I’m suddenly very glad Joey wasn’t with us when we found Rachel. He’d probably have treated the whole thing like a scene from one of his stupid horror movies. I open my mouth to say so, but other voices suddenly boom down the hall.
“Fault . . . Mary . . . abuse . . .”
“Investigation . . . troublemaker . . . just like . . .”
I’m only able to catch every third word, but it sounds like my aunt and Jensen are on the verge of coming to blows. The voices rise to a crescendo. A moment later, the front door slams.
Calmly, as though everything is totally normal, Aidan opens the bag of chips.
Aunt Jet strides into the kitchen. The sleeves of her sweater have been rolled up to her elbows—almost like she actually was on the edge of a physical altercation. “Insufferable, jealous, entitled man.” She spits out the words the way other people spit out curses, but when her eyes land on Aidan and me, she hauls in a deep breath and makes a visible effort to pull herself together. She walks to the table, grabs a handful of chips from the bag, and pops a stack of them in her mouth. If one can chew angrily, she’s chewing angrily.
“Am I in trouble?” I ask.
My aunt swallows and brushes the crumbs from the front of her sweater. “Don’t be ridiculous. You didn’t do anything wrong. If anything, I’m proud of you for pushing against his nonsense. This isn’t about you. His mother was a Morgan. Second cousin. He’s always thought he had a claim to the house, and he’s upset . . .” Jet trails off. She glances at Aidan and then quickly looks away.
There are only so many things Jensen could be upset about that Aunt Jet wouldn’t want to speak of in front of Aidan. He must suspect she’s thinking of selling Montgomery House. Maybe he even knows that she called that antique dealer. It’s a small town and people talk.
Jet is wearing an old opal ring that once belonged to my grandmother. She slips it from one finger to another and then back. “Since we don’t have to go to the station, I think I’m going to go upstairs and lie down. Will you be okay? Are you okay?” Worry flashes across her face. She reaches out and touches my shoulder carefully. The touch lasts only a second, but it’s oddly comforting.
“I’m fine, Aunt Jet.” The idea of actually being fine after everything that’s happened in the past twelve hours is a little ludicrous, but it’s not like there’s anything my aunt can do to make any of it better.
“One of us should call your father and tell him what happened.”
“I’ll do it,” I say, even though I have absolutely no intention of following through. It was Dad’s choice to banish me for the summer; I’m not going to spend an hour on the phone reassuring him that I’m safe and that he made the right decision. I just figure letting Aunt Jet think I’ll call—or have called—will delay the prospect of talking to him.
Aidan watches me, shrewdly, as Jet leaves the room, then reaches, again, for the bag of chips. “Are you actually going to call your father?”
“Next question.”
“Okay: What’s a Morgan?”
“It’s kind of stupid.”
He stares at me expectantly.
“You know Mercy Island?”
The fact that he has to think about it reminds me that he’s not from here, either. “Island off the coast, right?” he says. “Got cut off last winter when the ferry couldn’t make it across.”
“That’s the one. There were two Morgan sisters. One who stayed on the island and kept the lighthouse and another who married Jonathan Montgomery and came here. So, technically, every Montgomery in Montgomery Falls is descended from a Morgan.”
“Sounds very Dark Shadows.”
“Dark Shadows?”
“This old gothic soap opera. Joey managed to find about a hundred episodes online. I think I made it through all of three, and that was under duress.”
I shake my head. “Ever think of getting new friends?”
“You like Skylar.”
“I can’t argue with that.” Besides, given my own tendency to gravitate toward old bands and vintage stuff, maybe I should cut Joey a little slack for liking an old TV show.
“So you and Jensen are related.”
“Apparently.” It’s not really a pleasant thought.
“And he doesn’t seem to like you.”
“Doesn’t seem to.”
Aidan’s eyes sparkle as the corner of his mouth twitches in a grin. He lifts a potato chip, holding it aloft as though raising a glass for a toast. “In town less than two weeks and you’re already on the bad side of the chief of police. It’s nice not being the only troublemaker in the house.”
Fifteen
THE IDEA THAT NOAH DRIVES A BLUE CONVERTIBLE BMW doesn’t really compute. Not because he can’t afford it—the Frasers have always had tons of money—but because he doesn’t strike me as caring about that sort of stuff.
“What?” he asks, picking up on the fact that I’m staring at him as the river flashes by below.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t exactly match the car.” And he doesn’t. His jeans are worn through in places, and his T-shirt is so faded that I can’t make sense of the design on the front. He looks like he’d have trouble scraping up fifty dollars, never mind enough for a luxury car.
“It was one of my father’s,” he admits. “He gave it to Riley just before he moved out.”
“Was this before or after Riley crashed his boat?”
Noah takes his eyes off the road long enough to glance at me. “You heard about that?”
“I definitely heard about that.”
Noah shifts gears and turns off the bridge. “The car was before the divorce. The boat was after. And as you’ve brilliantly deduced, I’m not really a BMW kind of guy. My Jeep’s back in Ottawa. I would have driven it here, but I didn’t realize I’d be staying this long.”
“Couldn’t you go back and get it?”
“It would take a few days to fly out and then drive back.”
“And you don’t want to leave your mom alone?”
He nods once, gruffly.
I pull open the glove compartment. Other than the registration, which is indeed in Riley’s name, the small space is empty. I tell myself that there’s no reason to be disappointed: if there had been anything interesting in the car, surely Noah would already have found it.
I push the glove compartment closed and then twist around to grab a doughnut from the open bag on the back seat. I take a bite, managing to sprinkle toasted coconut crumbs all over the place in the process. This morning, I hadn’t been able to finish a sandwich, but when Noah showed up with coffee and doughnuts, my appetite returned with a vengeance. Even telling him about Jensen hadn’t been enough to kill it.
After what happened last night, it feels somehow wrong to be enjoying food while the sun shines on a summer day. It does not, however, feel wrong enough to stop me.
Noah may not look like he belongs in the BMW, but he handles it effortlessly, pushing the speed limit and hugging turns like he’s used to driving fast cars. I study his knuckles as his hand moves between the gearshift and the wheel, looking for a sign of those marks I had noticed that first day outside the drugstore. They’re almost gone. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you really get into fights down at the Riverbend?” This, like the car, is something that doesn’t quite fit. Noah can be standoffish, even surly, but he seems too smart to be hanging out in that kind of place and getting into that kind of trouble.
He winces very slightly. “Who told you that?”
“Just something I heard around.”
“Twice. Once after I got back and once a couple of days before I saw you.”
“Why?”
“My father has pissed off a lot of people over the years. Some of them think Riley disappearing is just my family getting what it deserves.”
“And Riley?”
“What about him?”
“What did people think of him?”
&n
bsp; Noah shrugs. “Everyone liked him. Everything seemed to roll off him. Even the whole boat thing seemed to be fine in the end.”
“But you were away at school, right,” I prod. “So you wouldn’t necessarily have gotten the whole picture . . .”
“I guess.”
I want to ask him if he knows anything about what happened between Riley and Skylar, but doing so feels like it would be talking about Skylar behind her back. It’s one thing to have asked Aidan about it—Aidan is Skylar’s friend; asking Noah is different.
The trees crowd the road closely on either side. After a few minutes, they thin out—just for a moment—and I catch a glimpse of the train bridge through the break. “It’s up here. Just around the bend, I think.”
Noah slows the car. As we round the curve, the trees open up entirely, giving way to a muddy field.
“Here.”
Ignoring a No Trespassing sign on an old fence post, Noah pulls off the road, taking the BMW over ruts and through puddles like he’s driving his Jeep instead of a sleek German car. We finally come to a stop at the edge of the field.
“Are you sure this is it?” he asks as we climb out.
“Yeah.” I glance down at the tire tracks; dozens crisscross the mud. “They had to leave the police cars here. The ambulance, too. They put Rachel on a stretcher and carried her through the trees.” I start making my way along a footpath, trusting Noah to follow.
After a few minutes—five, maybe ten—the trees begin to change as lush greenery shifts to dead, barren branches. Soon, the river comes into view. Bright and blue with white clouds reflected on its surface.
Tall grass and low bushes crowd between the trees as the ground slopes down to the water. Even from here, you can see signs of last night’s activity. Footprints in the mud. Styrofoam coffee cups. Crumpled bits of paper.
I glance at Noah. There’s a tightness around his eyes and mouth that wasn’t there moments ago.
“What is it?”
“No police tape.”
He’s right. There’s nothing to indicate a half-dead girl was found here. Nothing to warn people off.
I guess that’s one way not to start a panic.
“Come on.” Noah begins to reach for my hand to help me over the uneven ground but then catches himself—either because he remembers that my headaches are connected to touch or because he’s actually gotten the whole memo about women kicking ass.
I head toward an oblong imprint in the mud. The stretcher, I realize. I glance toward the bridge. It’s close, but not that close. If the moon hadn’t been full, if it hadn’t slid out from behind the clouds at the exact right moment, if I hadn’t been standing at the exact right spot looking in the exact right direction, would I even have seen her? I imagine lying out here all night. Dying out here. Able to see lights across the river but unable to get to them. It’s a lonely thought in a lonely place.
I crouch down and press my palms to the mud, to the spot where Rachel had lain. “She was here,” I say. There’s a smaller imprint next to the one left by the stretcher. I touch it, shivering as my body remembers the damp and the cold. “And I was here. I took her hand, and that’s when I noticed the medal.”
I feel, rather than see, Noah stare down at me for a long moment. When I glance up, I can’t read his expression.
He walks to the water’s edge. “This is where you pulled her out?”
“Chase did. A few feet over.”
I stand and join him at a spot where the shoreline curves like a question mark. The bend forms a sort of natural trap for things taken by the river. Driftwood and bits of garbage have washed up here—but so have other things. A child’s plastic ring. A kayak paddle. An old blue bottle that glints in the sun. “Riley would have liked it here,” I say. “At least twelve-year-old Riley would have.”
It takes a moment for Noah to get it. When he does speak, his voice is oddly thick. “All these lost and forgotten things.”
“Noah . . .” I move a little closer to him, thinking that I should tell him I have Riley’s journal, that I found it down in Aunt Jet’s basement. I don’t know if having it will help him or hurt him—maybe it doesn’t matter either way—but he should still know about it. Before I can say anything, though, there’s a rustle at the top of the hill.
Noah and I both go still as a man starts down the slope.
He’s older than Aunt Jet. In his fifties, maybe. He’s tall and angular with thinning brown hair over a sunburnt scalp and bushy brown eyebrows that stand out even at a distance. It’s like his body had decided to focus most of its hair-growing energy on cultivating those two patches.
He’s so intent on his footing that he’s almost to the bottom of the hill before he notices us.
“You kids shouldn’t be here.” A camera rests on his hip, its black strap slung over his shoulder. He tugs on it, the gesture oddly stiff and awkward.
Noah takes a small step forward. “We were just hiking along the river, Mr. Harding.” As the words leave his mouth, Noah changes. His face opens up, his shoulders straighten, and there’s a lightness in his voice that I don’t recognize. He hooks his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans in a gesture that reminds me of Aidan.
The man scowls, looking like a disgruntled owl. “You go to Riverview?”
“Graduated a few years ago.” Noah gestures at the man’s camera. “Great day for taking photographs. You’re here to get shots of the river? I saw that one you took last summer. The one that won that big contest.”
Everything about him is charming, affable, likeable. If he can act like this, I think, why does he skulk around so much?
The man hesitates, then nods, opening up just a bit under Noah’s flattery. “That one was part of a series. Got published in a travel magazine. You’re right: would be a good day to photograph the river, but the police asked me to shoot some pictures of the shore.”
Noah frowns. Not his real frown, but a paler, less biting version. “They say why?”
“Something about a girl they found on the bank.” He slides the camera from his shoulder and twists the lens cap. “Have you kids heard anything?”
“Not a thing,” says Noah.
The man nods again, the gesture small and slight. “You’d better get going. Don’t want to catch you in any of the photographs.”
“We were just heading back up to our car anyway. Nice day for a walk, but it’s going to be a scorcher.”
Harding mumbles something noncommittal as we walk past. As his gaze slides to me, his eyes narrow. Something about the look sends a small shiver down my spine.
I glance back as we hit the top of the hill. Harding is standing a foot away from where we found Rachel, camera pointed down at the spot where she laid in the mud, but his eyes are on Noah and me.
I wait until we’re back in the car before speaking. “Who was that?”
“A photographer. Kind of weird.”
I roll my eyes. “Figured that part out, thanks.”
Noah glances at me, weighing the sarcasm in my tone. It’s a tiny reminder that we don’t really know each other. “He used to own a one-hour photo place on Main Street—at least that’s what I’ve heard. It went under when everyone went digital. Now he photographs weddings and portraits and stuff. The school hires him to take the yearbook pictures.”
“And he freelances for the police. Busy guy.” Given the size of the Montgomery Falls Police Department and the fact that the town normally has a low crime rate, I guess it makes sense that they would outsource some things. Still . . . “If Jensen really thinks Rachel just got lost, why bother getting photos?”
“Covering his butt, I guess,” says Noah. “This way, if it turns out later that he’s wrong, he can at least say he did something.” He starts the car and pulls out of the field, but instead of turning left and retracing our route back to Riverside Avenue, he turns right.
“We’re not going home?”
“I’m starving.”
I twist in my seat and sn
ag the bag of doughnuts.
“I need real food,” he says, shaking his head.
Ten minutes later, we pull into a diner on the wrong side of the town limit—a long tin can that’s meant to look like one of those ’50s setups with lots of neon and atmosphere.
Part of me can’t help hoping the real 1950s didn’t look quite this sad or shabby as I follow Noah inside and to a back booth. Everything—the floor, the tables, even the menus—seems to be coated in a thin layer of grease, and though it’s just a little past noon, the place is practically deserted. Only one other booth is taken, and most of the stools at the counter are empty.
“It’s busier at night,” Noah says. “Mostly truckers.” He hesitates for a moment and then asks, “Do you feel anything?”
“You mean like the draft from the air conditioner?”
A waitress comes over for our order. Noah asks for a cheeseburger and fries. They serve an all-day breakfast, so I order two eggs, sunny-side up—unlike my mood—and bacon. We both get Cokes.
After she walks away, Noah leans forward. “Rachel works here.”
“You told me you didn’t know who Rachel Larsen was.”
His eyes flash at the hard, suspicious note in my voice, and I instantly want to retract the words.
“I made a few calls before I picked you up.”
“Sorry,” I say softly.
“It’s okay,” he says, but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes when he says it. “Do you feel anything?”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . psychic stuff?”
“I’m not a psychic. I’ve told you that.”
“But you see things when you touch people. I wasn’t sure if it’s just people, or if it works with objects, too.” He glances around the diner, probably thinking that Rachel has touched every saltshaker and tabletop. If I could pick up things just from objects, it would have been a great place to bring me. Of course, if I could pick up things just from objects, I’d probably never leave the house.
“I’m not psychic. Not like that, anyway. I can’t read people’s thoughts or feelings just by looking at them, and I can’t pick up something someone touched and tell you anything. I don’t see the future or the past, and I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with a crystal ball or a deck of tarot cards.” For some reason—maybe because I’ve spent the past few years reminding myself that it’s not safe to tell anyone the truth—I find it hard to look at him while I talk. “When I touch people, though, I do see things. Either something that they really want or that really scares them. Desire or fear.”
You Were Never Here Page 12
