The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  Micah still wouldn’t look up. He closed his eyes for one second, two. Finally, he opened them.

  “My dad.”

  Micah’s words bounced around the small space, but they wouldn’t seem to land in my brain.

  “Your dad? But that’s not possible—”

  “And I have to protect him,” Micah said, cutting me off as if I hadn’t even spoken. “There’s no one else who can do it, no one else who will.”

  That’s when he tightened his grip on the gun and raised his arm.

  I took a step back automatically, tripping a little as I did and holding both my hands out in front of me, half reaching toward Micah and half defending myself.

  “Whoa, man,” Dex said. “Take it easy.”

  “What the hell is happening?” Reese screamed.

  Micah just swallowed, shifted from one foot to the other. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this. It wasn’t. . . .”

  The gun waved, the barrel now aiming toward me. I yelped, a small noise, something I couldn’t control.

  “Micah,” my dad said, his voice carrying an unnatural calm given the situation. “Put the gun down, son. You promised not to hurt Penelope. You promised to leave her out of this.”

  Suddenly, Micah laughed, a strange, high-pitched sound. “As if I didn’t try! You know how hard it was to keep her from digging, from trying to find you? Leave her out of this,” he said in a low, mocking imitation of my dad. “Have you ever met your daughter?”

  And somehow, with those words, my fear transformed into something else. Leave her out of this? Like my dad thought I was a child, one who deserved to be kept in the dark. Who deserved to be lied to.

  He was wrong.

  “Micah,” I said, lowering my hands to my sides. Fighting against every instinct in my body, I took a step toward him, toward the barrel of the gun. “Micah, it’s me. You can trust me, remember? You can tell me what’s going on.”

  “No, Pen, you don’t understand. . . .” my dad started.

  But I ignored him, stepping past Reese, who cowered against the wall on my right, and Dex, who still held up the camp light with one shaking hand on my left.

  “I can help you, Micah. I know you’re a good person. Let me help you.”

  “I tried before,” Micah said, his voice nearing a whimper. “I tried telling you everything before, and it didn’t work. I had to make you forget.”

  “Make me . . . ?” And then I realized. My missing hours. The blank space of time right after I visited the plant. But how could Micah have caused that?

  “I don’t know what I did before,” I said, forcing my voice to stay level. “But I know what I’ll do now. We’re going to get out of this together, Micah. But I need to know why my dad is chained up in this barn. And why you think that glowing-light thing out there is your dad.”

  Micah stayed absolutely still, his eyes on mine. He pursed his lips together, as if he was seriously considering my request. The whole barn was silent. I didn’t dare turn back around to look at Dad, afraid that he might disapprove of my tactic, afraid that disapproval would shake my confidence.

  “I can trust you?” Micah finally asked, his voice barely more than a small squeak.

  “Yes, absolutely. Everything is off the record,” I said, forcing my mouth into a smile I hoped was believable.

  At my lame joke, Micah’s mouth quirked upward on one side, and his shoulders relaxed, just for a moment.

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I don’t know how it all got so bad. My dad was fine for years, and then . . .” He trailed off.

  “Your dad was . . . fine?” I prompted, taking one more careful step forward.

  “He didn’t really die, Penny. That’s the whole thing. The whole secret.” Micah sighed then, and I noticed that the gun dropped a fraction as he did. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dex move—not much, just an inch or so—in Micah’s direction. His eyes never left the gun.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my voice light and calm.

  “It was the meteorite,” Micah said. “My dad was right. He knew there was something strange going on at the plant; he knew it. Those government scientists didn’t move the meteorite out of town to study it, they moved it to the plant. Set up a whole secret lair in the basement. You were there.”

  Another wave of anger crested up inside me as I wondered what exactly Micah had made me forget. I fought to keep calm.

  “I remember,” I said. “The hallway with all the locked doors—”

  “I had to keep them locked. That’s where my dad lived, where he had to live for years after what happened to him. After what they did.”

  “What? What did they do?” Reese asked, her voice squeaking. Micah and I both looked over at her in surprise, and when we did, Dex moved just a little closer to Micah. I wondered briefly if Reese had drawn Micah’s attention away on purpose.

  “They left him for dead!” Micah yelled. “They studied the stuff from the meteorite down there for months, in secret, making different things out of it in those labs. Dangerous things. The meteorite stuff—somehow they knew it affected people’s memories.”

  Tommy Cray, I thought with a jolt. He’d discovered the meteorite, but had no memory of it. If the meteorite itself had caused his memory to disappear, had affected his brain somehow . . . scientists would want to study that. Maybe they’d want to use it.

  “But their experiments got out of control. My dad was on to them. He was just a security guard, but he knew something was shady. He went to go gather information, to expose what they were doing right here in our town—but something went wrong. He never remembered it, what exactly caused the fire in room X10. But he was inside the room when it happened—trapped inside with their meteorite chemicals.”

  I nodded, trying to keep up. Micah was on a roll now, the words pouring out of him quickly. He waved his hands around a couple of times during his speech, as if he’d forgotten he was holding the gun.

  “Dad was so badly burned they could barely recognize him. Declared him dead right away. But he wasn’t actually dead. Just changed.” Micah sniffed, his voice thick. “He actually snuck out of his own casket, right before it went into the ground. Can you imagine what that must have been like for him? We knew if we didn’t keep him hidden, they’d come after him. Do more experiments. So we kept on pretending he was dead, and we hid him in our basement—for a while. Then the plant closed altogether. They just packed up and went away, leaving their mess behind. Blaming it all on my dad.”

  The bitterness in Micah’s voice was heavy. I tried to focus on what he was saying, on all the pieces slotting into place, one by one.

  “But half the town worked at the plant. They would have known about a secret lair, about the fire. . . .”

  “No,” Micah said, shaking his head. “That’s the thing—one of their experiments worked. They actually made something from the meteorite that could affect people’s memories in small doses.”

  “X10-88,” I breathed.

  “They used it on the entire town.”

  “What?” Dex this time, his voice incredulous.

  “That’s how the drug works. You give it to someone, and you can make them forget a certain amount of hours, or you can plant suggestions that they think are true, and they become like new memories, pasted over the old ones,” Micah said.

  Plant suggestions . . . new memories.

  That line of dialogue jumped to the front of my brain, the one I’d heard repeated so often in the past week—by Cindy, Hector, even Mrs. Anderson. I’d asked all of them about the accident at the plant, and they’d all answered in a similar way . . . not just similar, but identical.

  It’s best not to think about it too much.

  The goose bumps were back, crawling up my skin. It wasn’t just a common expression, or one they’d read in an article. It had been put into their mouths. Planted into their brains.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  “No one remembered what was going
on in that basement or what really happened to my dad. No one.” Micah’s eyes were wild with anger. His voice got louder. “Do you know what that’s like? To have everyone think your dad is some fuckup who lost the town the plant contracts and all their jobs, when really he was a hero just trying to get to the truth? And I couldn’t tell anyone. If the agents guessed he was still alive, they would take him away. Or worse. So he had to stay secret. He had to stay locked up. The basement was too small, and the house is made of wood, so a few years ago, we moved him to the plant.”

  “The house is made of wood? What did that have to do with anything . . . ?” I asked, shaking my head in confusion. Micah bit his lip, as if he’d said too much, and then it made sense. “You were afraid he’d burn it. You said your dad . . . changed? After the accident?”

  Micah’s eyes fell again, and his mouth pulled into a tight line. For a moment, he looked like he might cry.

  “Oh, he changed,” my dad said. I turned slightly to face him. His expression was grim as he kept his eyes on Micah. “I found a body in the woods a few months ago, a hiker. Something was weird about it, though. No one would believe me. Not that that’s anything new. But I thought I could catch the killer. I set up cameras in the woods. . . .”

  “I know,” I said. “I found one of them.”

  Dad looked at me then, with a strange expression. “You did?”

  I nodded, and a strange look settled into the lines of his face. He looked surprised and almost . . . proud.

  “I captured a strange image on one of the cameras. It was almost alien-like. Or at least, I thought so at the time,” Dad continued. I pictured the image I’d found on his camera my first night back in Bone Lake. The strange bent branch that looked like an arm. “That was the camera I’d set up in the woods not too far from the Jamesons’ place. I went to check it out, and that’s when I saw Hal Jameson, in the woods.”

  “He started going out, wandering in the woods on his own,” Micah said, his voice strained, almost desperate. “I told him not to, but he . . . eventually he . . .”

  “He killed someone,” Dex interrupted.

  “He didn’t mean to!” Micah yelled, whirling on Dex. “You don’t understand. That meteorite stuff they were experimenting on—it changed him. Maybe he got too close to it, or maybe when it mixed with the fire, it . . . I don’t know exactly what happened to him in that room. But that stuff they were messing with, it burned itself into his insides. It, like . . .”

  “Infected him?” Dex asked.

  Micah kept going as if Dex hadn’t said anything. “For the first few years, he was just sick. He couldn’t move, couldn’t remember who he was most days. Sometimes he’d complain about being cold all the time, even though his skin was burning up. Then small things started catching fire when he touched them. Then he started getting out of the house at night. . . . That’s when we moved him to the empty plant, so he’d be safer. I didn’t know he was going to hurt anyone. . . . I didn’t know he could.”

  “But you found out,” Dad said, his voice still cold. “When I found Hal out in the woods, you knew I’d put it all together. So you sucker punched me and locked me up.”

  Micah just swallowed, not confirming or denying what he’d done. Dad turned his head to address me. “I woke up in the basement of the plant, and he injected me with gold liquid from a vial—X10-88. But it didn’t work.”

  “It should have!” Micah exploded. “I was going to fix everything. I’ve seen how X10-88 works before. Before the accident, Dad stole some of the stuff from the plant. Mom was afraid of it at first, but when those agents came to use it on her . . . she recognized it. They still gave it to her, and she forgot everything. Everything my dad had uncovered, even the fact that he was still alive. When she saw him in the basement later that day, she nearly had a heart attack. I had to explain everything to her—all over again. What had happened to my dad, why everyone thought he was dead. It was so hard on her, keeping the secret. Keeping Dad in the basement when he was so . . . changed. Burns on ninety percent of his body. He couldn’t remember us most days, could barely move on his own for months, could never leave the house. . . .” Micah’s voice lowered to just above a whisper. “Mom started taking the stolen drug on her own sometimes. When she wanted to forget what our lives had become, even just for a little while. I couldn’t blame her, but it was so hard . . . taking care of everything on my own.”

  Micah was unraveling now, and I felt a wave of pity for him. He hadn’t asked for any of this to happen to him—for the meteorite to crash here, for the government to do secret experiments on it in our town, for his dad to get hurt or his mom to lose her mind from grief and maybe something worse. His face was drawn in the dim light, and his shoulders were hunched. He was staring at me, out of everyone else, like he wanted me to understand. Like everything rested on me understanding.

  But my dad was chained up behind me, and people were dead, and understanding was different from forgiving.

  “So you used your dad’s stash of drugs on my dad?”

  Micah blinked, disappointed. But not ready to give up. “It was going to fix everything. But I didn’t know how the whole suggestion thing worked. I couldn’t plant a new memory into his head like the agents could. I just had to give him enough of it to make him forget the past few days—forget seeing my dad. He’d wake up at home, and not remember anything. It’d just be like . . . a blank space. But there wasn’t enough of the drug left to make him forget more than half a day. I kept trying, but after all these years the stash was running low.”

  “And you had to use it on other people,” I said. “Like me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Micah said, but it was more of a whine than an apology. He still didn’t understand why I wasn’t siding with him. “I really wanted to keep you out of it. After we found Bryan and Cassidy, I saw how worried you were about your dad, so I wrote that email from his account so you’d know he was safe. But you didn’t stop looking. And then you came to the plant, and you almost found your dad in one of the rooms. . . .”

  I shook my head. I remembered going down into the basement hallway, opening door X10 . . . and hearing noises in a neighboring room. I’d thought it was a raccoon again, but really . . .

  “Dad was there?”

  He’d been so close. . . . I’d been so close to finding him. . . .

  “I saw you in the plant and I followed you. I told you everything,” Micah said. “I tried to get you to understand why your dad was in the plant, why you couldn’t see him yet. But you were so mad. You said you were going to go to the sheriff, that he was probably already on his way. So I used some of the very last of my stash to make you forget, and then I made your dad leave you that voice mail to help you stay away, and I moved him out here to the barn.”

  I shook my head, torn between wanting to punch Micah in the face and knowing I had to get all of us out of here in one piece. Another small bit of information clicked forward in my mind.

  “I wasn’t the only person you used the drugs on, was I?”

  Micah shifted on his feet but didn’t respond.

  “The sheriff. You gave him the drug, too. Was it just because he was at the crash site? Or did he see something else you didn’t want him to see?”

  Micah pursed his lips. “The sheriff and I were both out in the woods for the same reason—trying to find the rest of Ike’s cameras. Reese told me that’s what the cops found near Bryan’s and Cassidy’s bodies: a camera of Ike’s.”

  “I told you that in confidence!” Reese said. She looked slightly abashed at her outburst. “Not that it matters now, I guess.”

  “If my dad had been captured clearly on any of those cameras, it would be all over,” Micah went on. “I had to find them. But my dad must have followed me out into the woods. He was getting harder to control, refusing to stay locked up anymore, no matter how hard I begged him . . . and when I got to the crash site, the sheriff was already there. He saw me—and my dad. I had the drug on me, so I just . . . I
only used a little bit, enough to make him forget a few hours. I never found another camera.”

  “We did,” Dex said. “But in the pictures we saw, the sheriff was just standing there, staring . . .”

  “That’s how it works,” Micah said, miserable. “The drug makes you fade out for a bit, and then you forget. Or if you’re the government, you make people remember things that aren’t true. But I never did that.”

  “I’m sure your medal’s in the mail,” Dex retorted.

  “And there’s more, isn’t there?” I said, slowly realizing. “Mrs. Anderson. We found her in the street one day, and she was dazed and couldn’t remember where she’d come from. She kept talking about pie . . . that she’d just brought a pie to someone. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  Micah’s face twisted in chagrin. “She came to our back door. She shouldn’t have done it. My dad was confused, wandering in our backyard, and she saw him. I only used a little of the drug on her, I promise. And she’s fine now! She only lost a few hours, right?”

  “We had pie later, on our date. Was it hers? You drugged her and then fed me her pie?”

  Micah bit his lip, and I took that as a yes. I felt sick. All that evidence, right there before me, and I hadn’t put any of it together.

  A loud thumping noise made me look up. Reese had just stamped her shoe on the ground. “Pie? Who the hell cares about pie?” Reese yelled, waving her hands in the air as if trying to get us to see something obvious. All her cowering fear was gone. “Micah, you just admitted that your dad killed people. He killed Bryan and Cassidy, didn’t he? Didn’t he?”

  Micah looked taken aback by Reese’s outburst and put his head down, as if he couldn’t face her.

  “He didn’t mean to,” he finally whispered. “He’s in so much pain, and he gets so confused, and he can’t control it. I didn’t even know he could do that to someone until the hiker. And I hoped Bryan and Cassidy had just run off; I really wanted that to be true. . . .”

  “But you were the one who found their bodies,” Reese continued. She waved a loose hand toward me. “Both of you. You knew then what your dad did. You knew what he could do, that we were all in danger. And you did nothing.”