by Bryce Gibson
She enlarged the whole thing and let the cursor hover over the picture. An arrow appeared up on the right-hand side. She clicked it.
The photo of Cade and Tristan disappeared. In its place was another one from the same night—the one of the deputy talking to them. The deputy’s body was circled in neon green. There was a caption—WAS THIS MAN PAID TO HIDE A CRIME?
Lisa clicked the arrow again. Now what I was looking at had a close-up of Cade on the left side and Mayor Williston’s booking photo from when he had been arrested on the right. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON, the caption read.
Lisa was smiling. “It’ll go live on the night of the grand opening,” she explained. “They’re having a big party, and this is what they’ll see.”
For a moment I was speechless. What she was planning was way more than what I imagined.
“You’re really good at this,” I told her.
“Thanks.” She continued to click around on the keyboard rearranging things just so. We were both quiet for a moment.
“Lisa, You know when your dad was asking me about college?
“Yeah.”
“Well, I kind of lied. I have decided, but I wanted to tell you first.”
Lisa stopped what she was doing and looked at me.
“I’m applying to Clemson,” I said.
I was about to tell her the bad part—that Dad and I would be moving to Columbia, but before I had the chance, Lisa screamed, jumped up, and wrapped her arms around my neck.
When she let go and pulled back, our eyes met, and without hardly any contemplation, we were kissing. This went on for a few seconds, then her hand went underneath my shirt and mine went under hers. She sat up straight and slid to the floor.
“Your parents...,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
By then she was unbuttoning my jeans. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
SHE WAS RIGHT. IT DIDN’T take long. At all.
Less than an hour later we were parked on the back row at the drive-in theater. What Lisa and I had done was just now beginning to sink in. Before that day, I had only kissed one girl—Katie Carmichael, who I worked with at Burger Heaven.
Kissing Katie had been a completely different experience. Davey had pushed me into it. “Just go for it,” he’d urged me. One night, Katie and I had been sitting in the swing at my house, and I leaned over and kissed her. That was as far as it went, and it was the only time.
And now this had happened with Lisa. As daylight slipped into dusk, the full moon became visible. The way that the moon was positioned right above the movie screen couldn’t have been more perfect. Both windows of Lisa’s truck were down. There was a slight nip to the air. The breeze that came in carried the scents of popcorn, cotton candy, and fresh cut grass.
When the sky was finally dark, the first movie of the werewolf double-feature started. It was called Cursed, and even though the movie didn’t scare either of us—we actually thought it was kind of funny, especially when the werewolf flipped off the main character. Lisa and I were huddled close together in the middle of the seat. We stayed that way, with my arm around her, all the way through the second feature, Bad Moon.
After the movies the field lights came on. I looked at the clock on the dash. It was already after midnight. The cars and trucks were headed out of the parking area when, from my right, I heard a loud clatter. I looked and saw an old, green van making its way down the rough red-dirt drive toward the exit. At some point in time, the van’s bumper had come loose and was now tied up with a bungee cord. The tie-job held everything in place, but it didn’t stop the bumper from bouncing up and down and hitting the back end of the van as it moved.
The van came to a screeching stop behind us. The windows were so tinted that I couldn’t tell who was inside. It looked like something that a serial killer would drive.
The passenger side window finally came down. A blonde girl I didn’t recognize was in the seat. She was starring at me. I was confused. Then the driver leaned forward. It was Riley. “Blake,” he called. “I didn’t know you would be here.” The person in the car behind him pressed down on the horn, telling Riley to go. “Why don’t y’all meet us at Waffle House?” Riley suggested.
I looked at Lisa, who smiled, and I turned my attention back to Riley. The car behind him blared its horn again. “Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”
The nearest Waffle House was fifteen minutes away in North Augusta at I-20. When we finally got there, the restaurant was full of people that must have had late-night munchies. There was no open booth; there wasn’t even a spot at the counter.
“We can get take-out,” Riley suggested. “We can go sit by the river.”
While we waited on our food, the blonde girl, Lindsay, who was Riley’s fiancé, was twirling her long hair around the fingers on her left hand. I noticed that her ring finger was bare and remembered that Riley had been saving his tips from the brewery so he could buy her an engagement ring.
“What did y’all think about those movies? Great or what?” Lindsay’s eyes darted from me to Lisa.
After our order was ready, and we were back in the truck, Lisa and I followed Riley’s van to the river. It was only a short drive down Georgia Avenue to where we eventually turned right, just before the bridge that would have taken us from one state to another if we’d kept going. We followed the looping road that eventually led us to the water.
We parked at a small gravel parking lot under the bridge. From there we followed a paved path that went downhill. The wide Savannah River was in front of us. The moon reflected against the water. Across the water the city lights of Augusta were bright. I thought about the story that Riley had told me about his girlfriend—while crossing the bridge to see him, she’d crashed her car and drowned in the river.
While the four of us sat on a pair of park benches and ate our food, the sound of the cars on the bridge above us was a nearly constant hum.
Later, Lindsay and Lisa were walking together along the edge of the water. Riley and I were sitting on the benches.
“It doesn’t hurt to come back here?” I asked.
I could tell that it took him off guard for me to have realized that we were near the spot where it happened. “It took me a long time, but eventually I just said the heck with it, you know? Life’s too short to be dwelling on the past. Instead of letting this be a place that made me feel sad, I focused on the happy times that I had here.”
THE ROAD THROUGH THE country was dark, but the high beams on Lisa’s truck illuminated the landscape that lay ahead. By then the town and interstate lights were miles behind us.
On Sweet Water Road we were surrounded by cow farms, corn fields, and steep inclines of dense woods. There was only the occasional house to break up the rural landscape. On roads like this, deer were notorious for darting out of nowhere. That was my first thought when Lisa slammed on the brakes—she was trying to avoid a deer.
“Did you see that?” Lisa put the truck in reverse, backed up, and stopped.
A truck was several yards into the corn field on our left. Because of the flattened stalks in the truck’s wake, it was obvious that the driver had lost control and run off the road. I recognized the decals on the back glass. It was Cade’s truck. The headlights and brake lights were on.
Lisa pulled over to the side of the road. We left our doors standing open and followed the flattened path through the corn. The drying corn stalks clattered gently in the nighttime breeze. The red glow from the brake lights on the back of Cade’s truck gave our surroundings the ambience of a Halloween haunted trail. I half-expected a masked man with a chainsaw to jump out any moment.
“I hope he’s not in there getting frisky with somebody,” Lisa said with a giggle that failed to cover up the nervousness in her voice.
Even at seventeen, I couldn’t imagine being desperate enough for some action to go flying through a corn field just to find a private place.
By then we were right behind Cade’s truck. Lisa walked around
and stepped closer to the driver’s side. “Cade?” Now, she was tapping on the glass. “Something’s wrong,” she said and was reaching for the door handle.
My thoughts about what could have happened to Cade were shooting in rapid fire...heart attack, stroke, blood sugar crash...I knew all of those things were rare in teenagers, but they did happen.
Lisa swung open the door, and the interior light came on. She screamed at whatever it was that she was seeing. I ran around the truck so that I was standing next to her, and I saw for myself...
The inside of the cab was covered in blood.
chapter sixteen
CADE WILLISTON HAD been struck over the head with an axe. That was the first thing that popped into my head.
At this thought, an unwanted memory flashed through my mind—my step-dad with a bloody axe, charging across the yard after me.
“Here, have another tea. It will make you feel better, I promise.” Destiny sat a ceramic mug down in front of me.
Lisa and I were back home. After finding Cade’s truck, we’d called the police, who, upon their arrival, got a statement from both of us and then abruptly sent us on our way so that they could investigate the scene.
I thought back to the idea that Charley17 had been orchestrating things to push me and him together. Obviously, he was a creep, but what if it was more than that? What if he was obsessed? What if he was the person wearing the rain jacket that had been following me around? When I deleted my Reading Buddy account, could it have caused him to finally snap? But why kill Cade? It just didn’t make sense.
This was the second tea that Destiny had made for me. I lifted the hot mug to my lips and briefly inhaled the steam before taking a slow, careful sip. Destiny was right; the tea was soothing.
“Linden flower,” Destiny said and poured herself a mug from the screaming kettle on the stovetop. “It helps to relieve stress.”
It had surprised me to come home and find Destiny there. Maybe she and Dad hadn’t broken up after all. The idea that Lisa and I might have interrupted something on the romantic side was kind of gross. That, in addition to the awkward run-in with Destiny the day before, made me feel weird being in the presence of the two of them together.
Lisa was sitting next to me at the kitchen table. Instead of tea, she had opted for hot chocolate. Dad stood across from us. He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. Destiny moved so that she was standing next to him.
“What were y’all doing out there?” Dad asked again.
“I already told you. We went to the drive-in.” I knew that he wouldn’t like that we’d gone to the river so I hadn’t told him the rest.
“Okay, I got that part, Blake, but the drive-in’s not on Sweet Water Road. There’s no reason...”
“After the movie...,” I relented, “we went to the river with Riley.”
“Blake,” Dad said. “You were at the river this late at night? You could have been robbed or even worse—you could have been killed.”
“Well, we weren’t,” I shot back and immediately realized how inappropriate my words were, considering the apparent fate of Cade.
A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts. It was a police deputy. He was silhouetted by the flashing blue lights coming from the top of the car behind him.
Destiny sat her mug on the counter and opened the door. It was the same deputy that had been at the house a few days earlier. He looked at me as he made his way to the center of the room. Destiny returned to Dad’s side. The kitchen door was left standing open, and the blue light that was coming through set me further on edge.
“We haven’t found Cade, but we did talk to his BFF, Tristan.”
I winced. Two dudes would not call each other BFF, but...whatever.
“He told us that it was possum blood in the truck,” the deputy continued.
Lisa and I looked at each other confused about what the man was saying. I heard an audible sigh of relief from Destiny. Meanwhile, I couldn’t shake the mental image of Cade killing a possum.
“Cade staged the scene to make it look like a murder. He was pulling a prank on you two.” The deputy was looking at me and Lisa. “He wanted us to think that you killed him. Now, why would he want that?”
Why would he want that? Did Cade know that we found the images on the hunting camera? Maybe he had an idea of what Lisa was planning. It was obvious to everybody that we hadn’t been getting along—maybe he’d seen this as the ultimate payback. But what about the fact that Tristan had also been at the Williston’s barn that day? Like the rest of us, he was up to something. I couldn’t let the deputy know all of that. Not now. Besides, it seemed like the sheriff, Deputy Roper’s boss, was in on things, too. From what Lisa and I had been able to piece together, Mayor Williston had likely paid the sheriff to remain quiet, and that in itself was a crime. They would both be in trouble. If I brought up all of that, the shit would really hit the fan. I decided that once Cade reappeared, Lisa and I could settle this on our own without involving the adults.
I shrugged my shoulders at the deputy’s question.
“The bad thing is,” the deputy continued, “even though there is no sign of Cade being hurt, we still don’t know where he is. We’re waiting on toxicology results to determine that it is in fact possum blood in that truck. Meanwhile, I’m going to go over to the Williston’s place and see if I’m able to locate this boy. Then, maybe, we’ll be able to get to the bottom of all of this.”
chapter seventeen
THE NEXT DAY, I WAS surprised when Dad made the suggestion that we spend the day at the lake.
I was sitting on top of the cooler that we’d brought, and Lisa was next to me in a beach chair. She was chewing on a string of old-fashioned licorice candy. In front of us, Dad and Destiny were chest deep in the black water. It was Labor Day, and the lake was packed with families and partiers who were wanting to hold on to the season for as long as they could.
But I was different—I was looking forward.
I was ready to move past all of this. Cade still hadn’t turned up, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t fully grasp the reasoning behind last night’s prank. Tristan told the cops that Cade wanted to make it look like Lisa and I had killed him? But why?
The grand opening celebration for the shopping center was ten days away, and if Cade didn’t reappear soon, the event would surely be canceled. Without the crowd, would it make sense for Lisa and I to go through with our plan for the billboard? And even if we did, would it have the same impact?
I still hadn’t told Lisa that Dad and I would be moving away. The time just hadn’t seemed right.
I looked out to the water. In the distance, a motor boat sped past and sent little waves across the water’s surface. Dad and Destiny were laughing.
From out of nowhere, a group of screaming kids ran past. I could hear the squeak of the rubber floats that they wore, and, just like that, I was torn away from the book that I was reading and was back at the pool store in Ridge Spring. Davey was there with his nose deep in a book. In a split second, the image of Davey that I had in my mind was replaced with another one—here, he was screaming; blood was gushing from where the axe was buried deep in his ribcage.
Like the drama with Cade, it was time to put that to rest also. In less than a year’s time I would be at Clemson with Lisa, and I didn’t want to take any of that baggage with me. I thought about something that Mrs. Reynolds told me—“Don’t let whatever lurks in the dark recesses of your mind control you. Face it, and conquer it.” Just the night before, Riley told me that it wasn’t until he finally went back to the river that he was able to overcome the loss of his girlfriend. As Mrs. Reynolds suggested at our last meeting, psychodynamic therapy is a way to rearrange a memory, and I knew that, in order to do that, I would have to go back to the house where the killing happened. There was one thing I wanted to take from there—a box that Mom had used to keep her favorite memories.
“I want you to go with me to Ridge Spring,” I told L
isa and dug my toes into the sand. “I know, it sounds crazy, but...”
“It doesn’t sound crazy.” Lisa cut me off. “You need closure.” She popped the last of the licorice into her mouth. “What time should this train depart?”
I DIDN’T WANT FIFTY questions from Dad about where I was going so we decided that we would wait until he went to bed.
At the intersection in front of the house, I was pacing back and forth, hoping that nobody would see me. My eyes kept watch on my surroundings. In the quiet night, every sound was intensified. Through the woods I could hear the distant clink of a dog pulling on its chain. Finally, I saw a pair of headlights approaching from the distance.
A minute later I was in the passenger seat of Lisa’s truck, and we were flying down the road. There was hardly any traffic. Once we hit SC 23, it was a straight shot to Ridge Spring. We rode alongside the train track for miles through Johnston and Ward. Between the small towns, peach orchards and farmland stood on both sides. Some of the orchards had been re-planted the previous winter, and, in the moonlight, the white cardboard around the new tree trunks resembled rows of tombstones that would be found in a memorial cemetery.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lisa asked.
The town-limit sign was coming into view. WELCOME TO RIDGE SPRING.
“I’m positive.”
The town looked the same as it had the last time I’d been there. Several grain silos greeted us right away. It was a single strip of stores that ran along the left-hand side of the street: a couple of restaurants, a bank, and an old-timey gas station, all of which were dark in the late-night hour. Except for us and a logging truck that barreled past, the road was empty.
The front of Heyward Pool and Supply was boarded over with plywood. The leader board out front said closed. There was a For Sale sign in the window. The grassy area where the pool had fallen over and crushed Morris was roped off.
