Summer's Edge, page 9
I wish I could have told Ryan that. Before he got so angry. “But you did love her?”
“Why are you pushing this?” He gives me an odd look.
“I just think it’s weird. You had a girlfriend. Emily turned up dead.”
“Jesus, Chelsea.”
“Mila was here, and you slept with Emily.” I look into his eyes. “You messed up. Everyone messes up and you did too. Say it, Chase.”
He stares at me for a moment. “Okay. I did. But there was nothing sinister about it. If you want to accuse me of something, carpe diem.”
“I don’t. I just wanted to—”
“Ask me about my motive,” he finishes. “Well, there you go. And if you’re curious why I didn’t run into a burning building to save my girlfriend, it’s because by that point it was physically impossible. I don’t know how it all went up so fast, but it did. I hope that’s an acceptable excuse?”
“Yes. Sorry. Of course.”
“Now can I ask you something? Why exactly do you have so many questions about the fire? I mean, I get that everyone has blank spots. We were in different rooms, there was smoke inhalation, sleep, no one exactly sees a gas leak. And it does seem the Hartfords did quite a job keeping the details under lock and key. But you really seem to know nothing. Like Jon Snow nothing.” He looks at me expectantly. Suspiciously?
I edge around him uncomfortably. “I know what I witnessed. None of the rest of you saw what I saw. They told me I have post-traumatic stress disorder with severe insomnia and panic attacks. I have these intrusive thoughts. Like…” I push forward, head down, avoiding his gaze as he tightens his pace to match my stride. “Little movies of terrible things happening that just run on a loop. The theory was, the more I knew, the more intrusive thoughts I’d have, and the more detailed they would be. And the more panic attacks. And I’d think I was dying every day. And I wouldn’t sleep. Which is all true. Kennedy asked me why I never sought this information out. Why I didn’t ask my parents or a doctor or just read a newspaper. What happened in the fire.” I take a deep breath. “But the truth is, I was in a scary place, Chase. I’m not magically better, but things were worse. They were a lot worse. And being back here… the not knowing is hurting me too.” I stop and catch my breath.
He reaches out to me and pulls me into a bear hug. “When I say I didn’t leave my room… I couldn’t. I was so afraid something would happen. How… much can you handle now?”
“All of it. I have to. And then just take it one day at a time, you know?”
He puts an arm around me and we continue on. “Exactly. We don’t need to hear all the details in a single night. As for me, to be honest, I might not have caught much more news coverage than you from my pizza cave. I didn’t even hear about the gas leak, although I bet that makes Mila nervous.”
“Because—” I mime lighting a cigarette.
He nods. “Exactly.”
“You don’t think she…?”
“I know she didn’t.” He sets his jaw stubbornly.
“Kennedy thinks she wasn’t invited. Do you think she would just show up?”
He looks at me. “Mila is always invited. I’m not leaving her behind ever again.”
I blush. “I didn’t mean to imply she isn’t welcome. Kennedy didn’t either. She just… has a theory that the person who made the game cards meant them to be about you, me, and Kennedy, because of some comment Mila made about the invitations. If she’s right, it would make you the traitor by process of elimination. Which would mean neither you nor Mila is guilty.”
“Oh,” he says. “Well, I’m not going to argue with that.”
“So if you don’t know what started the fire, what about the boat?” Someone has to hold the key to deciphering the tarot clues.
He furrows his brow. “Yeah, some of us took the boat out earlier… Kennedy, Mila, and me. I can’t remember anything notable happening. I think maybe we had drinks with Emily at the stone table when we got back. But you went to bed early right? Headache?”
I grab his arm. “So you do believe I was asleep when Emily came inside.”
A look of understanding dawns on his face. “Chelsea, no one thinks you locked Emily in the attic or anything. Everyone honestly believes this was an accident.”
“Not Ryan.”
Chase’s expression darkens. “Right.” The cell spot is close, almost in view. He takes a deep breath. “Look, I’m the last person who wanted to even consider this, but I don’t see an alternative explanation anymore. Ryan’s fucking with us. This entire weekend was a setup. He invited us here because he blames us for what happened and he’s trying to scare us to death.”
I shake my head. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“No, he wouldn’t commit murder. This is catharsis. It’s messed up, and I don’t believe for a second that he would hurt any of us, but from everything you’ve said, he truly believes one of us killed Emily. Think about that. Then tell me someone else is more likely to be behind this.”
I struggle to answer. “If. If someone did kill—”
“But who? Who would kill a friend? Who could live with themself after that? It would be like some kind of epic torture. Look at Macbeth. As humans, we’re not designed to handle it. He thinks we did this thing. No one else makes sense.”
I take his arm, stopping him. “But there is an alternate explanation, you just won’t listen. It could be Emily that called us back here. Emily or… I don’t know, a kind of distorted echo of Emily that drew us back to the lake, the attic, the cellar. It’s like she’s making us retrace our steps from that night.”
He frowns as he starts to walk toward the clearing. “Why?”
“Because it forces us to face what we did.” My head snaps up, and I run to his side just as he’s reaching the edge of the clearing. “Because when we left the lake house, it got very comfortable living in denial over what happened, but we can’t do that here. And she knows that because she knows us.”
But Chase isn’t listening anymore. He’s staring into the empty clearing. “Shit.” I gaze around. Soft pine needles blanket the damp earth, untouched by footprints. Up here, above the mossy rocks, we played pirates as children, painted toilet-roll telescopes and popped sunglass-lens eye patches. Later, we discovered this was the one spot at the lake house where we could call home or text a friend. Up farther, from the highest point, you could see over the rooftops, see the sun drain bloody sunsets into the lake or crack the earth to reveal a newborn phoenix rising from the depths.
Chase shouts Mila’s name, but the fog seems to swallow it up. He drops onto the ground and leans against a tree, throwing his head back in frustration. “I must have missed her by one minute. I stopped to talk to you. When I went inside, I heard footsteps upstairs. I kept calling her name, but… I couldn’t catch up. I failed her again.” A chill runs down my spine. There it is again. Footsteps. Just like Mila heard earlier. He rubs his head as if to soothe a massive headache, smearing it with mud. Our hands are stained with dirt and scented with sap from climbing. We look like grave robbers. Maybe Mila’s right. I do think in nightmares.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “She wanted to use her phone. I thought… It doesn’t matter.”
He rolls his head over to me. “What?”
I sigh. “You keep laughing at my theories.”
He laughs again but not in an amused or mocking way. He laughs like it’s the only sound left to make. “I’m sorry. I think my brain is broken.” He eyes me. “Mila didn’t think it was funny. You know, you got into her head a little bit with the ghost-whisperer stuff.”
“So she believed me about Emily?”
“Not exactly—not about the ghosts. Maybe just the idea of haunting. I think she’s spooked by the house itself. There are a lot of ways to be haunted. A place, a person, a memory.”
“I don’t think any of us believed in ghosts until tonight,” I say, annoyed. It’s the way people word things. Always so careful to separate themselves. Mila was never kicked out of school for admitting she thought about suicide. Spent a year shuttered away in a haze of pills. So she’s allowed to believe whatever she wants.
He backs off. “I wasn’t insinuating anything, Chels. I mean, come on. Look at what’s happening.” His eyes meet mine. “The invitation, the game, the attic door slamming shut. The lights and cars didn’t cut themselves. We are not alone here. Don’t you feel it even now?” That’s the thing. Up here, cloaked in thick layers of fog, where no one could see us fall or hear us scream, I do feel it. The clearing is empty.
But we are not alone.
On the lake, too, there was someone, something. The shadow tumbling from Summer’s Edge. The something stirring beneath. I take the tarot cards from my pocket and slowly turn them over in my hands. “Whatever Ryan is after, he genuinely believes Emily is still here, and is trying to communicate to him that she was killed, and wants him to find out how.”
“Jesus,” Chase whispers.
“There’s more.” I sift through the cards. “He thinks Emily is using tarot cards she made to give him clues. The cards are unsettling. Believe it or don’t, but she did make them, which means she had certain feelings about us that I didn’t know she had.”
He looks at me expectantly. “How bad are they?”
I hand him his card. Chase in the clearing. He takes it slowly and stands, and as the moon breaks through a veil of fog, he’s cast in an eerie pale blue light, mirroring Emily’s sketch. And it hits me what the tarot card is showing just as he looks up, the blood drained from his face.
“It’s me,” he says hoarsely.
“Right here. With your phone.”
He looks sick. “When did she draw this?”
I shudder. “Sometime before she died.”
He grabs my hand and yanks me to my feet. “Come on.”
I look up at him, alarmed. “What’s the matter?”
“We have to find Mila and Kennedy and get as far away from here as possible.” He stuffs the card into his pocket, and I slip the others into mine before he sees them and freaks out further.
“Can you please walk me through whatever is going on right now?”
He shakes his head as he pulls me rapidly through the trees, down into the thicker fog. “Stay close, okay? If you see Ryan again, shout.” He glances back at me over his shoulder. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. And I don’t want to know. But I promise you this—Ryan left these cards, not Emily. And they aren’t clues. They’re warnings.”
24
Six candles burning in the dark
Find them fast before they spark
One is in the living room
One in the garden where the flowers bloom
One on the boat that bobs on the lake
One in the room where we sleep and wake
One in the attic over your head
One in the cellar where you’ll find one dead.
25
“I don’t understand.” I double over to catch my breath as we reach the bottom of the hill.
Chase waits for me impatiently. “Look, I don’t know how she found out, but the picture on that card is between me and Ryan. If he gave that card to you, he wanted it to get back to me. It’s part of the little game he’s playing.”
I straighten up, wheezing. “Then tell me what it means. What does it have to do with last year?”
He pauses. “It’s personal.”
“Not if it’s about Emily,” I say, probably a little more sharply than I need to. But I’m done with secrets.
“He’s mad at me for making a phone call.” Chase walks briskly toward the house, and I push myself after him, but I’m exhausted.
“A phone call?” I can’t keep pace with him.
He whirls around to face me. “Yes, a phone call. So it’s not a secret, and it’s not a lie, and we can just—” He takes the card out of his pocket and tears it into pieces, tossing them into the road and grinding them into the pavement with his sneakers. “Gone.” I stare at him, a little afraid. Chase isn’t one to lose his cool.
“I believe you,” I say.
“Good.” He looks shaken. He turns back to the house and stops short. The front door is wide open. He breaks into a run, shouting for Kennedy and Mila. I walk slowly, terror creeping over me. The house, that giant wooden box full of memories and ghosts, fills me with more dread than the uncertainty of the fog. It looms, mocking, darker than the dark, seeing with shuttered eyes, a stern, unforgiving reminder of my fatal failure as a friend. Maybe I deserve to be haunted. I hear Emily in the attic, begging for help, the pounding on the floorboards. I don’t want to go back inside. But when I reach the door, Chase reappears, his face ashen. “Kennedy’s gone,” he says. He holds a note that reads: Took the boat to find Mila. Meet me out back.
The house is filled with lit candles, flickering and filling the space with an eerie light, giving the odd feeling that everything is moving, even the walls, the ground beneath our feet. I look over Chase’s shoulder. The back door is wide open too. I start to follow him out but halt abruptly halfway across the room. Something doesn’t seem right. Like one of those drawings in the Highlights magazines you read as a kid in the dentist’s office. A missing chair leg here, a stairway leading to a blank wall. I turn in a slow circle until my eyes rest on the walls and zero in on the thermostat, then travel down the thin wire to the dormant metal rectangles lining the walls. The baseboard heaters. The electric baseboard heaters. Ryan’s voice echoes in my head: An entire house burned to the ground because of a gas leak. My heart begins to beat faster as I walk in a daze through the kitchen, placing one hand on the cool coils of the electric stove. I walk faster toward the cellar, the dreaded cellar, and force myself down, down into the mold and mildew, past the acrid scent of rotten eggs, the vision of rotting rabbits, to the water heater, where the access panel has already been removed. Someone got here before me. No pilot light. No flame. The water is heated by electricity, not gas. I search the room frantically. There’s an electric meter. But no gas one. And on the meter is a worn sticker with a wind turbine logo and the following words in tiny print: Thank you for using clean energy!
There wasn’t a gas leak. There’s no gas line to this house.
I turn around and rush up the stairs, my heart pounding in my ears.
The cold air hits me like the slap of a wave as I rush back out into the dark, soundless night. There are candles here, too, some put out by the fog, but one flickering in the garden catches my eye, and my heart drops into my stomach. Another tarot card. I pick it up numbly, and my breath is drawn out of my lungs. It’s me. My paper twin stands on the dock, mouthless, eyes wide open. She stares out at something in the lake casting an enormous shadow that stretches back to the house. The handwritten caption says: Queen of Cups: beware the girl who sees the truth and speaks none.
I crumple it and throw it on the ground. “Chase!” He turns to me. “Where did you first hear the story about the gas leak?” I meet him halfway down the boardwalk, out of breath.
He looks surprised. “From you.”
“It’s a lie. The house isn’t powered by gas. Ryan told me that story because he knew I didn’t know anything. He wanted to control the narrative.”
“Why?”
“Kennedy was right. He wanted to turn us against one another. Look for a human spark. Mila’s lighter, Kennedy’s candles. This house is old. The wiring is old. He won’t accept an accident, so he invented a crime and he used me to plant it in our heads.”
Chase examines his card. “I knew it.”
I feel sick. I should have known. I should have doubted. “I don’t even know if I believe Emily made those cards. He could have faked them. And he could have faked Kennedy’s handwriting on the invitations. Forgeries can be very effective when they play off your expectations. I expected him to be the good guy. That’s his game.” And I was just a pawn. A player piece. Pathetic.
“I wanted to say I was sorry,” Chase says quietly. “But he doesn’t want an apology. He wants revenge. And he’s still here. I know it. He could be watching us right now.”
We begin down the boardwalk together, but I freeze when I see a shadowy figure ahead. Chase grabs my arm, but I find myself drawn forward. The boat is gone, and Kennedy with it, but the life raft floats just beyond the dock. Not the raft from the boat—the extra one the Hartfords store in the boathouse. Kennedy never found her. Mila stands shivering, gripping an oar to her chest, her bags at her feet.
Chase rushes forward. “Oh, thank god.”
But she holds up a hand and he halts. Her long hair falls over her face in a dark, tangled curtain, her head bowed, shoulders hunched. For a second I think she’s crying, but when she raises her head, her eyes are dry. “We were wrong about everything. Everything we thought. Everything we’ve done.” Her voice is slow, and she looks dazed, almost drugged. “And we are going to pay for it.”
A chill runs down my spine. “What do you mean, ‘everything we’ve done’?”
Chase looks at her nervously. “Mila. We can talk about this later.” He jerks his head toward me. Like he’s warning her not to say something, not to show something.
Mila laughs. “More secrets. How could that possibly backfire?” Her voice takes on a bitter tone. “But we can’t upset Chelsea. She’s delicate.”
I glare at Chase. It’s another one of those words people use. It sounds pretty, but it’s unbearably cruel. And it isn’t true. “Secrets? What is she talking about?”
“Nothing,” Chase says sharply, uncharacteristic of him. He tries to pull Mila away from the edge of the water, but she slumps back like a stubborn toddler refusing to leave a toy store.
She grins at me and hands me the slick, mildew-covered oar. “Dead things, Chelsea. Dead things.” Then she looks Chase square in the eye. “And if we survive the night, I’m telling.”
The tension in the air is as heavy as the fog. “Mila, Ryan’s the one behind all of this,” I say. “He made up the story about the gas leak. This is all his revenge.”
