The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  “Can you unlock it?” I asked.

  Dex adjusted himself on the log and stuck his arm carefully through the hole. His skin hit one of the jagged edges of glass, and he flinched but kept going. After a few moments, he was able to slide the window to the right, leaving a hole just big enough to crawl into.

  “I feel like I already know the answer to this,” Dex said with a heavy sigh, “but you want me to keep going, don’t you?”

  I smiled. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Dex angled his body into the window without losing his balance on the log and then dropped down to the other side. Then it was my turn. The log held more easily for me, and I was able to shimmy into the window hole more easily, too. But the drop down to cement was jarring, and I landed hard on my ankles and kept on going until my hands hit the ground, too.

  The storage unit was large, maybe forty feet by forty feet. And it was almost entirely empty. My dad’s truck sat alone on a stretch of cement under a single, unlit bulb hanging from the metal ceiling above. The walls and four corners of the room were completely empty. Standing on its own, just a few feet away from my dad’s truck, were a few large plastic containers filled with papers. After just a glance, I recognized them as coming from my dad’s office.

  “This is it?” Dex asked. “This is their whole investigation?”

  “My dad is their whole investigation,” I murmured. “But there has to be more, something they’re hiding.”

  I moved slowly toward the red truck, passing a pile of my dad’s camping equipment that looked like it had been tossed haphazardly into the open bed. I opened the door to the familiar smell of fading pine-scented air freshener and Old Spice aftershave, and had to blink hard as I climbed into the front seat of the truck, sliding over to make room for Dex. I felt the crunch of old CD cases beneath my feet, and I kicked them out of the way.

  “What are we looking for?” Dex asked, gently closing the truck door behind him as he slid behind the wheel on the driver’s side.

  “I don’t know. There must be a reason the FBI agents brought this here. If only we knew where they found it, we could go there and look for him. . . .”

  “They’ve probably done that already, Penny.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t know him like I do,” I said, then looked up and met Dex’s eyes. “Like we do.”

  Dex held my gaze for a beat. He opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment we both heard it—a light, scraping noise. Our heads both swiveled automatically toward the main door of the unit, which was clearly visible through the truck’s windshield.

  Another metallic scraping noise, and then a small, unmistakable click.

  “They’re back,” Dex whispered. “Why are they back already?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said, fighting back against panic. There was no way we’d get up to the window and back out in time.

  The whole front door of the unit started to slide upward like a garage door, revealing a crack of sunlight that grew bigger and bigger.

  “Duck!”

  I threw myself to the floor of the truck’s cab, and Dex followed. He landed hard nearly right on top of me, then adjusted quickly so we were face-to-face, the gear stick above us and the truck floor below. All day I’d been trying to stay a careful, friends-only distance from him, and now the lengths of our bodies were pressed together, his knee just above my shin, his shoulders arched a few inches over mine.

  For a moment it was just the two of us, awkwardly close. I intentionally averted my eyes, looking instead in the only direction I could, toward the ripped driver’s-side floor mat coated in years of dirt and dust. I held in a sudden sneeze, my whole body rippling. Dex tensed above me, and I didn’t dare look at his face.

  And then—footsteps. Followed by low voices. I strained to make them out over the sound of our comingled breaths and my own racing heart.

  “. . . telling you, it’s worth it,” said one male voice. It sounded like one of the agents, but I didn’t dare try to lift my head up to make sure. “Best in the whole state. Whole country, really,” the voice continued.

  Another, deeper voice scoffed. “I don’t care if it’s the best in the whole damn galaxy. You tell me we’re meeting here at two, I expect you at two.” I moved my head up a little, as if getting closer could help me distinguish the voices better. I really thought the gruff voice sounded familiar, maybe like the slightly taller agent, the one named Rickard. . . .

  “Just try some before you snap at me,” said the other agent, the one we’d seen come out of the hardware store in a yellow tie. Shanahan.

  A rustling noise, almost like paper. Then a grunt from the gruff voice. A pause, then a sigh. “Damn. That is good.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s the cherry filling. I remember it from last time.”

  “Mmm,” Rickard said around what sounded like a mouthful of food.

  “And I was here before two,” Shanahan said. “Brought the new lock and parked around back. But then I remembered that diner down the highway, and we did skip lunch today—”

  “We’ll have to skip dinner, too,” said Rickard, “if we don’t make headway on this soon.”

  “I’m telling you, we need a new approach. Following Hardjoy’s leads has gotten us nowhere. He’s probably a dead end. Just another body out there waiting to be found.”

  My throat tightened, and I instinctively clutched at the closest thing to my hand—which happened to be Dex’s upper arm. He stiffened a bit, and I looked up at him, our eyes meeting. I saw everything I was feeling there—the worry, the confusion. Neither of us could say a word without risking getting caught, but he moved his head a fraction, a small, barely there nod that brushed the top of his forehead against mine, and I knew immediately what he wanted to say.

  He’s still alive. Of course he is.

  “Or he’s the one doing this,” Rickard said. “Just another backwoods serial killer. Granted, a weird one.” Then I heard a thump, and the sound of something scooting across the floor. My dad’s files? “A weird one who might know more than he should.”

  “Still doesn’t explain the infected,” Shanahan said.

  Infected?

  Dex’s eyes widened, inches from my own.

  A long sigh, from Rickard, I thought. “Don’t go down that road, Jim. Not until we have to. Honestly, sometimes I think you want to be fired.”

  “I’m telling you, I’ve had a bad feeling about this from the start,” Shanahan replied. “You think we’d get lucky enough for this to all be some pyro wack job or a conspiracy nut trying to get our attention? Even if the bodies were too burned to tell, they had to be infected. I just know this is all because of that damned site somehow. Come back to haunt us.”

  “You gotta get off that idea. Whole place was wiped clean.”

  “Maybe not clean enough. If we’d just razed the whole town after the plant fiasco like I suggested, we probably wouldn’t have had to come back here at all—”

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t. And we’re here again. Deal with it. At least you got your precious cherry filling.”

  Shanahan mumbled something I couldn’t hear in response.

  “You wanna say that a little louder?” Rickard asked, angry.

  There was a silence.

  “That’s what I thought. You need to spend less time sampling the local snacks and more time focusing on this case.”

  “I am focused,” Shanahan said, snippy. “And I’m telling you, the more time we waste in here on Hardjoy’s file box of crazy, the more people out there are gonna die gruesome. And this time when the company comes to do cleanup, they’ll start with us.”

  “God, you’re dramatic. Wait . . . what is that . . . ?” Rickard said. But then there was a pause, one that stretched out so long, I wondered if the agents had moved away from the truck. And then I remembered the window, the one we’d slid open to sneak inside. I’d closed it most of the way shut behind me, but there was still a hole in one corner of it, and pr
obably glass on the floor, too. I sucked in an involuntary breath and went rigid. Above me, Dex looked confused.

  I stayed completely still for one second.

  Two.

  Three.

  Just when I thought we were going to be caught for sure, I heard Rickard speak again, this time around the sound of chewing.

  “Is that . . . custard? Right in the middle of a cherry turnover?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So it’s an abomination, is what it is.”

  I heard another soft sound, like a splat.

  “Oh, now, that’s just wasteful,” Shanahan said.

  Another big sigh from Rickard. “All right. So we widen the search from Hardjoy.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m not saying you’re right about the infection, but we might as well rule that out. So we start at the ground floor, see if anyone else is acting strange—”

  “Strange? You have seen this town, right?” Shanahan scoffed.

  “Hey, this is your theory we’re testing. Do you want to get to work on it or not?”

  Shanahan again mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  “So we divide up tonight,” Rickard continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “You go search the crash site. I’ll canvass the area for signs of any infected.”

  There was a silence. Shanahan must have nodded or given some sign of assent, because the next thing I heard were footsteps leading away, the storage unit door slowly sliding up again. The two agents began bickering again as they locked the door back up. Then the faint slams of two car doors, two engines revving up and fading away.

  I let out a long exhale, and Dex’s body moved to fill the space just above my rib cage. My limbs felt cramped, one elbow lodged in the small space between the truck seat and the floor, my feet jammed against the bottom of the passenger-side door. I knew it was time to get up, to think, but all I could focus on was the roaring in my ears, and the heat coming through Dex’s T-shirt, the skin of his arm against mine.

  “Dex—”

  He jumped up quickly, as if I’d held something hot against him, moving so fast that his head knocked against the underside of the steering wheel. He kept going, pulling himself up onto the seat. With jerky movements I followed, careful to sit next to him without touching him. Both of us faced the front of the storage unit, looking through the windshield to the large, locked door.

  I felt shell-shocked.

  “What,” I started. “The. Hell.”

  Dex just shook his head, eyes straight forward.

  “I mean, Dex, what . . . what the hell?” I sputtered, unsure of where to start. “What kind of agents are those?”

  “I don’t know,” Dex replied in a strained voice.

  “No, I mean . . . when they came to my house, they said they were with the FBI. But now they’re talking about infections . . . that’s CDC stuff. But they’re definitely not with the CDC. What’s going on here?”

  “They were talking about the meteorite site. . . . How it could infect people?” Dex spoke slowly, as if organizing his own thoughts while talking.

  I shook my head. The only thing Bryan, Cassidy, and the dead hiker had in common was being burned to death. What kind of an infection was that?

  “Or maybe . . .” Dex continued, “maybe something that came out of the meteorite can infect people. . . .”

  I shook my head. “No. no, no, no. Don’t say it. Don’t say—”

  “Aliens? I think we have to say it. Penny, I know you don’t want to go there, but after everything we’ve seen and heard, can you honestly tell me there’s not something beyond the ordinary at work here? Something even unexplainable?”

  Dex’s words crashed around in my head, mixing together with all of the doubts that had flooded through me the last few days. I didn’t believe in make-believe things. I believed in facts. Evidence. But if the evidence was the very thing leading me somewhere make-believe . . .

  “Because you heard those agents,” Dex continued. “If it’s not aliens, then the only other possibility is a human murderer. And the only person in town currently unaccounted for . . . is Ike.”

  “No. There’s no way. Everything can be explained.” I paused for a moment. “Even if that explanation is . . . potentially . . . meteorite-related,” I added.

  I looked away before I could see the gloat of triumph spread across his features.

  “You mean alien-related?”

  “Don’t push it.” I sighed. “There’s too many strange, conflicting pieces of evidence. So let’s consider it all. The deaths. The meteorite crash. What those FBI agents are really looking for, and what it has to do with the accident at the plant. Because now we know those two things are connected—it’s definitely the same agents who came after Mr. Jameson died. Micah was right.”

  Dex bristled for just a moment before barreling on. “Right. And don’t forget about the whole creepy ‘infection’ thing,” Dex added. “That seems pretty crucial.”

  “Very. Especially because the agents are looking for infected people in town right now. I mean, what does the infection look like? How do you get it?”

  “Hopefully not by going to the crash site, or we could have it . . . at this very moment. . . .” Dex tried an awkward laugh, but it was tinged with a bit too much actual fear. I softened.

  “The agents said they were looking for people acting strange. That was their exact word. And I don’t think I’ve been feeling any stranger than usual. Have you?”

  “Um . . .”

  The unbearably silent moment stretched and grew. Maybe, to Dex, trying to kiss me had been strange. Him yelling at Cindy certainly was. But still, none of that behavior seemed like the kind the agents were looking for. . . .

  “Dex, I don’t think they meant . . . that,” I started awkwardly. “I think they meant ‘strange’ as in, like, inexplicable behavior—”

  “Like losing a whole night of your life?”

  My mouth fell open as I realized that Dex hadn’t been thinking of his own behavior at all—but of mine. But before I could argue that I was in no way infected, Dex straightened and turned to me, his eyes suddenly wide.

  “Or like staring straight into nothingness while standing absolutely still for hours on end at the site of a meteorite crash? That kind of behavior?”

  “Yes. Exactly like that.”

  Too many questions were swirling around my head, thoughts and pieces of information like kite strings in a storm, and I couldn’t get a grip on any of them. But here, finally, I’d latched on to something with promise.

  “We need to find the sheriff.”

  Twenty-Nine

  I TRIED CALLING Micah twice on the ride over to the police station, to make good on my promise to keep him updated on anything I found—after all, it had been his idea to find the “FBI” agents in the first place, and he deserved to know that his mom was right. But both times my call went to voice mail.

  The sheriff wasn’t at the station, so we decided to try him at home. The sky was almost fully dark by the time Dex parked his car in front of the Harpers’ house.

  “What are you going to say to him?” Dex asked as he turned off the engine.

  I stared up at the Harpers’ wraparound porch, once as familiar to me as my own. I hadn’t climbed those steps in years.

  “I mean, are you just going to go up to the sheriff and ask him nicely if he’s been feeling infected lately?” Dex continued.

  I kept my eyes on the house. “We’ll just ask him some questions about the crash site, see how he reacts.”

  “His reaction could be to arrest us.”

  “He won’t arrest us,” I said.

  “You know, you sound really confident when you say stuff like that, but sometimes I wonder if you’re just making things up.”

  I rolled my eyes, unwilling to let on how right he was. Instead, I doubled down. “Dex, we just followed some shady, maybe-FBI agents to their secret warehouse and didn’t get caught. I think we can handle talkin
g to the sheriff of Charlevoix County.”

  Dex breathed out slowly and then finally nodded. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  We got out of the car and made our way over the familiar gray-painted boards of the front porch. I looked over to the wicker chairs, where Reese and I used to sit and take quizzes from magazines, her sucking on a Ring Pop and me slowly marking off As, Bs, Cs, and Ds in bubbly circles.

  I pushed the memory—and my nerves—far down and knocked on the door. A few moments later, it opened wide, revealing not the sheriff’s face or even Reese’s, but Julie Harper’s.

  Her features tensed when she saw me, and then spread into a too-wide smile.

  “Hi, Julie,” I said quickly. “Is the sheriff in?”

  Julie’s smile stayed plastered on, but she didn’t move away from the door or offer to invite me inside, the way she would have done years ago.

  “I’m afraid Bud’s out at the moment. Is something the matter?”

  I shot a quick glance to Dex as I wondered how to answer. Didn’t Julie deserve to know if her husband was possibly “infected” with something? What if she was infected, too? She looked mostly normal standing before me, her hair pulled up into a messy bun and a dish towel hanging loosely from one hand. Mostly normal except for that distracting, too-cheery smile.

  “Um, we just have some questions for him,” Dex said. “Urgent questions.”

  Julie stepped forward, her smile transforming into a look of concern. “Urgent? If something’s wrong, you two should go on up to the station. Bud’ll be back soon.”

  “It’s not that urgent,” I quickly corrected. “We just need to ask him something.”

  “Well, like I said, he’ll be back soon. He just went up to bust a party at Millers’ barn. Shouldn’t take him that long.”

  “A party?”

  “I know,” Julie said, shaking her head in disappointment. “As if now’s a good time to be rolling a keg out into the woods, what with everything going on. I have half a mind to ground Reese till fall.”