A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  “Look,” Serena said, nodding at a huddle of kids farther up the trail. Rebecca was among them, and Shelly, and some others that I remembered from Shelly’s party. Rebecca was crying, her face red and crumpled. She had one hand pressed firmly over her mouth, as if she could hold the tears back that way. Her shoulders heaved with the effort. Then, as if she felt me staring, she looked over. She came down the path slowly, dragging her feet through the dirt.

  “Finley,” Rebecca said. I hugged her, not knowing what else to do. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe she’s really dead.”

  Serena and I looked at each other coolly while Rebecca wept into my sweatshirt. There were a lot of appropriate reactions to Betty’s body turning up eight months after she’d disappeared, and I was reasonably certain disbelief wasn’t one of them.

  “I know,” I said, rubbing Rebecca’s back. Serena rolled her eyes.

  “I just don’t understand. Who would do something like that?”

  Serena’s irritated expression began transforming into something much more dangerous. Don’t, I mouthed.

  “Maybe now the police will finally be able to figure out what happened,” I said to Rebecca, unsure how I’d been so abruptly tasked with the job of comforting her.

  “I never thought she was serious,” she wailed. “If I thought she really meant it, I would have told somebody.”

  “Meant what?” I said. I stopped rubbing her back and my hands fell to my sides. “What are you talking about?”

  Sniffling, she wiped her eyes with the hem of her shirt, briefly revealing her soft, white belly. Everyone in Williston was so goddamn pale this summer, like they’d all been living in their basements. The sun never came out anymore; the puddles in the driveways never went away; everything smelled damp and rotten and sometimes worse—that fetid stench of decay, as if there were shallow graves like Betty’s all across town, and hers was just the first we had discovered.

  Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe that’s just how it felt. But I looked around and saw how tired everyone seemed—stooped shoulders, puffy, unfocused eyes. To an insomniac, the world always has a slightly surreal quality, and a lot of people had that dazed expression I knew I wore when I couldn’t sleep. They had plenty to worry about, from the lack of tourists to the mold growing in their houses, brought on by the relentless moisture in the air, to the ever-growing popularity of Silas’s pills. Caroline’s accident, Owen’s arrest, and now a dead body in the woods. Or maybe they hoped this would be the end. That if we laid Betty to rest, everything would be just like it had been before.

  “Rebecca,” Serena said, “what do you mean, you never thought she was serious?”

  Rebecca stared at her blankly. “You changed your hair.”

  Before Serena or I could push for an answer again, Shelly and the rest of them arrived.

  “Come on,” Shelly said to Rebecca. “Let’s go to the hospital. Maybe they’ll let us see Caroline.”

  “How is she?” I asked.

  Shelly looked at me suspiciously. “She’s not dead yet.”

  A soft drizzle began then, a mist that seemed to rise up from the ground as much as fall toward it.

  “I can’t believe it’s raining again,” Rebecca said. “I swear it’s like this place is cursed.”

  “Maybe Betty cursed it,” said Serena. “Could you blame her if she had?”

  Shelly snorted. “You’re so fucking clueless. Believe me, Betty got exactly what she wanted.”

  “Really?” I countered, pointing toward the police and the crime scene. “You think this is what she wanted?”

  “I feel so sorry for you two. I really do. She’s been gone all this time and you’re still making her the center of your universe.” Shelly put her hands on her hips and looked at us with sheer disdain. “Do you think she would do the same for you, Finley? What about you, Serena? From what I recall, she barely said hello to you in the hallways—”

  Serena lunged forward and gave her a hard, vicious shove. Shelly stumbled backward and her friends caught her before she went down. I grabbed Serena in a bear hug, ignoring her struggles as I restrained her.

  “Get it together,” I whispered in her ear. “There are cops here, there’s a fucking TV reporter. I don’t want to end up in jail or on the news.”

  And yet, Shelly wasn’t done. “It’s funny how the people who spent the least amount of time with her before she died are the same people who think they knew her best. You two didn’t know shit. You’re a couple of dumb cunts who deserve each other,” Shelly said. She shook her head and started down toward the highway, the rest of her friends following, Rebecca bringing up the rear, giving me a last, sorrowful look over her shoulder before the trail led her around a curve and she disappeared. I kept Serena in my embrace long after they were gone.

  • • •

  I took her back to my house to watch the news. Dad was staying late at the office, trying to get the paper out a couple of days early. If nothing else, I hoped that the day’s grisly discovery would keep Owen’s arrest from ending up in the Messenger. It was hard to imagine anyone giving a shit about that now. As we settled onto the couch, a million random details flitted through my mind—what I would wear to the funeral; whether the medical examiner would find any evidence, something that could miraculously incriminate Calder; would it be raining in the cemetery when we buried her, as it always seemed to be in the movies. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about Silas’s deadline, one day already gone, three to go.

  There was only one thing we learned from watching the news that we hadn’t already known. All the rain that summer had disturbed Betty’s grave, the topsoil slowly washing away while the water level rose underground, until finally some part of her surfaced, and then it was just a matter of time until some poor hiker stumbled across her bones piercing the moist, raw earth. The reporter didn’t identify whoever it was; she just said the sheriff’s department had received an anonymous phone call with the location of the grave. By the time the news aired, the medical examiner had gotten hold of Betty’s dental records and confirmed that it was her. The reporter finished the segment by saying there were no suspects in the murder, but the investigation was ongoing.

  I turned off the television with an angry flick of the remote and slumped against Serena.

  She played with a lock of my hair. “What was she doing in the woods? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I just can’t figure out—” I paused.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been here for a month. Talking to people, snooping around, eavesdropping at Charlie’s and the diner, going through my dad’s old notes and files. And I still have no idea why Calder would kill her. She broke his heart, sure, she slept around, but that was all months before it happened. Everyone says he was avoiding her, and that she was the one who was acting strange. All that shit about Ophelia, not mailing in her NYU application. Whatever.”

  “Are you wondering if he did it at all?” Serena asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. “I’m not. But he must have done it for a reason. If they had a fight and he lost his temper, what were they arguing about? What were they doing together that night in the first place? If they were hanging out again, someone would have known. There’s no secrets in a small town, remember? So what are we missing?”

  “Rebecca knows something. She was about to tell us when Shelly started in.”

  “I need to talk to her again. Get her alone, sometime before the funeral.” I thought about this for a moment, how to catch Rebecca at her most vulnerable, with nobody else around.

  “So,” Serena said, “are you going to tell me what happened to your face?”

  “Silas,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “To get to Owen.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Owen thinks I should leave town. Go back to New York.”


  Serena stiffened. “Is that what you think you should do?”

  “Of course not,” I said, putting my hands on her hips and pulling her close to reassure her I wasn’t going anywhere. “I told him no way. Even before we got the call about Betty.”

  “So what do we do now?” she said, pressing her lips to my collarbone.

  “About Calder?”

  She kissed my neck. “About Silas.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve got something in the works.”

  “Great,” she said, pulling away and rolling her eyes. “Now I’m fucking terrified.”

  “It’s cool,” I said, playing with the crucifix around her neck. “We’ve got God on our side.”

  • • •

  Dad came home late that night, long after Serena had left, and found me lying on the couch in front of the classic movie channel again. This time it was musicals. I was watching The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire was getting his shoes shined in the middle of some weird arcade, and I was leafing through Dad’s notes again, searching for some clue I had overlooked, someone I hadn’t spoken to yet, an unlikely source of information who could tie it all together for me so it would finally make sense. Instead I kept coming back to the unsettling thought that there were still bits and pieces of the story I knew about yet had failed to learn, from Rebecca and Danny and Owen, and I didn’t know how to ask again and get a different response. Maybe the funeral would shake something loose, but in the meantime I was stuck on the couch, riffling through the same legal pad over and over.

  “Hello?” Dad called as he came in the front door. “Finley?”

  “I’m in here,” I yelled back.

  “I’ve been looking for those,” he said, gesturing to the notes in my hand.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “I borrowed them and I was going to put them back, but then I couldn’t get back into the office.”

  “You could have just told me you had them. If you’d asked in the first place, I might have even let you see the file.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, handing over the pad. “Most of it was illegible anyway. Why do you need them now?” I moved my feet so he could sit next to me.

  He sank into the couch and sighed. “There’s a draft in there, that I started—I never ran, you know . . .”

  “The obituary,” I finished for him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Not really. Any news about the funeral?” I asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” he said. “There’ll be a service at the Flynns’ church.”

  “So the medical examiner released her body?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  Dad shook his head. “She didn’t have much to work with.”

  “Cause of death? Did she drown?”

  “They can’t be sure, Fin. I’m sorry.”

  “Did they rule it a homicide?”

  “A possible homicide.”

  “Possible?” I said. “She didn’t bury herself in the fucking woods.”

  “Obviously the circumstances around her death all point to homicide. But—” He paused. “Do you really want to hear this?”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently.

  “There was no head trauma. No broken bones anywhere.”

  “If Calder drowned her, there wouldn’t be.”

  “If she did drown, there would be no way to tell.”

  “She didn’t drown,” I corrected him. “She didn’t swim out too far and get tired. He drowned her. That’s different.”

  “Look,” Dad said, resting his hands on his knees and staring at the television. “The police have a theory about what might have happened. You’re not going to like it, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because I’d rather you hear it from me. I just ask you do your best to not let this send you into some kind of emotional tailspin.”

  “I will make no such promise.”

  He sighed. “The police think it’s possible she may have overdosed on drugs. And that whoever she was with at the time panicked, and hid her, buried her in the woods, because they were too scared to tell anyone. So they tried to make it look like she disappeared.”

  “That is bullshit!” I shouted.

  “Finley—”

  “Please tell me you’re not printing that in the paper.”

  “I don’t have a choice. It’s in the sheriff’s statement. I can’t just leave it out.”

  They’ll believe it if they read about it in the paper, Serena had said.

  “You can’t print that. If you print it, people will think that it’s true.”

  “I’m sorry, I really am.” He tried to rest a sympathetic hand on my ankle.

  I jerked my foot away. “Who do you really think came up with that story? The sheriff, or Leroy Miller?”

  “I know this is not what you wanted to hear. Okay? I understand that. But you’re going to have to accept that we may never know what happened to her. It’s a miracle her body turned up at all, that we even get to know for sure.”

  “What is with this delusional uncertainty?” I yelled. “Calder sat in the fucking police station and told Emily Shepard that he killed Betty. Just because he was only seventeen when he said it doesn’t make it any less true. How is there still room for doubt after something like that?”

  “Because that’s how it works. That’s how the law works. And it’s not for you to decide whether he’s guilty.”

  “Of course he’s guilty!”

  “How do you know, Finley?” he asked me. “How do you know? Because of a confession you never heard? Because of all the evidence they never found? Tell me, what gives you the right to be so certain?”

  It took me a few moments to gather my voice. I realized now that my father had never outright asserted that he was as convinced of Calder’s guilt as I was, but it had never occurred to me that he wasn’t on my side, that he actually thought there was a chance that—“Wait a second,” I said. “Are you saying you think he didn’t do it?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know. That nobody knows. And that it seems more likely than ever that we’ll never know. The funeral might actually be a chance for you to find some closure, and say good-bye, and maybe move on, and stop dwelling on what happened to Betty.”

  “Stop dwelling on it?” I said. “Are you kidding? By tomorrow everyone is going to be saying that Betty died of a drug overdose, because that’s the most convenient story. If the police could prove she’d been killed, Leroy would have come up with a story about a drifter passing through town. What’s next? Maybe he’ll get some witnesses to come forward, and get the whole thing put to bed, and that’ll be the end of it. And next year, when some girl at Bates disappears, what then?”

  “She’s not coming back, Finley. No matter what you do. No matter how angry you get. She’s never coming back.”

  “Somebody buried her,” I said, choking on a sob. “Somebody dug her a grave in the woods and left her there to rot forever. You’re supposed to be a fucking reporter. Aren’t you at least a little bit curious about who it was? Why aren’t you the one out there looking for answers?”

  “Don’t you think I tried that?” he said, gesturing toward the notes I was still clutching in my hand. “If I couldn’t find out what happened to her, what makes you think you’re going to?”

  “I know what happened to her,” I said. “I just don’t know why.”

  The phone rang, the cordless blinking at us furiously from the side table next to the couch. Dad leaned over and picked it up with a sigh of resignation, like he was expecting more bad news.

  “Hello?” he said. “Sure, hang on a second.” He held it out to me. I eyed it suspiciously. I wasn’t expecting bad news, per se, but I certainly wasn’t anticipating anything good.

  “Finley?
” said the weepy voice on the other end.

  “Hey, Rebecca,” I said.

  “Are you busy right now?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Can you come meet me? I need to talk to you.”

  “That’s funny, I need to talk to you, too.”

  • • •

  Rebecca was waiting for me in the playground next to the softball field, sitting silently on one of the swings. I sat down on the swing next to her, the worn rubber curving around my ass, and ran my hands along the rusty chains. The rain had stopped, for the moment, but the clouds hadn’t cleared.

  “Where’s Shelly?” I asked.

  “They were all going back tonight,” Rebecca said. “They wanted to hike back up. Like they might get to see her ghost, like it might be fun or something.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “I don’t want to see her ghost,” she whispered, looking down at her feet.

  “Why not?” I spun around in my seat, twisting the rusty chains as tightly as I could.

  “Have you talked to Danny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he told you.” She met my eyes with what seemed like a great effort.

  “That he thinks he saw her? Yeah.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “Not really.” I shrugged, picking up my feet so the chains unwound and the park whizzed around me in a blur.

  “I do.”

  “Since when do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her, digging my Chucks into the ground to stop myself, kicking up a damp clump of dirt.

  “Did Danny tell you anything else?”

  “No, but I think he knows more than he’s telling.”

  “He does.”

  “What is it, Rebecca? Just tell me already.” I was starting to lose my patience.