by Alex Flinn
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Just static electricity, I guess.” It wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to say.
He began to massage my ankle and, with each touch, I felt the same electric thrill.
“You’re not from around here,” I said.
He smiled. “How do you know that?”
“It’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone else.”
“Oh, I thought maybe it was because I was so special you’d have noticed me if you’d seen me before.”
I rolled my eyes, even though it was true.
“I’d have noticed you,” he said. “Pretty girl like you. I bet you’re the prettiest girl around here.”
“Hardly.” I laughed. I certainly wasn’t. Emily had been, but I wasn’t even a close second. I’d never even had a boyfriend. Of course, that was partly because everyone was scared of my mother.
He finished rubbing my ankle and began to wrap it with the ace bandage. His hands were firm, strong. “I find that hard to believe. Is this a town with inordinately beautiful girls?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been out of it. Well, except sometimes to go to the mall down in Glens Falls for school clothes, but that’s not a big city either.”
“You’ve never been away from here? And you’re how old?”
“Seventeen, almost eighteen. And a lot of people have lived here their whole lives. I’m not some stupid hick, you know.”
Although saying it made it sound like I was. And, really, how did I know I wasn’t?
But he said, “I didn’t say you were. You might be the most brilliant person in the world, but how would you know if you never see anyone else?”
It was like what I’d been thinking, only sort of the opposite, sort of turned on its ear.
Of course, I’m probably not brilliant. At least, I’d always been a C student in school. I was always bored in my classes. Besides, what’s the point of killing yourself in school when you know you aren’t going to college, aren’t going really anywhere? Still, I secretly have always thought, hoped I was smart. I also hoped maybe there was something I was good at, best at. And, more than anything else, I hope that someday, something will HAPPEN.
But, so far, in nearly eighteen years, nothing has.
He finished wrapping the bandage and looked up at me to see what I thought. I nodded. Actually, it didn’t hurt at all.
“You could be really good at something and not even realize it,” he said. “I think about that kind of thing sometimes, like what if the world’s greatest baseball player lived in a place where they didn’t have the game? Maybe he’d never know how great he was. He’d become a goat herder or something and never realize his potential.”
I laughed, but I liked the idea of it, that I might still be special somehow and just not realize it, that the best part of my life wasn’t already over.
“How about you?” I said. “Where are you from?”
“Me, I’m from nowhere. Or everywhere. My family moved around a lot. I’m twenty, and I’ve lived in at least twenty towns, almost as many states.”
“And now?”
“I’ve been living in New York City for a while, trying to make it playing guitar and singing, but it’s hard. I wait tables, street perform for tips, but there are about a million other guys doing that there. I heard they were looking for an act at the Red Fox Inn in Gatskill, so I tried for it.”
Gatskill is the next town over. My friends sometimes go to the Red Fox Inn for dinner, but I never have. “So you work there? You’re a professional singer?”
He grinned. “I guess you could say that.”
I noticed a guitar case in his backseat. “Will you play for me?”
“Next time, I will. Right now, I think I need to take you to Mrs. McNeill’s before I turn into a pumpkin. I double as a waiter at the Red Fox, and they open at five.”
I glanced at my watch. It was three thirty. He’d said next time.
“You want to see me again?” I asked.
“Danielle, I want to see you as much as possible.”
I smiled inside at the thought of it even as I shuddered to imagine Mom’s reaction. He stood and walked to the other side of the car. He took me to Mrs. McNeill’s. When the old lady looked through her cataracty eyes and asked who my young man was, he didn’t correct her, didn’t say he wasn’t mine. Even though my ankle had stopped hurting, I held on to him anyway. I liked how it felt to be beside someone.
When he drove me home, I told him to stop at the bottom of the driveway.
“You’ll be okay?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “When can I see you again?”
“I’ll walk my dog this way again day after tomorrow, same time. Or I’ll try to.”
“I’ll be here.”
And then, he took my hand and pulled me toward him. He kissed me. I knew he was going to do it only a second before his lips touched mine, and when they did, I felt the same electrical impulses, like a wire leading from my stomach to my mouth had become electrified, and I was exploding.
I told Mom I’d fallen near the McNeills’ and Mrs. McNeill had given me the crutches and driven me home. She didn’t question me, so I mentioned how much Ginger had enjoyed the walk, how I thought she was getting fat and needed to exercise, so I planned to do it every day.
I do. For once, something is happening to me.
7
Wyatt
Mrs. Greenwood was knocking at the door. “Wyatt, the man is here to install the computer thing.”
“Okay.” Quickly, I stuffed the notebook into its prior spot and opened the door.
It was weird, reading a missing girl’s diary. Danielle had been hanging with a guitar player named Zach before she disappeared. Did Mrs. Greenwood know? Did anyone? Probably not, since Danielle had been so secretive. Maybe the guitar player was the reason behind her disappearance. Maybe she’d run away to the city with him. Or maybe he’d murdered her.
Should I ask Mrs. Greenwood if she knew? I, more than anyone, knew the importance of not keeping secrets. Some people were big on them, but I knew that secrets could kill like handguns and knives.
Still, this secret was almost twenty years old. Mrs. Greenwood probably didn’t need to be reminded of painful memories that were best left dead.
I thought back to Danielle’s diary. What could I ask that would bring it up, yet not bring it up.
“You know what this place could really use?” I said. “A dog.”
I knew she’d had a dog when Danielle was alive. Thinking about a dog wouldn’t be as painful as thinking about her probably dead daughter.
Which is why I was plenty surprised when she immediately burst into tears.
I mean, really burst into tears. Even the Wi-Fi guy looked up from his work to give me a dirty look for making the sweet old lady cry. I shrugged. I didn’t know it would cause that reaction.
“Oh, God, Mrs. G, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would upset you so much. I was just talking. I don’t need a dog. I’m so stupid.” The Wi-Fi guy nodded. I said to him, “Don’t you have work to do? Come on, Mrs. Greenwood. I’ll get you some water. Or tea, maybe. Do you like tea?” I took her arm. I had it in my head that old ladies liked tea.
Finally, she started walking with me.
She had calmed down by the time we reached the kitchen. I sat her down and started hunting for a kettle. I thought I knew how to make tea. You just poured the hot water over the tea bag.
“I’m being silly,” she said. “We used to have a dog, a yellow Labrador, back when Danielle . . . she was the sweetest thing, and one day . . .” She brushed a tear from her cheek.
I knew what was coming.
“I found her out in the road, dead. She’d gotten out somehow and ran into the street. Cars go so fast here. She didn’t stand a chance. I blamed myself for not protecting her well enough, for not taking good enough care . . .”
She sniffed, and I wondered if she really meant the dog, or if she meant Danielle.
It must be hard for a mom as overprotective as she obviously was to have a child disappear. And Danielle was her only child too.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Dogs get out sometimes. It happens. You can’t protect them all the time.”
“I didn’t do enough. I used to complain about her. She probably never knew how much I loved her.”
I found the kettle and hunted in the cabinet for tea bags. Clearly, if she’d gotten that upset when I asked her about the dog, I couldn’t ask her about Danielle. But what if the guitar player had killed Danielle? Maybe he was some kind of serial killer who’d killed lots of other girls too? Maybe he was still out there.
Or maybe Danielle was alive.
But I couldn’t ask Mrs. Greenwood. Besides, she’d probably never known about Zach. Obviously, Danielle was big on secrets.
“You never got another dog?”
“Oh, I didn’t think I could take care of it. A dog needs walking, and I was getting old.”
“This would be a good place for a dog. Lots of wide-open space.”
Lots of space to bury a dead body.
But I was thinking it must be so lonely for her. She’d been a widow for as long as my mother had known her, and then, to have her daughter disappear and the dog die, all in one year. It must have been unbearable. I knew something about loneliness, knew what it was to sit in my room, checking my phone for texts that never came, logging on to Facebook to see other people’s statuses, happy statuses indicating their lives had gone on while mine hadn’t.
Okay, this was depressing.
I found the tea bags and closed the cabinet. It didn’t shut completely, overlapping slightly with the one beside it. I tried to lift it a bit, to see if that would help, then opened the other cabinet and closed them in the opposite order. That didn’t work either.
“Oh, that’s been broken for years,” Mrs. Greenwood said.
“I could fix it. I could get a new hinge. Do you have screwdrivers and things?”
I wasn’t usually this helpful, but I remembered Mrs. Greenwood saying that Josh’s family owned the hardware store. And going there was an excuse to leave the house. I could ask Josh if he knew anything about the Red Fox Inn. Or Zach.
“I don’t want you going to all that trouble,” she said. “You should do your schoolwork now that you have the internet.”
“Hey, hey, hey, it’s Saturday. And school doesn’t even start again until the sixth. I can take today off and look around town. It’s pretty here. Hey, I can run errands for you. Do you have a grocery list?” I added this to prevent her offering to go with me. That would defeat the whole purpose.
“I suppose you’re right. It would be nice to get some things fixed around here. Why don’t you wait until the cable man leaves, and then, you could follow him into town. You can borrow my Chevy.”
Yes! Access to the car. Without even begging. The kettle shrieked to signal the water was boiling, and I was making tea like a pro.
I poured the water, and as I hunted for the sugar, she said, “It’s so good to have you here, Wyatt. I’ve been so lonely since . . . since . . .” She wiped a tear from her eye.
“It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about the dog.”
She shook her head. “Not the dog. No, not that. Since . . . Danielle.”
Now, I knew what people meant when they talked about the elephant in the room. It had been standing there the whole time, but we hadn’t said a word about it. “Oh, you don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want.”
“I know. But I feel I should explain. When I yelled at you last night. Of course you didn’t know anything about it, which room was hers. I should have thought. It’s just . . . I haven’t been in that room in almost ten years. At first, I sat there all the time. It made me feel closer to her, seeing all her photographs, her stuffed bears and such. The police thought she would never come home, but I was certain she would, unless . . .”
Unless someone had killed her. But I didn’t say it, didn’t prod her to go on. I just said, “I understand.”
“When I saw the light on last night, heard someone in there, I thought for a moment she might be back. Sleep does funny things to the mind, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. I know what it’s like to want someone back. Believe me.”
She patted my hand. “It’s probably a blessing that you’re here.”
I nodded, but I really did wonder what had happened to Danielle. And if Zach had anything to do with it.
8
Wyatt
Mrs. Greenwood’s Chevy was one of those old wood-covered station wagons from the 1980s. I tried three times before it turned over. “Maybe another day, I can take it for a tune-up. It’s not safe for you to drive it like this.”
I was setting the stage for another trip to town.
The Wi-Fi guy pointed me in the right direction, but he was going in the other. “Can’t miss it. There’s nothing and nothing and nothing. Then, there’s Hemingway’s Hardware and Sporting Goods.”
He hadn’t exaggerated about the nothing. I pulled onto Route 9, the supposed main road, heading south. About a mile away was a sign, advertising eggs for sale, and I wondered if it was the same Mrs. McNeill Danielle had visited years earlier. Eggs were on my shopping list from Mrs. Greenwood, and I thought maybe I’d buy them there. But when I got closer, I saw that the house was abandoned, boarded up. I remembered, then, that Mrs. Greenwood had said no one lived in the McNeill’s house, but it was strange that the sign was still up. After that, there was nothing but bare trees, ice-covered roads, snow, and more snow. The tires on the old car had looked close to bald when I left, so I drove slow. It was the kind of place where people just left things by the side of the road, abandoned. I passed a boarded-up bakery with a Closed sign and a hotel with a weather-beaten For Sale sign. I saw an old doghouse on its side, then an empty stand that had once held firewood for sale. Then, there was nothing but trees again for a long while. I checked my phone. Still no signal. I didn’t even want to talk to anyone, but still. Everything was white and gray and empty. It looked like the end of the world and the haze of nuclear winter. My soul felt like the landscape here. It was hard to believe that, back home, there were people wearing bright colors and going to the movies, too many people shopping at malls, buying things they didn’t even need, returning gifts they’d just gotten to get other stuff. Here, it felt like they didn’t even exist anymore. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I belonged here, here with this mournful woman and the ghost of her dead daughter.
Finally, I saw a building, its sign barely visible through the snowy haze. Hemingway’s Hardware and Sporting Goods, it said with no irony at all.
I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. I contemplated leaving the car running in case it didn’t want to start again after it stopped. Finally, I decided to chance it.
The hardware store wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before either. In front was a bulletin board with items for sale, cats and snowmobiles. In its center was a Missing Person sign with a photo of a guy about my age. I examined it. The date he’d gone missing was a little over a year earlier. I counted him, Danielle, and the girl Danielle had mentioned in her diary, all missing. This place was starting to look like a rerun of Cold Case.
The sporting goods section was a wall devoted to fishing lures and guns. Another wall held secondhand items, waffle irons and battered board games, irons and baby dolls, model Hess trucks and vacuum cleaners. A fancy hairbrush that looked like silver lay on a shelf by a monkey made of coconut shells that someone had bought on vacation. Three golden retrievers lounged in various locations, and there were two white pigeons in a cage with a sign that said Wedding doves for rent. Ask Josh. The only other customer was a man in his seventies, examining a television set that had an antenna attached to the top.
“Hey, she’s got you running errands already.” Josh came up behind me.
“Yeah, I might need a jump-start—or a mechanic—if this car of hers doesn’t start again.�
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He looked out the window. “Oh, that car’s not that old. People around here believe in keeping things. We don’t need any newfangled stuff when our stuff works just fine.”
I thought he was joking when he said “newfangled,” but I couldn’t be sure.
“I mean . . .” He held up the fancy silver hairbrush with engraved flowers all over it. “Why have a plastic brush when you can have this one that weighs ten pounds, and why have one of those big, ugly flat screens when you can have this cute one?”
I nodded toward the old man, who was trying the television’s knobs. “Can you even get cable on that thing?”
“If you can, he’ll do it. Jerry knows a thing or two about repairs.”
“Well, I’m learning. I’m looking for cabinet hinges. And I had a few questions.”
“Cabinet hinges. What kind?”
I held out the old one I’d taken off. “Like this.”
He gestured me toward another section, sort of hidden, considering this was a hardware store, behind the duck decoys and the tents and looked around. “We don’t seem to have those in stock. I could order it, though, and you could pick it up in a few days.”
The internet would probably be faster, but I wasn’t really in a hurry. My grandfather always said it was important to patronize local businesses. Besides, I wanted info from Josh. So I said, “That would be great. Thanks.”
I followed him to the counter, making conversation about another topic. “So, what’s with the pigeons?”
“We rent them out for weddings and stuff. They look like doves, but pigeons always come back home. We’ve got a falcon too, but he can’t stay at the shop because he eats road kill.”
“Good to know.” Trying to sound casual, I said, “Hey, have you ever heard of a place called the Red Fox Inn in Gatskill?”
Josh thought. He even said, “Hmm.” Finally, he shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Gatskill’s the next town over, and it’s pretty small. I’d think I’d have heard of everything in Gatskill.”