A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

On the other side of the sweat lodge Serena started to retch.

  I checked Calder’s pulse with trembling fingers—it was fast, erratic, but still there. “He’s unconscious, but I can’t wake him up.” I was dangerously close to passing out myself. My eyes closed and I shook myself awake. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Let him die,” Serena said, wiping her mouth with her wrist.

  “You said we should all be punished,” Silas said to me. “Maybe this is how it happens.”

  “No fucking way,” I said.

  Owen tried to stand up but his legs collapsed beneath him. I looked at him across the shadows, his sorrowful face slack, softened, once again the boy I’d grown up with. I knew what he was thinking about—who would take care of his parents, what would happen to the diner, all the books he’d never read. I implored him with my eyes—Just try again. He nodded, knowing what I needed him to do, smarter than I’d ever be, and crawled toward the door. Silas turned, startled and distracted.

  “Sit the fuck down, man.” The knife gleamed in his hand, outstretched in Owen’s direction.

  Hunched over, I hobbled to the pit of rocks in slow motion. Silas had his back to me just long enough; his focus was on Owen, and as Silas started to close the gap between them I thought of Snapdragon, how afraid I had been, and I realized I’d never actually been afraid before, never known fear in my life until now. I knew it was going to hurt; I could only hope the blues I’d taken earlier would mask the worst of it, and if I was lucky I wouldn’t have permanent nerve damage.

  I grabbed a rock the size of a softball from the top of the pit. It seared the skin on my palms and filled the lodge with the scent of scorched flesh. I cried out, a guttural, inhuman sound, and for once my utter lack of self-preservation worked in my favor—every part of my body was telling me to let go, but I didn’t. And when Silas turned my way I swung my arms like a baseball bat, just like Owen had taught me, and caught him in the temple with a deeply satisfying crack that I still hear sometimes in my dreams. He slumped over backward, a bemused look of surprise on his face, the knife slipping from his hand and skidding across the floor, and I dropped the stone, falling to my knees and bending over my ruined hands, the pain worsening with every passing second.

  “Owen?” I cried out in the darkness. “Serena?”

  “I think Serena passed out, too,” Owen said. On hands and knees, he made his way to the door and opened the flap, letting in a rush of cool air that I inhaled greedily. I was horrified to see the sky was lightening; we’d been in the sweat lodge all night.

  “It hurts so bad, O,” I managed.

  “We’re going to be okay, Fin. I’ll go get help.”

  “You can’t even stand up.”

  “I can do it. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m so tired,” I said, sobbing.

  He put my head on his lap and stroked my hair. “You have to stay awake.”

  “I really don’t think I can.”

  Owen slapped my face. “Goddammit,” he said, “I’m not going to let you die, too.”

  Maybe this was how Betty felt. Maybe this was what Calder had been talking about—standing on the edge of the precipice and realizing there truly is nothing to stop you from allowing yourself to fall. You could just let go.

  Somewhere outside the lodge there was a rustling in the trees, faint enough at first that I thought it was the wind. But it grew stronger, and louder, and then there were footsteps and voices, and suddenly Emily was there, crouched in the doorway, blocking the light and gloriously backlit by the rising sun.

  “In here!” she shouted over her shoulder to whoever was on the path behind her.

  Inside, she surveyed the damage—Silas unconscious and bleeding, Calder and Serena passed out around the rock pit, Owen cradling me in his lap as the skin blistered on my blackened hands. To her credit, she didn’t ask us if we were okay. “Just hang on, guys.”

  “One of these days,” I said to her, “you’ll have to tell me how it feels to be right all the time.”

  She crouched down to get a better look at my palms, and ruefully shook her head. “Not nearly as good as you’d think.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

  I WOKE UP in the hospital with my hands wrapped in bandages and my very own morphine drip. Dad was there, slumped in a hard plastic chair, his feet crossed at the ankles and his hands folded across his belly. For a second I thought he was asleep, but when he saw me open my eyes he scooted his chair closer, leaning over and kissing me on the forehead.

  “Hey, girl,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Is he dead?” I asked. I wasn’t even sure who I meant.

  “Nobody’s dead.”

  I didn’t know if I was relieved or not. “Serena?”

  “She’s down the hall. Owen and Calder, too. You’re all being treated for dehydration. Severe dehydration. The doctor said if you’d been in there for much longer, you could have gone into organ failure.” Dad paused. “Silas is in surgery.”

  “I need to talk to Emily.”

  “Look, whatever happened up there, you can tell me. You’re not in any trouble yet, as far as I know.”

  “Please,” I said. “Just find Emily.”

  • • •

  He returned with her a few minutes later, brought her into my room, and excused himself.

  “Close the door,” I said. My throat was still dry, my voice raspy. I felt like I’d never not be thirsty again.

  “I shouldn’t even be talking to you,” she said. “Your father’s been lying to the police, telling them you’re still unconscious, and then he snuck me back here.”

  “I needed to talk to you first. How did you find us?”

  “It wasn’t that hard, Finley. Your father called me when you didn’t come home, and he couldn’t get hold of Owen or Serena, and after you and I talked, I had a feeling you would try to do something stupid. So I got in touch with Officer Hanlon, told him to meet me at Silas’s property.”

  “And?”

  “We found the drugs, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t know if you were the one who planted them in his house or not, but if you did, you did a decent job keeping your prints off the bag. That was clever, too, with the cereal box.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Practice that line, Finley. You’re going to be saying it a lot in the next couple of weeks. Do me a favor. Don’t say a word to the police until you’ve got a lawyer.”

  “What about Calder? He admitted everything. He told us all he killed Betty.”

  “While you were being held hostage in a sweat lodge? Hallucinating, dehydrated, going in and out of consciousness? It won’t hold up, Finley. Not for a second.”

  “So that’s it?” I shouted. “He just goes free? Again?”

  She sat down in the chair Dad had vacated, hands in her pockets, weary and resigned, the Shepard family’s signature look. “That’s it. For now.”

  I swept my arm across the bedside tray table, knocking the remains of my last meal and a plastic pitcher of water to the floor. If my hands hadn’t been bandaged I would have started throwing things. I was filled with an outsized rage and there was no place for it to go. Instead of hurling the vase of flowers Rebecca had sent me at the wall so I could savor the cathartic sound of glass breaking, I broke down into guttural, violent sobs.

  It had all been for nothing. All of it. Back in June, Owen had been right. You can slash all the tires and set all the fires you want and she’ll still be dead and he’ll still be going to college in September. They had all been right, Owen and Emily and my father, and still I had stormed into Williston arrogant enough to believe I could give Betty justice. But all of it—the arson, the libel, the breaking and entering, all that sneaking around in the middle of the night and the amateur detective bullshit and hijacking the police blotter, near
ly suffocating to death and permanently scarring my own body—it had all been for nothing.

  Emily, bless her heart, made no move to comfort me. She simply waited until I had worn myself out. I swiped at my cheeks clumsily with my gauze-mittened hands.

  “How’s Owen?” I finally asked.

  “He’ll be okay, I think. Silas is in some pretty serious trouble, once he makes it out of surgery. His brain was hemorrhaging. You really nailed him good, Finley.”

  I looked down at the bandages covering my ruined hands and tried to remember reaching into the pit of smoldering rocks. “Yeah, but I’ll never play the piano again.”

  Emily erupted in an unexpected laugh. “Always the smartass.”

  “But Owen—”

  “Owen doesn’t have to worry about Silas anymore. And neither do you.”

  Owen would be okay. Silas would go to jail. And Calder—they’d pump him full of fluids, keep him overnight for observation, and send him on his way. Was I satisfied yet? Had we all been punished enough?

  I took a shaky breath. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who do you think buried Betty in the woods?”

  Emily shook her head. “You know I can’t talk about that.”

  “But it wasn’t in the confession. If he’d told you where she was buried, you’d have dug her up, inadmissible or not. You wouldn’t have let her rot there all winter long. I know he couldn’t have buried her alone.”

  “I’m not going to just speculate wildly—”

  I held up my bandaged hands and cocked my head so she could see the bruise on my temple where Silas had hit me. “I almost died last night trying to find out what happened to her. I think I’ve earned the right to a little speculation.”

  Emily was quiet for a moment, choosing her words carefully. “Let me put it this way. Who would you have asked? Think about it, think about it hard. You loved Betty, you trusted her, right? But would you have trusted her with something like that? How about Owen? With everything he has to lose—the diner, his parents—when his back is against the wall, could you count on him to keep your secret? You and Serena made a hell of a mess together this summer, but you’ve barely known her for two months.” She narrowed her eyes. “So say it happened to you. It’s the middle of the night, you’ve got a dead body on your hands. What would you do, if you weren’t you? If you were Calder?”

  I closed my eyes and once more conjured the scene I’d played out so many times—the moonlit beach, Betty’s red lips a chilly blue—but now I tried to imagine it from Calder’s point of view. What happened next.

  Maybe he panicked for a moment before he realized he could make up any story he wanted—it was an accident, she swam out too far, he tried to stop her, whatever. He didn’t have to tell the truth; we never have to tell the truth. But maybe Calder wasn’t confident in his ability to sell the lie, which he shouldn’t have been, considering he broke down in Emily’s interrogation room days later. So he needed to try it out on someone, someone he could trust to help him either way, someone who cared more about him—cared more about protecting him—than anything else. And lucky for Calder, that same person had the power to do it.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “You think Leroy buried her.”

  “I never said that,” Emily replied, giving me a stony, level stare. “I never said that at all.” She stood up and came closer to the bed, idly glancing over the IV bag steadily dripping fluids into my arm. “But look at what you were willing to do for Betty, even after she was gone. It’s not hard to imagine what a father might do for his son, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  Emily leaned over me, her face softening for the first time I could recall that summer. “You’ve done enough, Finley. No one could have tried harder. But no more, you understand?”

  To my utter humiliation, my eyes filled with tears and my chin quivered. “But I failed.”

  “We all fail. We all suffer. You’ve done enough damage, and I don’t mean to Williston, or Silas, or the Millers. Go back to New York. Go to college. Hang her picture in your dorm room, and when your new friends ask about her, tell them who she was.” She got up and strode toward the doorway.

  “And Finley?” She stopped and turned back to look at me, all the compassion erased from her features. “Don’t come back next summer.”

  I pressed the button on my morphine drip and closed my eyes.

  • • •

  Later, there was a knock on the door and I looked up expecting to see Serena or Owen or the sheriff, but it was just one of the nurses, telling me I had a visitor. Before I could answer, she wheeled in Caroline.

  “I’ll leave you girls alone for a few minutes,” the nurse said.

  “You look a lot better,” I told Caroline.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You look like shit.”

  “So it seems like you’re going to live,” I said.

  “I guess so,” she said, not sounding thrilled by the prospect. “When I get out of here, they’re sending me straight to rehab. Some place in Arizona, with horses and shit.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

  “How are your hands?”

  “Pretty fucked up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “So it sort of sounds like you saved my brother’s life.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it,” I said.

  “I guess a promise is a promise, then?”

  “Wait,” I said, struggling to sit up a little straighter in bed. “Let’s do this the other way. Why don’t I tell you everything I know about what happened that night?”

  A wary look crossed her face, and Caroline narrowed her eyes. “Okay . . . we can try it that way.”

  I steeled myself, and looked straight at her. “Betty had asked Calder to kill her weeks before. He said no, and she kept asking, and when he realized she wasn’t going to drop it, he finally agreed. Maybe he never thought he’d go through with it, maybe he thought she’d change her mind at the last minute, decide she wanted to live after all. Sometimes I picture it like this fucked-up game of chicken, with neither one of them wanting to back out. So he did it”—I saw a fleeting expression cross her face—“and then he panicked. He put her body in the trunk of his car, drove home, and asked your dad what to do. I think Calder probably lied at first, said it was an accident or something, but your dad’s smart, and I doubt he ever thought it was that simple. So they buried Betty in the woods. But when she went missing, Emily came after Calder, got him alone in that interrogation room somehow, and he cracked. It didn’t take much. I wonder if your dad knew that would happen—knew Calder would confess, knew it would be inadmissible. Maybe he just wanted to get that part over with. How am I doing so far?”

  Caroline said nothing.

  “And then it all just seemed to go away, except it didn’t. Calder coming apart, that I can understand. He’s the one who did it, after all. But you? You went way down some dark rabbit hole. Maybe it’s knowing that your brother killed someone and your father helped him get away with it.” I coolly leveled my gaze at her. “But then I saw Jack Emerson hurl a fastball into Calder’s gut.”

  Her face tightened at the mention of his name. “What does any of this have to do with Jack?”

  “At the end of last spring, Betty got in trouble with the cops. They found her parked in a car with some older guy, and no one ever said who it was.”

  “So? It was probably Owen.”

  I shook my head. “They didn’t start fucking until after the summer. I think she was in that car with your old boyfriend Jack. No one ever knew who it was, but Calder knew, because he’s Leroy Miller’s son, so he knows everything. And Calder found out, and broke up with Betty, but he didn’t know Jack was your boyfriend, did he? Because Jack was too old for you, and you were try
ing to keep it a secret. But there are no secrets in a small town, are there?”

  Caroline sat up straighter in her wheelchair. “You’re close, Finley, but you’re not quite there. I found out about Jack and Betty first. Jack told me himself. He said he didn’t want me to hear about it through the rumor mill. He said he was sorry, he wanted me to forgive him.

  “But I wanted everyone to be just as miserable as I was.

  “I turned around and told my father everything, and I told Calder, too. I knew Dad would go after the Emersons’ business, and that Calder would break up with Betty. She got sent off to church camp, and when she came back she wasn’t the same. I turned everyone against her. I made sure she didn’t get to play Ophelia. I watched her fall apart. And I was glad. At least at first. But then she disappeared, and I knew exactly who was to blame. And I did it all out of spite.”

  “But, Caroline, you’re not the one who killed her.”

  “Maybe not. But maybe if I’d forgiven her, she’d still be alive.”

  “It sounds like you’ll have plenty to talk about in therapy,” I said.

  “Watch it with that thing,” she said, nodding to the morphine button in my hand. “You don’t want to end up my roommate in Arizona.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I can’t stand horses.”

  Caroline scratched at her leg, trying to get at the skin under the cast. “You’re lucky you didn’t kill Silas, you know.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I just think it’s better, for you, I mean. I think there’s certain things about ourselves we’re better off not knowing. What if you’d done it, and you’d liked it? What would you do then?”

  “If I’d done it, it would have been in self-defense.”

  “Why didn’t you try to kill Calder in there? You could have done it, made up any story you wanted.”

  I didn’t know how to explain it to her, that I didn’t want to learn whatever Calder had learned because he had drowned Betty. That getting away with murder might be as terrifying as going to prison for it—seeing the world as a place where that could happen, learning the exact delicacy of the framework that holds all of it together.