Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  “She was at the PowerHouse game, too, talking to Monty,” Sophie says, addressing Tatum directly. “I guess your stalker club is growing.”

  Tatum looks away. I stand up, happy with this small advantage: I’m a head taller than all of them, and in better clothes. Still, Sophie’s eyes sweep me as if I’m an insect hovering too close to her picnic.

  “Tatum and I were just talking about the Game,” I say. My voice sounds overloud. In my head, I could flatten them with it.

  Several of the girls look at one another. Not Sophie, though. She’s too good for that.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says coolly. Then she peels away from the counter and sits on Tatum’s bed, placing a hand gently on the IV coil flowing liquid down into Tatum’s blood.

  My mouth goes dry.

  “Poor Tatum,” she says, cooing. “You’re crying.”

  “I’m fine,” Tatum says mechanically.

  Sophie shakes her head. “Aw, honey. You can’t lie to me. I’m your best friend, remember? Tatum’s a terrible liar,” she adds, to me. “It doesn’t stop her from trying, though. She’s, like, pathological.”

  She turns back to Tatum. “But we love you, anyway, no matter what.” She leans forward to stage whisper to her. “Even if you’re a slut.”

  “Get away from her.” I have to ball my fists to keep them from flying at Sophie’s throat.

  Sophie turns to stare at me. “You’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”

  “Tatum, please.” I turn back to her, beg her to listen, to look at me. “I can help you. If you’ll tell me the truth…”

  “I asked her to leave. I told her I had nothing to say.” Tatum’s hands fumble across the sheets toward Sophie, who leans over to touch her face, releasing her grip on the IV. A shiver travels through Tatum’s whole body, as if Sophie’s touch carries a current.

  Even before she begins to scream, I know I’ve lost her.

  “Help!” Tatum throws her voice as high as it can go. “Help! Help!”

  “Tatum…” I try, one last time, to reach her. But even as I start for the bed, Sophie steps in front of me. For a long moment, her eyes hold me there. And it’s in that moment that I know who this girl is—what she is. She’s their Kaycee.

  She smiles. She draws a breath. For a second, she looks as if she might apologize. “Help! Help!” She’s only inches from my face. I can smell coffee on her breath.

  Like dolls animated by the sound of her voice, the other girls begin to echo her. “Help! Help! Help!”

  I burst through the door. I trip, running down the hall. I push through a swarm of descending nurses, careen off the reception desk and hurtle toward escape.

  —

  Help.

  The word keeps echoing in my head, even when the clinic is far behind me.

  The sun is huge, red, terrible: like a mouth opening to swallow the horizon.

  A long-haul trucker blowing toward me leans on his horn before I realize I’ve drifted into his lane. I jerk the wheel and slam on the brakes as his horn blast rolls into silence.

  I pull over for a bit, just to let my heartbeat catch up.

  Help, help, help.

  From the bottom of my bag, my phone lets out a few insistent beeps. I’ve missed another call. I thumb over to voicemail with shaking fingers.

  Ms. Williams, this is Sheriff Kahn. I was hoping you could stop down at the station today, or give me a ring back. I got a complaint from the night manager over at the U-Pack, says there was some kind of scuffle and you disobeyed his order to stop your vehicle. The pictures of the fence look pretty bad, and he’s got security video, too. I’d like to hear your side of the story.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Condor comes to the door even before I’ve knocked.

  “Jesus Christ! Come in, before you beat my door down.”

  Maybe I did knock. My knuckles are raw-red and sore. My throat swollen as if I’ve been screaming. My mouth tastes medicinal. Vodka. Or whiskey.

  I remember a bar, dimly, but I can’t haul the image into focus.

  Hours are dropping away, siphoned into darkness.

  I remember seeing two calls from TJ, my dad’s friend. I remember letting my phone ring and ring, letting the sound of it drown beneath the noise of the bar.

  “What happened to you?” Condor says.

  What’s happening to me?

  “You lied to me,” I tell him. I count the drinks I must have had by the slur of my speech. Four maybe five maybe six.

  “Sit down. You need some water. Sit.” He pilots me into an armchair, and the room slows its turning, like a merry-go-round reaching the end of its cycle. The living room, warm and comfortable, its cheapness buffed and brushed up by details everywhere—pictures of Hannah, framed photographs cluttering the walls, old books stacked high on the shelves—fills me with a sudden shyness. Condor’s living room is like a weather-beaten dock, and I am washed-up wreckage.

  A glass cabinet filled with ornate feathers catches my eye and holds it there; silver, gold, purple, blue. As he returns with a glass of water and watches me finish it, he catches me staring.

  “Fishing lures. Always have better luck if you make your own.”

  The water has cleared my head, just a little. “Thank you. Where’s Hannah?”

  “With her grandparents for the week.” He gestures for the glass. “I’ll get you some more.”

  I can remember, now, leaving Dougsville, and finding a bar on my way home. I can remember the first drink but not the others. My stomach drops. I think of Misha’s pink shoes and how they ended up on the floor next to my bed after the bonfire in the woods. A sick feeling moves through me, like the world is tilting. “Something stronger,” I say. “Anything you got.”

  “I don’t think you need it.”

  “I’m telling you I do.” I make an effort to sharpen my words. “Come on, Condor. I’m fine. I can spit and hit my front porch.”

  He makes me drink another water first, then opens a bottle of wine and pours me some into an old jam jar. He takes a seat across from me. He moves as if his body hurts.

  “Well, what are we toasting?”

  I can’t think of a single thing. “To Optimal,” I say, meaning it as a joke. But my voice breaks. “Those fuckers.”

  “Those fuckers,” Condor repeats, solemnly, and touches my glass before drinking.

  For a while we sit in silence, as the night passes through the room, and the occasional sweep of headlights on the main road cuts through his windows.

  “My father’s dying,” I blurt out after a while. I didn’t even mean to say it. I didn’t come here to confess. Then again, I’m not sure why I came at all.

  Condor’s hand tightens momentarily on his cup. “Fuck, Abby. I’m…” He trails off, and when he looks away I can see a muscle working in his jaw. “You’ve had some couple of days.”

  I look down because looking at him only makes me want to cry, and wanting to cry makes me want to disappear. “I should be with my dad,” I say. “But I can’t. I couldn’t.”

  Maybe I did come here to confess, because suddenly the urge to be understood is overwhelming. “I hated my father. I wished him dead all the time. I used to pray for it. He would send me to my room for hours to pray. Sometimes he’d lock me in a closet, because he knew I hated the dark, and he told me that sinners lived in darkness forever. And instead I would pray that he would drop dead of a heart attack or fall off a roof.”

  “It’s not your fault, Abby,” Condor says.

  “How do you know?” I take a sip to keep from choking. “Maybe there is a God. Maybe my prayers worked.”

  “God doesn’t answer prayers like that. That isn’t what he hears,” Condor says quietly.

  “What does he hear, then?”

  He hesitates with his glass at his lips, watching me over the rim. “The little girl, alone, and frightened of the dark.”

  He’s nice enough to look away, pretending he doesn’t notice that
I’m on the verge of tears. He just sits there studying his glass, the walls and the ceiling, while I breathe through the urge to cry like the little girl I was then.

  When I get it together I don’t risk looking at him. I focus instead on the square of rug between my feet. “Optimal’s been fattening the bottom line by dumping waste in the water supply,” I say. “Probably for years now. The tests came back and proved it.”

  Condor stares at me. “They all said the water was safe.”

  “They all lied.” I remember Kaycee and I once found a bees’ nest, abandoned, lying in the woods. She poked it with a stick until it caved in. Kaycee said the queen leaves her hive after laying her eggs and the children kill one another. This time nobody won. “It’s a nest. It’s all corrupt. Optimal, the local agencies, and some of the federal agents, too. They’re all in on it.”

  “Money?” Condor asks.

  “What else?” I say. But I can’t shake the thought of Lilian McMann, and her daughter posing naked in those ugly socks.

  Those girls shouting in unison, Help, help, help. The word oozing from the corners of their pretty mouths.

  “We’re going back to Chicago,” I say. “We’ll do the rest of the work from there. Now that we have proof, we’ll have help from other firms, other agencies, deeper pockets.”

  “That sounds like good news,” Condor says.

  “It’s bad news.” I practically shout it. Condor sits back in his chair, watching me without expression. Another memory surfaces, of passing the principal’s office and hearing Kaycee’s voice float through the open doorway. I’m not lying. I’m not making it up. Why won’t you believe me? “There’s more. I know there’s more. If we could only keep digging.”

  “And then what?” Condor shakes his head. “It’s not your job to fix every evil. You did your job.”

  “The world is full of people just doing their jobs,” I fire back, “and look what we’re left with.”

  “Sure,” Condor says evenly. “And if all of us dig, guess what happens? We all get buried.”

  He’s right. But what he doesn’t know is I’m already buried. I’m not trying to dig down. I’m trying to dig out.

  “Why did you lie?” I ask him, and he glances up at me, surprised in the act of refilling my glass. “Why did you tell me you were the one to take the photos of Becky?”

  He finishes pouring, carefully, wiping the bottle lip with a thumb.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he says. “You told me.”

  “You let me believe it. You let everyone believe it.”

  For a long time, we sit in silence, and the house breathes as houses do, in ticks and clanks and creaks.

  “She asked me to lie,” he says at last. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this, the simplicity of it, pulls the air from my chest. “We were friends. Our moms worked together at the prison before it closed. They stayed close.” He checks his cup, as if he might find something different inside of it, then takes a hard swallow. “I kind of lost track of her in high school. I had my own problems. But I gave her a ride sometimes, hung out when her mom came over to gossip.” He shrugs.

  “Why did she want you to lie?”

  He sighs, long and hard, as if the truth is something heavy he’s been carrying. “When she heard about the pictures, she freaked. She was worried her mom would find out, so she wanted to just pay up and be done with it.” His eyes click to mine. “I was the one who talked her out of it,” he goes on. “I told her just to talk to her mom. To explain. We agreed her parents would take it easier if they thought I was responsible. Like we were hooking up, hanging out, getting drunk, and I did it for a joke to show her later. It sounds stupid now.” He looks away. “When it turned out the photos were from a party with all those people standing around, she just…couldn’t take it.”

  I imagine a circle of kids, laughing, faces red from alcohol: in my head, it’s Kaycee’s paintings I see, the predatory grins, a girl in the fetal position on the ground.

  “I didn’t think they’d actually send the photos around,” Condor says, and I feel sure it’s the first time he’s made the confession out loud. “I thought they were bluffing. There you have it. My dirty secret.”

  “Not so dirty after all.”

  “Dirty enough. She’s dead.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say, unconsciously parroting his own words back to him.

  He gives me a narrow smile. “Thanks. Feels like it, though.” He finishes his drink. The bottle is empty. He stands up to get another.

  “Fuck it, right?”

  “Kaycee Mitchell is dead.” I can’t keep it in any longer. “I’m sure of it.”

  For a long time, Condor says nothing. “Kaycee Mitchell ran away,” he says shortly.

  “No. That’s why I can’t find her anywhere. She never left in the first place.”

  “So everyone in town is lying?” Condor’s voice is curiously flat, as if he isn’t really asking the question. He pours another glass and slides it across the table to me.

  “Only the people who matter. Everyone else just believes what they were told.” My head is already spinning. “She was murdered.”

  There. I’ve said it.

  But Condor doesn’t look shocked. Just tired. “Oh, yeah? Then who killed her?”

  I can tell he doesn’t believe me, and I say so.

  Condor sighs. He rubs his eyes hard with his fists. “Why would someone murder Kaycee?”

  “I—I’m not sure yet,” I admit. “But I know it had something to do with Optimal. And with the Game, too.”

  “You think Kaycee was killed for some high school hustle?”

  “No. It was bigger than that. I think her father was selling the pictures Kaycee and her friends collected. I think he found a new market. And I think he killed her when she threatened to tell.”

  “That’s insane,” Condor says.

  “He used to hurt her.” Almost immediately, I’m ashamed. It feels like a betrayal of a secret Kaycee would have sworn me not to tell.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Condor says, and his tone softens. “I’m telling you it’s impossible. There’s no way Frank Mitchell killed his daughter.”

  “So you’re a mind reader, now.” I don’t even care how I sound. I’m sick of being doubted, disbelieved, and made to feel like I’m imagining things. “Did you have to get a special degree for that?”

  The words hang sharply between us. Condor didn’t get a degree at all, and he knows that I know it.

  “Look, I saw Frank every day for months after Kaycee disappeared. Every morning, he bought a six-pack and a pint of vodka. For a while, it was a twelve-pack and a pint. It was like watching someone commit suicide in slow motion. One day I couldn’t help myself, and I told him drinking wouldn’t help him forget Kaycee.”

  He interlaces his fingers, squeezing so tight his knuckles stand out. “He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. You know what he said to me? ‘I’m not drinking to forget,’ he said. ‘I’m drinking to believe.’ I didn’t know what he meant at first. ‘Believe what?’ I asked him. ‘Until I believe she ran off, until I believe she’s somewhere doing just fine.’ ” Condor is quiet for a second. “Don’t you get it? He said she ran because he wanted to believe it. He needed to. But he didn’t know. He was terrified of not knowing.”

  I stand up quickly. My body feels like it belongs to someone else.

  “Forget it.” I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I did. Everything is collapsing everywhere I turn. “Forget I said anything.”

  Condor gets to his feet, too. “I’m trying to help you—”

  I cut him off before he can finish. “I may be wrong about Frank Mitchell. But I’m not wrong about Kaycee. They wanted her out of the way, they knew she could expose them—”

  “Who’s ‘they,’ Abby?” He looks at me like he’s afraid of me. “Optimal?” In his voice, I can hear how it sounds. In his eyes, I’m a shrunken reflection, desperate and small. “And Sheriff Kahn? And Misha?
And all of Kaycee’s friends? And Brent?” He spits the name out like a curse.

  “You don’t get it. You don’t know—Optimal owns everything in this town—it’s everywhere—”

  “You don’t get it.” His voice cracks against a note of pain, and it touches a place deep inside me and suddenly I realize that the anger is just grief, just fear, just worry. “Fuck Kaycee Mitchell. Dead, alive, burning in hell, wherever she is. Fuck her. She ruined enough. Don’t let her ruin you, too. Don’t—”

  I kiss him. Taking the words off his tongue with brute force. We knock a pile of books off the table, crash down to the chair and then onto the floor. We topple the lamp and it shatters on the ground, making the room go dark.

  “You can’t fix yourself on me,” he says, undoing his belt. “You know that, right?”

  “I’m not here to fix myself,” I say, pulling him closer.

  Because maybe I can’t be fixed at all.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Knocking. Someone is at the door, knocking again and again.

  I’m in my own bed, but the smell of Condor is everywhere and all over me.

  More knocking.

  My phone’s dead, and I have to find the microwave to read the time: 8:12. Only bad news comes this early.

  I twitch open the blinds with two fingers and my heart stops. Sheriff Kahn is scowling at my door as if it’s been talking back. I can tell just from how he’s standing that he’s been there awhile.

  The paintings are still sitting in my living room: each of them looks like something ripped from a body, like some horrible inner secret.

  Kahn starts knocking again before I’ve shuffled one of them beneath the sofa.

  “One minute.” Sweat sticks my hair to my forehead. I’m wearing the shirt I had on yesterday, but inside out. “One minute.” I shove the other two paintings under my bed.

  I look for a lie, for an excuse, for something to say, but there’s nothing. One time I lost control of my car on Lake Shore Drive, and after a few seconds of panic, while my car was spinning over black ice toward the ditch, I landed on a moment of peace just like this one. The collision was inevitable. All I had to do was wait for it. It was almost a relief.