The tiniest of hesitations from Lance. Then, “Okay. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you what I can.”
The anxious little needles in my gut move fromprickingtostabbing, and when I press my fingers to my neck, my pulse is racing, my heart working overtime.
“I was actually wondering if she ever mentioned anything about my father.”
Silence.
Then, “What did she tell you about your father?”
“Nope,” I say immediately, shaking my head. “I’m not asking you to tell me the same thing she told me. I’m asking if you know anything more.” I swallow. “Please, Lance. She’s dead. She’s gone. But…I’m not. And I want to know.”
I hear Lance sigh into the phone, a heavy, static sound. “All right,” he says. “All right. Look, I don’t know much, okay? Your mother was not an easy woman to get to know, Juniper.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “Of course I know that.”
“But she got pregnant when she was eighteen, and it happened at a party. It was the summer after her senior year. All she ever told me was that she had a group of friends she hung out with all the time. They gave themselves some ridiculous name—the Elitists? No, the Elites. It was your mom and something like three or four guys. The way she told it, one of those guys is your father.”
The Elites? I never heard her use that name before.
“Okay,” I say. “What else? Anythingyou remember?”
“No,” he says, his voice full of regret. “I’m sorry. But no. She never said anything else.”
“All right,” I sigh. “Thank you.” I clear my throat. “I appreciate it, Lance. I really do.”
“Just be careful if you’re poking around, Juniper,” he says with a sigh of his own. “Don’t go digging up the past if it seems like it would be better buried. All right?”
“All right,” I say grudgingly. “Thank you. Tell Roland he’s a turd for me.”
Lance laughs, and his voice is lighter when he says, “Will do. Take care.”
“You too,” I say. Then I hang up, still staring at the phone long after the line goes dead.
For a few minutes, Aiden and I sit in silence. I don’t know what’s going on in his head, but mine is a mess—a tangled, thorny bush that’s growing at an alarming rate, painful new possibilities pricking at me with every second that passes.
“There’s nothing here,” Aiden says after a moment. He slams the yearbook shut, looking frustrated. “Or if there is, I can’t find it.”
I worried that would be the case. I just nod. “Do you think anyone has reported her missing yet?”
“I hope so,” he says. “But I don’t know.”
“But wouldn’t the sheriff call us for more information if someone had reported her missing?” I say anxiously. “He would, wouldn’t he?” I check my phone; no missed calls. Sheriff Garrity doesn’t have my number anyway.
“Probably?” Aiden says. “I haven’t heard from him, though.” Then he speaks again. “Why didn’t you tell your brother about what we saw?” he says. There’s nothing accusatory about it; he just sounds mildly curious.
“What, the body? That would freak them out to no end,” I say when Aiden nods. “They’d get here so fast your head wouldspin, and then they’d move in and start living on your couch.” I stare vaguely out the window, my eyes losing focus as my mind churns.
My mother. Her friends. The dead girl in the woods.
“You know what’s interesting,” I say slowly. There’s a bird outside the window, perching on one of the white fence posts. He’s completely black except for two spots of color, sunshine yellow and brilliant red. “We get so disturbed by excessive gore in movies and all that, but when it comes down to it…” I pull my eyes away from the bird, looking down at my hand. I hold it up to the light, flexing it, stretching my fingers, closing my fist. “When it comes down to it, we’re all just bags of blood and bone.” I turn my eyes to Aiden, letting my hand drop back into my lap. “The world is populated by people full of blood and plasma and all sorts of fluids. That’s all the human body is. A sack of squishy parts and bony parts, all self-governed by an organ that just makes things up as it goes along. Isn’t that strange?”
For a second he simply looks at me, his face impassive. Then, slowly, he nods. “Yes,” he says. “I guess it is.”
Something about his expression—or lack thereof—has me backpedaling. “Sorry,” I say, forcing a laugh. “Guess that got pretty dark, huh?” Ugh. This always happens. I always open my mouth, something weird pops out, and whoever’s nearby gets scared away.
To my immense surprise, though, Aiden just shrugs. “Not really,” he says. “Even so…” He gets to his feet, yearbook in hand, and heads in the direction of his bedroom. But as he passes me, he looks down. Then, in a voice so matter-of-fact it can only be the truth, he says one thing: “I’m not afraid ofthe dark.”
I spendthe evening holed up in my loft bedroom, writing. Now that I know how my murderer would carry the body, I can move forward in this opening scene. Every now and then I hear the bass from the TV downstairs bleeding up through the floorboards, vibrating through the room. You’d think that on a Sunday evening Aiden would be watching some cool action movie, especially with sound effects like that, but he’s not; I know because I stuck my head down about an hour ago to find him immersed in a documentary about the French Revolution.
