“Owen was tutoring her,” I say. Mia glares at me, but I don’t care. “Our old Life Skills teacher told us. Maybe Owen and Summer stayed after school together.”
Wade is staring at us, openmouthed, obviously devastated that his big important theory has proved to be a complete wash. “But . . . but . . .” He looks back and forth from Mia to me, as if expecting one of us to yell just kidding. “That wasn’t in any of the reports.”
“She must have been embarrassed about it,” I say. “That must be why she never told us.”
“Why would they stay after school?” Mia crosses her arms. When she’s angry, she looks sharper, as if someone has chiseled her face into a point. “They could have gone anywhere. His house, her house—”
“Oh yeah, right. Like she would have gone to her house with Mr. Ball skulking around her.”
She seizes on his name. “You know, I’ve been thinking we should look harder at Mr. Ball. Do we have any proof that he was in Burlington that day, like he told us?”
“You think the cops didn’t check?” I ask.
“They didn’t check the football players’ alibis, did they?” Mia lifts her chin. “He used to read her emails. And she was sure he was stealing things from her drawers. Remember how weirdly afraid he was that she’d get pregnant? Like he just loved to picture her having—” She stops herself from saying the word sex. Her cheeks go splotchy with color.
“You saw the guy. He’s a wreck. You really think he could have tackled Summer?” I shake my head. “Besides, Mr. Ball didn’t know about Lovelorn.”
“He could have guessed,” Mia insists. “He could have read the book—”
“And the fan fic? Nobody knew about it except for us—and Owen.”
“Owen didn’t do it,” Mia says quickly. “It’s another dead end.” She draws her knees to her chest. “I don’t know. Maybe this was stupid. What do we know that the cops don’t?”
“Lovelorn,” I say. My head hurts. Like someone’s kicking my eyeballs from inside my brain. “We know Lovelorn.”
“If only we had our book back,” Mia says, exhaling so hard her bangs flutter. “The cops must have finished with it by now. The case is cold. They’re not even doing anything.”
“It’s evidence,” I say. I don’t know much about the law, despite Officer Neuter’s you don’t have to answer any of my questions unless you want to lectures, but I’ve watched enough TV to understand the basics. “They’re not just gonna go out and try and sell Summer’s stuff at the Goodwill. Besides—” I break off, seeing Wade’s face. “What?” I say. “What is it?”
“The cops don’t have Return to Lovelorn,” he says carefully, as if the words carry a strange flavor.
“What are you talking about?” Mia’s voice is sharp. “Of course they do.”
“They never had it,” Wade insists. “It wasn’t with the rest of Summer’s things. It wasn’t at home or in her locker. I know. I asked. I told you that,” he says, turning to me.
“You didn’t,” I say automatically. “I would have remembered.”
“I did,” he insists. “You just don’t listen to me.” He has a point. I’ve always thought Wade’s ramblings were like elevator music: best to just tune out. Now I’m realizing how wrong I was about him. He really does care. He does want to help.
“But . . .” Mia’s voice is weirdly high-pitched, like someone has a fist around her vocal cords. “That’s impossible. They knew. They knew all that stuff about the sacrifice scene we wrote. They knew about the three girls and the Shadow and the knife.”
Wade frowns. “They knew because you told them.”
“No.” Mia shakes her head so hard her bangs swish-swish with the movement. “No way. I never told them any of the details. I never . . .” She trails off, inhaling sharply, as her eyes land on me. “Oh my God. No. You didn’t.”
I feel like I’ve been locked into a toaster: I’m hot all over, dry and crackling. Now everyone’s staring at me. “Hold on,” I say. “Just hold on.” I’m fumbling back through those old, awful memories—that dingy interview room and Mom sobbing next to me, as if she really thought I’d done it. My sister in the corner, tight-lipped, gray-faced, her eyes closed, like she was willing us all to be a dream. “I only told them because I knew they’d find out eventually. They had the book. They had it. How else would they have known about the stuff we were writing? How else would they have known all about Lovelorn?”
Mia squeezes her eyes shut. Now when she speaks, it’s in a whisper. “I told them about the original book,” she says. “I told them we liked to imagine going to Lovelorn. I thought . . . well, if they had our fan fic, they’d find out anyway, right?”
For a long moment, no one speaks. For once, even Abby has nothing to say, although I can still feel her watching me, this time pityingly. My whole body is pulsating, like I’m being rattled around the belly of a giant snare drum, beating the same word back to me over and over: stupid, stupid, stupid. It’s so obvious now. How did I not see it? All those times Detective Neuter, and later Lieutenant Marshall, left the room to get sodas, snacks, water for my sister, tissues for my mom . . . all those times, he was just ratting to the other cops so they could wring information out of Mia, and so he could use whatever Mia said to get me all wound up.
They were playing us against each other the whole time.
Mia said she left you and Summer alone in the woods. Mia said she had nothing to do with it. Mia’s trying to get out of trouble.
I stand up, suddenly desperate for air, and wrench open the window. The cops don’t have Return to Lovelorn. They never even found it.
“The killer,” I blurt out. I turn back from the window. “The killer must have the book. Think about it,” I say, when Mia makes a face. “Summer loved that thing. She never even let us take it for the night. So why didn’t the cops find it with her stuff?” The more I speak, the more excited I’m getting. “The killer must have known it would lead back to him. So he took it and destroyed it. Burned it, or buried it, or something.”
“You think the killer broke into Summer’s house to get a bunch of fan fiction?” Abby asks, in a tone of voice that clearly says: You, Brynn, are a deluded subspecies.
“Maybe not,” I say, matching her tone. “Maybe he convinced Summer to give it to him. Maybe he offered to keep it safe for her.”
Strangely, Mia has gone totally white and very rigid, like a plaster model of herself. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
“What?” Abby at last turns to Mia, and I’m glad when her eyes are off me.
But it’s to me that Mia speaks. Her eyes are huge, anguished, like holes torn in her face. “I think I know where Owen went that day,” she says. “I think I know what he was doing.”
No one had seen the Shadow since the original three had been to Lovelorn. Gregor’s hair was now a wiry gray, since obviously without the Shadow’s protection people got old and ugly and died. Some people were even grumbling about it. Things had been different when the Shadow was around. Maybe they’d even been better.
—From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks, Brynn McNally, and Mia Ferguson
Mia
Now
It feels strange to ride in Wade’s truck with Abby next to me, and Brynn fiddling with the radio in the front passenger seat, and Wade tapping a rhythm with his hands against the steering wheel—almost as if we’re really friends. Some people, I know, get to live like this all the time: they ride in cars with their friends. They listen to music. They complain about being bored.
If Summer had lived, maybe she’d be sitting next to me instead of Abby. Maybe Owen would be the one driving.
If, if, if. A strange, slender word.
Abby reaches over and takes my hand. “You okay?” she asks. Luckily, Wade’s truck is so loud—he seems to be carrying the contents of an entire Best Buy in the back—that I know he and Brynn can’t hear.
“I’m okay,” I say, and give her hand a squeeze. Thank God for Abby. I haven’t told h
er about seeing Owen yesterday. I haven’t told Brynn, either.
Always, the story leads back to Owen. I think again of what he said: I felt sorry for her. And: I was in love with you.
Could it possibly be true?
Does it matter?
Brynn’s right about one thing: he’s the only one who knew about Lovelorn. If my hunch is right, he’s the only one who could have known.
To get to Owen’s house we have to pass through town. Main Street is, once again, blocked off by squad cars and barricades. Beyond them, a crowd is clustered at the corner of Spruce, in front of the little gazebo and the bandstand where the parade must have ended yesterday. Several trees have come down and been roped off by the parks department.
Abby presses her nose to the window as we wait at the light to turn onto County Route 15A. “What’s going on?” she says. “Why’s everyone standing around?”
“I don’t know,” I say, but then I spot the bunches of white lilies arranged in front of the gazebo steps and the microphone set up for a speaker, and my stomach drops.
Brynn must see them at the same time. “Summer’s memorial,” she says. Her voice sounds thin and uncertain, like a ribbon beginning to fray.
“Should we stop?” Abby asks.
“No,” Brynn and I both say together. Abby looks surprised, but she doesn’t argue.
When we drive past Perkins Road, Wade raps a knuckle against the window.
“That’s your street, isn’t it?” he says to Brynn. She gives a nod. “I remember your old house. I came over once for a barbecue when you were, like, five. I think it might have been your birthday party. Do you remember?”
“No,” Brynn says flatly.
“I wore a Batman costume. That was during my superhero phase—luckily, before I got really into Green Lantern but after Superman—”
“Wade?” Brynn’s voice is fake-sweet. “Can you please keep your weirdness to a minimum?”
Wade just shrugs and smiles. I suck in a quick breath when he makes the turn onto Waldmann Lane, navigating around a honeysuckle bush that cascades halfway into the road. How many times did Owen and I make the walk up the hill together, while he used a stick to beat at the grasses at the side of the road and overturn the mushrooms growing between the pulpy leaves, while I let every single word I’d swallowed during the school day come pouring out of me, a sudden release that felt as beautiful and natural as dancing?
Abby whistles when we crest the hill and the house comes into view, an enormous patchwork of stone and wood extensions, additions and modifications tacked on over almost two centuries. There was always something sad about the Waldmanns’ house—I’d always thought it must be because Owen’s mom died at home, just dropped dead one day from a cancer everyone had thought was in remission—but now it looks worse than sad. It looks broken and wild. The breakfast room, which used to feel like being inside a snow globe, has been completely destroyed. A tree has come down straight through the roof.
“Well,” Abby says, “that’s one way of redecorating.” Brynn snorts.
“You guys stay here,” I say quickly when Wade parks. I know, suddenly, that I need to get Owen alone. If he did what I think he did, he’s been keeping the secret for years. There must be a reason, and I won’t—I can’t—believe that he did it. That after the years that had passed, he was guilty after all. “I’ll talk to him.”
Wade is already halfway out of the car but now slumps back in his seat, obviously disappointed. Brynn twists around to look at me, and for a second something flares deep in her eyes, an expression of care or sympathy or maybe just pity. Then she clicks her seat belt closed again.
The gate—a new gate—is open. A big truck is parked in the driveway: Krasdale Landscaping + Tree Removal. I don’t see any other cars. Someone is working a saw—the air is shrill with the sound of metal on wood, a sound that makes my teeth feel like they’re getting filed. The air smells like running sap. Like heat and rot and insects. Like summer.
I start down the flagstone path, now choked with grass and weeds, toward the front door. One of the landscapers, ropy and muscled, comes around the corner of the house, carrying a chain saw. He shouts to someone out of sight. Then he turns to me.
“Not home,” he says, gesturing toward the door with his chain saw.
“Do you know where he went?” I ask, wrapping my arms around my waist, even though it isn’t cold. Just creepy to stand in a place that used to be familiar when it now feels so foreign, like standing on the bones of a former self. He shakes his head. “You know when he’ll be back?” I ask. He shakes his head again. My phone buzzes in my bag. I turn around, squinting, to see whether Brynn or Abby is gesturing to me, but can’t make out anything beyond the glare of the windshield.
Another guy comes around the house, this one reed-thin, shirtless, and the color of raw leather, with a skinny blond mustache and a goatee and lots of bad tattoos. There’s an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Maybe backcountry, or one of the cottage kids.
“You need help with something?” His tone isn’t exactly welcoming.
“I was just looking for a friend,” I say. “I’ll come back.”
“He had a funeral,” he calls out when I’m halfway to the car.
“What?” I turn around.
“No, not a funeral.” He’s got his cigarette lit, and he exhales a long stream of smoke from his nose, dragon-style. Definitely backcountry. I wonder if he knew Summer. I wonder if he knows me. “A memorial or whatever you call it. There was a girl who died a few years ago. Got axed. Nearly took her head off.” When he smiles, he tilts his head back and narrows his eyes, like a cat looking at something it can eat. “Your friend is supposed to be the one who did it.”
As always when someone mentions the murder, I get a weird out-of-body feeling, like the moment right before you faint. “She didn’t get axed,” I say. My voice sounds loud. I’m practically shouting. “She was stabbed. And he didn’t do it.”
I turn around and practically sprint back to the car.
“No luck?” Brynn says, when I get into the car.
“He’s not home.” I feel strangely out of breath, as if I’ve been forced to run a long distance. “He went up to town for the memorial.”
“What?” Brynn squawks. “Is he insane? He’ll get lynched.”
“Come on,” Abby says. “It isn’t that bad, is it? Not after all this time. We were at the school yesterday and no one bothered us.”
“That’s because no one noticed us.” Brynn pivots completely around in her seat to glare. “You live here. You should know how people are.”
“I’m antisocial, remember?” Abby says serenely. “I’m a shut-in, like Mia.”
“I thought you were famous.”
“Online.”
Brynn rolls her eyes. “Sorry, Batman. You don’t exactly look like you’re trying to fly under the radar.”
Brynn has a point: today Abby’s wearing a polka-dot taffeta skirt with a ruffled hemline, a T-shirt that says Winning, chartreuse shoes, and her Harry Potter glasses.
“I think we should go,” Wade says.
Brynn rounds on him next. “Oh, yeah, right. That’d go over real well. Sorry, but I’m already full-up on shitty ideas.”
“I’m serious.” Wade turns around, appealing directly to Abby. “Killers often can’t stay away—from the scene of the crime, from the media, from anything having to do with the case. What do you want to bet the killer will be at Summer’s memorial?”
“He’s right,” Abby says. “I watched a whole documentary about it.”
I can feel Brynn’s eyes on me and I look away. Owen came home after five years, right in time for Summer’s memorial. Could it possibly be coincidence?
No. Of course not.
But then I think of his smile and the way he used to chuck my arm and say, Hey, Macaroni when we passed in the halls. The afternoons up in the tree house, eating cheddar cheese on graham crackers, which was weird but surprisingly delicious. How he wou
ld watch my dance routines, really watch, his chin cupped in his hands, totally interested, no matter how long they were. The kiss.
And I know that that Owen, the old Owen, the Owen I always believed in even after he broke my heart, is the only thing I have left. I can’t lose it, too.
“That’s what everyone will think if we show,” I say. My voice sounds faint and fuzzy. Like a bad recording of itself. “They’ll think we just couldn’t stay away.”
“We don’t even have to get out of the car,” Wade says. “We’ll just get as close as we can, and we’ll watch.”
Brynn shakes her head. “No. Mia’s right.”
“Come on, guys.” Wade looks from me to Brynn, then back to me again. “Don’t you want to finish this?”
Brynn makes another noise of disgust. When we were kids, Brynn always seemed so much braver than everyone. She was a thousand times braver than I was. I threw up in the bathroom in sixth grade when we had to dissect a worm. She barely blinked. When Hooper Watts called me Mute Mia and told everyone I was too stupid to know how to talk, I proved his point and said absolutely nothing. When he told everyone Brynn had been caught stealing girls’ underwear from the gym lockers, she told everyone he’d been paying her to do it so he could add to his collection.
And maybe she is braver. But she’s afraid now.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
Brynn gapes at me. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Maybe,” I say, feeling strangely relieved, and strangely free, too. She keeps staring at me, shocked, as if she’s never seen me before, and I can’t help it: in my head I do a little jump, arms up to the sky, victory.
Why did Lovelorn appear to Audrey, Ashleigh, and Ava, when countless other children had wandered the woods and found nothing but toadstools and rotting tree trunks and finches twittering nervously in their roosts?
Maybe because Lovelorn needed them.
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