Far From You

13

NOW (JUNE)

Mom is gone by the time I wake up the next morning. On the kitchen table she’s left a note and a new cell phone.

Call me if you’re going to leave the house.

After I make some toast and grab an apple, I call her at the office.

“I’m going to the bookstore, then maybe get some coffee, if that’s okay,” I say after her assistant’s transferred me over.

I can hear a printer and some chatter in the background. “All right,” she says. “Are you going to take the car?”

“If I have permission.” It’s a deadly little dance we’re doing, circling around each other with closed-lipped smiles, careful not to bare our teeth.

“You do. The keys are on the rack. Be home by four. Dinner’s at seven.”

“I’ll be home.”

She hangs up with a perfunctory good-bye. I can hear the strain in her voice.

I put it out of my head and get the keys.

Stopping by the bookstore, I buy a paperback, mostly so I’m not telling Mom a flat-out lie. Ten minutes later, I’m pulling onto the old highway, heading north, out of town and into the boonies.

There’s no traffic this far out. Just a truck here and there on the narrow two-lane road that cuts between summer-bleached fields and red-clay foothills studded with oaks. I roll the windows down and turn my music up loud, like it’s enough to shield me from the memories.

The house is at the end of a long dirt road riddled with potholes. I maneuver around them, making slow progress as two big chocolate Labs bound out from the back field, tails wagging.

I park in front of the house. As I get out, the screen door bangs open.

A girl my age in polka-dot rain boots and Daisy Dukes runs down the stairs, her red pigtails bouncing. “You’re here!”

She gallops up and wraps her skinny arms around me. I return the hug, smiling as the dogs circle us, yelping for attention. For the first time since Macy dropped me off, I feel like I can breathe.

“I’m really glad to see you,” Rachel says. “No, Bart, stop.” She yanks the dog’s muddy paws off her shorts. “You look good.”

“You too.”

“C’mon inside. Mom’s at work, and I made cookies.”

Rachel’s house is cozy, with multicolored rag rugs scattered over the cherrywood floors. She pours coffee, and we sit across from each other at the kitchen table, bowl-sized mugs warming our hands.

Silence spreads over us, punctuated by sips of coffee and the clink of spoon against ceramic.

“So…” Rachel says.

“So.”

She smiles, a big stretch that shows all her teeth, so genuine it almost hurts. I don’t think I can even remember how to smile like that. “It’s okay that it’s weird right now. You’ve been gone a long time.”

“Your letters,” I say. “They were— You have no idea how much they meant to me. Being in there…”

Rachel’s letters had saved me. Full of random facts and going off in three directions at once, they’re a lot like her: scatter­brained and smart. Her mom had homeschooled her since she was a kid, which is probably the only reason we hadn’t met until that night. Rachel’s the kind of person you notice.

I trusted her. It had been this instant, instinctual thing. Maybe it was because she found me that night. Because she was there when no one else was, and I needed that when everything had been taken away. But that’s only part of it.

There’s a determination in Rachel that I’ve never seen before. She has conviction. In herself, in what she wants, in what she believes. I want to be like that. To be sure of myself, to trust myself, to love myself.

Rachel had stuck around when she didn’t have to. When everyone else, everyone who’s known me forever, had turned their backs. That means more to me than anything.

“Was Seaside bad?” she asks.

“No, not really. Just lots of therapy and talking. It was hard. To be in there and have to put everything on hold.” I pause, stirring my coffee unnecessarily. “How’s the telescope going?” I ask, remembering a letter mentioning some experiments.

“The refractor? Slowly but surely. I have it out at my dad’s, so I’m only working on it when I’m up there. But I’ve got a few more projects fixing some stuff up. There’s a tractor from the twenties in the backyard that my neighbor traded me. Trying to get it to work’s been a pain in the ass, in that good way.” With a shower of cinnamon, she takes a bite out of one of the palm-sized snickerdoodles. “I guess we should talk about what you’ve decided to do,” she says.

“I saw Kyle yesterday.”

“Run into him, did you?” Rachel asks sarcastically.

I stare at my coffee instead of her. “I might have locked him in the men’s room and threatened him with bear repellent,” I mumble.

“Sophie!” Rachel says, the word dissolving in a fit of laughter. “I can’t believe you. You can’t go around threatening people you suspect. You’ve gotta be subtle about this.”

“I know. But he lied about me. There has to be a reason.”

“Do you really think he could have had something to do with Mina’s murder?”

I shrug. I’ve known Kyle as long as I’ve known most of my friends. He was my field trip buddy in first grade. It’s hard to think that the boy who held my hand during the gross fish-gutting part of the hatchery tour could be a murderer. “Anything’s possible. The guy who killed her planned it out. The killer had a reason for wanting Mina gone. I just don’t know what that is.”

“And Kyle lied.”

“And Kyle lied,” I echo. “There has to be a reason for that. Either he’s covering for himself—or someone else.”

“Did he and Mina fight a lot?” Rachel asks.

“No,” I say. “That’s why I don’t get this. They got along. Kyle’s kind of a Neanderthal, but he’s sweet. He treated her like she walked on water. But even if he didn’t have anything to do with her murder, he’s hindering an entire police investigation. You don’t just randomly lie to the police. Especially Kyle. His dad’s all about the rules. If Mr. Miller found out Kyle was lying to a bunch of cops? Big trouble. His restaurant does the annual fish fry for the force every year. He’s friends with a lot of them.”

Rachel sighs. “I don’t think you can get someone who doesn’t mind lying to the police to just tell you the truth. So what’s the contingency plan?”

I look down into my cup of coffee. “It might seem kind of weird, but I did have one idea.”

“What is it?”

“I want to go back,” I say. “To where you found me that night.”

Rachel’s eyes widen. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It’s probably a horrible idea,” I concede. “But I need someone to walk me through it. Maybe it’ll spur something. And you’re kind of the only person who can.”

Rachel presses her lips together tight, and it makes her freckles stand out even more. “Sophie…”

“Please.” I look her straight in the eye, trying to seem confident. But I’m afraid of going. Just the idea of being there again makes my knees shake.

She sighs. “Okay.” She gets up and grabs her keys from the hook on the wall. “Let’s go.”

Rachel’s quiet as she pulls her old Chevy out onto the road, reluctance practically vibrating off her.

“I’m not gonna freak,” I tell her.

“I’m not worried about that,” Rachel says, and we drive in silence for a while. But twenty minutes out, she’s pulling off the highway onto Burnt Oak Road and I feel like freaking a little, even though I just promised her I wouldn’t.

We’re not even close yet, at least a mile and a half from the Point, but suddenly everything outside the truck—the trees, the hills, even the cows in the fields—seems terrifying. Potentially fatal. My heart flutters in my chest, and I press my fingers against my scar, trace the ridges of it through my shirt, trying to calm down.

Nine months. Three weeks. Eight hours.

I don’t realize I’ve closed my eyes until I feel the truck stop. I open them slowly.

We’re here. I avoid looking at the road. I don’t want to go there. I have to go there.

“I’m going to ask you one more time,” Rachel says. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I’m positive this is the last thing I want to do.

I nod anyway.

Rachel’s side-eye is epic, but she shuts the engine off.

I get out of the Chevy slowly, and she follows, shading her eyes against the sun. This time of day, this far out of town, the roads are empty, no cars in sight for miles. Just long sweeps of yellowing brush, barbed wire fences, and clusters of scrub oaks and digger pines.

“You ready?”

I nod again.

Rachel locks the truck and steps out onto the empty road, looking from side to side. Her pigtails sway every time she rocks back on her heels, and I focus on them instead of where she’s standing—where she’d found me that night.

“It was a little past nine,” she says. “I’d just called my mom to let her know I was almost back from my dad’s. I looked away to toss my phone into my purse, and when I glanced back at the road, you were right in front of me, standing in the middle, right about…here.”

She takes a few steps and scuffs her boot across the cracked asphalt, toeing the yellow line. I look at it…can’t stop looking at it. Was it right there? I remember the frozen feeling. I remember wanting the truck to run me over.

“I thought I was going to hit you. I’ve never slammed on the brakes so hard in my life. And you just stood there. You didn’t move; you didn’t flinch. It was almost like you…” She hesitates. “You were in shock,” she finishes.

I begin to walk, nervous energy filling me. I need to move, get away.

My body knows where I’m going. It’s always trying to find traces of her.

Rachel follows me as the road gets steeper. Chicory and foxtails, knee-high, swish against my jeans. The red clay sticks to the soles of my shoes. I’d washed it off my feet the day after, watched it swirl down the drain with the blood and tears.

“When I got out of the car I saw you were covered in blood. So I called 911. You were bleeding pretty bad from your forehead. I tried to put pressure on it, but you kept pushing my hands away. I wanted to get you in the car or to say something, even just your name, but…” She hesitates again. “Do you remember any of this?”

“I remember the ambulance. I remember grabbing your hand.” I keep walking. I know where I’m going now—brain, body, and heart finally in harmony. It’s only a mile. The scrub oaks are sparser now as the pines take over. In just a few minutes, we’ll round the curve, and there we’ll be.

“When the EMTs came, you wouldn’t let go. So they let me ride in the ambulance with you.”

“I remember the hospital,” I say. And I leave it at that.

I concentrate on my feet.

We’re on the wrong side of the road, and when we reach the place where it veers off to Booker’s Point, I stop and look.

The other side of the road is thickly wooded, clusters of pines jammed close together. Did the killer deliberately choose this spot? How long did he hide in the pines, waiting for us?

“You sure this is a good idea?” Rachel asks.

I take a deep breath. It’s cooler up here, shaded from the glare of the sun. It’d been cold that night. I could almost see my breath in the air.

“Bad ideas are sometimes necessary.” It sounds so much like an excuse, it’s such an addict thing to say, that my skin crawls.

Trying to leave the feeling behind, I walk across the road until pavement cuts off to dirt flattened by years of truck tires. I follow the crude road, disappearing into the thicket of tall pines, ignoring the way my footing falters as the ground slants up into a hill.

It’s quiet, just like that night. There’s a pleasant coolness under the trees. It washes over me, and I shiver.

All I can think about is how cold her skin had been.

The scar tissue around my knee aches as the trail gets steeper.

Then I turn the last bend of road, and there I am, at the top of the Point.

Just a few feet away.

Booker’s Point isn’t big, just a clear piece of land that fits a few cars. When I was younger, I’d hear stories about girls losing their virginity up here, of the wild parties and drug deals that went on after dark out in the boonies. But until that night, I’d never ventured out here.

Rachel hangs back, but I keep walking, across the flat stretch of road, past the straggly California poppies that grow in clumps in the dirt, until I’m standing right where it happened.

I thought it’d take my breath away. That somehow, being there again where she ended, where I’d sworn to her she’d be okay, would change something in me.

But I guess I’ve already been changed enough.

I move past the spot until I’m at the very tip of the Point, where the ground falls off, an endless drop. My toes skirt the edge, a little cascade of dirt and stones tumbling down beneath the pressure of my feet.

“Sophie,” Rachel warns.

I barely hear her.

I’m transfixed by the air between me and the ground so far below, by the little spots of green that are bushes and trees, the tiny pebbles that are flat, gray boulders, bigger than me, scattered below.

“Sophie!” A hand grabs the back of my shirt, yanking me off balance, away from the edge. I fall backward, knocking into Rachel. “Hey.” She frowns at me, all cheer erased from her face. “Not cool.”

I blink hard. Suddenly, all I want to do is cry. “This was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, I know. Come on.”

We’re quiet all the way back to the truck, and it’s not until we’re inside the cab that Rachel speaks.

“I don’t think you should come out here again. Not by yourself.”

I can’t look at her. I stare out the window.

“What you need is a plan,” Rachel goes on. “Having a plan makes everything better. If you think about what you need to solve Mina’s murder, the next step will become clear. Obviously, talking to Kyle isn’t going to work. So what’s the next step?”

Forcing my thoughts away from the past and into the present is exactly what I need. I’ll never find Mina’s killer if I keep falling apart. Rachel’s right. I need a plan that involves a lot more than dousing Kyle in bear spray.

“I have to start from scratch,” I say, grateful for Rachel’s reboot. “From the source. Mina was working on a story. I need to go to the Harper Beacon’s office and talk to her supervisor. If anyone knows what she was chasing, it’d be him.”

“Okay, good. What else?”

“I need to find her notes on the story. The police searched her computer and didn’t find anything, so that means they’ve got to be somewhere else. Maybe in a notebook. Her mom was always going through her room and reading her diary, so Mina hid stuff. I bet the police missed some of her hiding places.”

“How are you going to get in her room to look?”

I sigh. This is the part I’ve been avoiding. “I’m going to have to use Trev.”

Rachel lets out a sympathetic hiss. “Ouch.”

“There’s no other way to get into the house. If I asked him if I could search her room, he’d slam the door in my face. He doesn’t want to see me. But I have some of her things. I can put a box together, use it as my excuse to get in.”

“Has he even talked to you since you got back?” Rachel asks. “When you were at Seaside, your letters said he wasn’t writing back to you.”

I shrug. “He doesn’t believe me.”

“Well, he should,” Rachel says hotly.

“Rachel, why do you believe me?” I blurt out.

She leans back in the seat. “Why shouldn’t I?”

I shrug. “Sometimes I wonder, if you’d known me before…if you’d think I was lying, like everybody else does.”

“Anyone who saw you in the middle of that road…” Rachel pauses, and then goes on. “Anyone who saw you the way I did that night, they’d understand you weren’t capable of coming up with a lie—you could barely talk. And then in the hospital…” She pauses again, and I know we’re both thinking about it. How I’d yelled and thrown things when the nurse tried to make me take off my bloody clothes. I can still feel the prick of the needle against my skin, the sedative moving through me as I begged, “No drugs, no drugs, no drugs,” when I really meant, “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.”

“But you didn’t have to stick around. At the hospital, or after. I mean, you barely knew me.”

“You went through something horrible,” Rachel says quietly. “And it isn’t fair that everyone blames you. Even if you had been buying drugs that night, it wouldn’t matter. The only person who’s guilty is the guy who pulled the trigger. And we’ll find him. I bet you. Ten whole dollars.”

She smiles determinedly at me, daring me to smile back.

I do.