Time Will Tell

by Barry Lyga

  “That’ll be a sight to see, I’m sure,” Dad snapped, and turned away.

  Elayah brushed against the sheriff as he turned to walk out. His eyes, hard and icy, softened at the sight of her. He actually touched his fingertips to the brim of his hat, as though he’d stepped out of a Western.

  “El,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen, down the hall toward the front door.

  Elayah stood there with the bandages and the antiseptic and the antibacterial cream, worrying at her lower lip as she watched her parents, her mother trying to calm her father, her father trying his best not to snap at her for it.

  She’d witnessed this waltz before. With a heart-skipping resolve, she put the medical supplies on the counter and dashed down the hall after Liam’s dad.

  She caught up to him on the front stoop, tugging at his elbow, a move which she belatedly realized was probably quite foolish given he was armed.

  But he just twisted around, regarding her with those same gone-kind eyes. “What is it, El?”

  “I just…” She shook her head, then shook it again. The words had seemed so easy, so inevitable on her short jaunt down the hallway. Now they wouldn’t come.

  She froze there, caught between the hard truth that this was all her fault, that she shouldn’t have talked to Rachel… and the harder truth that even though he’d gone to school with her parents, the sheriff was still a cop, a white cop, and she couldn’t be sure she could trust him any longer.

  “El? Is there something you…”

  They both turned toward the road at the sound of a car approaching. Once again, neighbors had turned out for drama at the Laird house, and Elayah was glad to have the sheriff standing between her and the cameras.

  The new car was Liam’s, but he wasn’t at the wheel. Before the car even drifted to a stop at the curb, the passenger door flew open and Liam leapt out, hit the ground at a run, and charged over the front lawn in a straight path to Elayah.

  “Of course,” his dad muttered.

  Liam’s dad might as well have been invisible and intangible for all Liam took note of him. Instead, he took the stoop steps two at a time and bounded to her side in an instant. Then, as though he’d hit a wall, he stopped dead in his tracks, two feet from her.

  “El…” His voice strangled itself in his throat, like a baby throttled by its own umbilical cord. “El, I’m so sorry.”

  Sorry for what? It almost didn’t matter now. She nodded, numb.

  The sheriff sighed, clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder for a paternal beat, then trotted down the steps to wave off the onlookers and the first reporters.

  “Let’s get you inside.” Liam guided her in and closed the door. Elayah stood there in the foyer with him, staring down at her hands.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll think of something,” he told her. She knew it was a lie; she chose to believe it anyway.

  1986: KIM

  They stood in Brian’s garage and stared.

  “It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” Kim said at last.

  Dean paced slowly around the time capsule. The thing was three feet tall and more than a foot wide. Much larger than they’d anticipated.

  “It looked smaller in the catalog,” Brian admitted. “We could always send it back and get a smaller one.”

  A general murmur of agreement cluttered the garage for a moment.

  “No,” Jay said. “No. Lookit: If we send it back, that’s at least a week. Then two weeks for a new one. By then it’ll almost be Thanksgiving. The ground will be too hard to dig. We’ll have to wait for spring. Let’s just do this now.” He thumped the top of the time capsule, which rang dully. “We can just put more into it, is all.”

  Marcus nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  Everyone waited for him to look to Antoine for agreement and confirmation—the twins never did anything without handcuffing themselves together first—but an awkward moment passed, and Marcus defiantly did not so much as glance in Antoine’s direction.

  Kim cleared her throat. “I agree with Jay.” Her voice squeaked a bit.

  “Well, let’s start gathering our stuff, then,” Dean said, adopting a commanding tone. “We’ll do it the day after homecoming, right? That’s a week.”

  “Six days,” Marcus corrected.

  There was general agreement at this. Then Jay added, “We should put something in as a group, too. Like, something from school.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Brian.

  Jay shrugged. “I was thinking of something like the Cup.”

  The Cup. Formally known as the Steingard Trophy. A sixteen-inch-tall goblet of hammered copper with a black band around its rim, chiseled with the names of four local alumni who’d died in World War I. It represented the high school’s 1972 football victory over hated rivals the Riverdown Rafters. The two schools had passed the Cup back and forth for decades, beginning in 1943, the year of their mutual foundings, with the Rafters topping the rivalry at seventeen wins and years of possession. But the rival high school had been shuttered in the summer of 1973, and so had never had the opportunity to reclaim the Cup. Riverdown had more victories, but Canterstown would own the Cup forever.

  “It’s in the display case,” Dean protested. “They’re not going to let us just walk in there and take it.”

  Jay chuckled painfully, as though dealing with his mental inferiors suffused him with both amusement and injury. “They don’t have to let us. We have the keys.”

  The boys all went silent. Antoine studiously pursed his lips and stared up at the joists in Brian’s garage as though scrutinizing the structural integrity of the roof had been his true reason for coming to Brian’s house. Marcus’s eyes widened, and he actually took a step back from Jay. Brian swallowed and grinned uncomfortably.

  And Dean twitched his lips and hissed, “Jay!”

  “It’s okay,” said Jay, his voice laconic, untroubled. “She knows.”

  Dean goggled. Kim shot Jay a fierce look.

  “I helped her get some homework,” Jay said. “It was fun, right, Kim?”

  Kim ground her teeth together at his smile. “Yes.”

  “So let’s immortalize the Cup,” Jay said, spreading his arms wide to encompass legend, myth, history. “It’ll vanish. It’ll be a mystery. And fifteen years from now, we’ll dig up the capsule and—”

  “Go to jail for theft,” Marcus said dryly.

  “The statute of limitations will have run out by then,” Jay said, sniffing the air as though he’d detected an offensive odor. “I checked. Besides, by then I’ll be a cop and I can take care of it. Come on. It’ll be great.”

  As with all Jay’s suggestions, this one was agreed to, though with a little more grumbling and a little less enthusiasm than usual.

  They made plans for the burial, and then—as the twins and Dean left, and Brian went inside the house—she lingered long enough to catch Jay alone. He had remained behind and was measuring the opening of the time capsule with a tape measure.

  “What the hell was that about?” she demanded.

  “What was what about?” His feigned innocence might have fooled someone else, but not Kim. The corners of his mouth trembled with the urge to turn up in a self-satisfied grin.

  “You told… We said we weren’t going to tell Dean.”

  “I didn’t tell him about that,” he said, coming down too exaggeratedly on the word. If anyone else had been within earshot, they’d’ve known exactly what that meant.

  “Just be careful what you say.”

  “I’m always careful about what I say,” he told her with finality.

  Later, she pondered that. And the hell of it was this: That was true. Jay never said anything without a reason.

  It was fun, right, Kim? That was what he’d said. And of course he hadn’t been talking about the break-in. Did he want more than just that one time from her? Was he going to hold that secret over her head,
use it to have another taste of what he’d had in the teachers’ lounge?

  They had a secret between them.

  Secrets bound people together, she knew.

  She was bound to Jay now. Inextricably. In a knot that bristled with thorns. King Alexander, she remembered, had forgone untying the Gordian knot in favor of cutting it open instead.

  She was going to marry Dean someday. Her bones sang that to her when she thought of him; her core went liquid and warm. He would write, and maybe she would have a gallery somewhere that she could run part-time while raising their kids.

  Jay was Dean’s best friend. He would be best man at the wedding. He would visit them in their home. He would come to Fourth of July barbecues.

  And he would know. He would know that he could end it all or have it all.

  A familiar feeling came over her, an almost tangible sensation of something viscous and slightly cool on her flesh. It was the way she’d felt when the pimply freshman had “complimented” her ass. It was the way she felt every time she caught Brian’s eyes on her.

  And now she felt it as she thought of Jay and what lay between them.

  Benjamin Franklin had said something about secrets once. She remembered it vaguely, could pick out the outline like the haze of headlights in fog, but not its full shape.

  Her dad had a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in his den. She sat at his desk and flipped through, paging along patiently until she found Franklin’s section.

  There. There it was:

  Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

  On the wall behind her father’s desk was a glass-front case in which he kept his hunting gear. Two polished rifles, the wooden stocks oiled and gleaming. And there, at the bottom of the case, resting on a bracket like an afterthought, a straight length of steel with a black handle. Her dad’s hunting knife.

  Sometimes you untied a knot.

  Sometimes, like Alexander, you found another way.

  THE PRESENT: ELAYAH

  They were in panic mode now. The second break-in at Elayah’s house was two too many. She was kept home from school again and spent the day stewing until her friends got home and checked in on their group text.

  Liam: i still think Lisa knows something

  Marcie: well she’s not talking so

  Liam: anything from Indira?

  Elayah: not yet. we have other names to go on. who’s peej? who’s katie?

  Jorja: check the yearbook. find them. we go talk to them.

  Marcie: make it a race. go get your parents yearbooks and…!

  Elayah already had Mom’s at hand. She flipped it open, knowing that Marse and Liam and Jorja would soon do the same.

  She thought maybe Peej was shorthand for initials: P. J. Maybe. But the only person she found with those initials in the class of 1987 was someone named Paul Jamison. Who—a quick web search told her—died in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm.

  Jorja: I can’t find my dad’s yearbook. I don’t know where it is.

  Jorja: And now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.

  Elayah snapped a pic of her mom’s cover and sent it to Jorja to help in her search. SLEDGEHAMMER PRIDE! the cover proclaimed in thick, wavy black letters. Hand-drawn, as was the cartoony representation of a sledgehammer, speed lines indicating it being swung with great force. It resembled the Wantzler logo, which was no coincidence. Then she dived back into the class of 1987.

  Jorja pinged occasionally to update them. She was having no luck finding the yearbook. I bet my dad didn’t keep it.

  Liam: mute! unsubscribe!

  Elayah blocked it out and pored over the yearbook. Peej was a wash, but they had a little more luck with the mysterious Katie.

  There was only one Kathleen in the senior class: Kathleen Rourke. She had hair blown out and sprayed into wings, thick eyebrows, and the older-than-eighteen look everyone had in those old black-and-white yearbook photos.

  They checked the usual places: Facebook, whitepages.com, some other sites. It wasn’t hard to find Kathleen Rourke. She still lived in Canterstown, over on Bay Drive.

  Liam: are we really doing this?

  Marcie: yes

  But she also texted Elayah separately: are u sure?

  absolutely, Elayah sent to the group.

  She spared one more moment to flip to the memorial page for Uncle Antoine. Or Uncle Marcus. Whichever he turned out to be. She was no longer as certain as she had been—her dad’s paternal protectiveness made sense whether he’d killed his brother or not (she was still his daughter, after all), but something in his fury echoed with sincere effrontery. He didn’t act like a man whose chickens were coming home to roost.

  She gazed at the photo for a moment, and then her eyes drifted over to the opposing page. She blinked a few times. It took a moment for her brain to catch up to what she was seeing; it resisted interpreting the input, as though too confused by its existence.

  Also listed as Gone, But Not Forgotten was Jorja’s father.

  With his close-cropped hair, he actually looked a lot like Jorja at that age, which convinced Elayah even more than his name printed in black-and-white below the photograph.

  Patrick Jason Dearborn.

  Peej? Is that you?

  She snapped a quick picture of it and texted it to the group along with the only emoji that captured her mood:

  On the way to Kathleen Rourke’s house that night, they discussed the mystery of Jorja’s dad.

  “I never did find his yearbook,” Jorja told them.

  “Because he’s gone,” Liam said. “Not forgotten, just gone. So he never got one. Sayonara, Peej.”

  “It’s some kind of prank or joke.” It was Jorja speaking, but she was clearly aiming to convince herself.

  “Right. The yearbook staff just decided to stick your dad in the section for dead and missing kids.” Elayah didn’t know what the deal was with Jorja’s dad’s consignment to the Gone, But Not Forgotten section, but she didn’t think it was a joke.

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Marcie said consolingly, and patted Jorja on the arm.

  “A joke.” Jorja spoke almost inaudibly and folded her arms over her chest, staring moodily out the window.

  Liam’s phone announced that their destination was on their right. Kathleen Rourke lived in a somewhat dingy little cottage halfway down the block. The yard was mostly weeds, and the surface of the driveway crackled with fissures. A single dim bulb hung over the front door.

  The reporters who had been clustered like soldier ants at El’s house had now spread out, roving Canterstown in ones and twos. With no information forthcoming from the Laird house or the sheriff’s department, they’d begun interviewing anyone they could find in town who’d graduated in 1987.

  Which, perhaps, is why, when they rang the doorbell at Kathleen Rourke’s house, the light on the stoop went out and a voice from within cried, “I told you all: Leave me the hell alone!”

  “Ms. Rourke!” It was El who stepped forward and leaned in close to the door. “It’s Elayah Laird. I Facebooked you!”

  Nothing.

  El pounded on the door. “Go check your Facebook!” she yelled. “We’re not reporters.”

  After a moment, the door opened a crack and a single eye peered through at the four of them clustered on the stained concrete stoop. “Oh, Lord,” said a hushed, incredulous voice. “You’re the girl. The one who got stabbed.”

  “Can we come in?” Elayah asked. She pitched her voice a little lower and huskier than usual. Put a hand up to her throat. Playing the sympathy card.

  And playing it expertly, because Kathleen Rourke opened the door wider and hustled them inside, saying, “Quick, quick, quick. Before more damn reporters show up.”

  Elayah tried not to gawk once they were inside Ms. Rourke’s house. Her Facebook profile (set to public—old people, amirite?) had indicated an interest in Hummel figurines and rabbits, but that didn’t prepare Elayah for what was clea
rly an obsession.

  Porcelain rabbits perched on every elevated surface—the coffee table, the end tables on either side of the sofa, the walnut-stained shelves mounted along each wall, the mantel over the fireplace. Bunnies, bunnies, everywhere. Bunnies up on their haunches, bunnies in repose, bunnies flopped atop one another, bunnies in jackets and spats, bunnies in evening gowns. Bunnies with pointed ears and bunnies with drooping ears.

  “Do you have a pet rabbit?” Elayah asked politely.

  “No.” Ms. Rourke sighed. “I’m allergic.”

  She was about Elayah’s dad’s age. No, actually, take that back: She was pretty much exactly her dad’s age. They’d graduated at the same time.

  But while her father had grown older, Kathleen Rourke had just grown old. Her blue eyes glimmered dimly from a wrinkle-cracked pair of sockets. She looked more like Elayah’s grandparents than her parents. Life had not been kind.

  Though life had not been kind, Ms. Rourke was. She bade them sit on the sofa and in the easy chair (Elayah took that), then sat primly on an ottoman, her legs outstretched, ankles crossed.

  “Is this about the time capsule?” she asked without preamble. “Of course it is. What else could it be? I didn’t put anything in it. I barely remember hearing about it. Saw the pictures in the paper, of course. Lot of junk, if you ask me.” Her eyes skipped over to Elayah. “But I guess it was more than just junk.”

  “How did you know our parents?” They’d agreed that Marcie would do the talking again. She had her phone out, a list of questions they’d all contributed open in the Notes app.

  Rourke’s expression settled from interested to confused. “I don’t believe I did,” she said.

  Marcie licked her lips and chided herself under her breath. Then, to be sure, she quickly introduced everyone and explained who had whom for parents.

  “No, no, I understood,” Rourke said. “But I don’t really remember having much contact with them. I was sort of a jock back then. A tomboy. I don’t think we’re supposed to use that word now. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Marcie told her. “Did you know someone named Peej?”