by Kim Savage
I look over at Alice, feeling like an adult taking her kid on a Sunday drive. Alice with her Mary Jane sneakers, her Hello Kitty sweater with yarn appliqué. Alice with her headband.
“I know it’s been a while since we’ve hung out. But I want you to know that my parents and I prayed for you every hour you were gone,” Alice says.
Alice with no filter.
“I guess it worked. Thanks?” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she chirps, overly bright. “There’s something I’ve been wondering. Did your mother get closer to God after last year? Considering the miracle of your return, it’s hard to imagine that she’s still an atheist.”
“My mother isn’t an atheist. She’s agnostic.”
She shrugs. “Six of one.”
“Tomato tomahto.”
“Exactly,” Alice agrees, looking around. The new track is dead and dark with waves where it buckles, as though the town was in a rush and tarred it too soon. We walk for a while until Alice complains, and we plant ourselves on the bleachers, swinging our legs to keep warm. It brings back not unpleasant memories of playing outside with Alice when we were little until the streetlights came on. “I want to show you something.” She shoves her coat sleeve above her elbow. The lights cast a lurid glare on her pale arm. Below the crease in purple Sharpie is scrawled WWJD?
“Nice tat. New boyfriend?”
“You could say that.” She regards her arm for a moment. “I don’t take it that far.”
“Alice! JD—that’s a big deal. Are you dating a lawyer?”
She kicks my shin. “It’s an acronym, dummy.”
“Fine, I’ll bite. What does WWJD stand for?”
“It stands for What Would Jesus Do? Whenever I have a really big decision to make, I ask myself that question.”
“So Jesus told you to wear that Hello Kitty sweater with yarn whiskers?”
“Easy for you to joke.” Alice drags her sleeve down. “You don’t need to be reminded of what JC would do. You do it automatically.”
“I’m not following.”
“When you sacrificed your own life to save Liv’s.”
“I see,” I mutter, wary.
“In a lot of ways, you’re closer to Jesus than I’ll ever be.”
“I had no idea. I’m … sorry?”
“I’m all right with it. I understand that I’m a work in progress. Most of us are. We have a lot of business to do on this earth to be our best selves. Even my mother says she isn’t as close to God as some of the women she knows. Take Mrs. Lapin, for example.”
“No thanks.”
“My mother says she gives to her parish and her community selflessly, so she’s Father Carl’s favorite. She was nominated Catholic Woman of the Year by the lay board of Saint Theresa’s. That’s a big deal.”
Alice knows she may as well be talking about Wiccan white magic when she talks to me about parishes and priests. The Spunk girls don’t spend a lot of downtime in churches. Mom is a self-proclaimed skeptic, which is an agnostic on steroids. The word gets under my skin—ag-gnaw-stick—the way Mom overarticulates it, as if to burn it into my memory in case she’s accused of witchcraft and I’m called to her defense. “Why are you telling me this?”
“No reason.” She checks her arm. “Well, okay. There’s a reason. Since we’re coming up on the anniversary of the Shiverton Abduction, we’re having a special prayer mass tonight. To thank God for bringing you home.”
“Alice,” I repeat, my voice tinged with warning.
“I thought you might come with me.”
“Alice.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe in God.”
“Does it matter if I’ve never set foot in a church?”
“That’s okay! Jesus is welcoming. And Liv will be there. She got made youth ministry leader again this year. Not that it’s fair to get it two years in a row. I mean, what can she add? It’s not like she’ll have a fresh perspective.”
“Good point.”
“A sympathy vote after the Shiverton Abduction, if I might be so bold. At school, she might be queen bee to my drone. But in youth ministry, I could stage a coup at any time and be named leader. No one in youth ministry likes her. They think she’s bossy. And that maybe she doesn’t have the right intentions in her heart. But never repeat that!”
“I can guarantee I will not,” I promise.
“She wouldn’t have won reelection if it wasn’t for the Shiverton Abduction.”
“You can stop saying the Shiverton Abduction now.”
“Right. Sorry. So, like I said, come. Everyone would be praying for you. It’s nice. Not creepy at all.”
Alice is wrong: I never thought of prayer as creepy. More like a built-in advantage religious people have, a higher probability of their wishes being granted over nonreligious people.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“Cool. Speaking of Liv, what’s up with her dating Shane Cuthbert? He smells like a skunk’s butt.”
“That would be weed, Alice.”
She giggles. “Not that I think it’s so out of character. You don’t play Prey without a little bit of a dark side.”
“That was ages ago. And everybody plays Prey, Alice.”
“I don’t.”
I jump up. “We should run before it gets too cold.”
“I have bad shoes.”
“Okay, then. Jumping jacks!” I windmill my arms and legs in place, and Alice laughs, covering her mouth. “C’mon, Minke Whale! One, two, three—” I shout.
Alice’s mouth falls open.
“What?” I whirl around.
“Is that Paula Papademetriou?” she says.
Paula approaches, swathed in a cape-style coat the color of caramel, glamorous against the stark pines. She walks with a funny hitch, navigating the half-frozen earth’s bumps and buckles, her heels getting caught. Still, she’s polished and gorgeous.
“Who looks like that?” Alice murmurs.
Misguided pride spreads warm across the tops of my cheeks.
“I’m glad I found you,” Paula says to me, and presents a sleek, gloved hand to Alice. “Hi, Julia’s friend.”
“This is Alice,” I say. “She’s my next-door neighbor.” I want to pinch myself for saying that. Could I not just say friend?
Alice dives to shake her hand. “I’m Alice.”
“Alice—right. Got it. It’s nice to meet you, Alice. I live here in Shiverton too.”
“I know you do, on Central Street,” Alice says, being way creepy.
Paula smiles at her obliquely for a moment, then turns to me. “Julia, I am so sorry to pull you away. Is there any chance I could have a word with you privately?”
I look to Alice, whose grin drops, then lifts fast. “I need to do a lap,” she says, recovering and nodding vigorously. “It’s great exercise. You go, I’ll be right over there.”
“Two minutes,” I say to Alice, but she’s already gone, shuffling backward in her Mary Jane sneakers, nearly running into a randomly placed football tackle dummy.
“Can we go to my car?” Paula says, gazing at the parking lot half a mile away.
“I don’t know. That feels kind of cruel. I haven’t been a good friend to Alice in a long time. I probably shouldn’t disappear. You know how it is with friends,” I add in a leading way. Part of me hopes that Paula will talk about the best friend she mentioned at the trailhead.
“Then I’ll make it quick,” she says, ignoring my beggy vibe. “I got some information on deep background that has not yet been corroborated, but I thought you should know.”
I look at Alice and give her a small wave. She waves back with gusto. “Oh?”
“Apparently there’s a whole subset of Prey extremists who take the hunting-humans-instead-of-animals thing to a whole new level, like it’s some grand, virtual payback. Sometimes not so virtual.”
“I don’t mean to be impolite, but if you’re saying Donald Jessup was acting out Prey in the woods, the cops fi
gured that out a year ago. Based on the fact that he was chasing me. In fatigues,” I say.
“I know Donald Jessup liked to hunt. He also liked talking off the Twitter feeds. And that’s something he and Ana Alvarez, a veterinary student passionate about animal rights, with a history of … let’s call them unusual interests, had in common. The police hacked Donald and Ana’s direct messages. Ana arranged to meet Donald in the woods to play Prey and wound up dead.”
“Are you going to say all that on the news?” I ask.
“I can’t tell that story, because it looks like I’m blaming the victim. Besides, I don’t have independent corroboration.”
Alice swings close as she completes her first lap. I lower my voice. “How will you get it?”
“We need a source in the police department. That’s where you come in,” she says.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Alice, trying to read our lips and stumbling. I start toward her, but she leaps into the air, hands stretched to the sky. “I’m okay!” she yells.
I turn to laugh, and am surprised to find Paula’s eyes boring into me.
“You’re friendly with the son of Detective MacDougall, yes?” she says, eerily focused.
“You want me to ask Kellan to ask his dad if it’s true that Ana Alvarez was playing a kinky game with Donald Jessup?”
“Like I said, that isn’t the story we’re going to run with. I see it as background information, a piece of the puzzle. We just need to know if it’s true to decide whether or not to include that piece. Detective MacDougall was on the case initially, and rumor has it he’s dissatisfied with the way things are being conducted this time around, with all new players. He’s a perfect source: knowledgeable, respected, and with a motive to talk. You might even consider asking him directly; I understand he’s quite an admirer of yours.”
I gasp. “I’m not in a position to do that!” I catch myself and lower my voice. “I can’t.”
“It’s your call, of course. I really just wanted you to have the information anyway. Because you deserve to know.” Paula turns to Alice and waves. “I’m leaving now. Nice to meet you, Alice.” From an inside pocket, she pulls a glossy headshot postcard and a pen, and scribbles across the corner. When Alice runs up, she hands it to her. As Paula walks away, Alice stares at the picture. I stare at the real thing, her pale heels slipping from the backs of her shoes, a move at once sexy and kind of icky.
“This is so incredibly cool,” Alice says, holding the edges of Paula’s headshot as though she might smudge the image. “What did she want?”
“Just checking in. We’re friends. I guess.” I walk slowly, putting distance between us and Paula.
“This is about the big police exposé, isn’t it? Mom says it’s awkward, because they both live in this tiny little town and Detective MacDougall is so not having it, he might even lose his job, and, my gosh, Paula Papademetriou is a major journalist! She wins all kinds of awards, and she’s gorgeous, and she’s powerful, and maybe if the local police and these guys in the state government did something wrong that put Donald Jessup out on the street, they should pay.”
I charge ahead, pointing my keys at the car. “The woods. Not the street. He was in the woods.”
Alice runs to keep up. “Call me Pollyanna. I guess I want something good to come. Maybe that makes me naïve. Or annoying. I think the laws ought to be toughened or something, so that nothing like this ever happens again. Paula is doing what … oh, never mind.”
I look at her over the car roof. “You think Paula is doing what Jesus would do.”
“I do!”
I slip behind the wheel and close my eyes. Alice jumps in and throws her arms around me, squeezing hard.
“Oh Julia, I was so afraid to say it. But I do! I think Paula is your avenging angel,” Alice declares.
I think about that as Alice hugs me in silence. I don’t hug her back, but I don’t resist, either.
“Julia?”
“Yeah?”
Alice drops her arms. “I overstepped a line before, when I was gossiping about Liv. What I said was totally inappropriate. And now I feel bad.”
“Consider me your safe place to vent.”
“Oh, I like that. Then can I ask you a question?”
“As long as you run it by Jesus first.”
Alice screws her mouth to the side. “Do you think Donald killed that other girl? Ana Alvarez?”
“No,” I lie, because I can’t bear to put my gory suspicions inside Alice’s head, alongside all those kitties and rainbows. “Okay. Now can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask me anything.”
“Do you think Liv feels guilty toward me, because I saved her and got caught?”
“Hmm. A valid question, that one.” She taps her lip with her finger, then stops. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Raise the floodgates.”
“Well then. There was this one time about a week after the Shiv—the unfortunate event—and youth min was meeting in the church basement. It was Liv’s first meeting back, in fact. I wanted to plan a candlelight ceremony thanking God that you both returned to us. I got some dirty looks. It was kind of soon, I guess. My suggestion was viewed as ‘indelicate’ by some. But I promise you my intentions were pure. Anyway, Liv got teary and ran to the bathroom. The other kids didn’t want me to, but I chased after her anyway. I say, do what’s in your heart, right? Anyway, I think I caught Liv at a low moment, because she said the oddest thing that I’ll never forget.”
I pull my scarf up over my mouth to keep from interrupting.
“I tried to say the most comforting thing I could possibly think of. I said, ‘God was watching over you that day when he sent Julia.’ I figured she’d agree. Instead, she snapped at me. She said, ‘That day she finds her speed. That day, she catches up. I needed a few simple minutes alone to make things clear.’ It was like she was talking to herself, as if I wasn’t even in the room. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Maybe that was indelicate. But she wasn’t making any sense.”
I tug my scarf down from my mouth. “What else?” I ask.
“She looked at me, horrified, like the way your parents do when they drop the F-bomb? Well, maybe just mine. Anyway, she tried to smooth it over, got affectionate, hooked her arm through mine, and said, ‘You know how it is, Alice, when you’re best friends and you’re together constantly? I wanted some space from Julia. To think. That’s all.’”
I cringe. Now I understand why Alice remembers this so vividly. There was nothing crueler to say to the friend I dropped than what a pain it was to be my best friend.
Alice takes a deep breath and shakes out her neck. “Naturally I never said anything to anyone. I had to respect the fact that maybe she wasn’t feeling like herself. You’d both been through heck. But secretly, at the time, I thought it was strange. Almost like she was angry with you for saving her. So no, guilty is not the word I’d use to describe the way Liv feels about you.” She looks away hard, out her window and into the night.
I want to ask more questions, get more information to process Liv’s weird outburst, but Alice is trying to keep it together. The urge to flee is overwhelming. I drop my phone into the cell dock ignition lock that Mom installed so that I can’t drive and text. A chirp, loud and long, my tone for missed calls, makes us jump. I shut off the car and hit Play on speaker.
“Julia, it’s Paula.”
Alice explodes into tiny, soft claps.
“I forgot to tell you. I thought you’d like to know your friend Olivia has been admitted to Saint Rose of Lima Hospital.”
EIGHT
360 Days After the Woods
Shane refuses to acknowledge my glare across the hospital waiting room, his pale eyes fixed on the high-mounted TV. I search for guilt in his mouth, the angle of his shoulders, the set of his cheeks with their spray of rosacea bumps, but there is nothing. Eventually, he tosses his chin, remembering I am Julia Spunk and he’s known me since he was little, or, more l
ikely, that I have a murky relation to the girl he’s hooking up with.
Beside me, a teenage sister and brother text nonstop while their mother cries into a tissue. A guy with a new baby and a toddler tries to jostle the baby while interesting the toddler in an aquarium built into the wall. On TV, a woman with saggy chins is told to pack her knives and leave a reality cooking show. The baby shrieks like a cat. Over the din, I hear Deborah’s tinkly laugh, followed by her struggling to push an empty wheelchair alongside a jacked orderly who resolves the problem by kicking up the chair’s metal feet.
Deborah stops short and coos, “Why, it’s Shane Cuthbert! And Julia!” oozing charm in front of the handsome orderly with the pipes. “You’re a little late for a visit. Liv is about to be discharged. It was just a touch of mono.” She looks pointedly at Shane. “No flowers?”
Shane, low in his seat, lolls his head to one side. “No, ma’am.”
Deborah looks up at the orderly. “Everyone has been so worried about Liv. Popular girl, you can imagine. Well, this works out perfectly. You two can keep Liv busy while I sign the discharge papers. First door on the left.”
Shane rises and slinks down the hall. I follow at a distance. He stands at the doorway, as if to say, Me or you?
“You go,” I say roughly.
Hands jammed into the pockets of his shredded jeans, he sways his hips and gives me a once-over.
“What are you looking at?” I say, so sharp it slices the air.
He nods, smirking, and slides into her room. I sink to the corridor floor and wrap my hands around my knees as Liv calls out, “Shane, oh my God. Thank you for coming. I’m already discharged, believe it or not. I would have told you…”
The door closes partway. “You didn’t answer my texts,” Shane says.
I scramble to the door and place my ear flush to the crack.
“The service in here is very spotty,” Liv says.
