7 Minutes in Heaven

by Tracey Ward

  “She seems more subtle than that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about Mr. Rixton?”

  I laugh, shaking my head. “No way.”

  “He says some weird stuff. Like that destiny speech he gave us. What’d he say?”

  “He said, ‘Your destiny can still be changed. You don’t have to be what the world wants you to be. You can make your own choices and choose peace.’ Something like that. I don’t know. It sounded really preachy.”

  “It sounds insane.”

  “He’s off. He has issues. We know that. He’s not exactly on our side, but he’s less against us and Kyle than Melissa.”

  “Oh, we’re calling her Melissa now?” she laughs.

  “We’re dead,” I remind her plainly. “We can call anyone anything we want.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I have some choice words for Marcy.”

  “She’s not so bad.”

  “She’s not great either.” Ashley shakes her head, squinting into the sun. “I never trusted her.”

  I cock my head to the side pensively. “You don’t think . . .”

  “No. She doesn’t have the stones to kill us. And for what? Because we got Kyle and she didn’t? It’s been over a year. She doesn’t care.”

  “Makena?”

  “No motive.”

  “Ashley,” I suggest, feeling sick with myself for even thinking it. “She might be jealous of all the attention Kyle is taking from her.”

  “Then she’d kill Kyle. Not us.”

  “Right,” I relent glumly. I drop down onto the planter next to her. “Mom and Dad?”

  “They’re lost without us. There’s no reason to get rid of us.”

  “Mark,” I suggest, shivering at the memory of the way he stared at us at the mall.

  “He’s dated three other girls since us.”

  “He’s still calling. He changed his number so he could. And he was watching us, remember?”

  “Yeah, but that was nearly a year ago. We haven’t spoken to him in months. What are the odds he followed us up to the cabin, saw Kyle put a ring on our finger, lost his mind with jealousy, and shoved us off the cliff?”

  I pause, studying the ground under my feet. “That’s a good point. What did our last moments look like to someone watching? They wouldn’t necessarily know we’d said no to Kyle.”

  “It didn’t look like we said yes.”

  “But we didn’t take the ring off. And we were crying. If we had said yes to Kyle, we’d be crying.”

  “Maybe you would.”

  “We’re the same person, jerk,” I remind her. “Stop trying to distance yourself from what we have with Kyle just because—”

  “He killed us.”

  I sigh, sitting back against the trunk of the tree inside the planter. “Forget it.”

  She looks at me seriously, her eyes full of apology. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I think we have to come back to Kyle.”

  I close my eyes. I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to die thinking my one true love was a psychopath who murdered me because I didn’t love him quite enough. Or because he loved me just a little bit too much.

  “Nine times out of ten, the killer is—”

  “The spouse or partner,” I finish for her. I open my eyes, nodding slowly. “I know. I remember.”

  “It’s hard to imagine. He always seemed like such a good guy.”

  “I still think he is.”

  “I know you do. But we’ve eliminated everyone else.”

  “I’m not sure we eliminated Nate,” I argue. “He’s weird about us and Mom, and when we got pushed I smelled oranges.”

  “Kyle always smells like oranges. His house stinks of it.”

  “So does Nate! He’s obsessed with brewing that nasty orange beer. He smells like oranges and hops.”

  “I’m not denying that he’s creepy, but did you smell beer when we were pushed? Because I didn’t.”

  I shake my head reluctantly. “No. I only smelled oranges.”

  “The exact same orange scent that’s in Kyle’s house.”

  “So it was someone in his house. We’re back to Mrs. Rixton.”

  “Oh my God,” she mutters, looking away in disgust.

  “We haven’t eliminated everyone else,” I insist stubbornly. “I’m better with the theory that it was some random stranger who just happened by in the woods at that exact moment than one that says Kyle did it.”

  “That is so unlikely.”

  “As unlikely as Kyle killing us?”

  She chews on that silently. I can see the wheels turning and I wish I could get into her thoughts the way she can dig into mine. I wish I could climb over to her side and change her opinion, clear Kyle’s name, and take us to the other side without a doubt in our mind that he’s innocent.

  “I don’t know,” she finally mumbles.

  “There are people coming in and out of this town all the time. We have vandalism and theft problems at the end of every winter because these tourists and rich jackoffs tear the place apart before leaving town for the season. There’s every chance that one of them killed us for a cheap thrill or something.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  I stand abruptly. “Let’s do it again.”

  “Do what again?”

  “Get killed.”

  Ashley frowns. “It hurts. You really want to go through that again?”

  “If we can find a clue that tells us who really did it, then yes. I do.”

  “We didn’t see anything. And if we turn around and look now, we still won’t see anything. Object permanence, remember?”

  “I remember, but maybe there’s something we missed the first two times. We were focused on Kyle and the proposal and breaking his heart. Let’s step away from that and look for something else. A sound. A smell. Anything that will prove there was someone else there with us. It might not tell us who it was, but if it clears Kyle, it’s good enough for me.”

  “I don’t want to do it again,” she admits nervously.

  I soften my expression. “I know. It’s rough.”

  “It sucks. It hurts so much.”

  “I get it. But I gotta know, you know? Don’t you want to know for sure?”

  Ashley shifts anxiously. “We don’t have a lot of time left.”

  “What else do we have to do?”

  “I don’t know. We could relive our memories of visiting Grandma’s. We could eat cookies with her. We could be seven years old again and opening presents on Christmas morning. There are a thousand deposits in our memory bank that I’d rather pull.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. We do this one just one more time, and that’s it. Whatever we find out, that’s my answer and I have to live with that. Or die with it, I guess.” Tears sting my eyes. It’s getting real. That last drowning really rocked me and I can’t be as flippant about death as I could before.

  I’m starting to doubt whether or not Kyle can actually save me.

  I clear my throat gently. “After that, we’ll start from the beginning. We’ll relive being a kid and ride that wave until our time runs out. Okay?”

  She doesn’t want to do it. Her face is pinched with regret. I think she wishes she’d never told me what was happening. If she’d kept it to herself, I wouldn’t have gone on a trip trying to clear Kyle’s name to this audience of one. It wouldn’t have mattered. We would be knee deep in turning thirteen again and riding our bike in the summertime. We’d be watching fireworks and eating hot dogs and skinning our knee as we climbed over the fence into Mr. O’Brien’s yard to eat the fat, red cherries off his tree. We absolutely would not be about to stand on a hillside waiting for the cold embrace of death for the third time in one day.

  I’m asking a lot of her and I’m honestly not sure what she’ll choose.

  What I’ll choose.

  I’ve never known myself that well. That’s part of the problem with me and Kyle and the big, bright future that’
s waiting for him. I never saw that for myself because I have no idea what I want. My own sister had to remind me what my favorite color is. That’s how out of touch with myself I’ve become.

  Ashley stands, her back stick straight. Her face determined. “Let’s do it.”

  She takes my hands reluctantly. They feel warm in hers. It’s the only time they don’t ache—when we’re holding onto each other. When we’re whole.

  Two halves of the same coin sinking slowly to the bottom of the lake.

  chapter thirty-three

  “Do you need a coat?” Kyle asks.

  He’s standing behind me. He smells like life at the beach, away from Jackson the way we always talk about. We’ll go to the islands, we say. We’ll live on a boat. We’ll be together. Always.

  “Grace.”

  I close my eyes, trying to ignore Ashley. She’s standing behind me, behind Kyle, but I don’t want to look. If I look, Kyle won’t really be there. I never looked at his face while we stood here. I have no memory of it in this moment, so if I turn, I won’t find him. He’s not real. None of this is real.

  My fingers are freezing. My hand aches viciously. My chest is screaming in agony.

  My time is running out.

  I sigh, stepping carefully away from the feel of Kyle’s body behind me. I feel his warmth leave me. His love. I feel alone when I open my eyes to see nothing there. No one but Ashley.

  “I know this was my idea, but—”

  “I know,” she admits quietly. “It’s not easy.”

  I take a deep breath, telling myself to get it together. This is my last chance and I have to know.

  I have to clear this throbbing doubt inside my chest.

  I look around the hilltop for any clues to what could have happened, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. I hear birds in the trees but I can’t see them because I didn’t see them that day. I didn’t look so they don’t really exist. There’s nothing here but a picture I have stored in my mind of what the cabin should look like. My killer could be standing right here in the exact same spot as me and I wouldn’t know it because I never saw it.

  “We’ll have to head back soon,” Kyle murmurs from nowhere.

  “That’s eerie,” I mutter.

  “I could do a million minutes like this with you,” he says, his smile rich in his voice.

  “It’s just going to get creepier,” Ashley confirms. “We have to ignore him. We remember him because we were focused on him.”

  “I got my letter from Villanova,” Kyle says softly. Reluctantly.

  “We have to look for what we weren’t paying attention to.”

  I got in, he continues without us.

  “A sound or a smell. Sight is useless.”

  It’s good news.

  I shake my head in frustration. “He’s really distracting.”

  That’s all I have to do before I can enter the Draft.

  Ashley nods in agreement. “I know. It’s going to be hard to ignore.”

  Pennsylvania.

  “Let’s split up and move to opposite sides of where we were standing. Maybe we’ll have a better chance of catching something if we’re not standing right next to him.”

  If I even get picked up.

  “Good idea,” Ashley agrees.

  We move away from each other; Ashley toward the cabin and me toward the woods. The one thing I do remember is that I heard a twig breaking under someone’s foot right before I was pushed. I could swear it came from this direction. To the right of the cabin.

  But you’re right. I don’t know by who. I could end up anywhere.

  I close my eyes, listening to the sounds of the woods. Birds. Wind.

  Kyle.

  No. I’m never going back to Florida. Ever.

  “He was so adamant about that,” I call to Ashley softly. “I wish we knew what really happened to Karina.”

  “We never will, so you have to tune him out,” Ashley scolds mildly.

  Just come with me to Pennsylvania until I get drafted. Then we’ll go wherever we go. We’ll start our adventure. Together.

  A squirrel chitters in a tree. He’s excited about something. Or someone.

  Give me your hand, Grace. No. The other hand.

  A cell phone pings quietly.

  I frown, turning toward the noise. Where did it come from?

  Grace Murray, will you marry me?

  “We should have said yes,” Ashley whispers. “We wanted to.”

  Is it too tight?

  “Shut up,” I snap at her anxiously.

  “What?”

  What? Kyle echoes.

  “Okay, that was weird timing,” I mumble. I open my eyes, searching the woods that will never be anything but empty. “I heard something.”

  Are you serious?

  “It came from over here. It was like a text message coming into a cell phone but the tone was weird.”

  “Weird how?” Ashley asks.

  Grace, what are you talking about?

  I point repeatedly at the trees to the right of the cabin. “It was here. Right here and it sounded like . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a bicycle bell.”

  “Are you sure?” Ashley challenges skeptically.

  “I’m positive.”

  “It could have come from Kyle’s pocket. He always has his phone.”

  “Have you ever heard Kyle’s phone make a bicycle bell sound?”

  “No,” Ashley admits, her voice tense. “Never.”

  I lick my lips, feeling my blood run cold. “There’s someone else here.”

  “Where, though?”

  “There in the trees. Someone was watching.” My chest feels tighter than ever. I can barely breathe, my pulse rushing even though there’s no danger. It already happened. Whoever was there, they can’t hurt me anymore, but you can tell it to my heart because it’s racing like it’s trying to run right out of my body.

  I think we should go, Kyle says gruffly. The pain in his voice cuts me clean through. I think it’s time to go.

  “It’s almost time,” Ashley tells me reluctantly.

  “No, no, no,” I chant. “Not yet. Wait.”

  “We can’t stop it, Grace.”

  “But the bell. Who do we know that has a sound like that on their phone?”

  “No one. I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Shit,” I whisper fiercely.

  “Are you sure that’s what you heard? It could have been a windchime, maybe.”

  “No. It was . . . I think it was a bell.”

  No, Kyle says forcefully. I’ve got it. I think—I need a minute alone.

  “Oh, God, it’s ending,” I moan miserably.

  I love you, Grace.

  I close my eyes, pinching my lips together against the agony. “I love you, Kyle,” I whisper brokenly.

  “Listen,” Ashley whispers. “I can hear him leaving.”

  Kyle’s footfalls are heavy. He’s downtrodden and sluggish. Slow. The distinct sound of his flip-flops smacking against his heels recedes gradually. A step on the porch groans under his weight as he mounts it.

  My blood is rushing wildly in my ears as I strain to listen. I look into the nothing surrounding me. The landscape that’s as unmoving as a portrait. The squirrel is back. He’s upset. His teeth are clicking wildly.

  The music inside the cabin clicks off.

  A twig snaps behind me.

  “Grace,” Ashley whispers.

  I nod numbly. “It’s happening.”

  The wind rushes down the hillside.

  The rich scent of orange fills my nose.

  Rough hands shove me hard from behind.

  I’m falling.

  Ice and agony. Cold water. A sharp slice against my palm that burns like fire. Breathless. Gasping. Choking.

  Dying.

  minute six

  chapter thirty-four

  “Look out!”

  Whoosh!

  A ball flies by my head. It misses m
y face by an inch. I stand stock still as it bangs like a gunshot against the door behind me.

  Before I can see him, before I can even think of him or hear him, I turn and leave the gym. I walk into the nothing of my memory of the courtyard, find my favorite planter, and drop down onto it heavily.

  It doesn’t take long for Ashley to sit down beside me.

  “That sucked,” she says plainly.

  I snort in agreement. “Yeah. Seriously.”

  “And all we got was a bicycle bell.”

  “A bell on a cell phone that tells us there was someone else in the woods.”

  “Who, though?”

  I shake my head, feeling instantly deflated. “I don’t know. But Nate’s off the table. We’ve heard his phone chime. I’m pretty sure it’s a bird call. Not a bike bell.”

  “What if it wasn’t a bell at all? Or what if it was, but it was real? Like a real bell on a bike we couldn’t see? Maybe one on the side of the house or something?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I relent, too tired to fight.

  Ashley sighs. “Or, maybe it was someone else. Kyle went inside to turn off the music. It stopped right before the twig snapped. He couldn’t have gotten back out to us that quickly.”

  “We would have heard him running.”

  “His shoes were loud,” she agrees.

  I look at her sideways, my eyebrows raised high. “Do you think he might be innocent?”

  Ashley winces. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. Not anymore.”

  That’s the best I’m going to get. That was our last run through. Our final shot. What we know now is all we’re ever going to know, and that fact sits heavy in my heart. I couldn’t prove he didn’t do it, but if I made her doubt that he did, that’s something. It would be enough to convince a jury to let him go.

  “Do you think he’ll be arrested?” I ask her softly.

  “I don’t know. He’ll be questioned for sure.”

  “There’s no motive.”

  “Maybe they’ll think it was an accident.”

  “Or that we jumped.”

  Ashley makes a sound of disgust in the back of her throat. “Mom and Dad will never believe it.”