That part made me the maddest. One of the things no one tells you about public interest cases is how they take on a life of their own. June’s story had been plastered all over the news. In the days before her body had been found, it had been the subject of breathless gossip in true-crime forums (I heard she was using drugs/it’s always the boyfriend/maybe it was that sex trafficking ring in Blackwell Falls/was she a prostitute?). A million caricatures had been created of June, a million personas that had nothing to do with her but that were subsequently associated with her anyway.
It all came out in the end, but I was still protective of June, of her story. Now the Butchers knew all about it and I couldn’t help feeling exposed.
I tried to calm myself as I finished my eggs. The Butchers might have thought they knew all about me, but they were wrong.
I still had plenty of secrets.
26
POE
We took the Hummer.One of the only good things about a car over a bike was that you could carry a lot of shit in a car, especially one as big as the Hummer.
Then again, stuff was overrated. My grandparents had been to the loft exactly once and I’d been able to see our excess in their eyes. The loft was minimalistic in design, but the big-screen TV, multiple gaming consoles, state-of-the-art sound system, and gourmet kitchen hadn’t been lost on the two people who’d raised Whit and me in a double-wide trailer on native land outside of town.
Driving to the grocery store with Maeve, I wondered what she thought about the way we lived. She was a normie, neither rich nor poor, the address in her background part of the nice, middle-class neighborhood where teachers and business people lived. Could she see through the loft’s minimalism to the money it had taken to build and furnish? Did she think we were a bunch of rich assholes who hurt people for fun?
Would she be wrong if she did?
I glanced over at her in the passenger seat of the Hummer, looking out the window as we passed through Main Street. Themore I looked at her — the more I thought about her — the more interesting she became. There was something about the contrast between her thick black hair and the light in her pale blue eyes: sun and shadows, light and dark.
Or maybe I just wanted to fuck her and was I making it deeper than it was.
Who could blame me for that part? She was small and compact, her body rounded in the best of ways, in all the places that made me imagine my fingers pressed into her flesh, my teeth nipping at her full tits, rounded hips, and a stomach that would be soft under my mouth.
My dick got hard and I shifted in the driver’s seat, annoyed with myself. I knew better than to lust after one of the Hunt girls. They were almost always locals, and we didn’t fuck locals.
It was too complicated in a town like Blackwell Falls where everyone knew everyone else. Where you’d probably gone to school with someone’s brother or sister, where their parents might have been your teacher in seventh grade. There were too many possible connections, all of them messy.
And Blackwell Falls was more than our home — it was our corporate headquarters. Bram ran the town, making the rules behind the scenes, keeping things nice enough that the tourists would keep spending their money here, making space for the real residents, the ones who lived here when it snowed hard enough to close the ski resorts, when it rained for days in the spring, before it was warm enough to draw hikers and kayakers.
And if Bram was the town’s CEO, Remy and I were its chief operating officers. We did most of the dirty work, shaking people down when they sold drugs outside their designated territory, teaching them a lesson when they caused trouble at Syd’s that might bring the cops.
It was smarter not to shit where we ate, and Blackwell Falls was our all-you-can-eat buffet all day, every day.
“Still mad about the background?” I asked Maeve.
She seemed comfortable with the silence in the car, but I wanted to take advantage of the time I had with her alone, get to know her better. I told myself it was because we’d be living together for the next three months, but I didn’t entirely buy my own bullshit.
She turned her gaze on me, and her eyes flashed. “Wouldn’t you be?”
I nodded as I turned onto the road leading to the big-box stores outside of town. “I would.”
“You could have asked,” she said.
“Would you have told us everything?”
She scowled. “That’s not the point.”
“It is for us.”
She turned her head to the window again. “I know you just think of me as a… a slave or whatever, but I’m a person. How do you think it feels to have people you don’t even know digging through your past, making judgements about you and the people in your life?”
An unfamiliar heaviness pressed against my chest. It took me a minute to realize it was shame.
HowwouldI feel if someone rifled through my past? If they read about my family — the dad I didn’t know, the mom who’d disappeared when I was little, my impoverished grandparents and the double-wide trailer, Whit and his long road to meth dealer — like they were reading a tabloid magazine?
None of the other Hunt girls had ever objected to the background checks we’d done on them. Maybe they hadn’t cared, or maybe they’d been too scared to say anything, but now I felt bad for how casually we’d rifled through their lives.
