He let Billy have his foot back and nudged Bourneville with his knee. “Good girl,” he praised her and dug his fingers into her ruff approvingly.
Sprawled on the ground, Billy glared up at him. Frustrated, resentful tears dripped down into Billy’s ears, cutting trails through the dirt on his face. He scrubbed them away on his shoulder and scrambled up onto his knees.
“If my grandad were still here, he’d have found Drew by now,” he said, his voice breaking. “He wouldn’t have wasted time blaming me.”
Cloister held his hand out and waited. After a second, Billy grabbed it, and Cloister hauled him to his feet. He staggered, caught his balance, and pulled away. He clenched his hands into fists, and his knuckles poked bony divots against his skin.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Billy asked bitterly. “What do you want from me?”
He was angry. That was obvious. Under that, though, was guilt. Javi had seen it and thought it was because of what Billy had done. Cloister had too, at first. Now, though, he thought it was because of what he hadn’t done, or what he thought he hadn’t done.
“Whatever it is that you don’t want to tell us.”
The defiance in Billy’s eyes flickered, and he looked away. His shoulders, sharp and too broad as he waited for the next growth spurt, hunched up under his hoodie. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Yeah, you do,” Cloister said. He reached back and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. The denim was rough against his fingers. A breath pulled at his chest and pressed against his ribs. “I did.”
That got Billy to look up from the ground and search Cloister’s face suspiciously for something. “Huh?”
Cloister looked around. He squinted against the glare and nodded toward the path he’d taken uphill. “C’mon,” he said, starting back that way.
As usual Bourneville padded along in his shadow. After a second so did Billy—more from a lack of anything better to do, Cloister suspected, than any real desire to know Cloister’s story. That was okay. The lack of questions gave Cloister time to work out how to say what he needed. In the end it was easy. The story wasn’t that involved. It wasn’t even that unusual. It was just his.
“When I was younger than you, my brother went missing too.”
“Younger brother?”
“Older,” Cloister said. “Not by much, but he never let me forget it.”
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know,” Cloister said. “Probably never will.”
It took a second, but eventually Billy grunted. Not quite sorry, but at least acknowledging that his wasn’t the only family shitty things had happened to. That didn’t remind Cloister of himself at all. He’d been a miserable bastard.
They reached the hill behind the campground—a scrub of trees growing raggedly in the stripped-back dirt. It was steeper than it looked. Cloister had skidded down it earlier. Momentum was the only thing that kept him from sliding on his ass. Now he kicked his toes in, dug out short-lived, crumbling footholds, and went up with even less grace.
Bourneville lunged past him, back legs kicking the dirt, and showed him her furry ass as she scrambled to the top of the hill. She flopped down to wait and stuck her head over to watch him intently with pricked ears and a lolling grin. Some of the dog handlers Cloister had worked with warned against giving your dog too much credit, like assigning the dog brain with human intelligence or motives. Cloister didn’t care. He could tell when he was being laughed at.
He gave Bourneville the finger—it made him feel better, whether she got it or not—and grabbed a low-hanging tree branch to pull himself over a loose patch of dirt. The bark dug into his palm as the branch bent and pulled away from the trunk as it took his weight.
“My mom never believed that, though.” He glanced around at Billy. “She figured I knew something, had seen something, and I was lying.”
“Why?”
Cloister let go of the branch and scrubbed his sap-sticky palm absently against his thigh. “I don’t know. Because at least if I were lying, there was something she could do? There was an answer out there if she could just get it out of me.” He shrugged and hesitated for a second. It was harder to talk about than he expected. The story of his brother’s disappearance had been told so many times—by Cloister and to Cloister—that it didn’t really hurt anymore. There was just the memory of when it had. Like a hole where a tooth had been.
His mother wasn’t someone he talked about. Not really. Not often. When he was a kid, he figured he’d grow up, get out, and get over it. He’d done the first two, but he thought the fact that his mother hated him would sting until the day they tossed the dirt on top of him. He’d never been able to do anything to help her, but maybe he could help Lara Hartley.
“I guess because, at least if I were lying, she still had some control,” he said. “If she could make me talk, then we could find him. If I’m telling the truth, if there’s nothing I can tell her, then what else can she do? Me lying is all she has.”
Bourneville got up as Cloister reached him, and Cloister let her lick him and then turned and grabbed a handful of Billy’s hoodie to steady him up the last few feet. He put him back on his feet and then gripped his shoulder and felt the bones and wiry muscle under his fingers. Billy looked up at him, chewing at his chapped lower lip with sharp teeth, and his eyes were desperate for Cloister to not say what he was going to say.
“You do know something, and you need to tell us what it is,” Cloister told him. “There was nothing I could do to help my mom. You can, and you have to.”
Billy sagged. He looked a lot older than thirteen. Adult fear gave his features an adult cast. He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“She’s gonna hate me,” he said.
