Last Things

by Jacqueline West

  Jezz lets out a breath. “Yeah, that’s the other reason we’re here.”

  I throw him a look. “Where’s your pitchfork? In your pocket?”

  Jezz nods, faux serious. “It’s small. It’s a pitchspork, actually. More versatile.”

  When I don’t laugh, he says, “We know you, dude. We know you didn’t have anything to do with Frankie disappearing. And we just wanted to tell you, maybe other people are saying bad things about you, but we’re not. And we’re not buying any of it. We know that if there’s anybody who’s upset about all this, it’s you.” He smacks Patrick lightly on the arm. “Right?”

  “Right,” says Patrick softly.

  “So.” Jezz shuffles his Converse shoes in the gravel. “That’s why we’re here. Moral support or whatever. We were talking about coming out here even before Patrick got the note, but then—yeah. Then we were sure.”

  I get what he’s saying. Jezz was ready to forgive me. Patrick needed another nudge. But here he is.

  I look back down at the wheel because I’m afraid of what my face might be doing. “Thanks, guys,” I hear myself mumble. “Really. Thank you.”

  “And just because Last Things might be on hiatus doesn’t mean we can’t speak to you or anything.”

  “On hiatus?” I swear, my heart actually leaps.

  On hiatus. Not over. Not forever.

  Then I glance at their faces and see what this really means. Jezz’s face says the door is still open, at least for him. Patrick’s face says the door is still shut. And locked. And that maybe there is no door.

  Of course, none of this even matters if I can’t compose or play anymore. I force down a flare of panic.

  “I mean . . .” Jezz looks at Patrick, too. “Never say never. But we can talk about that later. When everything makes sense again.”

  It’s a small step. A better-than-nothing. “Okay,” I say. “Good.”

  We’re all quiet for a minute.

  I frown down at our shoes, my ancient knockoff Dr. Martens, Jezz’s red Converse, Patrick’s scuffed work boots, all of us shuffling in the gravel. And suddenly the craving to jump back into our usual routines is so powerful that it almost knocks me down. I want to talk about music with them. Listen to a new track with them. I’d give pretty much anything I own just to get out our instruments and play.

  But they aren’t my band anymore.

  I still can’t wrap my head around this. It’s like learning that your mom isn’t actually your mom, and that she’ll never be hugging you or helping you with anything again, and she’d really like it if you moved out of her house ASAP.

  “So,” I ask when I can finally talk again, “who do you think left the note?”

  Jezz looks at Patrick. Patrick doesn’t speak. “I don’t know,” Jezz says. “Maybe it was another one of Frankie’s friends or something. Like Will. He’s not a total psycho. Maybe he knew about their plan and wanted to stop it. In a kind of chickenshit way.”

  I nod. “Maybe.”

  Patrick makes a little grunting sound. Jezz and I know exactly what this means. It’s the sound that means Patrick disagrees, but he’s not going to say anything unless we ask him to.

  “What?” I say.

  He lifts one shoulder. “It didn’t look like a guy’s writing.”

  We all think for a second.

  “Anyway.” Jezz rocks on his feet. “Crazy, about some other car being in the river.”

  My heart sinks. “Yeah.”

  “I mean, I don’t think you had anything to do with Frankie or with that, but maybe there’s some kind of connection. I mean, things like this just don’t happen all the time. Not in this little town. Right?”

  I’m starting to feel sick again. “I don’t know.”

  “You know what I think?” Jezz hurries on. “I think there’s something weird happening around here. Around this whole town. I mean, like, bad spirits or something crazy like that. I think it’s affecting all of us.” He nods at my wheel. “I mean, even an ass like Carson Bergdahl wouldn’t normally do something that could kill somebody. And—I’m just saying—you do seem different, dude.” He raises his hands, quickly, placatingly. “Not, like, dangerous different, but like . . . Dude, what was with that song on Saturday night? ‘Devil’s Due’?”

  I focus my eyes on the hood of the Nissan, just to have somewhere else to put them. “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t plan that. I had no idea it was coming. It was like I wasn’t in control of it at all.”

  “Maybe you’re epileptic,” says Patrick, out of nowhere.

  Jezz blinks at him. “What?”

  “Like that guy from Joy Division. He’d have seizures onstage and stuff. Curtis Ian.”

  “Ian Curtis,” corrects Jezz. “You think Anders has seizures?”

  “Maybe.” Patrick raises his shoulders. “Just saying.”

  “Yeah,” I say softly. “I don’t think that’s it. But maybe.”

  “I think it’s something else.” Jezz looks weirdly thoughtful. “Okay. Maybe it’s nothing supernatural or whatever. Maybe it’s just some crazy local weirdo.”

  “Like that stalker who was just hanging out in the middle of your road,” says Patrick softly.

  The skin on the backs of my arms goes cold.

  He saw her, too. So she was really there. That’s something, I guess. Something strange.

  I shake my head a little harder than I need to. “She’s weird, but she’s harmless. She actually saved Goblin. He was stuck in some old basement in the woods all weekend. She brought him back.”

  The guys are mute for a second. Then Patrick says, “Or maybe she kidnapped him.”

  I turn toward him. “What?”

  “So she could return him.” Patrick’s voice is measured. “Maybe she loosened the bolts on your wheel and then left me the note. So she could save you herself.”

  The fragments of these ideas whirl around in my brain, slashing through everything else. Nothing holds together anymore. Nothing makes sense. “Jesus,” I breathe. “That’s . . . messed up.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” Patrick stares straight into my eyes. “Like her aunt. Like her.”

  “Dude,” Jezz jumps in. “You know what I heard?” He leans closer, like there’s anyone nearby to overhear. “There was this series of fires around town back in the eighties, barns and sheds and other places, mostly out in the woods, and everybody knew Mae Malcolm did it. But there, like, wasn’t enough evidence to convict her.”

  I frown. “Then how does everybody know she did it?”

  “I don’t know.” Jezz raises his hands again. “I’m just saying. Everybody knew.”

  We go quiet, staring at the woods all around us.

  I step back into the garage to hang the wrench in its spot. I try to walk smoothly and slowly, but my heart is hammering in my ribs.

  I can’t avoid this anymore. There are too many pieces, too many signs.

  You’re going to risk losing everything? It was a threat. I knew it was. Oh, Anders. You are going to be so, so sorry. . . .

  I need to talk to Flynn.

  I take a stumbling step toward the Nissan. “I’ve got to get to the studio. But thanks again for coming here, guys. I mean it. Thanks.”

  They both nod. Jezz even reaches out and clasps me on the shoulder. “We’ve got your back,” he says. “You know that.”

  “I’ll keep you posted if anything happens.” I’m trying too hard to sound normal. I just sound stupid instead. “I’d better get to my lesson.”

  I climb into the car and head out.

  When I glance into the rearview mirror, the guys are still standing there, watching me. Then the road twists, and the dark blur of the trees comes between us, and they’re gone.

  Thea

  My father used to bring me stones.

  Nearly every day he’d come home from repairing a boat somewhere and in his pocket there would be a stone, smooth and water polished, from whatever river or lake he’d been near.

  “Bapti
zed in the waters of the River Jordan,” he’d say. Because all rivers are one river, really. Every river, every raindrop, all flowing to the sea.

  It took time for me to see the power in them. In the flowing water and in the stones. But then I started to build the circles. Circles of river-washed stones, around my bed, around our house, around the scrubby edges of whatever yard was temporarily ours.

  As long as the circle was whole, we were safe. The darkness couldn’t reach inside.

  My father didn’t approve. He thought it was pagan. Witchy. More magical than holy. But I know the truth: there’s not much difference.

  My father’s always been this way. He argues with Aunt Mae about her cards and her whiskey and her Bible scrying, when she asks the book a question and opens it to a random passage. He argues with me. At me.

  I understand. He isn’t one of us.

  He’s always on the lookout for the things he calls evil. He sees them on TV. In music. In other peoples’ churches. But he can’t see what we see. The places where the evil slides in. The spots where the world is a little too thin and too dark and too full of hiding places.

  My father and I used to move around a lot, river to lake to river. In each new spot he would find a church and then slowly begin to disagree with the pastor’s way of doing things until he’d launched a whole holy war in his mind. Then he’d go off on his long nights, drinking, preaching, standing thigh deep in the river. Every now and then he’d get a warning or a fine from the police. Public intoxication. Disturbing the peace. A few times something larger happened, something that might have tied him to some old barn or building that had suddenly burned down, and we’d leave town with the smell of smoke still billowing behind us.

  Sometimes I had to leave before my own work was done.

  I lost some. The ones I couldn’t keep inside the circles. The ones who were already half gone.

  It just made me work harder.

  My father had been gone on a weeklong bender/baptizing spree when I learned about Anders, up near Aunt Mae’s place in Greenwood. Mae had been seeing things, hearing things. But she couldn’t go out and do the work herself—a fragile old woman lurking around a high school, hanging out at a noisy coffeehouse.

  She called us. Spoke to my father. Told a white lie about her health to him and the truth to me. We all decided I should move in with her. Back home. If the Malcolms can be said to have a home.

  Aunt Mae and my father were born just outside Greenwood. The family has lived in the area longer than anyone can trace—in part because they had to change names and homes so many times. My ancestors had a gift for getting run out of town. When someone is present wherever and whenever bad things happen, always turning up stained with blood or ash, always arriving too promptly for coincidence, people decide one of two things. Either that someone has a gift for helping, always being in the right place at the right time. Or that someone is behind the bad things themselves.

  I know what people usually choose.

  Still, Aunt Mae has stayed in Greenwood, keeping to herself in that house outside of town, because she knows she’s needed here. Darkness takes whatever space it’s given.

  Small towns. Back roads. Deep forests.

  The woods outside Greenwood have given it plenty of space.

  Maybe I’ll try to explain this to Frankie later tonight. I’ve told her about the searches, all the hundreds of people lining up to comb the woods.

  It’s good for her to know that people are looking. To think that they’re getting closer to finding her. It keeps her from getting desperate. From trying to break out on her own.

  I visit the root cellar twice a day. Make sure her ropes are secure. That she has water and enough to eat. Then I sit on the steps, just for a few minutes.

  She always tries to keep me talking. She wants to keep me there for as long as she possibly can. She’s asked all about my family, about me and Aunt Mae and my father. I give her fragments. The whiskey that soaks through both of them. My father, fixing boats. The way he’d bring me pretty stones. She’s told me about her family, too: her mother and her father and her brother, Leo, her grandparents, her adorable little cousin, Emilio, the way they all get together for Sunday dinner twice a month.

  The cellar still smells like earth. But there are other smells in it now. Smells of fear and sweat and passing time. Frankie’s legs are tied with rope much too thick to break or fray, no matter how she picks at it, and the rope knots around each of her ankles and weaves behind the shelves that are bolted to the wall. She can move around the cellar. Get water or food, use the lidded bucket in the corner. But she can’t climb higher than the first step.

  By the time I’ve shut the door and covered it again, I can barely hear her screaming.

  I think of all this as I ride through the woods, paralleling Anders’s path toward town. I’ll beat him to the music studio. Hide in the shadows of the alley and wait until he steps inside.

  I will watch. I will watch, because evil will use any weakness. The moment I stop, that’s when they’ll slip in.

  Anders

  Door number four swings open before I can knock a third time.

  “Anders.” Flynn looks out of the lesson room at me. He looks the same as always. Tan, T-shirted, ageless. His face is just a little more surprised than usual. “I didn’t expect you today.”

  “It’s . . .” I look at the clock hanging out in the waiting room. “It’s Wednesday. Three o’clock.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s Wednesday.” Flynn gives me a tiny smile. “I just thought, with everything—you know—you might not show. Should have known better.” He steps back, letting me through. “Come on in.” The door clangs shut with me on the inside.

  I set Yvonne’s case down. But I don’t sit. I can’t.

  I need to ask him about that woman, the one in the black Audi, but I can’t get there yet. Instead, I hear myself blurt, “Last Things broke up.”

  Flynn looks less surprised about this than about me showing up for my lesson. “Ah,” he says. “Whose idea?”

  “Not mine.” I pace across the room, toward a wall of concert posters. “And maybe it’s just a hiatus.” Panic twists in my stomach. “But that might not even matter. Not if I can’t play anymore anyway.”

  “What do you mean, if you can’t play anymore?”

  “Like, my hands won’t work. They won’t do what I want them to.” I clench and open my fists. “Everything’s screwed up. Everything.”

  “Well,” says Flynn, calmly, slowly, “maybe you’re just a little too tense. No offense, but you seem pretty stressed out.”

  This is exactly what I needed to hear. A nice, normal, fixable explanation.

  “Yeah. I have been. I am.” The words give me my next opening. I pace back across the room. “You’ve heard about that girl, Frankie Lynde, right?”

  “Yeah. Crazy stuff.” Flynn sits in his chair and leans back, crossing his legs in their worn blue jeans. “Every kid I teach is pretty freaked out about it.”

  “Well, she and I were kind of—hanging out.” The words clunk out of me. “Like, not together, really, but . . .” I trail off.

  “Right,” says Flynn slowly. “Yeah. You told me about that.”

  Of course I did. I tell Flynn almost everything. Months ago, at my lesson, when I opened Yvonne’s case and a note with pink hearts on it fell out—a note from some girl I’d never even talked to—and Flynn started laughing, giving me crap about all the girls throwing themselves at me, I admitted something about Frankie. I remember blushing and smiling and trying not to look like a total dork, and feeling my heart thumping harder the whole time. Now my heart feels like a dead grenade.

  “Anyway.” I swallow. “On Saturday night she was at the Crow’s Nest, and we ended up having this huge fight, and everybody overheard.” I have to stop and swallow again. “And that’s the last time anybody saw her. So, of course, people think I have something to do with—with her—disappearing.”

  Anybody else would
probably ask me, So, did you? But Flynn doesn’t need to ask. He knows me way too well. He just looks at me, tipping his head slightly to one side, laid-back as always.

  “What did you fight about?” he asks.

  “We . . . God.” I rub my hair with one hand. “I was trying to tell her that I’m not into the whole relationship thing right now. I mean, she’s only interested in me because of the music thing, you know? And I don’t want to have a whole relationship based on that.”

  “Hell, Anders.” Now Flynn smiles. “If it weren’t for the whole music thing, most guys in bands would be permanently undateable.”

  He looks so relaxed, sitting there in his frayed jeans and scuffed leather boots, I wonder if he’s even hearing me. But of course he’s hearing me. He just doesn’t understand. He has no idea how much of this is my fault, how much of a dangerous moron I’ve been.

  So I push on. “And they found that other car in the river.” I drop my voice without even meaning to. “It was her, wasn’t it? That music business woman?”

  “Yeah. Sad news.” Flynn nods. Now his face looks more solemn, at least. “The police called me about that. My name was in her calendar, I guess.”

  “You didn’t—” My heart is thundering. I can barely believe I’m going to say this next thing, it’s so pathetically cowardly. “Did you tell them about her meeting with me?”

  Flynn pauses, scratching his upper arm before answering. “Nah. I just told them she came up to see you play. Nothing about the one-on-one. They don’t need to know about that.”

  “Oh. Good.” Air whooshes out of me. “Thank you. I mean—that’s, like, the last thing I need. The police hearing that I was probably the last person to speak to both of them.”

  I finally sink down on the other folding chair. I brace my forehead on my fists and stare at my lap.

  I shouldn’t have said good, I realize, sitting there. I should have at least said “I’m sorry” to Flynn about losing his friend, or his business contact, or whatever she was. I should have said something about it being so terrible, the way she died. But I didn’t. Panic is turning me into an even worse person. Or maybe it’s just revealing how bad I actually am.