Summer's Edge, page 6
I grit my teeth to ratchet the line. “Someone moved me. I woke on the dock, soaking wet.”
She barely flinches. “Don’t those heavy-duty sleeping pills cause sleepwalking? Even sleep driving and sleep murdering and all kinds of messed-up shit?”
“I just sleep.” I love how one sleeping pill makes me an unreliable witness, and their hours of drinking doesn’t factor into the equation.
The sail catches wind, and she jumps behind the steering wheel. “They cause hallucinations, though. Don’t they?” She says it lightly, but the implication is clear. I didn’t see anything from the dock. It was exhaustion, it was a trick of the light, it was my pills. Kennedy will always find a reason not to believe. I study her silhouette, standing at the bow of the boat, hair tossed by the breeze. The resemblance to the tarot card gives me goose bumps.
“You know what? I think it’s your fault Ryan left. He lost his sister and you were horrible to him. And I don’t know how to get through this weekend without him.”
Kennedy’s expression tightens. “Well, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It is a loss! He’s the only one who didn’t laugh in my face about hearing Emily.”
“Because he always says whatever you want to hear.”
“No, because he hears her too. And not just whispers. Clues. About what happened to her. Like the cards in that game. Don’t you see it?”
I don’t like the way she’s looking at me. A little bit of pity, but a little bit afraid.
“Don’t look at me like that. Emily left Ryan…” I stop short of telling her about the tarot card warning not to trust her. “You’re proving my point. He believes me, and you’re condescending as fuck.”
She presses her hands against her lips and screams into them silently. “There is no more Emily! I don’t know what Ryan’s going through, and I’m sorry, but it’s no excuse to drag you into it, and turn you against us again. Against me. He is always getting between us.”
“I can’t believe you’re making this about you.” I wrench my arm away. “It’s about Emily and what really happened last year. Maybe if you were honest with me, I wouldn’t need Ryan.”
“Wow.” She stares at me. “Well, I feel a little better about the fact that you think it’s remotely possible that one of us killed Emily. Because now I know who brainwashed you.”
“I don’t think it. I just… have questions. Don’t you?”
“Fine,” she says as we drift up to the dock. “I’ll prove he’s lying. If that’s what it takes for you to finally trust me.”
We dock and Kennedy moors the boat and stalks back to the house. I climb down into the cabin and find a couple of towels. I dry myself off with one and smack Chase with the other.
He startles awake. “What did I do?”
“Have you been asleep this whole time?”
“I mean, not since birth. I dozed off at some point when we lost the wind. Does that mean I deserve to be towel-smacked awake? Reasonable minds may disagree.”
I sit down next to him with a sinking feeling. “Chase, something weird is going on. I saw someone go overboard, and they never resurfaced.”
His eyes widen. “Did you send out a mayday?”
I shake my head. “I don’t even know how to do that.”
“Kennedy does.”
“I’m the only one who saw it.”
His expression changes. “Oh.”
It suddenly clicks, and I can’t even begin to describe how furious it makes me. These are supposed to be my best friends. “You think I’m imagining it. Like hearing Emily in the house. You think I hallucinated a person falling into the lake and disappearing under the water.”
“I mean… How well did you see it?” He looks like he wants so hard for it not to be true, and for me not to be having some kind of breakdown. Why can’t he just take me at my word?
“I was on the dock, and it was dark. But I saw it, damn it. You know how I feel about water, and I dove in and swam all the way to the boat. That’s how sure I was.”
“Hey.” He puts a hand on my arm. “If you’re that sure, we can go to the cell spot right now and call 911.” The cell spot is the one place nearby with reliable cell service—a secluded spot in the woods, about a fifteen-minute hike. A drive to town would take five minutes longer. But I hesitate. I feel sure. But sure enough to attach my name to a police report? Something about the thought sets off alarm bells. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it feels like such a bad idea. But it does. I wish I didn’t always second-guess myself. I wish Ryan were here.
I sigh. “I could be wrong.” My eyes fall on Mila, still sleeping. “Chase,” I say quietly. “What can you tell me about the fire? I’m trying to piece together what happened. I figure all of us saw things the others missed.” Better not to mention Ryan’s suspicions. It probably wouldn’t be the smartest way to get honest answers, anyway. It backfired with Kennedy—she shut down the second I even mentioned the possibility that one of us could have been at fault.
Chase frowns. “Why?”
Mila yawns and stretches. “Why are you like this, Chelsea?” She turns to Chase. “She legitimately gives me nightmares.”
“She’s one of my best friends,” Chase says with a warning look.
“I’ll tell you what happened last year if you vow not to mention ghosts again,” Mila says.
“Fine,” I say. We’ll see. “I know about the gas leak… not so much about the spark.”
She relaxes. “I was asleep when the fire started. Sorry I can’t help you there. Chase carried me outside to safety.” She nestles her head into his shoulder.
Chase pulls away slightly, giving her a puzzled look. “No I didn’t.”
She gazes up at him. “Yeah, you did.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I went to try to stop the fire. By the time I gave up, there was no way to get upstairs.”
Mila sits up straighter, looking alarmed. “Oh my god. Someone did. Some guy carried me out of the house and laid me down on the grass. I thought you saved my life, Chase.”
He shrugs helplessly. “I had no idea. I’m glad they did it. Can we pretend it was me?”
“No, seriously—if you didn’t, who did?” She looks at me.
“It had to be Ryan,” I say.
“Ew.” She shudders.
Chase casts her a sidelong glance. “What’s wrong with Ryan?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It just feels wrong. It should have been you.”
Chase looks uncomfortable. There’s always that unspoken rivalry between him and Ryan. But it also does feel wrong in a way I can’t articulate. It’s not because she was Chase’s girlfriend. And I wish I could say that none of us needed saving. But that’s not the truth. Emily needed saving. I guess the unsettling part is that Ryan came back for Mila, but left Emily behind.
“I guess I have some questions for Ryan now,” Chase says, ruffling Mila’s hair.
I sigh. “Me too. I wish he’d stuck around.”
Chase looks at me in surprise. “What?”
“Kennedy told me he packed his bags and left a note. I guess things got a little too intense. I know he was having a hard time.”
Chase looks crestfallen. “He should have woken us to say goodbye.” He chews the side of his cheek thoughtfully. “I wish you wouldn’t worry about whatever you saw. It was just us three on the boat—kind of hard to board without anyone noticing. You were asleep on the couch. We came out here and…” He starts to drift, and I wave a hand in front of his face. “Clearly drank too much,” he finishes, rubbing his eyes. “Jesus, I haven’t blacked out since freshman year.”
Mila looks thoughtful. “Did you actually see Ryan leave?”
“No.”
“Then he’s probably still here.”
Chase and I both turn to her. “Why?”
“I heard him, up in the attic.” She eyes me. “I figured it was you at first. Insomnia and all. I couldn’t sleep with the footsteps pacing back and forth all night.” Mila turns to Chase. “That’s why I woke you and suggested a moonlight sail. It’s quiet on the water.” She looks at me. “When we found you on the couch, I realized it couldn’t have been you in the attic. Kennedy was with us—so it had to be Ryan. Probably creeping around, basking in the death sparkles of his sister.”
I make a face and she returns it. It’s comforting, in a way. It makes it feel like things are still sort of cosmically balanced. No one believes in anything, and Mila thinks I’m a loser.
“Kennedy said she found his note just before you went out,” I offer.
Mila shakes her head. “I was the last to leave, and I heard the footsteps again as I left.”
“But why would Kennedy lie about Ryan leaving?” I say.
Mila shrugs. “Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he lied to her.” That gets my attention. He could have left the note to fake Kennedy out and then stuck around to investigate unseen. But why wouldn’t he tell me?
“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.” Chase takes off his T-shirt and hands it to me. “You must be freezing.” I strip off my soaking T-shirt and pull his on. It’s like wearing a dress. It’s strange how the temperature drops so quickly from day to night. The chill of the lake air hangs on your bones, seeps into you. It sucks the heat right out of every cell in your body. Chase and Mila seem calmer now, the odd events of this evening forgotten. But then, they didn’t see that figure disappear under the water. They didn’t wake up on the dock, soaking wet in the dark. For all they know, I’m lying about everything. It must be nice to be believed. By the time I reach the dock, Kennedy is gone. Up ahead, the lights in the house seem to glow brighter, the kind of unnatural brightness that hurts to look at, and suddenly blink off all at once.
“Did you see that?” I whisper.
“Seriously?” Mila groans.
“Blackout,” Chase says with a hint of uneasiness.
My eyes travel up to the attic. I could have sworn that before the lights snapped off, I did see something. A shadow, a blur. I take a careful step onto the dock and begin to walk quickly toward the house. If Ryan is still there, I want to get to him before Kennedy does.
16
Power is a funny thing.
When you have it, you take it for granted.
When you don’t, it’s the only thing you think about.
I’m going to take yours before you die.
It’s the least I can do.
Maybe not the least…
But I can do it.
That’s the whole point of power.
17
I walk ahead as Chase and Mila linger behind to tie up the boat. By the time I reach the lake house, I can see faint candlelight flickering in the living room, Kennedy’s room, and the one tiny circular window in the attic. Someone’s definitely been up there. Inside, a thick blanket of silence hangs over the house, and a panicky feeling flutters through me, the feeling of déjà vu, of crushing loneliness, of being abandoned over and over and over again. Kennedy has lit a candle on the living room table next to where I was sleeping, alongside a glass of water with another note reading For your pills. I stuff it into my pocket, annoyed.
I flick the light switch, but the light doesn’t come on. Every hair on my body stands on end. I’ve had a recurring nightmare since childhood where I wake up and reach for the light next to my bed, and it doesn’t turn on. I go to the door, and the light switch on the wall is broken. I feel my way down the hall to the bathroom, and those lights are out too. And just as it’s dawning on me that all the lights in the world are out, I wake up. It shouldn’t be that scary. Blackouts happen all the time, especially during heat waves. They happen frequently at the lake house. It’s not the content of the dream, it’s an unspoken implication, a subtext. It’s not the what of it all, it’s the why.
The dread that saturates that dream flows through me now. I try every light in the living room, then the kitchen, flinging open the refrigerator in desperation. There’s something creepy about a dark refrigerator that’s hard to explain. I slowly close the door on the gradually expiring milk and eggs, and a light wisp of condensation escapes like a gasp of breath. I turn back to the living room. There’s a circuit breaker in the cellar. I’ll find Ryan faster if I can get the lights back on.
I can make out the door by the candlelight, near the base of the staircase. As I draw near, I notice the cellar door is slightly ajar, and for a split second I reconsider my circuit-breaker plan. The cellar has always creeped me out. We found a dead rabbit down there once—not a mouse, a rabbit. I don’t know how it got down there. It was our first summer at the lake house all together, the summer after third grade. We’d had a class pet rabbit that year, Miss Palindrome. We all took care of her, we all loved her, and we all cried at the end of the year when we had to ceremonially hand her over to the next class.
We found the rabbit in the cellar just a week later. She had white fur with caramel-and-coffee-colored spots, just like our pet. She was about the same size, and I thought their faces looked similar. I don’t think she’d been dead for very long. It wasn’t like roadkill, with a stretched-out, gaunt, tortured, almost petrified look, but her throat had been torn. Chase stood staring, stuttering, while Ryan held Emily’s hand, forcing her up the stairs, shouting for Mr. Hartford. But I was stuck, my eyes locked on the rabbit I was convinced was Miss Palindrome, who must have somehow found us, and been punished by some divine force for running away. Of course, it couldn’t have been Miss Palindrome, and she didn’t run away. But a child’s imagination can make impossible things feel very, very real.
I reach for the door, but before my fingertips touch the knob, it begins to move. Slowly, so slowly that in my head I feel time grinding to a halt and beginning to move in the wrong direction, like a record player going backward, twisting your favorite song into a dark and terrifying hymn. It moves. I watch helplessly as it drifts away from me with a long, sighing creak, like a little doll’s scream, and clicks shut. Every single hair on my body rises. The brass lock above the antique doorknob slowly turns, sealing the door shut. I stare at it for a moment, frozen, a strange numbness in my legs, my lips glued together. My brain begins to buzz like it’s swarming with flies, and I get another shutter flash of Miss Palindrome. I force my wooden legs to bend and hinge in their sockets, and I reach for the bolt and turn it. For a moment, I rest my hand on the doorknob. The metal is warm under my skin, like someone’s been holding it for a long time. I shake the thought out of my head. Absurd. People don’t stand around holding doorknobs.
I take a deep breath and try to yank the door open. It’s stuck. I flip the bolt back and forth a few times, but the door won’t move, even when I throw all of my weight behind it. It’s odd. It was ajar just moments ago, and it drifted shut softly. It shouldn’t be jammed like this. I knock on it, feeling silly. “Hello?” I call through the door. No one answers. I put my ear to the wood and rap again. “Hello?” One more tap, this time with my knee. “Kennedy?” I make a skittering noise on the door with my fingernails. “Miss Palindrome?” I whisper, just to be an asshole.
There’s an enormous bang against the door from the other side, like someone is throwing their entire body against it. I scream and fall away from it, slamming against the living room table and sending the Truth or Dare game sprawling onto the floor, and the candle on top of it.
I smack my palm down on it in a panic to stop the flare-up, but regret it the instant the room is cloaked in darkness. A watery rinse of moonlight filters in through the windows, but it doesn’t reach the stairs. The cellar has gone quiet again. I make a dash for the staircase and feel my way up, scrambling on all fours. The rest of the house is chillingly silent. Kennedy must have heard me scream, which means I won’t be alone for long. I pause at the top of the stairs and consider calling for her. I don’t want her following me up to the attic, though. I hear Chase and Mila stumble into the house, something glass shatters on the floor, and Mila curses. Perfect—that should buy me time to find Ryan first.
I tiptoe past the guest room and then stop short. The door to Kennedy’s room is wide open. It catches me off guard. It’s been closed all day. The balcony doors are flung open, and a slight breeze flutters the gauzy curtains, princess pink, just like the old ones. Exquisite care has been taken to carve the fairy-tale scenes in the walls anew. Sleeping Beauty with her spinning wheel, Rumpelstiltskin dancing around his fire, the Snow Queen with her shattered mirror. Kennedy has placed a candle here, too, on the dresser. I shut the door silently behind me. The entrance to the attic is through a trapdoor in Kennedy’s closet. I open it and climb up the ladder.
“Ryan?” I call softly. No one answers.
As always, the attic is about ten thousand degrees and smells like sawdust. I get a suffocating sense of claustrophobia just poking my head into it. Ryan isn’t up here, but someone was. At the center of the unfinished, cavernous space is another lit candle and an open book. I step lightly across the floor. When someone walks in the attic, it sounds like elephants stampeding below. I bend over the candle curiously and pick up the book. It’s an old library book, but all of the pages have been scribbled out in black ink. On the inside jacket is Emily’s name. Under it is a short series of notes in tiny handwriting, hers and mine. We must have passed it back and forth in class years ago. I hold the candle up and squint to make out the words.
No one will believe you. (Emily’s hand)
They might. (Mine)
She gets away with everything. They all do. Don’t bother.
You don’t know them like I do.
Yes I do. That’s your problem, Chelsea. You think you know everyone better than me. They’re my friends too. And they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
I stare down at the words, bile gathering in my mouth. I haven’t thought about the incident the notes are referring to in ages. It almost tore our group apart. It was just after Kennedy broke my heart for the first time, the summer after ninth grade. After, I guess, I inadvertently broke Ryan’s. Kennedy and I were barely speaking, and Ryan was avoiding me. Emily was the one everyone trusted. And suddenly things got really ugly. According to Emily, Kennedy’s mother discovered a family heirloom missing at the lake house. Either she or Kennedy suggested that I “accidentally put it in my bag and took it home.” Obviously I didn’t do it.
