The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. Next to Dad, Dex gave me a grim smile.

  “Ike Hardjoy,” Agent Rickard said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Well, I wish you’d looked a bit harder.”

  The corners of Rickard’s mouth rose just a bit. “Yes, your daughter was telling us about what happened. Horrible thing, for Hal Jameson to be alive all these years, hiding out in the woods while his mental health deteriorated. I’m sure the families of the deceased will be glad to know this is over.”

  It took a second for the agent’s words to register. The agents had arrived at the scene just moments after the local police, and they’d taken over questioning me, claiming jurisdiction. While Micah and his dad were being given medical treatment, I had answered—truthfully—all of their questions about what happened that night. I had explained the glowing light, Mr. Jameson’s horrifying ability, all of it.

  “His mental health deteriorated?” Dex sputtered. “Are you kidding me?”

  The other agent, Shanahan, turned to Dex. “He never kids.”

  “That’s not what happened here,” I said, my voice level.

  “It’s all right, guys,” my dad said, keeping his eyes carefully trained on the agents. “These agents seem to have their story straight,” he added, drily.

  “Yeah, until they use their mind-erasing drug on us,” Dex spit out.

  Shanahan raised one eyebrow. “You’re clearly worked up, son. You’ve all been through an ordeal—”

  “He’s talking about X10-88,” I said.

  “Penelope—” Dad warned. But I kept going, fueled by anger at the smug condescension in the agents’ voices. How could they just discredit everything we’d been through, all the pain they’d caused with their secret experiments at the plant? With their botched cover-up?

  “And you know it,” I added. “You know exactly what caused this. You tried to use the meteorite alloy to create a memory-wiping drug, and you wanted to keep it secret. But Mr. Jameson found out. The only thing I can’t figure out is whether or not what happened to him was really an accident. He was curious about the basement lab. Did he get too close to the raw alloy and it infected him, turning him into walking fire and almost killing him? Or maybe he got too close to the alloy and then someone else burned the room down intentionally, trying to solve the problem of Mr. Jameson and what he knew, and instead made everything worse?”

  Both agents stared at me, their expressions identically indifferent. I realized I’d probably never get an answer.

  “No matter what happened, afterward you tried to cover it all up. Not caring how you hurt the Jamesons. Not caring how closing the plant hurt the whole town. And now you’ll probably just use X10-88 again on us—”

  “Miss, I need to ask you to be calm,” Shanahan interrupted. “You’re sounding a bit hysterical—”

  “X10-88 is gone,” Rickard said abruptly. Shanahan whipped his head around to glare at his partner, as if shocked at his reply.

  But Rickard kept talking, his steely, appraising eyes on me. “You’re a tenacious girl, Miss Hardjoy. With a tenacious father. But if you go looking for a story about a memory drug and its connections to a meteorite alloy, you won’t find anything. That project closed years ago, and all records were destroyed. Thoroughly. What happened here was merely an unfortunate remnant of a previous mistake—one we will now rectify. But know this—even if there were still X10-88 floating around in the world—which there’s not—there’d be no need to use it tonight. Do you know why?”

  The smugness in his tone made me so angry I couldn’t speak. I shook my head instead.

  “No, I see you do not.” Rickard turned to my dad. “But you know, don’t you, Mr. Hardjoy?”

  “Because no one would believe us,” my dad said. His eyes flashed with anger, but also with resignation. “A crackpot journalist and a couple of kids.”

  “I see you do understand,” Rickard said with a small, dismissive smile. “Which means we’re done here.”

  “Wait,” I called out just as Rickard was turning around. “What about Micah? What’s going to happen to him?”

  “We’ll question him, of course,” he answered. “If what you said is true, he aided and abetted a known killer. Once he’s . . . processed, the justice system will sort everything out. He’ll face the punishment he deserves.”

  His tone was level, but his words felt ominous.

  “Maybe someday you will, too,” I said, keeping my eyes on his.

  The corner of Rickard’s mouth rose just a fraction before he turned away from me. The agents both climbed smoothly into either side of the SUV, but my eyes were on the back door as it slowly slid away and down the road. Micah was in there; Micah with the big grin and the kind word for everyone. Micah, the pride of Bone Lake, the quarterback with a bright future and a secret so dark it had ensured he’d never get to see that future realized. And even though I still couldn’t believe that he’d held my dad hostage, lied to me, wiped my memory, and nearly gotten us all killed, it wasn’t anger I felt as the SUV disappeared down the street and into the night. I felt something heavy settle over me instead: a kind of sadness for something lost.

  The digital clock in our kitchen had just ticked past midnight, but Dad and I were still wide-awake. We sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table; he was drinking Bud Light from a can while I sipped from a glass of tap water. We both munched slowly on the only food left in the cupboards—a half-eaten carton of Sandies.

  Dad looked exhausted, his beard gone straggly, dark circles under his eyes. The skin around his wrists was raw and red. The cops had wanted him to go to the hospital, but he’d firmly told them no.

  “I’m taking my daughter home,” he’d said. “We can handle everything else tomorrow.”

  And that was true—with one exception. On the ride back to our house, I’d called my mom and filled her in. Well, not on everything. Not yet. I’d told her Dad was found, and the killer in the woods was caught. I didn’t have the energy to rehash the rest of it, not over the phone, not that night. Mom had still wanted to fly back to Michigan, but I’d convinced her to stay in Spain for now. Soon enough, I’d tell her everything.

  So now it was just Dad and me, sitting at the kitchen table, neither of us knowing quite what to say. We’d sat like this before many times over the past few years, eating in silence, wary of each other. But I was tired of the silence.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said, trying to break the ice.

  “Me?” Dad gave an incredulous chuckle. “Pen, if you’d gotten hurt tonight, I don’t know what I would have done. It was reckless, what you did.”

  “I know.”

  Dad sighed, then smiled. “Brave, too.”

  And I couldn’t help smiling back. Even after everything, praise from him warmed up my insides.

  “I don’t know if I should ground you or buy you a car,” he said.

  “I’d lean toward the second option.”

  Dad smiled, and we fell into silence again. I felt myself chickening out, like I’d done so many times before. It would be so easy to swallow his praise, to hug him good night, to go to bed, and let everything be the way it’d been before. But Dad’s own words kept me in place. Brave, he’d called me. I wondered if that was really true. It took one kind of bravery to run off into the darkened woods to save your father from an accidental killer infected with government-manipulated meteorite juice. It took a whole different kind of bravery to look him in the eye and tell him all the ways he’d hurt you, all the ways he’d let you down.

  “Dad—” I started.

  “Hold on,” he said, standing up. He went to the fridge and got out another can of beer. Then, after a moment, he pulled out a second one. He came back down and put one of the cans in front of me.

  “Don’t tell your mom.”

  I couldn’t help, once again, but smile. I ran my fingers under the cold top of the can, popped it open, and took a small sip.

  �
�I probably shouldn’t have given that to you, but after the night we just had . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I promise not to enjoy it too much.”

  “I know it’s my fault, what happened tonight,” he went on, his eyes looking down as he took another sip of his beer. The admission of guilt nearly shocked me into silence.

  “Well . . . you didn’t make the meteorite land here or make the government experiment on it in our town. You didn’t make Mr. Jameson into . . . what he became.”

  “No, guess not. Government experiments on the meteorite,” he said, then gave a small chuckle. “There goes my Visitors theory, I guess. Not like anyone believed it anyway.”

  “I did,” I said. “Once.”

  He went quiet for a minute.

  “One thing you could have done differently was tell me about the body you found, the hiker. All these months, and you kept it from me. And then you packed up your camping gear in the truck to go chasing after this story the day before I was supposed to get to town—”

  “That’s not what the camping gear was for,” Dad said, shaking his head. “I was loading up the truck so the two of us could maybe take a trip together. Go camping at the dunes or somewhere . . . like we used to. I was just going to check out the Jamesons’ property real quick before we left, and . . . well, you know.”

  “Oh,” I said. So he hadn’t chosen his story over me.

  “I know things haven’t been . . . right . . . between us for a while, Pen. I don’t really know what to do about that. I thought if we went camping, just the two of us . . .”

  I nodded. “We can still do that, maybe.” I hated how vulnerable my voice sounded, how much like a little girl who needed her dad. I cleared my throat. “But . . . I think it’ll take more than just camping. I don’t want things to go on like they were before. When I was looking for you, I learned so much about you I didn’t know. It was like you were this whole other person, one I’d never really met.”

  Dad looked confused. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Well, it’s just . . . everything that happened with Mom, and . . . and with Julie . . . I don’t think I ever knew everything that went down with that. So I filled in the blanks myself.”

  Dad’s whole body went still, the tips of his ears turning red. This was the point, right here. The point of no return.

  “You were just a kid, Penelope. There was no point telling you all the details. It would only hurt you.”

  “I got hurt anyway.” The words caught around a lump in my throat as I tried to get them out.

  Dad closed his eyes then, and I knew that this time I was the one hurting him. He let out a long sigh. “Look, it’s really late, kiddo—”

  “It is late. About five years late for us to have this conversation, I think.”

  Dad gave a small laugh, but not a pleasant one. “You always were quick with the smart comebacks. I think you got that from your mom.”

  “No I didn’t. And don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay,” Dad said, rubbing his eyes and leaning back in his chair. “I won’t. I’m not going to pretend that I was the perfect husband or father all the time. And what happened with Julie . . . I screwed up, I know it. And I was never really sure how to deal with that.”

  “So you just . . . didn’t.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But, Dad . . . I can handle ‘not simple.’ Maybe I couldn’t before. But I can now.”

  Dad looked at me then, really looked at me, his eyes boring steadily into mine. He gave a sad smile. “I guess I can see that.” He cleared his throat. “It’s hard to explain, Pen. Maybe you’ll know when you have kids, but . . . you always saw me in a certain way. Like I was your hero. Like I could catch all the monsters in the world.”

  There it was again, the lump in my throat. “I know.”

  “It’s hard to go from being the hero to being one of the monsters.”

  His voice caught, just a bit, and I thought he was going to look away. But he didn’t.

  “But you’re neither of those things,” I said, thinking about Micah, and how he hadn’t been able to see his dad for what he really was, either. “And I’d rather see you the way you are. No lies. No pretending.”

  Dad took a shaky breath. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  What did I want to know?

  A few weeks ago, I’d wanted to know that every single question in the world had a yes or no answer, and that you could find it if you looked hard enough. My dad was a liar, and I was angry at him—things were as simple as that. But I didn’t think that was true anymore. There wasn’t a simple answer as to why my parents got divorced, or why my dad did the things he did. But I knew enough to keep my eyes open now, to keep searching for the answers even when they didn’t make sense, even when there was no “right” one. So what did I want to know about him?

  Everything.

  “I want to know . . .” I said slowly, wondering where to start. The beginning of a thought was forming in my mind. After what had happened these past few days, I didn’t think I had it in me to keep writing my Northwestern article on Bone Lake’s decline. And I sure couldn’t write the truth of what happened tonight, not without verifiable sources or proof. But maybe I could focus my article on something else, something that encompassed both of those stories through a singular viewpoint. A more personal viewpoint, like my journalism teacher had advised. A focus on Ike Hardjoy, professional storyteller. And so many other things, too.

  “I want to know why you write stories for Strange World,” I blurted. “What drives you, when I know you don’t believe in half that stuff? Why . . . why do you do the things you do?”

  Dad sucked in a breath.

  “There’s not really an easy answer for that.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need the answer to be easy. I just need it to be true. Even if you think the truth is hard, or that it’ll hurt me, or even if it will make you look bad.”

  Dad was still peering at me. “You want to know the truth.”

  “I want to know your truth.” Because that was the best he could do. The best any of us could maybe do. I could see, now, how the truth wasn’t just this one, finite thing. A bear might be just a bear, but people were more complicated. Dad’s truth was different from Mom’s truth, and mine was different from both of theirs. And that made everything harder; it made the full picture, the full truth, a thousand times more difficult to see. But it made it a thousand times more interesting, too.

  Dad gave one slow nod. “Okay, Penelope. We can try that.”

  “And Dad?” I said, taking one more sip of beer and looking him in the eye. “I want you to call me Penny from now on. It’s the name I like.”

  Dad smiled, and this time it reached his eyes. “Okay, Penny. I can try that, too.”

  Thirty-Three

  MY ROOM WAS completely dark as my head hit the pillow. For the first time in days, I didn’t feel a trickle of fear before I closed my eyes, didn’t wonder what was lurking around just outside.

  Then came the light. I saw it first through the slits of my eyes, a bright light passing right above my head, catching on the opposite wall. I immediately jumped up, heart racing, and spun to the window behind me. There was a light out there, one moving slowly past my lawn and toward the trees. But after a few frightening seconds I realized it was just an ordinary flashlight, bobbing along before disappearing around the corner of my house.

  I got up, quickly throwing on sweatpants and tennis shoes. There was no light under Dad’s door as I passed by and slowly made my way to the kitchen before sneaking quietly out the back. I saw the flashlight as it disappeared up and into the tree house. When I put my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder and started climbing, a head with brown hair sticking up all over shot through the hole of the tree house above me.

  “Penny? You scared the crap out of me,” Dex said, putting out a hand to help me through the hole.

>   “Me? You were the one skulking past my bedroom window.”

  “You mean walking past at a normal pace?”

  “Seemed like skulking to me.”

  We sat down across from each other, cross-legged on the bare wooden floorboards. Dex stood the flashlight up on its end so a circle of light flashed upward onto the ceiling, spilling a dim glow over our features.

  I thought about the last time we were in this tree house together and quickly averted my eyes from Dex’s.

  “What are you even doing out here?” I asked.

  “Would you believe that I wanted to finish off those Twinkies?”

  I raised my eyebrow.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Dex admitted. “After everything that happened tonight . . .”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Did you tell Cindy?”

  “Yep. I still don’t think she really believes me, though. Not about all of it, anyway. I told her to go down to the station tomorrow and ask for herself.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, but the sheriff was unconscious for Micah’s big confession. All he’ll remember is seeing something weird in the woods and then getting knocked out. And the agents fed the deputies their own story. No one’s going to believe us.”

  Dex leaned back against the wall of the tree house, his head hitting the wood with a light thunk. “It’s not fair. We did this really cool thing—”

  “Cool is not the word I’d use.”

  “Well, fine. But we solved this whole mystery and saved your dad, and no one will ever know. For the first time I think I’m getting a small taste of what it’s like to be Ike.”

  “Yeah,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Dex caught my eye. “So are things . . . okay between you two?”

  I shrugged. “Okay as they can be, I think. But there’s a very real possibility that things could get . . . better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What about your mom? Did you make up from your fight?”

  “Honestly, she was so glad to see me okay tonight that I think she might have forgotten about it,” Dex said, then added, “For now, anyway.”