by Steven James
But despite that, he didn’t open the door. Instead he strode toward the bathroom.
However, when he got there, he couldn’t quell his curiosity and he went back and pressed gently against the door to Emily’s room and eased it open.
Just for a minute. Just to see where she lived.
Then Daniel stepped into Emily Jackson’s bedroom.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
The pink walls had posters of boy bands, horses, and kittens. There was a calendar hanging above her desk with days neatly crossed off, ending on the day before she disappeared.
Emily didn’t have space for all her books. The shelves were jammed and there were books piled on the floor and even stacked horizontally on top of the ones that were shelved.
She liked fantasy—Tolkien, Rowling, Paolini, and others, and preferred hardcover to paperback. The shelves looked sturdy, but sagged under the weight of the heavy volumes.
Her bed was meticulously made, with a neat pile of stuffed animals positioned, just so, beside the pillow.
The small polka-dot garbage can beside her closet was empty and the only things on the desk were a closed laptop, a spiral-bound notebook, a propped-up photo of her and Ronnie with Ackerman’s Studio logo imprinted on the corner, and a pencil holder with seven items in it—a highlighter, two mechanical pencils, three pens, and one red Sharpie.
The room was neat. Too neat. The kind of neat a mom might go after when she’s getting ready for company.
Or maybe when she’s trying to tidy up and preserve the memory of her daughter.
Daniel stood motionless just inside the doorway.
He wasn’t about to go rooting through Emily’s things, shuffling through her dresser drawers or digging through her closet. He felt weird enough just being here looking around her room, but there was one thing he wanted to do before leaving: take a look inside that spiral-bound notebook on her desk.
As he stood there, he wondered if this was the notebook people were talking about—the one that’d supposedly been in her locker at school, the one Ty had mentioned.
Daniel leaned toward the hall and listened intently. It sounded like Mr. Jackson was still in the kitchen.
It wouldn’t take much time at all to flip open the notebook and just take a peek at what was inside, then get out of her room, hit the bathroom, and head downstairs.
Finally, Daniel reassured himself that he would have enough time to glance through it before Mr. Jackson would get suspicious of the toilet not flushing, so he walked to the desk.
As he picked up the notebook, a loose sheet of paper slipped out and glided to the floor.
He knelt to replace it and saw that it was written in the same script that appeared on the sign on her door.
Quickly, he scanned it.
It’s right after second hour. All around me, people are talking and laughing and getting snacks from the steel-and-glass vending machines.
I watch the Popular Kids talk. I watch them and I despise them and I envy them and I hate myself for wanting to be like them.
Then one girl shifts to the side and leaves a small opening in the circle, so I step in.
But they don’t notice me. They just keep talking and laughing in their cool-student-sort-of-way and I don’t know what to say. I don’t have anything to say. The conversation goes on without me.
I’m invisible to them.
Every time I think of something to add, they’re already talking about something else.
The rest was written with a different-color pen, as if she’d paused and then picked up the entry later to finish it:
So, finally, I step back and the circle closes up again . . . like a wound healing itself . . . and I go to the window, unwrap my candy bar, and watch the geese fly south for the winter.
As I eat something sweet.
Next to the steel-and-glass machines.
The words were so sad, and Daniel couldn’t help but think again of dreams and death and the story Miss Flynn had read in English class—the one about the girl who wanted to be a movie star and never got up enough courage to leave her hometown.
He remembered what he’d been thinking on Tuesday when he went to Emily’s funeral—that she was the kind of girl everyone walked past at school, ignored at lunch, never really had time for.
Until she was dead. Then all the students made time for her funeral.
Some things about the world were just tragically upside down.
He slid the paper back into the notebook, and began paging through it.
And immediately felt uneasy.
One name appeared dozens of times, scribbled in the columns and margins. A name with hearts drawn beside it.
The name of his best friend.
Kyle Goessel.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Daniel stared at the words, then flipped forward and backward through the notebook. No other boys’ names were written in the columns next to the English notes and algebra equations, just Kyle’s.
Emily obviously had a crush on him, but the other day Kyle had said he didn’t even know her.
But he does know where her locker is.
And he did act a little strange when you asked him about her.
Also, when they’d shown up at the locker that Ty had shoved Ronnie into, Ty had said he knew about Kyle and Emily. What did all that mean?
But Kyle was with Mia, and he wouldn’t have led Emily on. He wasn’t that kind of guy. And for as long as Daniel had known him, he’d never dated younger girls—let alone those who were two years younger than him.
Whatever it meant, there was something more going on here, another whole level of meaning, like in a puzzle or a riddle where what you see isn’t what you get, where looks are deceiving, and things aren’t what they appear to be.
And he couldn’t shake the feeling that this all had to do not just with Emily herself, but with her death.
Her murder.
As Daniel was thinking about that, he realized that he didn’t hear sounds coming from the kitchen anymore.
Out the window, movement on the street below caught his attention.
A car turning into the driveway.
Quickly, he closed up the notebook and set it back on the desk, trying to make sure it was in the same position as when he’d found it.
Downstairs, footsteps were crossing the hallway leading to the stairs.
Daniel hurried out of the bedroom, closing the door softly behind him. He rushed to the bathroom, quickly used the toilet, flushed it. Rinsed his hands.
When he left the bathroom, Emily’s dad was at the top of the stairs, as if he were standing sentry in front of Daniel’s only exit. “He’s here. Ronnie is. I told him you’d be right down.”
“Thanks.” Daniel tried to read his face to tell if he had figured out what he’d done.
Before Mr. Jackson turned around to head back down the stairs, his gaze flicked toward Emily’s room. Daniel felt a sweep of nervousness.
Mr. Jackson studied the door longer than he needed to, but in the end he said nothing about it and simply led Daniel to the living room.
Daniel breathed a quiet sigh of relief as he followed Emily’s father down the stairs.
Ronnie was hanging his jacket on a hook near the front door. “Hey, Daniel.”
“Hi, Ronnie.”
“Thanks for coming over.”
“Sure.”
Mrs. Jackson appeared in the doorway, introduced herself, and Daniel shook her hand. She looked at him curiously. “So you know Ronnie from school?”
“He’s the quarterback,” Ronnie told her. “On the football team.”
“Sheriff Byers’s boy?”
Daniel nodded. “Yes.”
“Aren’t you the one who passed out at Emily’s fune
ral?”
Not the question he’d expected, and not one he was excited to answer. “I felt dizzy. I’m sorry. I—”
“Maybe it would be best if you left,” she cut him off.
“Mom,” Ronnie objected. “It’s okay.”
Daniel wasn’t sure why she would want him to leave just because he was the guy who’d fainted at Emily’s funeral, unless she thought it had disrupted things too much or that it was some kind of stunt he was pulling.
“Dear,” Mr. Jackson said to her, “let Ronnie and his friend talk, they’re just—”
She glared at him harshly, then spun on her heels and headed to another room. Daniel couldn’t even imagine what this family was going through right now, and whatever Mrs. Jackson’s reasons, he wasn’t about to stay if she didn’t want him to.
“It’s alright,” he told Ronnie and his father. “I should probably be going anyway.”
“But you just got here,” Ronnie objected.
Daniel wanted to talk with Ronnie, but he really did not want to get in the middle of this. “We can catch up at school tomorrow. Cool?”
Mr. Jackson was looking toward the room his wife had stormed into. He set his jaw and left to find her, leaving Ronnie and Daniel alone.
“Can I talk to you on the way to your car?” Ronnie asked.
“Sure. Come on.”
As they left the house Ronnie said, “My parents, you know. My mom, she’s just . . .”
“Yeah, no. I get it. Don’t worry about it.”
Daniel remembered the photo Emily had taken of herself and Trevor at Windy Point. “Hey, I read in the paper that Emily had left home to go on a walk out by the lake. Did she do that a lot?”
“Not all the time, but it wasn’t that unusual. She left a note that she was taking Trevor for a walk before she, well . . . you know.”
Daniel thought of how Emily had told him that Trevor was in the car. He wanted to ask Ronnie about it, but couldn’t think of any way of doing it that wouldn’t sound weird. After all, how could he have possibly known about her dog being in a car—if that was even the case?
Instead, he took the conversation in another direction: “Do you know what was in the locket of her necklace?”
Ronnie looked at him curiously. “How did you know about that?”
“She was wearing it in a couple pictures at the funeral. I guess I just thought she must have liked it, worn it a lot.”
“Yeah, um, I don’t know. I think it was a picture of some guy she liked. But here’s what I really wanted to talk to you about: her cell phone.”
“What about it?”
“She didn’t have it on her when she was found.”
“So she didn’t carry it in her purse?”
“No, her pocket, mostly.”
Would her cell phone really have fallen out of her pocket if she just went into the water?
No.
Unless she fell off Windy Point, maybe—but then what about her broken glasses up on the beach?
Daniel wondered if the fact that she didn’t have her phone with her had raised any red flags with law enforcement, or if his father had looked for it. He hadn’t mentioned anything, but then again, his dad wasn’t really allowed to fill him in on the details of his cases.
Bringing up the broken glasses might have helped Daniel get information from Ronnie, but he knew his dad was against his sharing anything about them. And, honestly, the last people in the world Daniel wanted to get worried that Emily might have been murdered were her family members.
Ronnie already thinks that.
Regardless, he held back from saying anything about the glasses. Instead, he asked Ronnie about what he’d brought up the other day at school. “So, your sister knew how to swim?”
“Not just knew how, she swam all the time at the YMCA back in Madison before we moved here. She was really good.”
“Is there anything else?”
“She was thinking about going out for Mr. McKinney’s math club thing next semester.” Ronnie paused. “To try and make some new friends.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to find out what happened out there at Lake Algonquin? What really happened?”
Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.
But Daniel did anyway.
“Yeah. I am.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
Once he was in the car again, Daniel texted Kyle to call as soon as he had a chance.
Then he took off for home.
Clouds had blown in.
A storm was on its way.
Daniel caught up with his dad in the garage cleaning his Glock at the workbench.
Partly he was tempted to bring up something about the missing phone, but he realized his dad wouldn’t be at all happy to learn that he was still looking into Emily’s death.
“Mom called me this morning.”
His father set down the cloth he was using on the gun’s barrel. “She did?”
“Yeah. She wants to come to my game on Friday. She told me you called to tell her I blacked out at the homecoming game.”
“She’s your mother, Dan. She has a right to know how you’re doing. Can you imagine what she would have said to me if she found out later that you’d gone to the emergency room and I hadn’t told her about it?”
“Why did she leave?”
His dad was silent.
“I asked her and she wouldn’t tell me. I mean, anyone could tell you guys were having some problems, I get that, but—”
“I don’t really want to talk about this right now, Dan.”
“Sure, I know, but—”
“Not right now.”
But Daniel didn’t give up. “Was there . . . is there another guy?”
“When the time is right I’ll explain everything.”
“You know, that’s what she said too. That it wasn’t the right time.”
“There you go.”
“I asked her when it was going to be the right time. She didn’t tell me. Maybe you can.”
“No—there wasn’t another guy. She just preferred being alone rather than with me.”
And with me, Daniel thought. She preferred being alone to having her son around.
He wasn’t sure his dad’s answer really satisfied him, but he accepted it for now. Rather than dwell on the reasons, he said, “She wants me to go see a doctor. She said you did too.”
“We think it might be best. I was going to bring it up to you, but we haven’t had much of a chance to talk. I scheduled an appointment for you tomorrow up in Superior.”
“What? I have school and then football practice tomorrow afternoon. I can’t miss that.”
“I’ll call the school to get you an excused absence, and I’ll talk to Coach Warner. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“Dad, listen, I don’t want to go see a doctor.”
“I understand. But in this case I’m not asking.”
“We have a game Friday and—”
“Daniel. We’re going to get you checked out.”
“Checked out.” Then it struck him. “Why Superior? It’s not our doctor?”
“I got a referral. It’s a specialist. A neurologist.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t at least talk to me about this before setting it up,” Daniel exclaimed. “That’s not right.”
Tension drew tight between them.
His father was the first to speak. “We leave at eight tomorrow morning.”
There was a rule at their high school that if you missed classes for the day, you weren’t allowed to practice with your team or play in any games that night. So, going to the doctor tomorrow would also mean missing practice.
Also, if he missed school tomorrow he wouldn’t be able to find out from Stacy why s
he hadn’t shown up at the dance, or talk with Kyle about Emily and whether or not he knew she had a crush on him.
Sure, okay, he could call or text them, but both of those things seemed like they’d be better discussed in person than texted back and forth. Besides, Stacy wasn’t replying to his messages anyway.
Daniel said nothing, just headed to the kitchen. He felt like slamming the door to make a point, but left it open instead. For some reason it seemed to make more of a statement than banging it shut behind him would have.
However, when he got to his bedroom he let loose on the door.
Anger gripped him, anger from everywhere and nowhere.
He squeezed his hand tight and aimed it at the wall beside the window.
His fist left a dent in the drywall.
He stared at it.
This isn’t like you.
What’s wrong?
You’re changing. You’re losing it.
A little frightened by what he’d just done, by what was happening to him, he moved a Mavericks poster to cover the hole, and then dropped onto his bed.
Checked his texts.
Nothing from Kyle or Stacy.
He went to the desk and tried to put everything else out of his mind and focus on his homework.
That turned out to be useless.
Without getting any assignments done, he put his books away. After lifting weights until his arms and chest were pretty much wasted, he threw together a sandwich and some leftover spaghetti for a very late supper.
He checked his phone again, and this time he did have a text: Nicole, thanking him for taking her home last night and asking if he might have found one of her earrings in his car.
It didn’t take him long to locate the earring between the seats. He texted her back that he was going to be gone tomorrow, but would bring it to school with him on Tuesday.
She replied that that’d be cool and she’d see him then.
He got ready for bed, lay down, and closed his eyes to try to get a full night of much-needed sleep.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, he woke up at 3:14 a.m. in his clothes, chilled, and completely drenched.
