Hanging by a Thread

by Sophie Littlefield

  I hit “Enter.”

  There were over a thousand results. I clicked on “Images,” and my screen was tiled with pictures of her, a beautiful young girl in a cheerleading outfit, in a photo with her parents, in her official school picture—

  I froze, unable to breathe.

  There, over and over, sprinkled among the other images, was a photo of a laughing dark-haired girl in front of a bush blooming with pink flowers, wearing the denim jacket that was stuffed in a box in my closet. The one that had knocked me out, that practically buzzed with terrifying energy, had belonged to a girl who disappeared.

  I knew it had to be the same jacket because of the unmistakable details: the distinctive topstitching, the twisted placket that was a hallmark of Ripley Couture sportswear, the crested silver buttons, the striped silk lining. And I’d lay odds that Amanda was a size small, judging from her fine bone structure and lean figure. What were the chances of two of the same expensive designer jacket showing up in a tiny town like Winston? It was practically impossible.

  I scanned several of the articles, but learned nothing new. I’d seen it all on the news over the past year. Still, there was something nagging at the back of my mind.…

  A memory popped into my head, the borrowed memory from Lara’s vision. The long-haired girl who’d been at Dell Market … It hadn’t clicked before, but I suddenly realized what had been nagging at my mind: she had been wearing the jacket. It had been Amanda, getting ready to party with the crowd I now was trying so hard to belong to. All I could see in the vision was her profile, but it was the same girl on my screen, wearing the same jacket. The distance between me and this stranger, this girl who’d disappeared a year ago, was starting to close. I couldn’t pretend much longer that I didn’t care about what happened to her.

  Rachel knew things she wasn’t telling me. All of it seemed connected, and not in a good way. The people I knew best, the people I cared about in Winston, had a dark side that I had only begun to recognize, much less understand.

  But somehow I was being pulled right into the middle of it all. The jacket in the box was Amanda’s, I was sure of it. But how had it gotten filthy and torn? How did it end up in a plastic bag on a junk dealer’s table?

  And what was I supposed to do with it now?

  When you can’t sleep, you turn to your tried and true methods for dealing with insomnia, right? But the harder you try, the more you toss and turn. Lincoln used to get crazed around test time—he wasn’t a good test taker—and he told me he would count backward from one hundred, imagining each number scrawled on a sketch pad. My mom had a secret stash of sleeping pills that she would take in a pinch, never more than once or twice a month.

  Me? I got out my ripper.

  A seam ripper is a little plastic-handled sewing tool about the size of a ballpoint pen. At one end is a sharp metal point with a fishhook-shaped blade. You poke the point behind a stitch in a seam in a piece of clothing that you want to un-sew. Carefully, because you don’t want to cut the fabric itself, you hook the stitch on the point and slide it down the curved-blade part, which cuts the thread. Now you have two tiny thread ends poking out of the seam of the garment.

  So far so good. But the really satisfying part comes next. You use the sharp point to tease out the threads, undoing a few more stitches until you have a big enough hole in the seam that you can hook your fingers in. Which you do—and then you pull.

  Rrrrrrip!

  There’s a kind of muffled popping sound as the fabric comes apart. You can’t pull too hard or you can damage the garment, and you can only pull out a few inches of stitching before you have to start over again by cutting the threads, but it’s incredibly relaxing, undoing in seconds something that took ages to create, knowing that you’ll put it back together again and make something entirely new.

  I dragged my big tub of vintage finds from the sewing room and rooted around in it until I found the perfect piece to work on, a pair of thin-wale corduroy pants, low-waisted and narrow-legged, in a pale green. Size 8—my size. I’d already tried them on and they fit perfectly through the waist and hips.

  It was just the leg I didn’t like. I didn’t have a problem with skinny jeans, but I thought it was a look that was best left to denim, dark denim with a bit of Lycra for stretch. These pants were crying out to be something different.

  I’d gotten my inspiration from an old magazine article I found online about Veruschka, who was a German model in the sixties. In one picture she was wearing a pair of jeans with a triangular patch set in from hem to knee that turned ordinary trousers into bell bottoms. In the photo I had printed and tacked to the wall above my sewing table, the designer had used a bright orange paisley fabric, not even bothering to hide the fact that the inset was an afterthought. That was what I intended for the green pants, and I had the perfect fabric set aside to enhance them—a washable home-furnishing-weight linen printed with a wild floral design in black and russet.

  But tonight all that mattered was that the inseam had to be ripped, hem to knee.

  I played some old Joan Baez to get in the mood, and bent over my task with my bright OttLite focused on the tiny stitches. They disappeared into the velourlike wale of the corduroy, and it took me a while to find the perfect one to start with. I poked the ripper’s point underneath and slit the stitch, teasing a few more out on either side, carefully unraveling the hem so that I could separate the leg panels, and then—when I had a firm grasp on the pieces—I gave a mighty tug.

  Rrrrrrip.

  The seam gave way with a satisfying sound, cotton thread popping and the fabric separating easily. Later this week, I would carefully pin the gusset in place, using a dozen pins on either side, making sure it was eased in perfectly so that the pant leg hung correctly.

  When I had the seams separated the way I wanted, I folded the pants in thirds and laid them out on my ironing board, ready for tomorrow. Then I turned out the light and made the short trip to my bedroom, where I got under the cool cotton sheets and glanced at my alarm clock.

  One-thirty. And Jack was picking me up at seven-thirty. Okay. Leaving an hour for a shower, a speed blow-dry, and a little makeup, I’d still get enough sleep to keep a normal human fueled for a day. Enough, maybe, to dispel the sense that I was going crazy.

  I switched off my iPod, but not before hearing Joan rasp her way through “Scarlet Ribbons.”

  Through the night my heart was aching

  Just before the dawn was breaking …

  I’d always loved that song, but I’d never really listened to the lyrics until now, and suddenly I understood that it wasn’t a lullaby at all, but something much darker. A mother overhears her child praying for ribbons in her hair, and in the morning, finds red ribbons tangled on the girl’s pillow. But who left them, and why? Listening to the haunting melody, I felt certain that the visitor invaded the locked house with evil on his mind. Long after I drifted off, the music continued playing in the background of my dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I WAS WAITING FOR JACK ON the porch by seven-fifteen, the morning fog drifting in from the ocean. Steam lifted from the two mugs of strong coffee I’d brewed. For me, caffeine was a necessity—I hadn’t slept that well, tossing and turning until the sky finally lightened with the approach of dawn.

  I’d borrowed my mom’s concealer to try to cover the dark circles under my eyes, and chose what was, for me anyway, a pretty tame outfit: long embroidered Indian-cotton skirt that flared around my ankles, a T-shirt from a San Francisco club band that Lincoln liked, and a thick black belt I’d found in the men’s department of the Valencia Street Salvation Army. I’d had to cut off almost a foot of the length to make it fit, piercing the leather with a punch needle and blanket-stitching it with waxed thread to finish the raw edges, but it was worth the effort for the buckle alone, hammered silver in the shape of Texas with a turquoise cabochon inset for the capitol. I topped it all off with a zipped gray Blake School sweatshirt that was literally falling
apart at the seams. The sweatshirt had been Lincoln’s when he was a freshman, and when he outgrew it the following year he gave it to me. It reminded me of him, our close relationship, so I had never bothered to fix it.

  I had never had a sibling—well, my dad’s new wife had a baby the winter before, a little boy named Caesar, but I still hadn’t met him—and Lincoln was the closest thing I had to a brother. Years earlier, before my parents split, I’d hoped for a brother. Dad never paid much attention to me, and somehow in my five-year-old brain, I had decided it was because I was a girl. Nana was happy to play dolls and fairies and princesses with me, and I figured that if I had a brother, Dad would play with him—boy things, baseball and trucks and firemen—and I could join in.

  I should have realized that the problem wasn’t ever me. Dad was just selfish, the kind of guy who couldn’t tear himself away from the sports page or the Internet long enough to spend a few minutes with his kid. The kind of guy who’d throw everything away for a fling with his young, sexy assistant. Now that Dad did have a son of his own, I wondered if the new baby was getting much attention. Somehow I doubted it.

  I heard Jack’s car before I saw it, the sound of the engine not exactly purring. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it sure wasn’t the ancient Datsun pickup that shuddered to a stop in front of my house. It had once been white, but there were rusted areas that had been sanded and primed, and a couple of panels that had been replaced, one red, one brown, giving it a patchwork effect.

  Jack came around the car wearing sunglasses that masked any expression on his face. In a single night I’d convinced myself he was the boy of my dreams, then started wondering if he was violent and unstable, and how he fit into the story of the horror hidden in my closet. I wished I’d never touched the jacket, never Googled Amanda’s name, but now I knew I had to find out more. I wouldn’t rest until I understood what had happened to Amanda and, quite possibly, Dillon.

  Jack took the stairs two at a time. Our porch looked out over the water, with another row of houses one street below, and then the Beach Road, but I thought our views were better—and we could never have afforded the closer street anyway. The only reason we could live this close to the water at all was that the house had been in the family, all the way back to my great-grandmother.

  Which in a way kind of made up for being branded as the freak family in the haunted house. No matter what anyone else thought, I had been a part of this town from even before my birth. My great-great-grandmother Alma’s legacy lived on through me, not just through my sewing, but through the gift I carried in my blood. I might not have ever asked for the visions, but they bound me to Winston in ways that only Nana could ever really understand.

  “Hey, Clare.”

  I offered Jack the coffee cup as he sat in the other wicker chair. Mom had found the chairs when we’d gone scavenging at a farm sale, and painted them a creamy color that complemented the sage green of the house. I’d been meaning to make chair cushions for her as a surprise, but the truth was, it was so much more fun to work on clothes that I never got around to the home décor projects Mom wanted done—curtains for the kitchen, a fabric panel to hide the pipes below the sink in the guest bathroom.

  “Do you want cream or sugar?” I asked, feeling awkwardly formal.

  “No. Thanks.”

  In the steely light of morning, his eyes were a clear gray, like the ocean itself. Caleb had told me that gray mornings provided some of the best light for portrait photography—now I saw why.

  “Listen, Jack … There’s something I wanted to ask you about. But maybe not here. My mom sleeps late on the weekends, but …”

  “We can talk on the way,” Jack said. “Where’s our first stop?”

  I told him about the garage sale I’d found on Craigslist, north and a few miles inland, in the town of Palacios. It was home to ranchers and people escaping the city, and the seasonal population swelled with farmhands and migrant workers. Sometimes these inland raids yielded great vintage finds—boxes of old clothes that had been abandoned in attics and sheds and garages, things most people wouldn’t give a second look. Many were unusable, but occasionally I’d find woolens or silks that could be used to add interesting touches to more modern garments. If nothing else, I raided them for buttons. A patch here, a closure there; these were the details that made my designs unique.

  The ride was beautiful. The fog dissipated as soon as we left the town limits, and we drove along a two-lane road winding through gentle hills and fields of berries and lettuce, corn, and tomatoes.

  Jack’s driving surprised me. He was a careful driver, never pushing the old truck over the speed limit. It smelled nice, a combination of motor oil, sunbaked vinyl, and tobacco, among other things I couldn’t name.

  “Dad and I were going to restore this truck together,” Jack said abruptly. “He was still teaching me how to do the bodywork when he died.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so instead I cautiously changed the subject. “Look, Jack … about what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Yeah?”

  I was silent for a moment, trying to decide where to start. I couldn’t very well bring up my vision—the baseball bat, the broken windows—unless I could explain how I knew about them. And I had no way to do that without lying. But maybe I could work around to the subject another way.

  “It’s about Amanda Stavros.”

  The change in him was instant. His facial features went from taut to angry, and his hands gripped the wheel tightly. Still, when he spoke, his voice was calm and unemotional.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I … heard you used to date her.”

  “Yeah, I did, off and on. It was no big thing, despite … whatever you’ve heard.”

  “I—I haven’t heard anything,” I said, surprised.

  He raised his eyebrows behind his mirrored sunglasses. “No?” he asked softly, a deadly edge to his voice. “And yet, here you are asking me about it.”

  His bitterness stung, and there was something else—a faint tendril of fear, of wondering whether I had misjudged him. Clearly, he had more of a temper than I had realized. But enough to escalate to rage? To violence? “I’m just, I thought that since you knew her—”

  “Along with a thousand other people. Amanda wasn’t exactly shy, Clare. And there were guys she dated besides me. We weren’t exactly exclusive.”

  “But no one—”

  “You want to know about that time, I’ll tell you. But I have to warn you, I don’t have a lot to say, especially considering it messed up my life for a while. Not my relationship with Amanda—that part of it was no big deal.”

  “You weren’t serious with her?”

  “No.”

  He answered quickly—too quickly. Not the way I would have expected from someone whose girlfriend had disappeared. So maybe they weren’t in love, but still, Amanda must have meant something to Jack. I couldn’t imagine losing even a casual friend to something like what had happened—but Jack was behaving as though her loss didn’t matter to him at all.

  “How did you end up dating her, anyway?” I asked him.

  Jack took a deep breath, slowly exhaling as he kept his eyes on the road. “Amanda was in my English class. At first I noticed her for the same reason everyone else did—I mean, you’ve seen what she looked like. But she and I were assigned to do a report on Fahrenheit 451 together. I had a hard time getting through that book, but Amanda loved it. She came over to my house a lot. I think she didn’t want to be at home. At first it was cool, because we talked about books and … things. But she was different in school.”

  “Different how?”

  “She liked the attention. Girls, guys, teachers, it didn’t matter. She acted stupid at school, and when I called her out on it, she got really …”

  His voice trailed off and his skin flushed. “Aggressive,” he finally said. “Sexually. After we argued, she always wanted—it was almost like she liked it better if we were … f
ighting. I wasn’t into that, which is one of the reasons we kind of grew apart.”

  Now I was the one who blushed. Not because I had trouble understanding what he was telling me, but because I’d imagined what he would be like. What it would be like to be with him. Now I wondered if I was crazy, to be attracted to someone so volatile.

  “So when she disappeared, you’re saying other people blamed you?” I said, trying to refocus the conversation.

  “Not at first. There was all that serial killer speculation in the news. But it was only a day or two before the cops showed up at my house. And yeah, Detective Kostelic—he was the one who got to play bad cop—he had it in for me.

  Kept it up for weeks. Told me if he had his way my record would never be sealed, it would follow me around so every woman I ever met would know I was a killer. Oh, and my mom—she says she doesn’t blame me for Dad’s accident, but since it happened the day after I was taken in for questioning, the timing was kind of bad, you know what I mean?”

  “So they accused you of murder.” I acted like I was learning this for the first time, but given what he’d told me about him and Amanda, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise. If I’d been one of the cops on the case, I would have suspected Jack too, especially if he’d allowed his temper to get the better of him when they questioned him.

  “Not outright, other than Detective Kostelic a couple of times when there was no one else in the room.” Jack laughed bitterly. “There were a lot of implications. They kept coming around to talk, upsetting my mom. After a couple months they finally arrested me for vandalism and possession. It was almost a relief, just to have them do something.”

  Like in my vision. I remembered the feeling of rage, the borrowed emotion that made my own fingers twitch with the longing to break things, to lash out. Jack’s anger was real. His quiet exterior did not mask the simmering fury on the inside. I had to figure out if it was controlled, or dangerous, before I got any closer to him.