I shook my head, smearing peanut butter on my nearly black toast. “I don’t remember a banana man. One of the cops was Bradley Pine’s dad. I remember that.”
Vail groaned. “Bradley beat me up twice in high school. I hated that kid.”
I focused on my toast, unwilling to admit to Vail that I’d had a wild crush on Bradley Pine, the big football jock, in high school. I’d been obsessed with him, and he’d had no idea. He’d looked through me like glass. “Anyway, if there’s a police file, the Fell PD will give it to me to read.”
“Do police departments do that?” Vail asked, glancing at me for the first time.
I shrugged and took a bite of toast. “They will,” I said with my mouth full.
He nodded, as if this made perfect sense. “What’s in those woods behind the house?” he asked, changing the subject.
For a second, I scrounged in my brain for an answer. As a mother, you feel like you have to have an answer for every single question that’s asked of you, no matter how outrageous. Then I remembered that I wasn’t a mother right this minute, and I didn’t have to know anything. “I have no idea,” I said.
Vail grunted. We’d never been the kind of kids who would wander the woods, exploring and playing imaginary games. Our dreary neighborhood didn’t exactly invite it. I loathed uncertainty, Vail would rather read books, and Dodie simply didn’t give a shit. She was one of the least curious people I knew.
So the tangled trees and brush that extended behind the house weren’t mapped terrain. We didn’t hang out back there, which had baffled the adults after Ben disappeared. They were all certain that he must have wandered in that direction, wanting to play, and met some kind of accident. I remembered being asked, over and over, where we usually went back there, if Ben might have gone to a spot he remembered. No one had believed me when I’d answered that as far as I knew, Ben had never been to the woods in his life.
“They searched, remember?” Vail said, following my train of thought. “Like he would have just gone into the trees by himself.”
“Stupid,” I agreed. The adults had all thought this was plausible because they didn’t know Ben. He didn’t go exploring because he was an Esmie. He was one of us. He preferred to be wherever we were.
Even if Ben had gone into the woods, which he hadn’t, what did they think had happened to him? Was there a cliff to fall over, a well to fall into? It wasn’t the Mojave Desert. There were no fairy-tale wolves. If a little boy wandered into the trees and got cold or scared, he could simply turn around and come home.
“I’m going to go back there today,” Vail said, looking out the window again. “I’m going to see what’s there.”
I nodded, popping the last of my toast into my mouth and washing it down with coffee. “Take Dodie with you.”
He gave me a glance that was both scathing and amused. “She’s asleep.”
“It wouldn’t kill her to get out of bed.”
A smirk crossed Vail’s lips, the big-brother kind of smirk that promised trouble for his little sister. “You know, I think I’ll do it, if only for the entertainment value.”
“I’ll bet it’s wet back there,” I said with some relish. “Muddy. Buggy. Somehow cold and sweaty at the same time.”
“Perfect,” Vail agreed. “Let us know how it goes with the police.”
“I will.”
“And let me know if Bradley Pine has been longing for you all this time and finally wants to marry you.”
I had a second of shock, then I dropped my coffee cup into the sink without bothering to wash it. “I hate you so much.”
“If I catch sight of him, I’ll break his fucking nose,” Vail said jovially. “It’ll be fun.”
I didn’t bother to answer. I just banged out the door.
8
Violet
After so much time away, it only took minutes to feel like I had never left downtown Fell. Maybe the place truly hadn’t changed much, or maybe Fell would always be mapped out in my brain because I had dreamed of it so often over the years. I parked at the end of Sidewinder Street and walked, feeling the familiar cracked sidewalks beneath my feet, just like I had when I’d walked here as a teenager.
Fell wasn’t a remarkable town. It did not boast a lively downtown or a fun central hot spot. To walk through Fell was to take in low-rise rental apartments that had seen better days, thrift stores, corner video rental shops, secondhand record shops, and an abundance of laundromats. The Royal movie theater sold tickets for two dollars and rarely showed first-run movies. I passed a pawn shop, a bait-and-tackle shop—though Fell was not located on any body of water—and a hair salon with faded photos of old hairstyles taped to the windows.
I bought a newspaper in the magazine shop on the corner. I stared longingly at the cigarette display at the counter as I paid, but I resisted the impulse. Then, tucking my newspaper under my arm, Icrossed the street to Scooty’s Treats and bought myself a Creamsicle. Scooty’s was a special occasion when we were kids, mostly because with all the ice cream treats being kept behind the counter, we couldn’t steal them and had to actually buy them. That made it stand out. When Ben came along, we’d bought him Creamsicles whenever we had the money.
I wasn’t in a hurry to complete my errand. For the moment, Fell had sucked me back into its clutches like it always had, and it made me curious. Whatwasit about this town? Or was it me?
