R.I.P. Eliza Hart

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  Mack takes a step back. For a second, he looks less solid, like a breeze could knock him over.

  “You think I hurt her?”

  “You butchered those trees.”

  Mack looks like he thinks I’m an idiot for not knowing the difference between a girl and a tree. He lowers his muscular body into a chair across from Sam and me and buries his face in his hands. Sam glances at the door. He raises his eyebrows: Should we make a run for it?

  I try to stand, but my legs are still shaking.

  This is what being trapped is really like. It’s not a closed door to a closet or a bathroom.

  Trapped is a strong man between you and your escape.

  Mack looks up. “You know she never slept?” He sounds almost impressed, like sleep was for normal people, weaker people, and Eliza couldn’t be bothered with it.

  It takes me a second to realize that there’s probably only one reason why Mack would know her sleeping patterns. “You’re her secret boyfriend? She came here when she snuck out after curfew?”

  “Eliza had a boyfriend?” Sam asks, just as Mack says, “How did you know about me?”

  I answer Mack. “I didn’t know about you,” I explain. “I just heard Erin and Arden talking about someone.” I don’t explain who Erin and Arden are. If he’s her boyfriend, he probably already knows.

  Mack nods. “She told them she was seeing a college student and she had to keep it a secret because her parents wouldn’t approve of her seeing someone older.” He wrinkles his nose at the lie.

  Sam jumps in. “Listen, Elizabeth and I don’t want any trouble. We’re just—”

  Mack cuts him off. “Just accusing me of murder.” He laughs bitterly, then looks at me. “Your name is Elizabeth?”

  “Ellie,” I correct automatically.

  “Ellie Sokoloff?”

  My heartbeat speeds up again. Beneath my sweatshirt, goose bumps rise on my arms. “How do you know my name?”

  Instead of answering, Mack whistles, looking me up and down. “Ellie Sokoloff,” he repeats. I fold my arms across my chest like I think I can block his view of me. “Man, was she scared of you.”

  I squeeze my hands into fists. It’s bad enough that the kids at school think I had something to do with her death, but here I am standing across from an actual criminal, and I’m the one she was scared of?

  “I was scared of her, not the other way around!”

  Mack laughs his joyless laugh. It sounds like he’s coughing up something sour. “Looks like she did a number on both of us,” he says finally.

  Sam grabs my hand but keeps his gaze trained on Mack. “You loved her.” It’s not a question.

  Mack’s face hardens. “Not that it mattered much.”

  “You knew who she was,” I add quietly. “This morning, in the woods, you told Riley you didn’t know about her family. You were lying, weren’t you?”

  Mack stands and springs across the room. He crouches so his eyes are level with mine. I shrink against the back of the couch.

  Did he look at Eliza like this, the night he killed her: his blue eyes unblinking, his jaw set?

  “You’re the one who knows about her family,” he spits. “She told me everything. You were there the last time her dad—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” He says it quietly, like he’s trying to calm himself down.

  “The last time her dad what?” I feel like Alice when she first lands in Wonderland: Nothing makes any sense today. Our school’s rich princess was profiting off of black-market redwoods. A criminal was in love with her. She was scared of me, not the other way around.

  “The last time her dad what?” I repeat, sitting up a little straighter. My heart is still pounding, but I’m not shaking anymore. I want to know what he’s talking about too badly to back down.

  “You honestly don’t know?” Mack takes a step backward. I shake my head. “All that and she doesn’t even remember.” Again, the room fills with the sound of his sour laughter.

  “What are you talking about?” My voice is shrill.

  Instead of answering, Mack just gestures at the front door. Sam stands and pulls me toward it. Much to my surprise, I’m not ready to go.

  “You’re just letting us leave?” I ask incredulously. Riley told him to take care of us. I don’t think he meant confuse the heck out of us and then let us go. “Won’t you get in trouble with Riley?” Why do I care if Mack gets into trouble or not?

  “He just wanted me to scare you into keeping quiet.”

  “We could still call the police and tell them about you.”

  Mack shrugs. “I guess you could.”

  “Aren’t you scared of going to jail?”

  Sam tugs at my arm but I hold firm. What’s wrong with me? Why do I want to stay here?

  “What did you mean this morning?” I ask quickly. “You told Riley that if Eliza had listened to you, she’d still be alive.”

  Mack shakes his head. His enormous shoulders begin to shake. He opens and flexes his fists.

  “Elizabeth,” Sam whispers. “Let’s get out of here.”

  This time, when Sam yanks on my arm, I don’t resist.

  As we leave, I hear the sound of something pounding. I turn back and see Mack punching one of the bungalow walls. The entire house is shaking, a localized earthquake.

  I think he’s strong enough to knock the little house down.

  The cold never used to bother me. I wore flip-flops when it was forty degrees outside and hiked in shorts when the fog was so thick it soaked your skin and you could barely see three feet in front of you. But everything’s different now.

  It’s not like I thought life and death would be the same, but still.

  I was thirteen when I stopped trying to fall back to sleep after I woke up in the middle of the night. When I was still living at home, I’d study, read, watch TV. Anything to pass the time.

  My sleeplessness got to be so reliable that I didn’t even bother doing my homework the night before. I’d wait until my mixed-up internal clock woke me sometime after two in the morning and start working then, just to have something to do.

  Living at Ventana Ranch changed everything: When I woke up in the middle of the night, I could leave the dorm and explore the woods. The first time I saw Mack and Riley, it was 4:00 a.m. and I was hiking.

  The campus was quiet.

  All my classmates were sleeping soundly.

  It was dark, but I’d never been afraid of the dark.

  When I reached the end of the Y trail, I used my ID to open the gate and kept hiking in the woods on the other side, public property. It was only October, and I’d already had enough restless nights to hike every trail on campus. It wasn’t as safe as staying on campus, but I didn’t care.

  I didn’t care about much of anything at that point.

  The drought had been so bad that the pine needles were turning brown and falling off the trees. It looked like they were already dying.

  Any other girl would’ve run when she heard the buzz saw.

  But then, any other girl wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  I watched them work. It was cold, but they were wearing only T-shirts, so soaked with sweat that I could see their muscles moving beneath the fabric in the light from their flashlights.

  One of them—Riley, I was about to find out—kept his eyes on the forest around them instead of on the tree or the saw.

  I recognized the look on his face: fear. He was scared of getting caught. He wanted to get this done as quickly as possible and get the hell out.

  The other one kept his eyes narrowed in deep concentration, a look I would come to know well. He kept his gaze locked on the tree in front of him.

  Later, he told me that of course he was scared of getting caught.

  He was scared of getting caught at the same time that he was scared of the buzz saw,

  at the same time that he felt bad about destroying the tree,

  at the same time tha
t he was adding up the amount of money he would need to buy a new surfboard and a new truck and a ticket to Hawaii and dreaming of taking his next wave.

  I never knew a single person could hold so many different emotions at the same time. Not unless they were manic, and there wasn’t the least bit of mania in Mack. His mood swings were normal: When he was happy, he smiled; when he was angry, he shouted.

  There were times, later, when I was the one Mack was shouting at. His blue eyes would narrow to nothing more than slits. He’d stomp the ground or punch the nearest wall. He was so strong he could make the whole house shake.

  Maybe I should’ve been scared of a boy like that. Maybe I should’ve run away in fear when he yelled at me.

  But I could barely muster any emotion in those days, let alone enough fear to make me run.

  So I stayed until the day Mack reached his breaking point.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  That October day in the woods, Riley saw me first. The fear on his face stretched into worry: He was weighing his options, deciding just how far he’d be willing to go to keep me from turning them in.

  He didn’t have to worry.

  I wasn’t interested in reporting what I’d seen.

  I was interested in the look in his eyes, the look in Mack’s eyes.

  In the emotions I’d never gotten to feel.

  It was then that I had a revelation: Maybe the problem wasn’t me after all.

  Maybe the problem was just that in my sheltered, safe life, the stakes had simply never been high enough to make me really feel anything. Maybe I’d never done anything exciting enough to make me sufficiently tired to sleep through the night.

  I’d read about people who had a higher threshold for stimulation—that’s what happens when you’re up half the night: You have time to read just about everything—people who skydived, who rock-climbed without a harness. They went big-wave surfing, or maybe broke the law. In between adventures, these people sunk into deep depressions because normal things weren’t enough to make them feel happy or excited. They needed the rush that came with risking their lives just to feel normal.

  Maybe I was one of them. Maybe an adventure was all I needed.

  At first, Riley laughed when I offered to help.

  Then I held up my ID. I insisted that it would be easier for them to do their work on campus: no chance of getting caught by a passing state trooper since they’d be on private property.

  Why would a good little schoolgirl want to get involved in all this? Riley asked.

  Maybe I’m not so good, I answered.

  If I was good, I wouldn’t have spent the entire summer fighting with my mother and avoiding making eye contact with my father. The look in my dad’s eyes was nothing like the look in Riley’s, nothing like the look in Mack’s.

  A few weeks later, Mack caught me sitting beside a tree we’d sliced open. Most trees could actually survive having their burls cut off—they usually grow bark over their wounds and heal—but this one didn’t seem to be healing. I read that burl-poaching makes some trees more susceptible to disease and infection, as though their immune systems have been compromised. And trees whose burls have been robbed are more vulnerable to windthrow—to literally being broken by the wind.

  Mack thought I felt sorry for the sick tree. To make me feel better, he pointed to the dozens of untouched, perfectly healthy trees around us. Trees that had lived for longer than even the oldest person I knew and would go on to live long after we were gone. That was when he still thought I’d gotten involved with him and Riley because—like him—I desperately needed the money.

  Later, I found out he’d made up a whole backstory about me: that I was on full scholarship at Ventana Ranch and couldn’t afford meals, had resorted to stealing food from the cafeteria. I laughed and told him that meals were included in our tuition. He’d blushed, and I’d felt—actually, really, for a split second, felt—bad about embarrassing him. It wasn’t his fault he’d given me the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t know that I shoved the cash he and Riley gave me under my mattress and never gave it a second thought.

  I’m not as good as you think I am, I’d told him.

  You’re not as bad as you think you are, either, he replied.

  I wasn’t there because I felt sorry for the tree.

  I wanted to watch it die. Wanted to know if I could figure out the exact moment when it turned from a living, breathing, photosynthesizing creature into a corpse.

  That was the good thing about not sleeping: I had plenty of time to keep watch.

  And now I’m still wide awake.

  “We have to call the police,” I breathe as Sam floors it, getting us out of Capitola as quickly as possible. My pulse is still so fast that I wonder if it’s possible for a sixteen-year-old to have a heart attack.

  “They took my phone.”

  “I still have mine.” I pull it out of my sweatshirt pocket. My hands are shaking.

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “That we found Eliza’s killer!” I’m almost shouting.

  Sam shakes his head. “I don’t think that guy killed her.”

  I stare at my roommate, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “Are you crazy?”

  “I think he really loved her.”

  I almost drop my phone. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt her.”

  Maybe he saw her talking and laughing with one of our male classmates and got jealous.

  Maybe she wanted out of the burl-poaching business and he said, There is no out, you already know too much.

  Maybe she tried to break up with him and he said, If I can’t have you, no one can.

  I remember the way his ice-blue eyes flashed with anger when I called Eliza mean.

  “He was practically punching a hole in the wall! He’s obviously violent. Who knows what he’s capable of?”

  “Elizabeth, he was clearly upset about Eliza’s death.”

  “Or he’s upset because he’s scared of getting caught.”

  “Then why would he let us go?”

  Sam might have a point there. “Okay, so maybe it was an accident. Maybe they were fighting and she lost her balance and fell and he didn’t do anything to save her.”

  “Julian saw them fighting a week before she died. Assuming it was even Mack Julian saw her fighting with.”

  “Mack is about Eliza’s height, just like the person Julian saw. And anyway, they might have fought again.”

  “I know you’re scared to talk to the police, but we shouldn’t accuse an innocent man—”

  “What are you talking about, innocent? The guy hacks trees into pieces for money! We already know he’s not innocent.” I’m squeezing my phone so tight that it’s hot in my hand.

  “There’s a big difference between cutting a tree and killing a girl.”

  Mack practically said the same thing. “I know that.”

  I lean back in my seat and look out my window. We’re going south on Highway 1. I watch the waves building in the Pacific Ocean. “We have to tell the police we found the burl-poachers, at least.”

  “A few days ago, I would’ve agreed with you.”

  “And now?”

  Sam shrugs. “Now I think if we tell them we know who’s killing the trees, they’ll just assume that person killed Eliza.”

  “Is this more of your judge not, that ye be not judged stuff?”

  “I’m not sure I’d call my belief-system ‘stuff.’ ”

  I feel myself blushing. “Sorry.”

  “And actually, no. I just don’t want to point the police in the wrong direction.”

  “Sam, they’re the police. It’s their job to look at the evidence and put the pieces together. Mack might have killed her. He should be investigated.”

  Sam runs his palms over the steering wheel thoughtfully. “Do you really think he would have let us go if he’d killed her?”

  I take a deep breath. My pulse has slowed to an almost normal rate. �
��I don’t know.”

  “Just think about it for a little while before you do anything, okay?”

  I hesitate. Won’t it just make the police more suspicious of me if I have a suspect and don’t tell them about him right away? I glance at my phone; it’s 2:00 p.m. I’m being questioned in two hours.

  Which means I have two hours to decide what to tell the police.

  When we get back to campus, Sam’s friend Cooper stops us on our way from the parking lot to the dorm.

  “Did you hear?” Cooper is decidedly talking to Sam, not me. He doesn’t even glance my way.

  “Hear what?”

  “They found, like, five thousand dollars in cash in Eliza’s room.” Sam’s eyes meet mine. That must’ve been the money Eliza earned from working with Riley and Mack. Blood money, I think, remembering the way the rust-colored bark looked like it was bleeding. Sam and Cooper don’t stop walking as they talk. They’re both taller than I am and I rush to keep up with them.

  “I heard it was ten,” someone says, coming up the path behind us. Riya Dasgupta, a senior everyone knows got in early admission to Yale. She’s wearing leggings with a sports bra as a shirt. Her perfect abs are glistening beneath a layer of sweat; she must be on her way back from the gym. I feel like a slob standing beside her in my bulky sweatshirt. Riya bounces on the balls of her feet and pushes her dark, stylish sunglasses up onto the top of her head.

  Cooper whistles. “Maybe that’s why they killed her.” Now Cooper does look at me, hard. “Whoever killed her,” he adds slowly, each word thick with meaning: We still think it might have been you.

  Does Cooper know I’m on scholarship? Maybe he thinks I need the money.

  I’m tempted to tell him about Mack, but I bite my tongue. If I’m going to tell anyone, it should be the police.

  “Eliza was worth a lot more than ten thousand dollars,” Riya counters. “I mean, if someone wanted money, why wouldn’t they kidnap her and hold her for ransom? Everyone knows the Harts are loaded.”

  “Whoa, way to go dark, Ree.” Cooper reaches out to muss Riya’s black hair like she’s a little kid, but she ducks out of the way. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”