Hanging by a Thread

by Sophie Littlefield

“I don’t know, Clare, it was a long time ago, I guess I was probably home watching TV or something, or, I don’t know, at a movie or the mall or—”

  I knew she was lying, knew it from the way she still wouldn’t look at me and was talking too fast, the words tripping over each other. And it hurt to know she was lying to me—but then again, I’d kept a secret from her, too. One I still couldn’t tell.

  “Stop,” I said, very softly. “Stop a minute. Please?”

  She did, and her eyes darted toward me, long enough for me to see that she was scared.

  “I know Amanda was driving,” I said carefully. And I’d known it for a while now, deep down inside, though it took seeing Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Stavros arguing to understand what it meant. “I know that she was texting. That she never meant to hurt him. She just looked away from the road for a second and that was all it took. Her car ran off the road onto the shoulder and she ran into Dillon’s bike, just hard enough to push him over, and the rail was broken. That wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.”

  Rachel was staring right at me now, the color draining from her face. Her lips parted slightly, and she said something like “Oh,” the ice cream falling from her fingers and bouncing off the rocks lining the pier right into the water. Seawater filled the cup, mixing with the pink ice cream as tiny narrow fish darted instantly to the surface to check it out.

  “What I think must have happened was that Amanda called her mom, and Mrs. Stavros told her to go home. Then she called it in. She picked the truck stop because she knew a call from a pay phone couldn’t be traced to her, and she got lucky, no one saw her. That was taking a chance but I guess Mrs. Stavros felt like she had to. That she had no other choice. Because Amanda was her daughter.”

  Rachel had gone ghostly pale, her lower lip trembling.

  I wanted to hug her, wanted to stop this terrible story, to say it didn’t matter. But her reaction confirmed my fears. Whatever had happened …

  It was every bit as much Rachel’s fault as Amanda’s.

  Rachel knew something. And I was giving her one more chance to tell me.

  “Who told you?” she finally said, in a whisper so soft the wind and the shouts of the tourists threatened to drown her out.

  “No one told me, Rachel, I just … I just found out. Okay? I won’t tell anyone, I swear it.” But if you don’t, that damn jacket will never let me alone. You understand, don’t you, that I’m taking orders from a couple of yards of cotton denim and a handful of tin buttons. Crazy—who, me? Just because every time I touch it I think it’s trying to drag me down with it? Sure. Rachel would understand.

  She bit her bottom lip, a gesture I’d only seen her make once or twice before, one that made her suddenly seem so much younger. Her blond hair blew around her face, and I was so close I could count her freckles.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she said softly, and her hand inched across the warm wood. I laced my fingers through hers and she squeezed hard. She wasn’t just afraid, I realized with a start, she was terrified.

  “I—I mean what I said. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, Rachel. I won’t tell, whatever it is.”

  “She wanted to see Jack that night,” she said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her free hand. “I didn’t want to do it. I was tired of being her excuse. She had … everything.”

  “Were you,” I started, trying to figure out how to ask it. Then I decided to just be direct. “You were frustrated with her, right? Did you feel taken advantage of?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said quietly. “I felt like everything was so easy for her. Like she didn’t ever have to work for it.”

  “Is that why you took her necklace?”

  Rachel froze, then stared at me with wide eyes. “How did you know about that?”

  “Listen, Rachel, I can’t tell you, I just—”

  “It was that time you slept over, right? When you borrowed my earrings? Did you see it then?”

  I remembered the night she was talking about. We’d been getting ready to go to the beach for the first time since I moved back, and I had on these silver skull earrings that had little fake ruby eyes. I thought they were adorable but Rachel said they sent the wrong message. She told me to look through her jewelry box and pick something, anything, else. I did it, mostly because I was feeling so insecure that first time. I’d borrowed a pair of silver hoops. But I hadn’t noticed the necklace in the jumble of shiny things in the compartments.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “And I guess you saw her name engraved on it. Well.” She sighed. “It was stupid, it was just one of those crazy impulse things, the night of the cheer dinner. Everyone was all over her, saying she led us to the state finals, you know, because she was captain and all, and it was just—I was just so tired of her getting credit for everything all the time. I mean, she partied a lot too, she was just better at covering it up. Clare … There’s something I’ve never told you.”

  “What?” I asked carefully, keeping my voice neutral.

  “Freshman year, I didn’t get into Gold Key. I had some … trouble in middle school, and there were these seniors—there was this bitch Nell Thornton who got her friends to blackball me. Even though I was a legacy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My mom had a fit. She was so angry.… She said she was ashamed of me. She kept talking about how it was my own fault, that she’d warned me something like that could happen. I mean, Clare, I hadn’t even done anything all that bad. Not in middle school, anyway. I got caught, that was the only difference between me and lots of other people. It got all blown out of proportion, and Nell—I don’t know. It all got to me, though, and I ended up … I had kind of a breakdown.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, putting my arm around her.

  “And I got better. I really did. But then to see Amanda at that dinner that night—anyway, I knew it was a mistake right after I took the necklace. In fact I was planning to sneak it back in there the next time I was at her house. I actually had it in my purse the night she disappeared. It was the only reason I agreed to go with her that night. But then when I got over there, she didn’t want to go up to her room. She was afraid her parents would wake up, so we just left, and I didn’t have a chance to put it back.

  “We took the cliff road because Amanda wanted to stay off Ridge. She said if someone saw us and her mom found out we weren’t really down at the coffee shop, she’d be furious. And no one ever takes the cliff road at night. Anyway, she started texting Jack. I told her to stop, I told her—I was scared, you know? It’s so dark there, there’s no streetlights, and she was weaving all over the road.”

  Rachel pulled her hand back, covering her face with it. Her shoulders shook and I knew she was crying, but she made so little noise. I wanted to comfort her but I didn’t know how.

  “So you were in the car,” I said, just to make sure. She nodded, her muffled sobs disappearing into the breeze. “But Rachel … you really didn’t do anything wrong. Nobody could say … I mean, you asked her to stop, and she wouldn’t, and there wasn’t anything else you could do.”

  Rachel spoke through her fingers. “She was hysterical, screaming, she wanted to go down the cliff after him. I knew I couldn’t let her, but I didn’t know what to do. It was me who called her mom, Clare—I didn’t know what else to do. And then I called my mom too. I told her to come as fast as she could.”

  The images had been building in my head since I left the Stavros house. Amanda driving away from the accident, leaving Dillon’s broken body on the rocks. Both girls shivering in the cold, looking over the edge, Rachel trying to keep Amanda from following Dillon down the deadly drop.

  Both mothers, driving along the deserted road to the accident site with only one thing on their minds—protecting their daughters.

  The terrible conversation they must have had before they sent the girls home, Mrs. Slade following in her car while Mrs. Stavros drove to the truck stop.

  “We brought Amanda home with us. Mom g
ave her something—I don’t know, a pill she had left over from when Dad hurt his back earlier that year. It knocked her out right away. Mom gave me half of one, but I didn’t fall asleep. I thought for sure she would tell Dad. But she never did. He was watching a game he had recorded, and Mom put me and Amanda in my bed, sitting in my room with us until I fell asleep. When I got up the next day, I felt all wrong from the medication, and Amanda’s mom had already come for her. My mom sat me down and told me how we were never, ever going to talk about it again. That it was a terrible accident and there wasn’t any point in letting it cause any more pain than it already had.”

  Tears leaked down her face, dripping onto her sweatshirt, and she looked at me out of the corners of her pretty blue eyes, now swollen. “It was really hard for a long time, Clare.”

  “I know,” I said, and I meant it. I too had kept a secret, but I saw now that mine was nowhere near as heavy a burden as Rachel’s. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Did you … Did you and Amanda ever talk about it?”

  Rachel blew out her breath. “We never talked again, period. I mean, whenever I saw her at school we were all friendly like nothing had happened. She never called me or anything. The police never came close to figuring out what really happened. For the longest time everyone thought it was just an accident. And then … You know, the next year Amanda was gone.”

  “Listen, Rachel, I know you think the Grangers put that note on your windshield, but they never knew what happened to Dillon. No one does. And what you said about Mr. Granger—”

  “I’m sorry, I should never have said that,” Rachel said, her face darkening with shame. “I know he’d never kill his own son. But he has a horrible temper—he could definitely hurt someone if he knew they killed Dillon. I mean, he put a guy in the hospital. He broke a bunch of bones in his face.”

  “But Rachel, how would he ever know it was you guys?”

  She sighed, looking out over the water. Wisps of hair blew around her face and she brushed them absently away.

  When she spoke, her voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “Because I told him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I WAS SHOCKED INTO SILENCE. Spray from the water lapping against the pier was misting up against my face, the sun was warm on my bare arms, a mother was yelling at her children to be more careful near the edge, but I barely noticed any of it.

  “Did you do that?” a gruff, angry voice said above us, snapping me out of the moment. I looked up to see a tall, thick-set man blocking the sun. He was wearing the green uniform of the local police force, and though I couldn’t see his eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses, he was frowning and he looked pissed.

  “What?” Rachel demanded. Instantly she transformed from the frightened, vulnerable state she’d been in seconds before to the brash, belligerent girl I knew so well. Rachel was good at covering up her true feelings with a heavy dose of attitude. “We’re just sitting here. Minding our own business.”

  “That.” The cop pointed at the water below us, where the ice cream cup was half submerged and bobbing near the surface. The pink cloud had spread out into the water like a candy-colored oil slick. “Littering.”

  “Oh, that was an accident,” I said quickly. “We dropped it. Not on purpose. Sorry.”

  “Well, how about if you accidentally lean down there and fish it out?” the cop said, even more sarcastically, if that were possible. Then he stood there, watching, while I got down on my stomach—my bare legs touching the pier where I knew there were bird droppings—and stretched my arm out as far as I could. But I couldn’t quite get the cup.

  “Here,” Rachel said in her bored voice, handing me the spoon from my yogurt. That did the trick—I was able to use it to snag the cup, and I scrambled back up onto my knees to hold it out to the cop.

  “I don’t want it,” he said, already turning to go. “Make sure it ends up in the trash.”

  When he was out of earshot, Rachel grabbed my arm and tugged. “Let’s walk,” she said.

  Rachel headed down toward the end of the pier, which jutted far out into the ocean. It got chillier near the far end and the waves crashed up against the pilings, so walking there meant getting wet, which kept people away from the end, so we had plenty of privacy. Right now there were only two people, a couple hugging and laughing as they looked out at the sea.

  “I know you’re going to ask me why I haven’t told the cops about Mr. Granger. But did you see what just happened? There’s your answer. The cops in Winston are losers. They can barely write traffic tickets. If I turned him in, they’d dick around and screw up the case and meanwhile I’d end up dead the minute he found out I told them.”

  “Rachel, what do you mean by you told him?”

  “Well, I told her. Mrs. Granger. And she told him.”

  “When?”

  “I went to the funeral. Everyone did. It was so sad. I didn’t want to go but Mom said we all had to. I wore that blue dress, the one with the crossover front. I just thought about other things, you know, just trying to get through it. And I did okay.

  “But then, after, when we were all leaving—I was going over to Victoria’s—we walked right past the limo that was going to take Mr. and Mrs. Granger to the cemetery. The door was open and a lady was helping Mrs. Granger get into the car. I could see Mr. Granger was already inside but he was just staring out the window on the other side, and this lady, I don’t know, maybe it was her sister or friend or whatever, she was trying to get Mrs. Granger to pick up her feet and get them in the car so she could close the door. But she wouldn’t.”

  Rachel looked into my eyes, like she was searching for answers there. “It was like she had forgotten how to move. She was holding on to this other lady’s arms and her face was … Clare, it was so weird, it was like it was sinking in, her eyes were all weird and staring and her mouth—her lipstick had all come off and she was kind of making this moaning sound with her lips pressed together. It was like her face was just going to collapse or something. Honestly, I can’t remember anything after that, until later when we went over to Victoria’s house and her mom was trying to get us to talk about our feelings but her dad told her just to order pizza. It was okay, later, I just pretended everything was fine. A couple of the kids had younger brothers and sisters who were in Dillon’s class, and they were talking about remembering him. I stayed out of it, I sat by myself and listened.

  “But I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs. Granger had looked like. I tried to talk to my mom about it but she said the only way we were going to put it behind us was to treat it like it never happened. She said after a while it would be like it really didn’t happen. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Amanda wouldn’t answer my texts, and at school she didn’t talk to me. I couldn’t sleep, I cut school a couple times … One day I just went over there. To the Grangers’ house. I thought—I thought she had a right to know. And I also thought—I mean, it felt like I was never going to sleep again. Not unless I explained it to her. I just didn’t want her wondering how Dillon had managed to go through that break in the guardrail, I kept imagining her lying awake trying to picture how it had happened. I thought … I know this probably sounds crazy, but I thought she might have some peace if she knew it wasn’t his fault. That none of it was his fault.”

  She hugged herself, shivering in the cold air.

  “What did she say?” I asked, afraid of the answer. “When you told her about Amanda and you, what did she say?”

  “She …” Rachel bit her lip and stared past me, out at the ocean. “She didn’t say anything for a while. She started crying. She was making these sounds like … like I never heard anyone make before. I started crying too, and she told me, she told me …” Sobs wracked Rachel’s body as I put my arms around her and hugged her. She felt so insubstantial, so light. “She pushed me toward the front door and I couldn’t stop crying. She said, ‘You’ve taken everything from us. Dillon was our everything.
’ ”

  “But—Rachel. She didn’t come right out and threaten Amanda, right? She didn’t say, like, ‘We’re going to get her’ or anything like that, did she?”

  Rachel pulled away from me, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

  “No, not exactly,” she admitted.

  “And how does she act around you now?”

  “Like she always does—super nice all the time. But that doesn’t mean anything. She could have told Mr. Granger, and then he went after Amanda. She might not even know he did it.”

  “Don’t you think she’d be suspicious? If all of a sudden Amanda disappeared after she told him?”

  “Maybe … maybe they decided together. Or maybe she just wants to be in denial about it. I don’t know.”

  “Rachel, I still think it’s a stretch. The police think it was a stranger—”

  “No.” Rachel shook her head. With her hair glinting gold in the sun and bringing out her blue eyes, she looked like herself again. “No. It was him. And ever since then, I’ve known he was watching me. Waiting.”

  “Is that the real reason you guys are leaving town tonight?”

  Rachel nodded, her hair covering half her face. “Mom told Dad we ought to get out of town because the festival was going to be crazy. She made the hotel reservations ages ago. He has no idea what’s really going on. I mean, it’s like this secret she and I have in the family, and I’m not allowed to ever bring it up, even with her.” Her voice quaked as she added, “I hate that, Clare. I hate having secrets in the family. It makes me feel really …”

  I knew what she was going to say even before the wind took her final whispered word and carried it away. I knew because I’d felt it too, felt it so deep it was like it was a part of me, in my blood, lodged in my bones.

  “Alone.”

  Rachel had to get home to finish her packing, and I was glad her parents were both home, getting ready for the trip. I didn’t want her to be alone.

  She seemed fine when she dropped me off. Rachel had always had an uncanny ability to switch from one mood to another. I’d always thought she was just really good at keeping her feelings pushed down and locked away. Now I knew better. She was more fragile than most people would ever know.