“What were they whispering about?”
“Just what I said to you already. About what they’d say when the police arrived. They knew that if anyone told you the truth—about Sadie, about the search party, about all the secrets they’d kept hidden—they’d all be in even worse trouble than they were already. And nobody was willing to take the chance. Mason, in particular. I guess that’s why he told the others to keep quiet, why he tried so hard to frighten them.”
“What did he say to them?”
“He told them you’d twist things, the way he said you had with him. He told them no one would believe them, not after all this time—that not only would they be blamed for Dylan, they’d be blamed for Sadie, too. The important thing, he said, was to stick to the story. We were looking for Sadie. Dylan followed us. And after that there was an argument and somehow Dylan got hurt. If we all said we couldn’t remember how it happened, nobody would get blamed, and nobody would be able to prove it wasn’t an accident.”
“And what did you think when you heard the others talking like that?”
“I didn’t think. I couldn’t. That’s why I left. When the others weren’t looking, I just . . . I ran. Into the woods. I couldn’t face . . .”
He left the sentence unfinished. Not for the first time, Fleet felt a rush of sympathy for the boy.
“So they didn’t realize it was you? The water that first night, the missing phones. They didn’t know that you were the one who’d been trying to drive them back?”
Luke shook his head. “Cora still blamed Mason. For everything—including Sadie. She seemed to think he’d genuinely lost it. That he’d shown he was capable of anything, and that everything that had happened was all part of his messed-up game. Abi probably thought so, too, although she still had a bee in her bonnet about Cora. And the pregnancy thing . . . I think she had her doubts about Fash by the end of it as well.”
“And Fash? Mason? What did they think?”
Luke rolled a shoulder. “Maybe Fash figured Dylan was the one who messed with the water, but he probably assumed it was just a prank. As for what happened to Sadie . . . You know what Fash is like. He doesn’t want to believe the worst of anyone. After finding out that Sadie might have been pregnant, I think more than anyone he blamed himself. That was partly why he was so keen to help Mason in the first place, I reckon—because he felt so guilty from the start.”
The woods were thickening, and for a moment they had to walk in single file. But then the trees parted again, and Fleet was back at Luke’s side.
“I don’t think Mason realized the truth either,” the boy went on. “From what he was saying, the way he kept glancing at the others, as far as he was concerned, nobody was in the clear. Not for the water, not for the phones. And not for Sadie either. To be honest, I don’t think Mason understood anything more by the end of it than he had on the day we set out.”
Fleet suppressed a sigh. Such a waste. All of it. It was all such a waste.
For virtually the first time since they’d started talking, Luke glanced Fleet’s way. “I tried to stop them, you know,” he said. “From forming the search party in the first place. I mean, I don’t think anyone actually wanted to come out here—other than Mason, obviously—but I suppose they felt they had no choice.”
“Because the others were going,” said Fleet. “Because they would look all the guiltier if they refused.”
Luke nodded.
“But Mason . . .” said Fleet. “When we were speaking at the station, you said you didn’t want him out here in particular. You kicked up a fuss when the others suggested asking him, called him a psychopath. Why was that?”
“Because you suspected him already. Everyone did. And if he went traipsing through the woods, spreading his, like, DNA or whatever all around . . . And if the others accidentally . . . if they . . . if somehow . . .”
“If they found her,” Fleet said, finishing the thought, “you realized how it would look. So you were trying to protect him. That’s why you didn’t want Mason to go.”
“I didn’t want any of them to go. But when I tried to dissuade them, they told me they’d go without me. So then I didn’t have a choice.”
“What about Dylan?” said Fleet. “When did you realize he’d followed you?”
Luke dropped his head. “Too late,” he said. “Just . . . too late.”
Fleet thought he knew something of the way the boy was feeling. Not least because, when it came to Dylan, he and his colleagues had messed up, too. They’d made the mistake of assuming exactly what Dylan’s parents had—that Luke had taken Dylan with him. That Dylan had been part of what had turned out to be the search party from the start.
“I should have realized earlier,” Luke said. “Like, when Abi said she’d heard something. Or when Cora said she’d seen someone in the night. But I assumed they were imagining things. The fact that they all seemed so freaked-out was what gave me the idea in the first place.”
“To scare them, you mean,” said Fleet. “To try to drive them back.”
“It was only when we got to the cave that I started to wonder. No, that’s not true. I suspected before then, but it was at the cave that I finally realized. That’s why I went rushing off into the trees. To try to find Dylan before the others did. To send him home. To tell him he wasn’t being any help.”
“And you did. You found him.” Fleet thought of the voices Cora had spoken about, of how a young boy’s voice might easily have been
