by Kara Thomas
But why would Jesse stay behind?
Because he’d never let Kat go alone.
“Claire,” Cummings says softly. “Maybe you could look at his picture again.”
I swallow, nod. I don’t think I can handle looking at his face but I owe it to Kat and Jesse, right? Because somehow, I got away.
I lift the picture. Michael Dorsey stares back at me, his expression blank and unthreatening. It seems impossible I could have looked into eyes that blue and not be able to remember them.
“Claire,” Novak says, pulling my attention away from the picture. “We tested the trees where you were found. We found some hair and skin cells.”
It takes me a bit to figure out what this means. “Mine?”
“The DNA doesn’t match Kat’s or Jesse’s, so we’ll need to test yours to be sure. But your injury is consistent with your head being slammed into a tree.”
It doesn’t make me feel any better to hear him say it. I was attacked. I didn’t hurt myself running away from something horrible I’d done. Something horrible happened to us.
“This Michael Dorsey guy,” I say, voice quavering. “He attacked me?”
“We can’t say for sure without you being able to identify him,” Cummings says. “But we can loosely place him on Bobcat Mountain, and he had Kat’s phone.”
Why can’t I remember him? I remembered Paul Santangelo—I remember feeling terrified of the hiker who was just trying to help me—but when I look at Mike Dorsey I feel nothing.
Was it too dark to see his face? Had he had his face covered when he smashed my head into that tree?
Or is my brain still trying to protect me after all, so that I don’t have to see his face every night before I fall asleep?
I give the photo back to Cummings and bring my trembling hands together. “There was blood on my hands, in the emergency room.”
“Dorsey had a stab wound on his shoulder when we recovered his body,” Cummings says. “It was at least a few days old.”
I lower my hands. “I had his blood on me. I had evidence it was him and now there’s no way to know for sure—”
Cummings puts a hand on my knee. “Claire, victims unknowingly get rid of evidence all the time. You can’t beat yourself up.”
Victim. I resist the urge to find the tender spot at the back of my skull with my fingers.
But Michael Dorsey is dead. The idea is incomprehensible—the FBI has someone who could fill in the blanks in my memory, who could tell us what happened to Kat and Jesse—if only he were alive.
“I understand how you must be feeling,” Cummings says as I’m wiping away a tear.
Anger rises up in me out of nowhere, the urge to lash out at someone as strong as my need to breathe. “How could you possibly understand?” I say.
Novak’s eyes flick to his hands, knotted over his belly. “I’ll go check on that coffee.”
Cummings shifts on the couch, edging closer to me. “I know it was before your time, but you ever hear of that plane crash in Queens after September eleventh?”
I shake my head.
“My mother and aunt were on that flight,” Cummings says. “On their way to visit our family in the Dominican Republic.”
Thirty seconds ago, I wanted to die. Now, I want to die and have someone light my corpse on fire and flush my ashes down a toilet because it’s what I deserve. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”
“It was. I was only a few years younger than you are now when it happened,” Cummings says. “It was twenty years ago, and some days I still don’t want to get out of bed.”
The knot in my chest tightens.
“How do you keep going?” I whisper.
Cummings glances at the kitchen entryway, where Novak disappeared through. On the other side, I hear my father murmuring words I can’t make out. “You don’t really have a choice. If you can’t do it for yourself, you do it for the people who love you.”
I rub the tears out of my eyes. Cummings opens the folder in her lap again, and my chest clenches.
“I know this is hard,” Cummings says. “But take a look and tell me if you recognize what I’m about to show you.”
I don’t breathe; when Cummings sets a picture on the coffee table, a whimper lodges in my throat.
Kat’s bandana, the pink one she wore to volleyball matches and used to tie back her wet hair that Friday night before.
A quick glance, and the grime on the fabric might be mud or dirt. But I look closer.
The stains aren’t brown, they’re a faded rust color, like a bloodstain left too long in the water.
I can’t stop seeing it. Even after Cummings and Novak are gone, even after the three Ativan I sneak when Mom leaves me alone so I can take a bath, the blood on the bandana is there when I close my eyes.
It’s there when I sink below the surface of the water in the tub. All my other senses dull, throwing the image of Kat’s bandana into sharp relief.
How long do I have to stay under here, I think, before it disappears?
How long until I disappear too?
SIX MONTHS LATER
DECEMBER
The spring before sixth grade, when my parents told me that Mr. Marcotte had accepted a position at Aviano Air Base in Italy and Kat’s family was moving with him, I shut myself in my room and refused to come out for anyone, especially Kat.
I knew I was being a giant brat about it, but we were about to start middle school. Kat and I had spent all summer making plans—we would both join the newspaper and maybe try out for the play and maybe finally sit with Anna Markey at lunch—and Kat was abandoning it all to move to Italy.
Starting middle school without her felt like a world-ending event. Mom implored me to imagine how Kat felt, having to start school in a country where she didn’t know anyone, but I couldn’t get over her leaving me behind.
I’d like to believe that if I’d known I would eventually lose her forever, I wouldn’t have been such an ass about her moving away. But I think I acted the way I did because it’s easier to live with anger at someone than to deal with the pain of missing them.
I miss her—I miss them—all the time, but I’m angry more often than I’d like to admit. I’ll think of a stupid thing Jesse said to me, a pointless argument Kat and I had where I knew I was right but I just gave in because I couldn’t win against her, and I get angry all over again.
It’s easier to be angry. It’s easier than wondering why I was the one who got away.
I’ve obviously had a lot of chances to discuss this in therapy. Mom found me a psychiatrist off campus who I take a twenty-minute bus ride to see every other week. There’s also all the doctors I spoke to during my two-week stay at Twin Oaks, not long after the search for Kat’s and Jesse’s bodies started and I lost what was left of my shit.
Anyway, a lot of things have happened between then and now, but all that matters is I’m okay.
I have to be okay. Because for four weeks, I am going home.
* * *
—
I haven’t been to Long Island since Thanksgiving; the drive from Geneseo is too long for spontaneous weekend trips, and to be honest, I’m not eager to spend a second longer in Brookport than I need to.
My father drives up two days before Christmas Eve to pick me up for winter break. I insisted I was fine to take the bus home, but Dad framed it as I’m just excited to see you and want that extra six hours in the car with you!
The real reason, obviously, is that my parents are probably skittish about me traveling alone. It’s a miracle they even let me leave for school at all, considering I was barely a functioning human being for most of the summer.
I push the thoughts away and let the sound of Dad’s audiobook lull me to sleep. We arrive home as it’s getting dark; the sight of our Christmas tree, its rainb
ow lights reflecting off the bay window, makes my heart tug.
When we get inside, Mom is in the living room, guiltily straightening the pipe cleaner antlers on the reindeer ornament I made in kindergarten. “I’m sorry we didn’t wait for you—Dad thought it might be nice if you got here and everything was all set up.”
“Mom,” I say. “I was at school, not—”
Missing.
“At war,” I say, letting my backpack slide off my shoulder, but it’s too late, Mom’s smile droops a bit. She covers it up by planting a kiss on my forehead.
“Do you want Mama Lenora’s or Panda Garden?” she asks, her eyes not meeting mine. “You’re the deciding vote.”
I’m suddenly not very hungry, but if I say so, she’ll keep digging and find out I also told Dad I wasn’t hungry when he asked if I wanted anything from the McDonald’s at the rest stop on the drive home.
It is very hard to hide signs of depression when your mother is a therapist; I tried that once and it ended badly. Or it ended well, depending on how you look at it, since I am here, in my house, on winter break from college, and not still in Twin Oaks.
“Panda Garden,” I say. “Can you get me my usual? I’m gonna start unpacking.”
She nods, worry working her jaw muscle, but by the time I’m shut in my bedroom, she’s on the phone with Panda Garden, her voice back to its normal, airy self.
I sit perched on the edge of my bed, my chest tight. I knew that coming home would be hard. What I did not expect was seeing our Christmas tree in that window—the same one we’ve had since I was in diapers—and barely recognizing it, as if it were an artifact from someone else’s life.
I need to do something to anchor myself, quickly.
I unpack my laptop and I Google Mike Dorsey.
This is the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before I go to bed. Sometimes, I even sneak in a session or two between classes when I’m bored. The only person who knows about this little habit is my therapist at school.
He says indulging the urge to Google the man who killed my friends and almost killed me is like picking at a scab. Gratifying, maybe, but at the cost of healing.
I don’t care enough about his stupid metaphor to argue with him about why it’s wrong. Googling Mike Dorsey isn’t gratifying, because I get nothing out of it.
There hasn’t been an update about Kat and Jesse’s case in months. The facts are out there, waiting for the necessary pieces to tie everything together: that definitively, conclusively prove that they’re dead; that Mike Dorsey is the man who killed them.
No one knows for sure exactly what happened in that parking lot between Mike Dorsey and Johnathan Marcotte. The FBI is being tight-lipped—ask anyone and they’ll say it’s to protect their own asses, in light of how badly they fucked up. Because they were supposed to be close by during the ransom exchange, making sure no one got hurt.
And yet, somehow, Mike Dorsey figured out that Mr. Marcotte had told the FBI about the ransom demand, and they were waiting for him to leave with the money to catch him. In his panic, he tried to drive off. Mr. Marcotte jumped in front of the car, desperate to stop him.
Mike Dorsey dragged Kat’s father’s body three hundred feet with his Dodge Charger before he escaped long enough to make it to the top of the quarry, where he presumably shot Kat and Jesse before dumping their bodies into the water. He might have escaped if not for trying to speed away from the FBI agent waiting for him at the quarry entrance, and barreling his car straight into a passing tractor-trailer.
The FBI says that Kat’s and Jesse’s DNA was found in the trunk of Mike Dorsey’s Dodge Charger. Tire tracks matching his car were found on the north side of Blackstone Quarry; an initial search of the water yielded Kat’s bandana, some items from Jesse’s wallet, and a camping knife that Elizabeth Marcotte identified as belonging to her husband. Not much biological evidence was left on the blade after the time it had spent in the water, but the FBI believes Mike Dorsey tossed the knife to cover up that his blood was all over it after I stabbed him in self-defense.
Marian Sullivan-Marcotte’s hundred-thousand-dollar reward for Kat’s return, dead or alive, still stands. After the authorities announced they were calling off the quarry search until the spring—the water was too deep, plagued by poor visibility and too many crevices to search for bodies safely—divers came flocking in from all over, desperate to be the ones to find Kat and Jesse and collect the money.
Once one of the divers got stuck in a narrow crevice and nearly drowned, the town of Sunfish Creek barred the public access to the quarry.
I know all of this, of course.
I know that Michael Vincent Dorsey, the man responsible for what happened on Bobcat Mountain, was born in Tampa, Florida, and moved to Sunfish Creek with his mother when he was fifteen. He was arrested twice in his twenty-five years—once for stealing cash from the register at his job at a pet store, and once for marijuana possession.
His Facebook profile is private, but posts he made that his friends leaked to the press reveal a man who loved cars, his mother, and their orange cat, Briscoe. He also ranted about how weed should be legal, how the series finale of Game of Thrones was bullshit, and how rich people are the scum of the earth and all-out class warfare is the only solution.
The people who were willing to admit they had once been friends with Mike Dorsey, in exchange for a thirty-second spot on the evening news, described him as mercenary, scheming, but above all, naïve. Mike Dorsey always had an idea of how he was going to make money, leave his life as a mechanic in Sunfish Creek behind. He wanted to live like the rappers and influencers he followed on his private Instagram account; in the absence of talent or brains he’d of course turned to crime.
Put all these pieces together, and it makes sense Michael Dorsey would murder the granddaughter of a wealthy congresswoman, along with her boyfriend, for one hundred thousand dollars.
It’s enough for most people. But it’s not enough for me.
It’s an explanation, not an answer.
Outside my room, the doorbell rings, and Dad shouts that the food is here. I shut my laptop and push Mike Dorsey from my mind. If I let him linger there, I’ll start to dwell on the question that will never, ever be answered.
How did he wind up at Devil’s Peak that evening?
How did he find us in the last place we were supposed to be?
* * *
—
Serg called me while I was still studying for finals to ask if I’d be interested in working over my break, and I don’t think I’ve ever said yes to anything so quickly in my life. I can tell my parents are disappointed I have to work Christmas Eve until I come home with a crisp hundred dollar bill in tips for covering waitress duties.
Tonight is New Year’s Eve, one of the only nights we’re busy enough to open up the dining room on the second floor. The bar gets so backed up that I’m pulled away from the hostess stand to run drinks upstairs.
I scan the room for the crusty old dude and the woman who is too young for him one of the waitresses instructed me to deliver two old-fashioneds to. My flats snag on the carpet and I almost swan-dive with a full tray of drinks because the woman in question is Ben fucking Filipoff’s mother, Pam, and sure enough, Ben is sitting right next to her, across from said crusty old dude.
The man—slicked-back silver hair, clearly Brookport Old Money—flags me down. “Over here, sweetheart.”
Ben’s face turns the shade of a beet as I place one of the old-fashioneds in front of the man. Pam Filipoff looks up from her chicken marsala and squeaks, “Claire! We didn’t know you worked here!”
Kill me. I offer a full-teethed smile. “Happy New Year, everyone.”
Mrs. Filipoff, nose and cheeks champagne pink, is not about to let me get away. She introduces me to Old-Fashioned, whose name is Frank and who is clearly u
nimpressed with having to make small talk with the help.
Ben bumps his hand against mine as I’m clearing the empty glasses on the table. “Where’s the bathroom here?” he asks.
He knows it’s downstairs; maybe he wants an excuse to talk to me or get away from Old-Fashioned, who is now whispering into his mother’s ear.
“I’ll show you,” I say, balancing one end of the drink tray on my hip. Ben steps aside when we get to the stairs so I can head down first.
“You look good,” he says, and I wish he wasn’t behind me so I can see his face and determine if he means it.
“You too,” I say. “Your mom’s new boyfriend seems nice.”
“He’s a dick.”
We’re at the bottom of the stairs; the bathroom is to the right, the bar is to the left. Here is where we should part ways, but Ben blurts, “What are you doing later?”
My cheeks flush, because he asked, but also because the answer is embarrassing. My parents are at a party at their friends’ house in Nassau County and won’t be back until after midnight; I was planning on taking home meatball soup in a bread bowl and falling asleep before the ball drops.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Same. My mom is going to Frank’s tonight.” Ben holds my gaze. “You know where to find me if you’re bored.”
I replay the invitation over in my head a dozen times over the next two hours. Around ten thirty, the chaos dies down. The diners have been served the final courses of their prix-fixe menus, and I haven’t had to seat a new table in over an hour. Serg relieves me of my hostess duties and I slip into the kitchen to retrieve my coat.
Carlos is sitting on the counter, prying open a bottle of Korbel. The cork flies out to cheers from the kitchen staff. He takes a swig and offers me the bottle.
I shake my head and he boos. “You better be coming to the tree lighting.”
He’s referring to the annual tradition in which he lights his Christmas tree on fire in his backyard and invites the whole staff to watch over cups of cheap champagne.