I can’t respond. I’m lost in thought, wondering if Kylie’s friend still lives there, wondering if it’s only a coincidence that Daniel Clarke lives in the house across the street from the place where Kylie was last seen.
Reese
“Reese? Is that you?”
He shines his flashlight on me, an actual flashlight, its beam shockingly bright.
“What are you—” he starts to ask, but then he looks down, sees my clothes on the ground and realizes I’m not wearing any. He shines his flashlight off in the distance, where Daniel goes running through the woods.
Heat creeps up my neck for my face. Uncle Elliott doesn’t finish his question. He doesn’t have to. He knows what was happening, or whatalmosthappened if he hadn’t messed things up for me.
“Who is that?”
I shrug. “Just a friend.”
He grunts. “Just a friend, huh?”
He bends down. Scoops my shorts and shirt up from the ground, tossing them to me. He turns his back to me, like he didn’t already see everything, and says, “Put your clothes on.”
“Don’t look at me,” I say, though he’s not. I say it anyway. I step out into the open to get dressed, knowing I’ll never be able to look Uncle Elliott in the eye again andnotthink how he saw me naked, though I try to rationalize it in my head, to tell myself that he didn’t see anything in the dark.
Except for the flashlight’s bright beam.
He saw everything.
“I’m done. You can turn around.”
He does. And from the sad, stuffy look on his face, I expect him to say something all preachy about safe sex and stranger danger and shit.
What I don’t expect is, “You know I’m going to have to talk to your mom and dad about this.”
But that’s what he says.
You know I’m going to have to talk to your mom and dad about this.
I feel the tension in my muscles first. My whole body tightens. My eyes narrow, my breath suddenly shallow. It doesn’t cross my mind to beg and plead for him not to.
Instead, I say the first thing that comes to mind.
“If you say a word about this, I’ll tell them that you were being inappropriate. That you said things. That you touched me. That you made me do things to you.”
He goes white. He jerks back before putting on a brave face, faking bravado.
“You wouldn’t.”
“You wanna bet?”
“That’s a very serious accusation, Reese. Do you have any idea the implications of telling lies like that?”
“Do you think I care?” I ask. Because I don’t.
I’ll say whatever I need to say to make sure he doesn’t snitch or that, if he does, no one believes him.
Courtney
I go through it in my mind as I drive back to the cottage. Kylie Matthews went missing five years ago, when she was eleven, on the cusp of twelve. Five years ago, Daniel Clarke would have been nineteen. According to Joanna, the summer that Kylie disappeared was the summer she first discovered boys and bras and that she had her first crush.
What if Daniel Clarke was her first crush?
