But why the hell couldn’t he think of one goddamn thing to do? He was the one who knew how to work people. He’d worked Bekah for two years before she’d caught on and ditched him.
He fought a lump in his throat as her memory floated across his mind. God, he wanted her now. He could have never told her, but he wanted her. She was so serene. She just went along with stuff. She’d calm him down now, or maybe he’d calm her down, and all this would seem just a shade more okay.
They didn’t talk on the way back to the farm, not even when Cade took two wrong turns and nearly fishtailed into the ditch. They got quietly out of the car, and Ivy and Mattie followed Cade back into the barn.
Cade clung to the quiet. Quiet meant no one was losing it. Quiet meant keeping it together. He counted his breaths. Concentrated on his steps. And then found Kinley and Tyler in full make-out less than twenty feet from their professor’s body.
“What the hell?” Cade shouted. “Are you kidding me right now?”
The couple separated. Kinley scooted away and ducked her head, but Tyler just sort of shrugged. “You guys were gone for a while. Chemicals?”
Cade shook his head and explained the situation. “We need another plan. Can’t we just bury him somewhere?”
Tyler stood up and began to pace. “With what? I think I saw a rusted pitchfork in the back. But that takes time. It’s not like in the movies where you can just knock out an eight-foot hole in twenty minutes. It’ll take all night. And with the mud? The rain? No way, man.”
“You’d know,” Ivy quipped, but Tyler ignored her.
“We could burn him,” Mattie offered. “It would get rid of the DNA, right?”
“Two things, genius,” Cade sneered. “First, how the hell would we get anything to start on fire tonight? All the wood is wet. Second, what if someone sees the smoke? It wouldn’t be completely weird for someone to call in a brushfire. Do you really want the cops on the site of a fire that turns out to be a burning body? What happens then? ‘Oh, sorry, officer, I accidentally set my dead professor on fire’?”
The group was quiet then. Cade felt a hot orb of rage rising in his chest, bubbling dangerously near the surface. It was the rage that ran in his family. That made his father so scary. He needed to do something before he blew up.
“The river,” Kinley spoke, still sitting on the lopsided bale.
“What?” Tyler asked. Cade turned toward her, flexing his hands into fists.
“Let’s throw him in the river. I think burning is frankly the best idea, but let’s get rid of the body in the water. We’ll throw some driftwood on him, and chances are he’ll get stuck in it downriver. He’ll get so bloated with water by the time anyone finds him that they won’t be able to determine the cause of death.” She bobbed her head. “In theory.”
Cade glanced at the corpse and imagined it, fat and blue-purple with water, the skin loose and translucent. He let his breath out. The idea almost calmed him down, strangely.
He unballed his fists and scratched his head. It was throbbing, his pulse pounding in his ears. “Yeah, but how far is that? Are we going to have to throw him off the bridge downtown?”
“No.” Kinley pointed to the east. “The river runs through the town. And then it runs through the farm. No one will ever need to know where, exactly, he was thrown in.”
“But he’ll be found,” Cade said.
“Yeah. But he won’t be found with us. It’ll take him far away. Maybe so far that they won’t track him back for a while. Maybe . . . maybe they’ll think he drowned. Or something.” Kinley rubbed her arms. “Any better ideas?”
The barn was quiet. The wind swept around the corners and made high, keening noises that sounded like crying ghosts.
Cade turned it over in his head. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to be rid of the thing in the corner.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s throw him in the river. Can we get him back in the trunk?” Cade led the way to the corner. And when he turned Dr. Stratford over, a fat black beetle crawled out of the corpse’s mouth.
Cade’s stomach lurched. He turned away and vomited, very quietly, in the corner next to his dead professor.
“What?” asked Tyler. “What happened, dude?”
Cade cleared his burning throat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nothing. Just . . . grab on to him. Let’s get him out to the car.”
They were better at it, this time. The corpse-carrying. It was something, unfortunately, that got easier with practice. They got Dr. Stratford back into the car in record time, and Kinley drove them to the river.
“He stinks,” Ivy whimpered. “God, he already stinks.”
“No.” But Cade wasn’t sure she was wrong. He felt like the corpse was invading his nostrils. The feel of Stratford’s waxen skin against his hand was infiltrating every pore. It was like Stratford was already haunting him, and he had been dead only a few hours.
He remembered the last corpse he’d seen. Somehow, he assured himself, it had been worse than this.
He would get through this.
He would.
He’d done harder things. Maybe.
Kinley pulled up to the riverbank and pressed the button to pop the trunk. It was raining harder now. Good, Cade thought. It would wash away any tracks they left.
The five gathered at the trunk and lifted their professor out, his legs catching on the lip. One of his shoes slipped half off.
“Put it back on!” shouted Kinley. The river was moving quickly, and it roared in their ears.
Ivy stepped away, her hands in the air. “No!” she yelled. “I can’t!” Rain streamed over her face.
“Holy shit, Ivy. I will, okay? Sue me if I don’t want a dead man’s shoe in my car.” Kinley leaned one of Stratford’s shoulders against the back of the car and pushed past everyone like they weren’t even there. And she grabbed Statford’s leg and shoved his shoe back onto his foot.
“Let’s go.” She grabbed on to a calf. “Come on!”
Together, they heaved the body down toward the edge of the riverbank, slipping and sliding in the mud. Tyler went down once, and popped up, half covered in the thick river sludge.
“Are you okay?” Mattie asked.
“It’s fine, dude. Let’s just do this.”
Tyler grunted under the weight of the body. Cade’s back strained. But together, they moved Dr. Stratford toward the river.
They paused at the very edge. The river had risen to the top of its banks, and it was rushing by with an intensity that Cade had never seen.
In town, there was a tiny bridge arching over the river, which was calm and lovely on most days. The kind of river people stopped to dip their toes in. The kind of river people spread picnic blankets beside and jumped into from giant rope swings.
But not tonight. Tonight, he imagined the water was nearly touching the bottom of the bridge. If the river flowed in the opposite direction, Dr. Stratford might even get caught against it, swept over the top, and found the next day, draped across the walking path with muddy clothes and leaves in his hair, by terrified lovers who were up for an early-morning stroll.
He shook his head, forcing the image away.
The rain and wind were coming in bursts now—for a moment, the rain and wind would buffet them and then it would stop before it began again.
“Okay!” Kinley shouted. “On the count of three, throw him in!”
Cade looked around the group. Their faces were drawn and wet, and their hair lay over their faces in giant flat strands.
“One!” Cade shouted. “Two . . . and three!”
And then they heaved their professor’s body into the river.
It barely splashed. He was there, on the surface, and then he was gone, into the stormy darkness, swallowed by the furious river.
They all stood there, together, for a moment, the wind and rain battering against them and the river rising steadily.
“We should have weighed him down,” Ivy said suddenly
.
Cade stared at the river. “Let’s just go.”
And he turned his back to the wet grave that hid their crime and climbed into the car. They did it quickly, their wet clothes trailing after them, desperate to be gone. They shut the doors, closing out the weather and the storm and the river and what they’d just done.
It was then they heard a voice, tinny and upset.
Coming from Mattie’s pocket.
Mattie froze for a few moments while the voice echoed in the car. He grabbed his phone frantically and it dropped on the floor. Mattie picked it up and tapped the screen.
It was silent.
Ivy
Friday, June 12
Ivy’s mouth dropped open. Had he just . . . had it just . . . had someone just heard them disposing of Dr. Stratford’s body?
She would have bet any amount of money that her night could not get worse. She would have staked her life on it.
And she would have lost. Oh, how Ivy would have lost.
“How long was he on?” Kinley asked. Her voice was low and quiet. She hadn’t started the car yet. The whole group was sitting, very quietly, but the energy in the air was palpably electric, as if one tiny spark would set the whole vehicle aflame.
Mattie just sat there, his phone in his fingers and his face totally slack. “It was Derrick,” he whispered.
“Who is Derrick?” Tyler demanded.
Ivy stepped in and plucked the phone from his fingers. “His boyfriend,” she said. She unlocked the phone and pressed recent calls. She held her hand against her chest and her eyes got huge. Mattie had screwed up. Mattie had screwed up big-time.
And they were all going to pay.
“What?” Tyler asked. “What is it?”
She pushed the phone back at Mattie. “He was on the phone for five minutes. Five fucking minutes.”
“He didn’t hear anything,” Cade insisted. “It was raining too hard.”
“Not the whole time,” Tyler interjected. “Not the whole time.” He lowered his voice. “We didn’t say—did we say . . . ?”
He trailed off.
They all sat, crammed in the little car, in complete silence.
“You shouldn’t have hung up,” Ivy whispered. Part of her wanted to make Mattie feel better. She knew he must be horrified.
But she was horrified too. Her heart was doing this rabbit-fast thing, and she hoped, for a second, it would just explode. Then they could throw her in the river too, and maybe it would really all be over.
“Wh-what was I supposed to say?” Mattie stuttered.
“You weren’t supposed to hang up, Mattie.” Ivy felt tears, for the first time that evening, welling in her eyes. If Derrick had heard anything, everything was lost. “You weren’t supposed to hang up.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” Mattie asked desperately. “What am I supposed to do?”
“How much do you trust your boyfriend?” Ivy asked, her voice quiet.
Mattie paused. “I—I trust him.” But his voice was small.
Ivy knew better. Ivy could tell from day one that they had problems. And Mattie wasn’t a good liar. He was too sweet. “You need to make sure he doesn’t talk, Mattie. You need to make sure.”
“He didn’t hear anything,” Mattie said. “He couldn’t hear anything.”
But everyone knew he wasn’t sure.
“I’ll text him,” he said, and Ivy watched as he typed in Sorry, pocket dial, studying. Talk later.
And then he hit send.
“What are we going to do?” Kinley asked. She was facing forward, and her hair was curly and wild from the storm. “Seriously, what are we going to do?”
It was the first time Ivy had heard the real pinch of stress in her voice. And it made the feeling in Ivy’s chest even tighter, made her sure that it was only a matter of time before this all blew up in their faces and they were rotting away in prison, their lives ruined. She imagined herself in twenty years, her face lined and aged, her hair a bunch of dried feathers against her orange jumpsuit.
She deserved it. After how she’d acted in her life, she deserved it.
“We make a pact,” Cade says. “We make a real pact. Right here, right now.”
“What?” Tyler asked. “We’re not a damn babysitters club.”
Tyler was right. But Ivy knew that it was bigger than that. More important.
It was life and death.
Ivy leaned forward in her seat. “He’s right. No one can talk.”
She looked back at Cade, and he began to speak.
“If one of us talks, we’re all screwed. So we agree. No one does. And if anyone as much as says a word—not just to the cops, but anyone—your mother, your brother, your best friend—then we turn you in. The rest of us band together and ruin you. If any of you even considers telling anyone what really happened tonight, you’re gone. You take the fall and the rest of us back it.”
“Yeah,” Kinley said breathily. She cleared her throat. “Yeah, that sounds fair.”
“I’m in,” Mattie said. His voice trembled.
“Shit. Yeah, me too.” Tyler brushed his wet hair back from his forehead.
“Ivy?” Cade asked. “Are you in?”
Ivy stared at the faces of her classmates. She was mean. That was for sure. Everyone knew it. She was a horrible, horrible person. But to be part of hiding a murder and getting rid of a body?
She was every goddamn bit as horrible as everyone always said she was.
“I’m in,” she said. She hated herself for saying it. But some things had to be done. “And we need a good alibi other than a barn and each other.”
“And that’s what?” Tyler asked. “Studying?” He shot a look at Mattie.
“No,” Ivy said. She sat up a little straighter. “Hey, Kinley. Can you drive us to the movies? We can sneak in the back and it’ll look like we’ve been there the whole time. If we hurry, we can catch the late show.”
“What’s playing?” Mattie asked, his voice faint.
“Who cares?” Cade asked.
“What about tickets?” Kinley asked. “They’ll know we snuck in.”
Ivy glared at her. “That’s right. They’ll know. And we’ll be seen leaving. And at worst, we’ll have to shell out ten bucks apiece or we’ll get in trouble over seeing a free movie. But if anyone asks, people will know we were there. At the movie theater. Tonight.”
Kinley held up her hands. “Okay, fine. Got it.”
They returned to the barn and used an old farm spigot to wash the mud from their shoes, and for Tyler, half his body. And then they were on the way to town, the air conditioner blasting to dry them off, cracking their windows whenever the rain slowed.
Kinley parked in the alley, and Ivy showed them what she’d only ever shown Klaire and Garrett before: the perfect, sneaky way to get into the theater without being seen. There were two doors that opened into a basement, and stairs from the basement that led directly into the back of the theater, right next to the rows that no one ever chose because they were too near the giant air-conditioning vents.
When Ivy and Garrett snuck in, they’d wear giant, fat sweaters and scarves and spend the entire show snuggling. Ivy would put her head on his shoulder and he’d wrap her up in his arms and she was happy, happy like she’d never felt.
This . . . this was different.
The group slid silently into the aisles, unnoticed. There was barely anyone in the theater. A lone man ate big handfuls of buttered popcorn in very middle, and a couple in the front row was already making out so heavily there was no way they’d notice if a bomb went off, let alone a few extra people slipping in to escape a murder charge.
Ivy stared at them. The movie was a stupid comedy, so she watched the man eating popcorn and the kissing couple. And she envied them.
A few months ago, she wouldn’t have imagined going to a movie alone on a Friday night. Now, she wanted to trade places with the man. With anyone.
“Are you okay?” Mattie whispered.
“Great.”
She realized she was crying again.
Mattie
Friday, June 12
“Make a scene as you leave,” hissed Kinley, grabbing Mattie’s sleeve. “We need people to remember we were here.”
“I’m just going to . . . I’ll be right back,” Mattie said. He stood up from his seat. He’d been in the theater, next to the freezing vent, for almost thirty minutes, but his clothes were still damp from the rain. He was cold like he’d never been cold; like his heart had been frozen and was pumping ice through his veins.
He could feel all of their eyes on him as he moved to the doors of the theater and then out, near the concession stand, where the only sound was the distant booming of a cannon (an action movie was showing next door) and the popcorn, the kernels exploding lazily now that there wasn’t anyone in line. The concession stand girl watched him for a second, and then busied herself with making a Slurpee.
He called Derrick.
He listened to it ring. Twice. Four times.
Voice mail.
Thank God it went to voice mail. He slipped his phone back into his pocket.
It vibrated against his leg. He jumped, and the girl behind the counter took a large sip of her Slurpee and rolled her eyes.
Mattie pulled the phone out of his pocket.
Derrick.
He didn’t want to answer it. He wasn’t going to. He couldn’t deal with talking to him right now. (But, he was finally calling.)
One tiny, joyous bit of his heart was thankful.
After all this time, Derrick was finally calling him.
“Hello?”
“Hey. It’s me.” Derrick’s voice, rough and low, came through the phone.
Of course it was.
Mattie’s stomach flip-flopped, and he felt a sick sort of happiness breaking through his pain.
“Hey! What’s up?”
“Just returning your call. Both of them.”
The temporary happiness that Mattie had felt faded away. “Oh. Sorry about that.”
Secrets, Lies, and Scandals Page 8
