What You Hide

by Natalie D. Richards

  “It’s not like that. I’m not in that kind of danger.”

  “I doubt you can be sure of that, Mallory,” she says, my name stilted and clearly unfamiliar on her lips. “If you’d like, I could put you in touch with an agency that might…”

  “No. But thank you. I appreciate the offer. I really am sorry for this.”

  I head for the gate, and I don’t dare a single backward glance. I don’t think I can bear to see Spencer watching me go.

  • • •

  I cry for the first eight blocks. Then I wander in a daze, too numb to think, and too upset to be still. I’m not sure if Spencer’s mom will send someone to the library that night, so I avoid it. Instead, I sit at Starbucks, nursing a cup of tea and a cookie until they close.

  I shift to a Steak-n-Shake after that, where I pick at a small order of fries, and then to Walmart, where I wander for almost two hours before buying a pair of gloves and a bottle of water. It’s almost one in the morning when I leave.

  I’d hoped it was later. There are still way too many hours between now and daylight. Where am I going to spend them?

  I’m searching for the least expensive item I can buy in the all-night drugstore when it hits me. Suds and Fluff is open twenty-four hours a day too. I remember the cheery 24/7 sticker on the door. It’s not the greatest area of town, but this clerk is already eyeing me and I’m running out of all-night stores to visit.

  I arrive after 2:00 a.m. To my surprise, there’s a woman in scrubs finishing her folding. Everything I own is freshly laundered, but I dump it all into a dryer and deposit my quarters, setting the timer as long as it will go. This is how I spend my Monday night, dozing in a plastic chair in sixty-minute shifts. The dryer buzzes or the bell over the door jangles, and I jerk myself awake. In comparison, the library is an Embassy Suites.

  I give up at 7:30 when a whole family arrives. Four little kids carrying a basket each, followed by bickering parents with trash bags full of clothes. I fold my clothes and wash up in the bathroom. Outside, the sunrise is promising a bright and sunny morning. Any other time, it’s the kind of crisp November day that would put me in a good mood.

  Today the sun in the sky doesn’t do a damn thing to brighten the world I’m living in. I pick up coffee so I can stick to my not-too-early routine at the library. Still, I end up arriving by 11:30, and I’m too tired and crabby to delay going in.

  I’m ready to find the skeletons in Charlie’s closet. There’s something to his story with Billie, and I’m going to find it and cram it down my mother’s throat so she will snap out of this delusion and leave him once and for all.

  The building is quiet and warm, and Gretchen smiles and waves the moment I’m inside. Good. Hopefully that means Mrs. Keller didn’t call the library.

  I pad quietly to the browsing room, taking a guest pass I won’t use to the computer. All the stuff about Charlie isn’t going to find itself. But I sit there for long, long minutes, staring at the compartment in the desk. Wondering if I should have said something else to Spencer. Wondering if I’ll ever see him again.

  “Hey.”

  I’m startled by the soft voice, and more startled by the curvy blond standing over me. It’s Ava. She’s wearing ratty sweats again, this time with a frayed Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt layered on top with a coat.

  I swipe my hands over my hair and try to smile.

  She waves off the effort. “Spencer texted me. He filled me in.”

  Dread pools in my chest. “Filled you in?”

  “He wouldn’t say much but begged me to check here for you. I’m guessing from your puffy eyes and his lack of shitty jokes that you got caught together.”

  “He told you I’d be here?”

  She looks down. “He told me a little.”

  I feel a strange and unwelcome rush of anger. “I’m not some kind of Fairview group project, so you can go.”

  She half rolls her eyes. “Calm down, nobody’s thinking project here. Why the library, though?” She wrinkles her nose. “It always smells weird in here.”

  “You mean, like books?”

  “Yeah, books. And…I don’t know. Library soap?”

  I laugh, relaxing marginally.

  “So why are you here?” she asks. “I mean, why are you not home?”

  Honestly, I can’t imagine a good reason to bother lying. “I have a creepy stepfather.”

  I expect outrage or shock. Maybe revulsion. But Ava doesn’t deliver. She sits down with a soft sigh, nothing but quiet acceptance in her expression. It makes it easier to keep talking.

  “I’m here because I’m avoiding him. And because I want to find something on him from the past so I can convince my mom to get the hell away from him.”

  “Like old relationship dirt?”

  “I’m hoping for criminal records.”

  “Well.” She perks up, and she yanks out the chair beside mine. “I’m always up for a little independent woman action.”

  She throws her keys on the desk between us and taps something. I look past the silver Mercedes key chain to the plastic Fairview Library key chain she’s touching.

  “Put this number in.”

  “I’m on a guest pass. But thank you.”

  She laughs. “Put it in. I have a staff card so I have access to the librarian databases and such. The stuff that can get expensive.” Off the question in her eyes, she shrugs. “My mom’s on the board, remember?”

  “They give you a staff pass for that?”

  “She donates like five thousand a year. And we both volunteer sometimes. They’d probably give me random paintings off the wall if I asked. Put it in. My password is three-four-three-seven.”

  I do and navigate to a search engine. “I don’t even know where to start, honestly.”

  Ava shrugs off her coat and pulls the keyboard closer. “Okay, let’s start with legal records. Has he always lived in Franklin County? We’ll start there either way, but if you have others you know about, you should write them down. The counties have different websites.”

  “How do you know this? I thought you were an artist.”

  “My mom is an attorney. I learned this when most kids learned to ride a bike. Well, come on. What’s the name?”

  I spell out Charlie’s name, and Ava’s fingers fly over the keys. It’s magic watching her work. She opens so many windows I have zero idea how she doesn’t get lost. Her phone buzzes constantly, but she ignores it, asking me questions, jotting down notes.

  We don’t find much, but it’s not for lack of trying. Two unpaid parking tickets from the nineties that might or might not be him. Nothing with Billie. No marriage ever took place.

  “Spell her name for me again,” Ava says.

  I pull out the crumpled paper, and she taps in the letters. She searches while I roll my neck and try to ignore my grumbling stomach.

  “You could call him, you know,” Ava says, without a single pause in her typing.

  “Spencer?”

  “Obviously. They’ve got hockey tonight so he’s probably on the bus moping. Alex said he’s been a mess the whole trip.”

  Hope flickers in my chest, but I push it down hard. “It’s probably better that I don’t.”

  “Stubborn, but okay.” She clicks something with a frown and makes a sound.

  “What is it?”

  “Um…you didn’t know this person, right? Billie.”

  “No, why?”

  “Because she died. Four and a half years ago.”

  Cold runs up the back of my neck. “She got engaged to Charlie five years ago. What happened to her?”

  She tenses and looks over at me, her face pinched. “Blunt force trauma.”

  I jerk the monitor toward me and lean in, sure she must be wrong. That it’s the wrong girl. Wrong date. But there it is, listed out in black and white. It’s
Billie Reeves, age thirty-one, died of blunt force trauma, death ruled accidental.

  A bitterness surfaces in the back of my throat.

  “I should go,” I say.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry. This is really helpful. I should call someone, so I can look into it.”

  “You can call me if you need me, you know,” she says. Then she fishes a green Sharpie out of a gorgeous leather messenger bag I hadn’t noticed because she slung it down like a sack lunch. She scrawls her number on the inside of my wrist and puts a smiley face next to it.

  I stare at her with surprise. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because Spencer never cares about anything,” she says, “but he cares about you. I think it probably means something.”

  Everything I could say in response feels stupid, so I keep quiet. I do take a sheet of notebook paper, borrow her green marker, and write a quick, four-line note.

  I reach past Ava to put the note in the compartment, and then I press my finger to my lips when I close it and make a shhing face that makes her chuckle.

  “A little library espionage?” she asks.

  “A little throwback to how it all started. Don’t tell him I put it there. If he needs it, he’ll check.”

  “And if he doesn’t check?”

  “Then he doesn’t need it. And that’s probably for the best.”

  Ava doesn’t look convinced, but Gretchen comes up and taps her on the shoulder gently.

  “Hey, Gretchen,” Ava says.

  “Hi, you! I have a weird question for you. Did you get a wild itch and make an elaborate book display in the art cabinet?”

  Ava laughs. “Not my idea of wild, and no. I haven’t been in here in months.”

  I don’t know Gretchen well, but I can spot a fake smile as well as anyone. Something’s wrong, and I’ll bet a million dollars it’s attached to the footsteps and the crying. To the writing on the wall.

  Haven’t the police found this person?

  Gretchen makes a few excuses and heads back to circulation, but I see her glance at the back of the browsing room on her way out. Ava notices too.

  “Come on,” she says.

  She doesn’t have to ask me twice for me to follow her. I know I should leave. I need to talk to Ruth at the women’s shelter to see if she thinks this information about Billie could help me. But I’m curious too. Why would a book display make Gretchen nervous? What would it have to do with all the rest of the stuff going on?

  It’s in a display case at the back of the browsing room, not directly visible from the service desks, so I could see how they’d miss it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is over the top.

  Towers of books, probably hundreds—some thin and long and some chubby paperbacks—are arranged in the shape of two seated people. Some are splayed open, balanced facedown on the tops of spiraling stacks of closed books. It doesn’t look like an advertisement for a reading topic. It looks like art.

  “I’m flattered they thought I could do this,” Ava says, mirroring my sentiment.

  “I’ve never seen a book display like this.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Ava shakes her head. “It’s not a display. It’s a sculpture. This would have taken hours. There’s even a theme.”

  “What theme?”

  “Sisters.”

  She’s right. The two book people could be female—they’re huddled side by side. But upon further inspection, the books confirm it. Every title involves sisters.

  My Sister and Me

  Sisters Like Us

  Lost and Found Sisters

  The Almost Sisters

  The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

  Bringing Home Sister

  My eyes freeze on that title, my stomach shrinking. My mother is having a girl, so technically I’m a sister. Or I will be soon. It feels like an awful coincidence, and then Ava moves right up to the glass, her messy bun flopping behind her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s something on that book,” she says. “The one they’re holding.”

  I move up too. The book they are holding is angled, and right across whatever words are written, there is another message. One written in slanting black marker, words that choke the breath out of me.

  Sister, Where Are You?

  Spencer

  Tuesday, November 21, 2:18 p.m.

  Mom insisted on driving me to Michigan because “we need more time together.” Even if it’s partly true, it’s partly not. The main reason she did it is because she’s afraid I’d somehow sneak away from the bus to stay home and look for Mallory. She wouldn’t have been wrong for thinking it.

  Still, I’m not in the mood for together time, so I was an asshole all the way here, refusing to engage in any conversation. After several efforts to talk, Mom listened to talk radio, and I watched the foliage on the side of the road turn from bare brown to snow-dusted brown. We had practice and another game last night and a game in the morning, so giving her the silent treatment has been easy.

  Not that it’s fair. She had every right to be pissed about Mallory. I know how the situation looked to her, and I can’t sit here and pretend my mind was in an entirely innocent place at the point when she caught us. Still. I wonder if it would have been different if she’d caught me with my ex or any other Fairview girl.

  Girls from Fairview would fall inside the lines of the future she wants for me. Mallory is a complete unknown. What Mom doesn’t realize is that I’m an unknown too. The idea of it hums just under my skin, an ugly energy I can’t seem to shake.

  It’s been a crap tournament so far—one loss, one win—and this game is going to be a grind. Still, I all but leap out of the car to get inside the rink. We’ve got warm-up time on the ice with another team—typical for the limited rink space—and usually I drag my feet for warm-ups. Today, though, I’m the first one out there. I’m the first of everything, probably because I’m desperate to get the whole thing over with.

  My skates hit the ice and I fly, tearing around our half of the rink as fast as possible. Everyone’s stretching and shooting, practicing passes. I skate circles until the coaches start bitching for me to grab a stick. Until Shawn checks me lightly.

  “Knock it the hell off.”

  I’m breathing hard and already sweaty inside my gear. And all the adrenaline is still pumping. It’s 0 percent better. I line up for a passing drill. A puck bobbles wild, and Jarvey passes the centerline to pick it up.

  Twenty-four gives him a little jab on his way out. Not much, but it catches my eye.

  “You see that?” I ask Alex.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not going to go well.”

  Especially since Jarvey’s jawing at him from the centerline. We loop around, rotating back through the drill. Jarvey drifts too high again, and twenty-four throws an elbow. It catches Jarvey in the side of the helmet, and he goes down hard. Twenty-four has his hands up in a second, all total-accident-nothing-to-see-here. But there was something to see, and I’m watching.

  I feel a delicious thrill of rage blaze through my chest as I charge across the ice full tilt. I’m on him before I can think, before the trainers get to Jarvey to check him out. I’m dropping gloves and throwing a fist into his side. Right in that sweet spot between his shoulder pads and hockey pants, the one there’s no pad to protect.

  “Get your hands off my center!” I scream.

  I can’t count the number of obscenities he swears back at me, his hand on my cage, mashing my helmet into my brow and ear so hard I’m sure I’m bleeding. Whistles scream, but I punch him again, and he’s throwing it right back. Good. I hope he never stops hitting me. I hope we tear each other apart for the rest of the day, because when my adrenaline roars like this, I can’t hear anything else. All the voices in my
head are blissfully quiet.

  We separate before they can really make a thing of it. If you play hockey long enough you’ll figure out exactly what you can get away with before the refs and coaches get serious about a punishment. Games are different, but you can pull a lot in a practice. An out and out fight is serious punishment. A little scuffle on the ice? Hell, that’s just good hockey.

  Twenty-four rips off his helmet, and I skate backward, grinning.

  “You want another dance?” I ask.

  “Keep your boyfriend on a leash!”

  I flip him double birds before scooping up my gloves. Coach Tieger catches me halfway to the bench. The look in his eyes tells me I didn’t judge the scuffle-fight line well enough.

  “You think you’re real cute, don’t you?” he asks.

  Probably not. I can feel my eyebrow swelling. But I force my smart-ass grin all the same. “You think so? I always feel like these pads make me look fat.”

  This time Tieger isn’t amused. “You’ll have plenty of time to feel whatever you want. I’m benching you for the first period.”

  Six months ago, I might have talked him out of it. I’d come up with something funny enough, some apology that would get him reliving his hockey glory days, and he’d probably cut it to the first half of the period. But now I’ve got nothing. My hand aches, my head pounds, and there’s a hollow in the center of my chest I imagine is shaped like Mallory’s face.

  I take my helmet and skates off in the locker room, figuring I’ve got plenty of time. I have a desperate need to move. I need to get out of this rink and out of my damn head. Maybe check in with Ava to see if she found Mallory.

  I throw open the locker room door and stop cold.

  Mom is waiting for me, face placid, her cell phone in her hand.

  “Time to talk, Spencer.”

  “I already told you. I don’t have anything to say.”

  “You can explain that to your father.”

  She hands me the phone and walks away, and I know there’s no getting out of this. It’s not like my dad to get involved. Mom handles our household issues just fine when he’s out of town, so when she does call for reinforcements, he’s like a dog with a bone.