by Steven James
He was about to change for bed when he heard a light rap on the window.
Then again.
Someone tapping on the glass.
The only person he could think of who might be there was Kyle, but that would be strange; he would have texted first.
And would he really have gotten here so fast?
Could it be Emily?
Another blur?
He wasn’t too excited about the idea of pulling back the curtains, but he knew he needed to see who—or what—was on the other side.
On his way to check it out, he heard it a third time.
Apprehensively, Daniel drew back the shades and saw Stacy Clern on the other side of the glass.
He slid the window open.
“Sorry if I startled you,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
He was surprised to see her—yes, he was—but she did have a history of showing up at his house late and unannounced, so he wasn’t completely shocked.
“I need to talk to you. Can I come in?”
His first impulse was to tell her no.
“What is it?”
“I don’t really want to talk through the window.” Her voice was hushed. She gestured toward the windowsill. “May I?”
He didn’t like the idea of letting her in, but this chatting-through-the-open-window thing wasn’t ideal, and the living room wasn’t great either, since they might easily wake up his dad.
He slid the window all the way open. She waved off his help and climbed through on her own.
“I like your room.”
“Thank you. So, what is it? What’s so important that you came over here at this time of night?”
“I wasn’t sure what else to do, since you seem to be avoiding me at school.”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t been avoiding you.”
“I thought maybe it was about the dance.”
“No, I’m . . . The dance?”
“I thought you were gonna call me Saturday. When we were at the lake you told me you were going to call me in the afternoon.”
“I tried to. I texted you a bunch of times. You never returned any of my messages.”
“You did?” She looked confused. “I didn’t get ’em.”
“None of them?”
“Uh-uh.”
He took out his phone and verified that he had the right number.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she told him. “I don’t understand. That’s so weird.”
“Are you getting other people’s messages?”
“Yeah. Maybe it’s something with the phone company.”
“Let’s try one right now.”
“My phone’s at home. Send me a text. I’ll check it when I get there.”
He did.
Honestly, being in his bedroom alone with Stacy felt a little uncomfortable, especially since it seemed like things were sort of moving forward with Nicole: friends, sure, but it felt like they were edging closer to something more than just a casual friendship.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the glasses,” Stacy said. “Did your dad find out anything?”
“Not that I’ve heard. No.”
“Did you think of checking when Emily went to the lake? Maybe we can find out who else was there at the same time.”
“My dad doesn’t want me looking into things anymore,” he told her truthfully.
“Oh.” A pause. “So how are you? I heard you were at the doctor’s yesterday.”
Man, word got around.
“Everything alright?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Actually, I’m not sure. I’ve been having these blurs.
“What was the appointment for? Because of the game? Because of your head?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
He weighed how to respond, how much he should share with her. “Some stuff has been happening.”
She gazed at him with concern. “Are you alright, Daniel? I mean really alright? It seems like something’s . . . well . . . What’s going on?”
He didn’t want to tell her about the blurs, per se, but he decided to fill her in a little bit on what was happening, at least indirectly why he’d needed to see the doctor yesterday.
“It’s the way I see things.”
“The way you see things?”
“What’s real and what isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
Trying to think of how to explain things, he gazed around the room and finally had an idea. Daniel held up a blanket so that it hung vertically above his bed. Stacy stood beside his desk, her back to the wall. He noticed that she was tapping her fingers nervously against her leg.
“Alright,” he said. “Imagine that everything on your side of the blanket is reality. Those are the things you can see, taste, feel, whatever. The things that are really there. Everything on my side of the blanket is . . .”
“Just imaginary.” She finished his thought for him. “All in your head.”
“Right. Now, from what I’ve found out in the last week, most people have a pretty thick blanket—barrier—that’s in their minds that helps them know which side they’re on.”
She was watching him carefully; if he didn’t know better, he’d say warily.
“So we can tell what’s real and what’s not,” she said.
“Exactly. But now imagine that the blanket is a shower curtain or something and you can see through it, but everything on the other side is blurry. So you’d know the other side is there—”
“But you’d be able to tell which side was which.” Stacy sounded slightly relieved. “You’d see the difference.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s you?”
A pause. “No. Not quite.” He dropped the blanket. “It’s gone.”
“The blanket is?”
“Yes.”
“Completely?” She’d moved almost imperceptibly farther from Daniel.
He nodded. A moment passed.
Stretched thin.
“Does that scare you?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer but said instead, “But can you tell this is real? That I’m really here, in front of you, right now?”
“Yes,” he said.
But he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything.
Not since realizing he was going insane—at least, that was the only explanation he could think of, since according to the neurologist there was nothing physically wrong with his brain.
But he wasn’t about to get into all that with Stacy tonight.
“Maybe I should be going.” She seemed to have suddenly become uneasy being here with him.
“Don’t worry, it’s just . . . I guess I’m trying to sort a lot of things out right now.”
“Yeah.” She edged closer to the window.
He offered to help her climb out, but she looked at him strangely and told him that no, she was fine and that she would see him tomorrow, and then she was gone, leaving Daniel to evaluate whether he should’ve told her what he had, and what the next step needed to be in unraveling what was going on.
The stuffed animals and flowers at the graveyard, the broken glasses, the necklace, the clues that pointed toward Mr. McKinney—all of it intrigued and confounded him.
Maybe you do need to try to find out who might’ve been at the lake the day Emily disappeared, like Stacy suggested.
How?
He didn’t know.
Once again he heard, from somewhere inside of him, Stay on this. Seek the truth. Learn what happened.
Yes.
Tomorrow.
Visit Mr. McKinney’s house.
He and Kyle would seek the truth, learn what they could, and then slip
away before anyone knew they were there.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
Even though there was no school today, Daniel woke up at his normal time and was frustrated he hadn’t been able to catch up on any sleep.
Maybe his sleeplessness was causing all this.
Blurs.
Daymares.
Trapped forever in a dream.
He made it to the kitchen just as his dad was getting ready to leave for work.
“Are you gonna be able to take a day off this week?” Daniel asked him.
“Hopefully tomorrow morning, at least. Hey, I thought I heard you talking with someone in your bedroom last night. Was Kyle over?”
“No, I was . . .” He almost lied, almost said that there was a speech he was supposed to give at school, that he was practicing, but this time he gave his dad the truth instead. “It was Stacy. The girl I told you about the other day.”
“In your room? At that hour?”
“It’s not like that. We were just talking.”
“I don’t like you having girls over late. You know that. Not alone in your bedroom.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry. It just sort of . . . Well, it came up out of nowhere.”
“So when do I get to meet her?”
Daniel realized that the last his dad had heard, Stacy was supposed to be going to the homecoming dance with him but had never shown. “Um . . . I’ll introduce you. The next time she’s around.”
“But not at that time of night.”
“Right.”
“By the way, the FBI e-mailed me early this morning. The only prints on those glasses were some partials they couldn’t identify, and yours.”
“From when I picked them up.”
“Right.”
“So how did they have my prints on file?”
“I did. From that criminology project you guys did last year for your political science class. I included them when I sent the glasses down.”
“Oh.”
Another dead end.
Since Daniel had missed school on Monday, his homework had piled up, and he spent the morning finishing some of it for tomorrow so he’d be free this afternoon for his trip to Mr. McKinney’s house with Kyle.
He’d gotten his assignments from Nicole and now read the two chapters Miss Flynn had assigned for Friday.
Poetry.
Honestly, Daniel didn’t even get what some of the poems were about. However, rather than analyze them, Miss Flynn usually chose to just let the poems speak for themselves and didn’t offer analytical explanations like other teachers seemed to be into doing. So at least he wouldn’t be expected to dissect them.
Considering what he’d been going through lately, however, one of them really struck him.
There is a moment beyond this moment
I finger it, fragile and delicate and hopeful,
torn sweetly from the fabric of
the robe of time. I touch it, glancing
my fingertips across its promises.
And something stirs deep within me
wondering,
buoyant,
and wild.
Could it be that
everything really matters?
The wind tastes like
spring-flavored freedom
this time of year.
—Alexi Marënchivek
When he read it, he didn’t try to take it apart word by word, but rather tried to “drink in its essence,” as Miss Flynn put it. “Stop trying to understand poems,” she’d told them one time in class, “and try to understand yourself better after reading them.”
Well, he understood one thing: he hadn’t tasted spring-flavored freedom in a long time, at least not since hearing about Emily’s death.
Afternoon came quickly, and at one o’clock he met up with Kyle on the street that ran along the far side of the woods that lay behind Mr. McKinney’s house.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Kyle asked.
“Not really. But I want some answers. And if we can find out anything while he’s gone, we can tell my dad and have him look into things. But I think we need to confirm that Mr. McKinney isn’t home before we do anything.”
“I’m not exactly sure how we can do that without knocking on his door, and that might be a little counterproductive.”
“How about this,” Daniel offered. “We call school, ask if he’s there, say we need to change a parent appointment with him this afternoon, something like that.”
“Cool.” Kyle drew out his cell and without hesitation found the number and phoned the school’s office. “Hello?” He tried to disguise his voice but sounded more like he had something stuck in his throat than like someone’s dad. “Is Mr. McKinney there? I need to reschedule a meeting about my son later this afternoon.”
He waited for a reply, then said, “Wait, that’s our baby crying. I’ll call you back. Thanks.”
He hung up.
“He’s there.”
“Alright,” Daniel said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINE
As they made their way through the woods toward the house, Daniel said, “Stacy stopped by my house last night after I got home.”
“Really. Stacy showing up in the middle of the night at your place. What a shocker that is.”
“She came by to ask me about the glasses.”
Daniel hadn’t intended to say that. It just came out, and only when Kyle asked him what glasses he was referring to did he realize what he’d said.
He took a deep breath and explained everything about the broken glasses he’d found on the beach, about the missing lens, about how the FBI had looked them over for fingerprints and had only been able to identify his.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this earlier?”
“I guess it was at least one promise I made to my dad that I was trying to keep.”
“Well, it makes her death even more suspicious.”
“I know. Anyway, like I was saying, Stacy asked me about ’em. Apparently she thought I was avoiding her, since she didn’t get any of my messages Saturday—you know, when I was trying to contact her about the dance. I guess something’s going on with her account or the phone company or something.”
When he said that, he realized he still hadn’t heard back after texting her last night, so maybe she hadn’t gotten that one either.
Daniel went on, “She suggested we try to find out who else was at the lake when Emily went out there.”
“Makes sense. But how?”
“Ask around, I guess. I’m not sure.”
“Well, what are you thinking about her?”
“Stacy?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you still want to go out with her?”
“As opposed to Nicole?”
“Pretty much.”
They were almost to the other end of the forest, and Daniel could see the back of Mr. McKinney’s house. It looked like there was a wooden fence maybe four feet high surrounding his pool.
“I don’t know. I’m not really sure. I thought Stacy was blowing me off, but now I find out she wasn’t. With everything else going on, it’s actually a hard week to sort things out.”
“I hear that.”
After scanning the area to make sure no one was around, they stepped onto Mr. McKinney’s property, approached the pool, and saw that it was empty.
It was apparently drained for the winter and gaped before them like a giant mouth, open and hungry and waiting. No diving board. A mildewed waterline ran around its inner edge.
Looking at the house, Daniel saw that one of the basement windows did face this direction, so it was possible that Mr. McKinney had been telling the truth. H
owever, with the fence encircling the pool it didn’t look like the angle was right for him to have seen his wife dive in.
Kyle must have been thinking the same thing. “Maybe he put up the fence after she drowned?”
“Maybe.”
Daniel imagined the pool filled with water and what Mrs. McKinney’s body might have looked like lying at the bottom. For a moment the image became terrifyingly real—not quite as distinct as the blurs when he’d seen Emily, but the water, the body, even summer sweeping across the forest all appeared before him and—
“You okay, dude?”
He looked away from the pool. “What?”
“You. Are you okay? I was asking you about the cellar.”
“The cellar?”
Kyle pointed to an outside entrance to the basement, one of those angled sets of double wooden doors that opens outward so you can access a set of basement stairs. A padlock was threaded through the hasp, but it hadn’t been snapped shut.
“What exactly were you asking me?” Daniel said, but he thought he already knew.
“What do you say? Just have a peek?”
“Inside?”
“To check the angle, you know, from the basement window to the pool.”
Daniel and Kyle stared at the cellar doors for a long time.
Mr. McKinney’s wife was dead.
Emily was dead.
But there was no proof either had been murdered.
Maybe he has something noting that he was out at the lake; maybe he had a fishing trip or something on the day Emily died. That might be enough for your dad to start looking into this.
“He’s at school. We could slip in,” Kyle said. “He’ll never know.”
You looked around Emily’s room. This isn’t any different.
Yes, actually it is.
Sneaking into a guy’s house was a lot more than just opening the wrong door on your way to the bathroom.
“There’s not nearly enough evidence pointing to him yet.” Kyle was eyeing the open padlock. “There’s no way your dad could get in there, get a search warrant, whatever. We’re here, Mr. McKinney isn’t. This is our chance to get some answers.”
Daniel scanned the neighborhood. It looked like only a couple homes had a view of the back of Mr. McKinney’s house, but no one was outside. The shades appeared to be drawn.
