A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  Owen’s story was missing a key element that had featured in both Danny’s and Rebecca’s—the part where they didn’t believe her, didn’t think she was serious. Owen had known how much she meant business, and still, he’d done nothing to stop her.

  “You’re lying,” I said. “You didn’t think she was okay.”

  “I wanted to believe it, all right? And I thought she was wrong about finding someone who would do it.”

  “How did you know Silas wouldn’t?”

  Owen shook his head. “He liked her too much. He wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.”

  “Not even if he thought he was doing her a favor?”

  “What, you think Silas did it now?”

  “We just agreed that he’s insane. How do you know what he would or wouldn’t do?”

  “Silas may be crazy, but he wouldn’t take that kind of risk unless he had to. He’s been to jail already, I don’t think he’s too keen on going back.”

  “I just—”

  “What?”

  “All summer long, I’ve been trying to figure out why Calder would do it. A fight, a jealous rage, something. I just can’t picture him killing her because she asked him to.” Maybe I just didn’t want to imagine that Betty had been so desperate and unhappy without my knowing. That she’d ask Calder for such a twisted, morbid favor before she’d unburden herself to me.

  “‘An act of mercy.’ That’s what he said after the funeral.”

  My hands were shaking so badly I needed both to pick up my mug. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Owen looked down at the table, scratching a nick in the Formica with a thumbnail. “I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied until you had the whole story. About the overdose, about me and Betty sleeping together. I didn’t want to hurt you any worse than you were already hurt.” He stared down at the counter. “I’m sorry, Fin, I really am. For everything. God, every time I look at your face I feel like shit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Bruises fade, O. I’ll be fine. You will be, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, unconvinced. “How?”

  Owen didn’t want any part of saving his own ass, because he didn’t think he deserved to be saved; he was waiting for whatever punishment was coming his way, in the form of Silas or financial ruin or felony charges that would actually stick. He was taking his usual martyrdom to new levels.

  I was still angry and I would be for a long, long time, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave his fate in the hands of Leroy or Silas.

  “Like you said,” I told him as I got up to leave, “you’ll think of something.”

  • • •

  I had promised Serena an actual date, and while a trip to see Caroline in the hospital was likely not what she’d had in mind, she was easily swayed by the promise of dinner and more to follow. As we rode up in the elevator, I told Serena about Leroy shutting down the Halyard.

  “That fits,” she said. “He did the same thing to Jack, you know, because he thought Jack was too old for Caroline. Leroy sicced inspectors on the Emersons’ business, had their permits held up, everything he could think of.”

  “Is that why they broke up?”

  She shook her head, lips pursed with frustration. “He wouldn’t say exactly why it ended, or who ended it. But I got the impression all that stuff with Leroy came later. After they were already broken up. That’s all he could tell me at the reception.”

  When we got off at Caroline’s floor, Serena agreed to stay outside the room and keep an eye out for any of the Millers.

  I wasn’t prepared for the girl in the hospital bed. Caroline’s nose was a broken, swollen mess, and the bruises around her eyes were black and purple. Her hair was so greasy it didn’t even look blonde anymore. There were a couple of bouquets of flowers around her room, although not as many as I thought there’d be. Her right leg was in a cast that I stared at a little too long.

  “It was crushed,” she said matter-of-factly, “underneath the steering column.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “How are you feeling?”

  She held up her morphine button. “Very little.” Her voice was hoarse and scratchy.

  “I’m surprised they let you have one of those things.”

  “I think they figure if I die, it won’t matter. If I live, it’s off to rehab. I haven’t decided which way I want it to go yet.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Can you imagine a Miller in group therapy?” She snorted. “We’re WASPs from Maine. We don’t talk about our feelings.”

  She had a point. “I saw your brother. He said you were asking for me.”

  “I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”

  “It’s okay. You would have been there if you could. Just worry about getting better.” I sat in the chair next to her bed. “Jack came.”

  She pushed the morphine button.

  “He says hi, and get well soon. And that he’s sorry.”

  Caroline took a deep breath and looked away. “Have you seen her yet?”

  “Seen who?”

  “Betty.”

  “Seen her?” I asked, confused. “How would I have seen her?”

  “Shelly was here before. She said they hiked up to the grave after dark and saw Betty’s ghost.”

  “Shelly is a lying piece of shit.” I got up and paced over to the window. There was a vase full of lilies on the sill, and I fingered the creamy white edge of a petal that was just beginning to wilt.

  “I know.” Caroline adjusted herself in her bed. “I was kind of hoping, I guess. For a little piece of Betty to still be around. I figured if she’d show herself to anyone, it would be you.”

  “Well, she hasn’t yet. If she is here somewhere, I don’t know what she’s waiting for.”

  “What happened to your face?” she asked bluntly.

  “I got beat up by a drug dealer,” I replied. I couldn’t help but enjoy the irony a little bit. My father had refused to raise me in unsavory New York City, and yet it was small-town Maine where I’d gotten wrapped up with an unstable criminal.

  “Owen did that?”

  “Not Owen. His dealer.”

  Her eyes widened. “Silas?”

  “You know Silas?”

  “It’s a small town. What’d you do to piss him off?”

  “Nothing really. He just did it to get at Owen.”

  “Poor Owen.” Caroline shook her head. “Seems like everyone’s got it in for him these days.”

  “It’s definitely starting to feel that way.”

  “You have to be careful, Finley,” Caroline said, her tone abruptly serious. “My dad and Calder, they’re starting to come apart. How much longer are you supposed to be here?”

  “About three weeks.”

  “Why wait? Why not just leave now?”

  It was a valid question. Betty’s body had been found; I knew who had killed her, and I knew why he’d done it, and after his display at the funeral I knew other people were finally starting to wonder about Calder. Maybe the drug overdose story wouldn’t take; maybe the police would investigate for real; maybe Calder would have a nervous breakdown and confess, again. I wasn’t sure what else I could hope to accomplish in Williston, but suddenly the idea of leaving Serena and Owen and even Caroline seemed impossible. I hadn’t been around when Betty had unraveled but I was here now, and the least I could do was stick it out until the shit storm I’d helped create had passed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just not ready to go yet.”

  “If I were you I wouldn’t hang around too long. God, you’re so loyal. You’re like a character on television. What are you trying to do, defend her honor? Even she didn’t care. She couldn’t be bothered. You’re taking punches for Owen. Bringi
ng me messages from Jack. Maybe you’re just getting in the way. Did you ever think of that?” She clicked her button for emphasis.

  “Is your brother friends with Silas?”

  “Silas doesn’t have friends. He has minions, and people who listen to his bullshit so they can score.”

  “And which of those categories does Calder fall into?”

  Caroline sat up in her bed, leaning toward me, her eyes bright and glassy but suddenly very lucid. “Let’s make a deal. I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “If I die,” she said, “you’ll leave my brother alone. Actually, no. If I die, you leave, period. I don’t even want you sticking around for the funeral. You catch the next bus back to New York after they call time of death.”

  “Jesus, Caroline.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Okay, okay. I promise. And if you live?”

  She pushed the morphine button again and sank back into her pillows. “I’ll tell you everything I know about what happened that night.”

  • • •

  Serena was waiting in the hallway. She linked her arm through mine and steered me toward the elevators.

  “How did that go?” she asked. “How’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know. Okay, I guess. Something about that girl really freaks me out.”

  “Are you too freaked out for dinner now?”

  Honestly, the last thing I felt like doing was sitting in a restaurant, but I had promised. “No, let’s do this,” I said, hitting the down button with what I hoped was a sufficient amount of enthusiasm.

  We waited, Serena’s arm snaking around my hips, and I tried to keep my body from stiffening at her touch, which normally thrilled me no end. Something was off today, even more than usual. I wasn’t thinking about dinner, or what Serena might do to me in her car or on the beach afterward. I was already five moves ahead, my mind on Silas and Calder and how long it would be until Caroline was ready to tell me whatever she knew.

  “Whoa,” Serena said, pulling away. “Where did you go, just then?”

  I opened my mouth, prepared to satisfy her with another one of my lies, when the elevator dinged its arrival and the doors slid open to reveal, of all people, Leroy Miller.

  He wasn’t as tall as Calder, but where his son was lanky and slender, Leroy was broad-shouldered and solid; his brown eyes missed nothing, lasering in on me. I met his gaze and instinctually moved closer to Serena, putting myself between the two of them, as if I were trying to protect her. His eyes did not waver, and my dread magnified. It was like he knew everything—every move I’d made since the graduation ceremony, from the moment I’d asked Owen for his knife so I could slash the principal’s tires until now, making some sick deal with Caroline for information about Betty’s death. My father had tried to warn me that I wasn’t as good a liar as I thought, and now, finally, I understood what he meant. My intentions had been transparent from the beginning, and compared to Leroy I was a rank amateur.

  Oh my God, I thought. What the fuck have I done?

  “Hello, Finley,” Leroy said. He held the elevator doors open, not once taking his eyes off me. “Were you here to visit Caroline?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “That’s very kind of you. She seems a little better today. We’re cautiously optimistic.”

  “That’s good. It was good to see her.”

  “I won’t keep you. Maybe I’ll see you at the softball game later?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Have a nice night. Drive safely,” he said, and smoothly stepped out of our way.

  Serena and I got into the elevator. He turned to look at me, smiling as the doors closed. I slumped against the wall.

  “Jesus,” Serena said.

  I couldn’t speak. I felt sick.

  “Okay,” I finally said when we got down to the lobby. “Now I might be too freaked out for dinner.”

  • • •

  I dropped Serena off at her house with a promise that I’d call her later, and made a quick stop to use a pay phone to call Emily.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said when she answered.

  “What?”

  “Is there anybody in the police department you still trust? Maybe someone who worked for you when you were still sheriff?”

  She paused warily. “What’s this about, Finley?”

  “I just want to know. If I had information about something, who could I tell?”

  “Whatever you’re thinking about doing, don’t do it. Talk to me, and I’ll try to help.”

  “If you could help, you would have done it already. Just give me a name.”

  Emily sighed angrily into the phone. “Fine. Here.” She rattled off a number that I scribbled on my hand with a Sharpie. “Make sure you talk to Officer Hanlon. He’s clean.”

  “Thank you.”

  • • •

  While the rest of the town was at the softball game, I went back to Williston High, letting myself in with Serena’s master key. I padded through the hallways silently in my Chucks, afraid to turn on my flashlight.

  We had hidden Owen’s stash in a locker tucked in a corner on the first floor, wrapped in a pile of old clothes. I stuffed the whole thing into my messenger bag. My knees popped as I stood up again, rearranging the bag across my body and taking a deep breath. It had been well over a month since the fire, but I still thought I could smell it, that acrid scent burning the back of my throat. I followed it toward the theater.

  The repairs hadn’t started yet, and the damage was still evident. I stood at the back of the house and looked at the stage where Betty had so loved performing.

  If she were anywhere, I reasoned, she would be here. Not at the beach where she had probably died, not lingering on Main Street in front of the trader, not up on the hillside where someone had buried her. She would be here, in the theater, the place she loved most.

  Her love affair with the stage hadn’t actually begun with acting; her parents had signed her up for ballet lessons in grade school, which she’d dutifully attended despite her middling aptitude. Her outsized personality was a lousy fit for a potential ballerina; she lacked the precision, the economy of movement, that would have made her great.

  But the same outsized personality that made her a lousy fit for a corps de ballet made her a star attraction. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. I was biased, of course, but I remembered every recital, watching her clumsy pirouettes, her loose and sweeping jetés, the way she covered the stage as if she was struggling to contain a wild magic she’d been born with, something bigger than her that she hadn’t yet learned to tame. After those performances, I would rush backstage to help her remove her bobby pins until she could free her long, blonde hair from the bun that had been threatening to come undone all night. Covered in sweat, she’d take off her ballet slippers with trembling fingers while I detailed all the highlights of her performance and she countered with a litany of her mistakes.

  Then, the summer before I left for New York—the summer we discovered the classic movie channel—Betty found her true calling, like a terrier laying eyes on its first rodent and understanding all at once not only that it has a special purpose on this earth, but what that special purpose is.

  She quit dance immediately and practiced monologues and facial expressions. We played a game where she would cover her face up to the bridge of her nose—she used a marabou hand fan—and I would have to guess what emotion she was trying to communicate through her eyes alone. I don’t know if it was her talent or our connection, but I was almost never wrong. We reversed roles a few times, but Betty never guessed correctly, and always gave up after one or two tries.

  “Pissed,” she would say. “You just look pissed.”

  I’d never made it up to Williston to see her in one of the school plays, some
thing else I could add to the list of things I felt endlessly shitty about, but I could picture her up there perfectly, even with the curtains gone and that big black scorch mark spread out across the stage. Costumed, made up, pretending to be somebody else. Who had Betty wanted to be? Had she really been ready to die that day, when she asked Danny to push her from the catwalk to the unforgiving floor thirty feet below?

  What about that night with Calder? How had she convinced him to do it? Had she gone along with it right until the end? Had she changed her mind during those last moments, decided when it was too late that she wanted to live after all, when she was pinned under the water and Calder could have misconstrued any struggle as the grim, final reflex of her body crying out for oxygen, instead of a capricious girl having a desperate change of heart?

  Is this really what she wanted?

  I needed so badly to feel her there. But as per my usual, I felt nothing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

  ONLY AS I was creeping through the woods toward Silas’s house did I start to wonder if I should have waited until morning. While it had seemed prudent to attempt this mission under cover of darkness, in the moment I realized that Silas was likely a nocturnal creature who would probably have slept through my visit if I’d had the good sense to make it in the daytime.

  I could have aborted, turned around and gone home, or to the softball game, or to Charlie’s, but instead I pressed on, over a carpet of damp leaves that had been beaten into the mud by all the rain. Under my hoodie and T-shirt I was wearing, ridiculously, Betty’s elbow-length opera gloves, the same pair I had taken from the school with the rest of her belongings—they were the only gloves I’d been able to find.

  The weather had cleared again, so beyond the canopy of trees the moon was out, guiding my way. I tried to keep my breathing slow and even and quiet, eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t stumble and make too much noise. I was approaching the property from the opposite side of the sweat lodge, so if Silas were holding one of his bizarre, culture-appropriating rituals tonight he would be at a safe distance from the house and the wigwam. My hope was that the brief respite from the summer’s endless rain meant he would be off by his fire pit, heating rocks and calling the four corners with his cronies.