The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  “The only thing I want to investigate right now is where my dad went.”

  Dex’s expression turned eager. “Then I think you know where we have to go next.”

  “Yeah.” I took a deep breath and turned toward the massive pines that surrounded Tommy Cray’s yard. “Into the woods we go.”

  Twenty-One

  THE SITE WHERE the meteorite had landed was across town, in the middle of what had once been state-owned land but was now private property. Even though it was miles away from the lake where we’d discovered Bryan’s and Cassidy’s bodies, I still felt spooked as Dex and I walked through the quiet woods. I half expected to take a turn around a tree trunk or climb over a fallen log just to stumble across a burned limb sticking out of the dirt.

  As if sensing my unease, Dex stuck close by me as we walked along the main path that had been widened by gawkers over the years. I stepped around a bright green, pointy-leafed plant that looked suspiciously like poison ivy, nearly crashing into Dex as I did so. He seemed to take it as another sign of my jumpiness and started talking in an overly loud voice.

  “Hey, remember that Halloween when your dad brought us out here and scared the crap out of us?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “That was classic. I think Reese almost peed her pants.”

  I smiled; I hadn’t thought about that night in ages. One Halloween, my dad loaded me and my friends in a big wooden wagon and hooked it to the back of his four-wheeler, then drove us through the streets of Bone Lake. We moved fast like we were in a car, but there were no seat belts, no windows. Just us sitting on a rickety wagon floor, eating bite-size candy and laughing as the wind whipped past our faces. It felt dangerous, but in a fun way. Probably it was illegal.

  Not that Dad cared. Every time he hit a bump or took a curve, sending us flying into each other and shrieking in glee, he’d laugh loudly, the sound of it carrying on the wind. We got to the path leading into the woods to the meteorite site, and Dad turned to take it. He moved slowly down the path, and my friends grew quieter. They chatted nervously and made dumb jokes as we wound farther and farther into the darkness.

  Eventually, Dad stopped the four-wheeler and cut the engine. He came to sit in the back of the wagon with us, and then he asked us what we knew about a murderer with a hook for a hand who’d escaped into those same woods that morning. Some of the kids laughed, thinking Dad was joking, but he had this way of telling a scary story so that it seemed real. The killer’s name was Hook Hand Pete, he said. He’d lost his hand working at an evil candy factory, and he’d had it replaced with a sharp-ended hook. Now he roamed the woods, vowing to get his revenge on any little kid he saw eating candy.

  “Like, all candy?” Emily Jennings had squeaked, pushing away her pillowcase full of Halloween candy.

  Dad had looked at her like it was the smartest question in the world. Before he could answer, though, he turned his head sharply to the right. “Did you hear that?”

  More squeaks. A chorus of “What, what?”

  “That . . . creaking noise. It sounds almost like . . . footsteps.”

  Emily moaned. Dex giggled, but I could tell it was a fear-giggle. Reese gripped my arm so tight, her fingertips left bruises I only saw the next morning. But I smiled. Everyone stared at my dad, rapt, and I felt something warm spread deep in my stomach. Pride. Most of my friends’ parents worked boring jobs or watched boring TV or played boring card games, but my dad was different. With a single story, he could command the attention of everyone around. And he was mine.

  “What was that?” my dad asked, whipping his head toward the woods again. The kids all followed his lead, staring off into the trees. Dad took that moment to look at me briefly and wink. I grinned. This was all a game, and he and I were in on it together.

  A couple of years later, after the Bigfoot incident—and the divorce—my memory of that night became tainted by everything that happened after. I thought it had been me and Dad against the world, playing a joke on my friends. But once I discovered that nothing else Dad “believed” in was real—not yetis, not the Loch Ness Monster, not even the Visitors—I realized that my dad had been playing one giant joke on everyone. Including me.

  “Hook Hand Pete.” Dex chuckled, pulling me back into the woods of the present. “Man, that was fun.”

  I bristled. “I remember it differently. Anyway, your dad was the truly scary one that night, remember?” I thought back to what had happened after my dad had told us the story of Hook Hand Pete. Someone had been out in the woods that night, just waiting for his cue to sneak up on us. “When your dad came busting out of the trees with that hook on his hand—”

  “You mean the coat hanger—”

  “Right, and he starts going, ‘Who’s eating candy? I smell CANDY. . . .’” I laughed. “I really thought Reese was going to scream herself to death.”

  “Or scream me to death,” Dex added. “I couldn’t hear out of my left ear for a week.”

  Our laughter trailed off as we continued walking through the quiet woods. Dex’s smile faded.

  “That was one of the last times I remember my dad laughing,” he said.

  I pursed my lips, feeling like an idiot. Why had I brought up the part of the story with Dex’s dad, just to avoid talking about my own?

  “I’m sorry, Dex,” I said, but it sounded inadequate.

  He shrugged, and I waited for him to make an off-the-cuff remark, or to change the subject. But his face remained uncharacteristically stony.

  “Have you . . . heard from him lately?”

  Dex kept going down the path, moving a little ahead of me so I could no longer see his face. “We heard from him a lot right after he left, but not much recently.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not for, like, a year, actually.” Dex’s shoulders rose in a shrug again, but I couldn’t see his face. “Last we heard, he finally found work in Tampa, and then . . . nothing.”

  “That really sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Dex said, his voice going lower. “But I’ve been wondering lately if there’s not, like, some other reason—”

  I heard my phone chime, and I got it out to see a text message. From Micah.

  I’m so sorry about last night.

  I stared down at the words, stumbling a bit in my tracks. Dex looked over, curious.

  “Sorry, what were you saying?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  I wrote back to Micah—It’s okay.

  A quick response—It’s not. I swear my mom’s not always like that. It was just a bad day. She feels bad about scaring you.

  Tell her it’s fine, honest.

  I watched the dot-dot-dot on the screen, the sign that Micah was typing back. One minute passed, then two. But when the text finally came through, it was only: I hope we can hang out again soon.

  Definitely, I responded. I put my phone away.

  “That Mr. Perfect?” Dex asked. He was looking away from me, his eyes straight ahead on the trail. He kicked a rock out of the path and watched it bounce off into the underbrush.

  “Micah’s not perfect,” I said. “But he is a good guy.”

  Dex snorted.

  “You could have a bit of empathy for him, you know. He’s been through a lot. He lost his dad, too.”

  “Yeah,” Dex said, looking a bit sorry. “I guess this isn’t a great town for keeping those around.”

  Dex suddenly picked up his step, pointing ahead of us. “We’re here.”

  I followed him to the end of the trail, which widened into a small clearing. The crater opened up just inches from our feet, stretching out in an irregular circle. Some of the trees on the outside of the wide hole were bending away from it, as if they were still trying to crawl themselves out of the blast zone. Right after the meteorite fell, this place had been roped off and covered in warning signs. Now that was all gone; a single, rusted OFF-LIMITS sign remained, stuck into the side of the crater at an odd angle, one of its metal points di
gging into the dirt.

  Dex looked at me, expectant. “Well? Now what?”

  I stayed still and looked around the area. It wasn’t like I’d expected to find my dad just standing here, waiting for me. So what had I hoped to find?

  I looked around the edge of the crater for footprints. But all I saw was grass and rocks and sticks. There weren’t even any pieces of meteorite left; every scrap had been hauled away years before.

  I took out my phone and started taking pictures of the crater to add to my file once I got home. Dex took out his phone, too.

  “Crap,” he said. “Text from my mom. I totally forgot she wants my help on a catering gig tonight.”

  I nodded, still taking pictures, as Dex walked around the side of the crater, touching the trunks of the bent birch trees. “So, what are the odds that Ike left a note? Maybe with an arrow pointing in the direction he went, like, This way, kids!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Since when are you the cynical one?”

  Dex smiled. “Just keeping you on your toes—”

  Click.

  “Stop. Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That clicking noise. It was soft, almost like . . .”

  I looked up in the direction of the sound. It had definitely come from above me. I walked over to the trunks of the nearest trees, craning my head upward. And that’s when I saw it—a small, shiny camera. It was fixed to a tree branch with zip ties and facing down at the crater site.

  Dex came over to me and looked up, his eyes going wide. “That’s one of Ike’s!”

  “Help me up, would you?”

  Dex joined his hands together to form a step, and I put one foot inside. I rested my hand on his shoulder, propelling myself up. I got just high enough to unhook the camera from its fastening and pull it down. It was identical to the camera I’d found on our coffee table, the one that had nothing but pictures of trees on it.

  “He did come here,” Dex said, sounding excited.

  The camera had gone back into sleep mode, and I clicked it on with my thumb. The first picture was of the back of my head, looking at Dex across the expanse of the crater. I felt a small shiver run down my spine, thinking that something had been recording me, watching me, without my knowledge. I clicked to the next picture. It was taken from the same position, but it was just trees, grass, the crater. There was a time stamp on the image.

  “This one was taken ten minutes ago,” I said.

  I clicked back to the previous picture. It had been taken ten minutes before. The next one, ten minutes before that.

  “Ike must have set the camera up to wake up and go off every ten minutes,” Dex said. “But why? What exactly was he hoping to see here?”

  I clicked through another photo, then another, going back through the images faster and faster. It was the same scene. The light in the images grew darker and darker, until they were just shadows. Then they lightened.

  I pushed on the button to see smaller thumbnails of the pictures.

  “There’re thousands,” I murmured, scrolling quickly through them. “Days’ and days’ worth.”

  “Stop!” Dex said. “Go back.”

  He clicked on one of the thumbnails. It showed the same crater area, in the middle of the day. Only there was a man standing off to the right, showing his profile to the camera. He was wearing a brown uniform.

  “Is that . . . ?” Dex started.

  “The sheriff.”

  In the image, Sheriff Harper was staring straight ahead and slightly down, as if he was looking at something on the far end of the crater, near the ground. I clicked over to the next image. For a second, I thought something was wrong—the second image was exactly the same. Sheriff Harper was standing in the exact same position. His arms loose at his sides, his feet slightly apart. His head angled in the exact same way.

  The next image was identical, and the next, and the next. Only the time stamps showed that the images were in fact taken at different times, each ten minutes apart.

  “How long did he just . . . stand there, staring, like that?” Dex asked, his voice soft.

  I clicked through ten images, then ten more. “Three hours? Maybe four?”

  “He’s the same in every picture,” Dex said. “Like he didn’t move . . . at all.”

  The shivers again, down my spine.

  All I could do was slowly shake my head, keep clicking through images. Finally, we landed on one that was different. The sheriff was still in it, but he was standing a few feet away. He was looking at a different point of the crater, and he was gesturing. His mouth was open, and it looked like he was talking to someone standing just offscreen. He looked angry.

  In the next image, he was gone.

  I breathed out slowly.

  “What the hell was that?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  And I didn’t. I didn’t have any clue. The sheriff clearly didn’t know this camera was here, and I was no closer to understanding why my dad had put it up in the first place, or where he might have gone next. What would happen if I showed this to the sheriff? What kind of stuff was he hiding from us? And did this weirdness even have anything to do with the killer in the woods?

  None of the pieces were adding up; nothing was making sense. Instead of leading us to a logical explanation, all of these bits of information were adding up to something outlandish and confusing, like something you’d read about in the National Enquirer or Strange News.

  Like we’d landed in the middle of one of my dad’s own stories.

  Twenty-Two

  THE BLACK CHERRY ice cream was frozen solid. A thick layer of white frost circled the edge of the bin, making it impossible to get through to the pinkish ice cream underneath. I hacked away at the frost with a metal ice-cream scoop, but I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. The lack of sleep the night before was catching up to me, and my limbs felt heavy and useless. As I worked, my knuckles turned blue with cold, and jagged pieces of frost flew up against my apron with every fresh blow.

  “Hey, what’d that bin ever do to you?” Cindy’s warm voice floated across the store. I turned to see her standing in the door to the kitchen, a spatula in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. She looked at me with a bemused expression, but there was concern there, too.

  “Picked a bad day to mess with me,” I joked weakly, once again plunging the metal scoop down to the rock-hard surface of the ice cream.

  “Well maybe go easy on it, hmm? Every day’s a bad day to be black cherry ice cream.” She wrinkled her nose.

  I backed reluctantly away from the case, running the scoop under a stream of warm water in the sink. The truth was, it felt good to hack away at the frozen bin, to do something physical and repetitive. Even if I was incredibly tired.

  I couldn’t stop seeing the image of the sheriff, staring vacantly across the crater at something invisible on the other side. In my mind, the image kept getting conflated with my memories of the night before, and how not there Mrs. Jameson had looked, standing stock-still at the edge of her yard.

  And then there was Dad. Let alone what the sheriff and FBI thought of his connection to the murders, the longer he was out there, the less chance he had of coming home alive. The meteorite site hadn’t turned up any more clues as to where he might have gone, but there was always the plant, and the mysterious X10-88 note in his files.

  The urge to go to the plant right now, to do something right now, was even stronger than the urge to go home and take a nap. Repeatedly smashing a metal ice-cream scooper into a bin full of frozen black cherry was a barely acceptable compromise, but I’d promised to work while Cindy and Dex left on their catering gig.

  I didn’t notice that Cindy had come up behind me until she put one hand on my shoulder. I jumped a bit, startled.

  “Honey, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time we called your mom and told her what’s going on.”

  I whirled to face her. “No, it’s okay. I’m okay. Honest.”


  “What you found in the woods . . . It’s a lot. I know you haven’t been sleeping well, and your dad’s been gone almost a week now—”

  “I promise, I’m fine. Really. Mom will just get worried and come back here, and she’s worked so hard to get to Spain. It means so much to her. Plus, if she comes here she’ll be angry with my dad, and she’ll take me away before he gets back, and I just . . .”

  I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if what I’d just said was true—if Mom would take me from Dad because she was angry. After our phone call, a lot of assumptions I’d made about my parents seemed to be false. But I did know Mom would be worried. And that, alone, would be enough reason for her to take me back to Chicago before I could find the truth. Before I could find Dad.

  Cindy pursed her lips. “I still think it’s her decision to make.”

  Her voice was gentle, but she was a mom first, and my friend second. I knew she’d call my mom in a heartbeat if I didn’t.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right. I’ll call her.”

  “Good,” Cindy said, giving a small, relieved smile. I felt guilty for misleading her, but technically I hadn’t lied. I was going to call Mom and tell her everything—just not until I figured out what was going on.

  “Dex and I won’t get back till after dinner probably. But there’s a lot of chicken casserole in the fridge, and stuff for a salad.”

  “Thanks, Cindy,” I said.

  “And you really can take Dex’s bed for as long as you need. I could tell you didn’t get much sleep on the couch last night. And Dex, well, that boy can lay his head down just about anywhere and pass out within a minute.”

  Cindy grinned. But despite the chilly air behind the ice-cream bins, I felt my face heat up. For some reason, the thought of spending another night in Dex’s bed, lying on his pillow and under his sheets, made my stomach drop in a way I couldn’t explain.

  “I can take the couch again,” I said, a bit more forcefully than was necessary. “I really don’t mind.”

  Cindy eyed me for just a second before nodding. “Okay, hon, whatever you want.”