grave. If it was Ashlynn. If it was true.
AS: Lucia didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.
41
Where was Johan?
Olivia felt helpless without any way to reach him. She couldn’t sit and wait as he threw his life away. When night fell, she knew she had to move quickly, and she knew where to go. She slipped out of her window, ducked through the wet streets of St. Croix, and borrowed a rusty Grand Am from the garage of one of her friends. She turned on her brights as she reached the highway. Her tires kicked up spray behind her like an ocean wave. Kirk’s house was ten minutes away, and with each mile closer to him, her terror climbed up her throat.
She parked on the shoulder near 120th. When she got out, a wave of rain slashed her chest. She ran for the dirt road, where she stopped and stared into the hole between the trees. It felt like descending into a monster’s cave. She smelled the smoke of a log fire and a wave of pine. The wind was fierce. With her hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans, she took tentative steps into the darkness. Her feet sank into the ooze. Her hair became wet ropes on her face.
Branches from the dense woods scraped her face. The constant patter of rain drowned out the other noises of the forest, and she worried that if someone were nearby, she wouldn’t hear them until their breath was on her neck. Her brain fed flashbacks from a horror movie, but it wasn’t a movie. In the invisible night, she found herself back in the belly of the train car as the boys assaulted her. She glimpsed quick, stabbing reminders of what she’d buried in her mind. She felt the crush of their hands on her skin, holding her down. Her body rattled on the metal floor with hammering jolts of pain.
She wanted to go back home, but she couldn’t.
She hiked step by step like a blind girl. When her knee collided with something hard, she stopped and pawed with her hands, running her fingers along wet steel. It was a car, parked deep in the soft mud under a canopy of brush. She reached into her pocket and yanked out her keys; she had a penlight on the chain. It cast a feeble light, but it was enough to show her the license plate of the vehicle. She recognized it. The car belonged to Glenn Magnus.
Johan was here.
The car was empty, but when she laid a palm on the hood, she felt the heat of the engine. He hadn’t been here long. She still had a chance to catch him. She opened her mouth to shout his name, but she caught herself and bit her tongue to stay quiet. She couldn’t let anyone know they were here. Even so, she felt his presence nearby, like a wi-fi signal connecting them. All her old feelings came back, as strong as ever. Memories of the two of them in the corn field last summer supplanted the black memories of the train car. She felt him holding her as they made love. Her first time. His, too, he said. His body was on top of her, and his heaviness was arousing.
Olivia walked faster. She needed to find him.
She reached Kirk’s house steps away from the black river. It was flooded with light, but she saw no one moving inside. She recognized Kirk’s pick-up parked near the garage. He was home. Or was he? The stillness bothered her. She expected the music of a party, or boys’ voices, or the squeals of stupid girls who didn’t know better. Instead, the house was as silent as a tomb.
She crept closer, exposed in the glow of the garage lights. If Johan could see her, she hoped he’d break cover and call her. No one did. She walked past the truck to the front-porch steps. Loose boards groaned as she climbed them, and she winced at the noise. At the front door, she cupped her hands by her face to stare inside the house. The living-room lights were on, and the place was a mess. Someone had torn it apart. Two drawers of a file cabinet were open and had been emptied onto the floor, which was strewn with papers and photographs. A desktop computer lay on the floor; its metal side had been stripped open.
What the hell?
Olivia backed away and retraced her steps off the porch. At each window, she saw more signs of a frantic search, but she saw no one alive. Not Kirk. Not Johan. She reached the rear corner of the house backing up to the wilderness and the river. The window on the corner looked in on a small bedroom, ten feet by twelve. She saw the high-school textbooks on the laminate desk and figured that the room belonged to Kirk’s brother, Lenny. He had a lava lamp, glowing with floating orange clouds. Dirty clothes covered the floor. There were posters tacked on the wall, all of naked porn stars. Front. Back. On their knees. It was disgusting.
On his bed, immediately below the window, she saw other photographs, too. Photographs of her.
Olivia felt violated all over again. She saw herself in the swimming pool at school. On the street outside her mother’s clinic. On her front lawn in St. Croix with Tanya. Wherever she’d gone, he’d been there with her. Spying. Lenny had been following her for weeks.
She recoiled from the window, and as she did, a hand clapped over her mouth from behind. Another hand snaked around her waist, and she felt dirty fingers on her bare stomach.
The touch of a boy’s hand set her off like a bomb. She drove her elbow backward into her attacker’s kidney, landing the blow so hard she thought the fleshy organ would squish out onto the mushy ground. She heard a yelp of pain and felt the hands loosen on her body. Free now, she spun, throwing her left fist, colliding with hard bone. It was the side of his skull. Another gasp. His hands flew in front of his face in self-defense. She shoved violently on his bare chest, and his legs spilled out underneath him, and he dropped flat on his back. His body was a mucky stretch of skin; he was naked. She swung her leg to punt his groin like a football kicker, but he squirmed away and covered himself, screaming, ‘No!’
She focused on his face for the first time. It was Lenny. She looked around, expecting Kirk and the other Barron boys to charge her. No one did. The two of them were alone.
‘Lenny, you bastard!’
On the ground at her feet, the boy wailed. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Olivia, I didn’t know it was you.’ There was a dirty wool blanket near him on the ground, and he scrambled to cover himself. ‘Honest, I didn’t know.’
‘Where’s Kirk?’
‘I don’t know. He kicked me out. I fell asleep in the truck.’
‘Have you seen anybody else?’
‘No, nobody. I told you, I was sleeping. Something woke me up.’
Lenny struggled to his feet, clutching the blanket at his waist. His chest was scrawny, his arms like toothpicks. His eyes darted up and down Olivia’s body, and she realized that her nipples were pointy and visible through the soaked fabric of her shirt. She folded her arms over her chest.
‘How long have you been following me?’
His eyes widened. ‘What?’
‘You’ve been stalking me, you creep. I saw the pictures on your bed.’
‘It’s not what you think. I just like to see you.’
‘You’re repulsive.’
‘I’m sorry. Really.’
She watched him adjust the blanket around his waist and knew he was becoming aroused. She felt another urge to kick him between his legs. ‘Go put some clothes on.’
‘Yeah. Okay.’
Lenny brushed past her. The touch of his shoulder made her fists clench. He squeezed his fingers under the sash and pushed open the window to his bedroom. He climbed inside, and she looked away, not wanting to see his naked body. She heard him opening drawers, tugging out clothes. When he climbed outside again, he wore a flannel shirt and blue corduroys. He’d combed his wet, greasy hair back over his head.
Before he closed the window, she ordered him, ‘Show me the pictures.’
‘Huh?’
‘The pictures you took. I want to see them.’
He looked as if he wanted to run.
‘Reach in and get them, Lenny. Now.’
Lenny bent over the ledge, and he pushed together the photos on the bed into a messy pile. They were
