew that lying to the police was wrong, and that if I said something about the phone call, I would get Joslin in deep shit.
So when they asked me to tell them everything that happened that night, I left out what I overheard Lori say to Jos on the phone.
What was I supposed to do? She was my sister, and I was terrified of her being taken away from me. I thought she’d go to jail for lying to the police. I had to keep her secret.
It wasn’t until Joslin left town that something clicked for me, that I was able to entertain the possibility that my sister, who couldn’t even kill a spider without feeling guilty about it, could have been involved in her friend’s murder.
It was a little white lie, my not telling the police about the phone call. A little white lie that swelled into a monster of a lie that I was too scared to expose, because I was a little coward back then.
And I can’t bring myself to tell Callie, because I’m stil
l a coward now.
•••
Maggie wakes me up at six and tells me there’s breakfast in the kitchen. I throw my sweatshirt on over the tank top I slept in and meet her downstairs. There’s an unsettling feeling in my stomach.
Maggie drags out the chair across the table and sits down. Her eyes are tinged with red. I take the seat across from her, where there’s a plate of sunny-side up eggs waiting. I can’t believe that after all these years she remembers how I like my eggs. “How was the vigil?” she asks.
“Hard.” I pop an egg yolk with my fork.
The coffeemaker beeps, announcing that a full pot is ready. Maggie pushes her chair away from the table and stands up. “Do you need to use the computer to check into your flight?”
I set my fork down. “Um, I actually wanted to call and change my flight to the end of the week. So I can go to Ari’s funeral. If that’s okay.”
Maggie looks confused, and my stomach sinks—until I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. Callie trudges into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes.
“Look who decided to join us,” Maggie says. “What are you doing up so early?”
Callie pours herself a cup of coffee. Leans against the counter and shrugs.
“So, is it okay?” I ask Maggie. “If I stay a couple more days?”
She turns her attention back to me. “Of course. You can stay here as long as you want. You’re going to need something to wear for the funeral, though. How about the three of us take a trip to Target?”
Callie eyes us over her mug. “Tessa was actually going to come to Emily’s house with me today. She’s having a hard time with everything.”
“Oh.” Maggie deflates a bit before putting on a smile. “Okay, maybe tomorrow.”
“Sure. Tessa can wear some of my clothes until then,” Callie says. She jerks her head toward the stairs. “I’ll show you what I have in my closet.”
No one comments on the fact that Callie is a size two and I’m a size six. It’s obvious Callie’s just trying to get me alone, but Maggie doesn’t seem to think it’s weird that her daughter was comparing me to a street urchin two days ago and now wants to play dress-up in her room.
I thank Maggie for breakfast, clear my plate, and follow Callie up to her room. The window is still open, and the boozy stench has been replaced with the wet-earth smell from outside. After it rains in Orlando, the moisture clings to the air until it’s almost suffocating. Here, I smell the rain and I can almost sense how Fayette must have been before people ruined it with all of our ugliness.
Callie sits down at her desk and begins to braid her hair. “I was thinking last night—wondering why it was Ari. She’s not like the other girls.”
“Neither was Lori,” I say.
“Okay, but Ari wasn’t like Lori either,” Callie says, then steels herself, as if she were trying not to be cruel. “I mean Ari was pretty, yeah, but she wasn’t exactly confident. She liked to think she was street-smart, but she was kinda clueless.”
Nick said Ari had wanted to leave town; maybe she just accepted a ride from the wrong man.
Or worse, I think, remembering Marie Durels’s hot breath in my ear last night.
“Did Ariel have a job in Mason?” I ask Callie.
Callie gives up on the braid and sets her elastic down. “I don’t think so. She babysat, in middle school, but once her mom went back to work, her dad made her watch Kerry Ann and Dave.”
I stretch my legs out in front of me on Callie’s bed, my knee giving a little pop. I don’t know how to bring up what Marie told me without sounding like I’m accusing Ariel of being a prostitute. My thoughts flick to playing “hotel” in Callie’s house—seven-year-old Ari as the receptionist, wearing one of Maggie’s old blazers and a satin scarf and sitting patiently behind a folding table. No matter what we played, Ariel always accepted whatever role she was given.
Callie stares at me, catching me spacing out. “What?”
“At the vigil, Marie Durels kind of insinuated that Ari was, you know…selling herself.”
Callie snorts. “Your old neighbor? Yeah, she’s super-reliable. Ari wasn’t a prostitute.”
I pull my legs in so I’m sitting pretzel-style. My calves ache from all that walking yesterday. “Marie had to hear it somewhere.”
“People talk all kinds of shit in this town.” Callie turns back to the mirror, opting for a messy bun instead of a braid. “High school girls don’t turn tricks at the Mason truck stop.”
Maybe in your world, I want to say. But I’m not going to take a dig at Callie just because I can.
“You’d be surprised,” I say instead. “There was this whole story on the news about how girls at Columbia were doing it. They used Craigslist and made thousands of bucks a week.”
Callie’s lips part slightly.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I heard her say something at lunch last year,” Callie says to my reflection in the mirror. “She was asking Nick if she needed her parents’ permission to open a bank account.”
I examine the filthy bottoms of my socks. “Makes sense if she wanted to hide how much money she was making.”
“Or because her dad is a total psycho who has to control everything.” Callie’s expression darkens. I know she’s always been terrified of Daryl Kouchinsky. Ironically, she never seemed bothered by my father, with his chaw-stained teeth and shameless weed smoking on the front porch. Probably because for all of his yelling and threatening to beat the shit out of Jos and me, he never actually laid a hand on us.
“Did Ari say anything else weird?” I ask Callie.
She shrugs. “I haven’t talked to her since the end of sophomore year.”
I’m quiet as Callie pulls off the Penn State Twirl Championships T-shirt she slept in. She catches my eyes in the mirror and reddens. Maybe she forgot that we haven’t changed in front of each other in ten years.
I avert my eyes as Callie puts on a tank top. “What happened between you two?” I ask.
“What are you talking about?”
“You and Ari. Last night, you said ‘I never got to tell her I’m sorry.’ ” I can’t tell Callie that I also know that she deleted Ari from her Facebook friends, not without admitting that I’m a huge creep who has been keeping tabs on her all these years.
She fusses with her bun, clearly embarrassed. “Nothing really happened. I was a bitch to her, and she eventually got tired of it, I guess.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That’s it?”
Callie shrugs a freckled shoulder. “After you left, she became my best friend by default, or whatever. She was just so needy, and it got on my nerves.”
Callie lets out a sigh, ruffling her side-swept bangs. “Anyway, if it’s true, what she was doing in Mason, she didn’t tell anyone in our group. They wouldn’t have been able to keep their mouths shut.”
“Someone must have known,” I say, frustration creeping in. I’d sooner stab my eyes out than knock on Marie Durels’s door and ask who told her Ari was selling herself.
Callie looks up. Pauses. “There’s one way we could find out,” she says. “We could go to the truck stop. Ask around and see if anyone ever saw Ari there.”
It’s probably a waste of time; any other girls who work at the truck stop will clear out for fear of the cops by the time today’s newspaper, with Ariel’s face on the front page, gets delivered. Probably they’ll all avoid the area for a few days. The ones who stay behind most likely won’t talk. Definitely not to us.
But the Fayette County Penitentiary is on the way to the truck stop. When Joslin visited my father the other night, she may have left a clue there about how to find her.
“Sure,” I say. “We can start there.”
It takes all I have not to bounce on the balls of my feet as Callie asks to borrow Maggie’s minivan. I can feel it. I’m going to leave that prison with a phone number or address for my sister. I just have to convince Callie to stop there on the way home from Mason.
; Maggie tells us not to eat lunch out, since there’s plenty of cold cuts she’ll have to throw away at the end of the week. We wave goodbye from the driveway, and she disappears from the living room window, smiling. As I buckle my seat belt and reach into my pocket for my iPod, I catch Callie giving me the side-eye.
“You sure listen to that thing a lot,” she says.
I shrug. “Helps me tune out the noise.”
Callie’s forehead crinkles. It’s the same face she made as kids whenever I said something too dark for her tastes. One night when I was over at the Greenwoods’ house, Callie was whining about me having to go home after dinner. “Why, why, why do I have to do homework?”
Maggie was losing her patience. “So you can get good grades, and get into a good college, and get a good job,” she snapped.
I remember looking up from the armchair where I was tugging my shoes on. “What’s the point of life,” I asked, “if you go to school, then go to work, then die?”
Callie looked horrified.
I was always such a little nihilist. I blame it on my father’s drunken rants. They got especially bad after he was laid off from the steel distributor he’d worked for, about six months before it closed.
Fifteen years I busted my ass for Ed, and he couldn’t even tell me it to my face. Human beings ain’t nothing but the shit on the heels of whoever dumped us onto this godforsaken planet.
In any case, Callie and I were raised differently, and it seems to come up every time I open my mouth.
Callie reaches for the radio. “Do you mind if I—”
I shake my head. Put my iPod away. Callie sifts through the static until she finds an alternative rock station. I wait for a commercial break to clear my throat and speak.
“I was thinking…if we want to know more about what was going on with Lori that summer, we should probably find my sister.”
Callie turns off the radio. “Find her?”
I look out the window. “I haven’t heard from her since she left.”
“That really sucks, Tess,” Callie says softly. “I’m sorry.”
The pity in her voice makes me wish I could shrink into the seat. I choose my next words carefully. “I think she’s back in town. She visited my dad before he died.”