Hereafter

by Kate Brian

“What?” Tristan said.

  “Really?” Krista asked.

  “Yeah, I want to.” I wanted to find out if there was some clue as to why Aaron had ended up where he did. Maybe if I had proof that the coin had made the right decision, I would somehow start feeling better about all this. “I’m supposed to be learning how to do these things, right?”

  “That’d be awesome, Rory,” Krista said, looking down at her project. “I have so much to do. Including baking cupcakes. Actually, can you come help with those tomorrow? At two,” she asked brightly, gazing at me with wide blue eyes.

  “Sure, no problem,” I answered distractedly as I stepped over the box of beads I’d been working on and navigated my way around the piles of flowers and feather bags. As I was heading out the door, Krista grabbed Bea.

  “You can take her place at the beading station,” she suggested happily.

  Bea groaned. “You’ll pay for this, Miller!”

  “Sorry!” I called over my shoulder.

  “I’ll go with you,” Tristan offered.

  “You don’t have to,” I said tersely.

  His face fell. “Do you even know where he was staying?”

  I narrowed my eyes, thinking back. “He mentioned a room, but…no. He always came to my place.” Was that some kind of clue? Had he been hiding something from me?

  “I can take her,” Joaquin offered.

  We both tensed. For a second, I’d forgotten he was even there.

  “That’s okay. I got it,” Tristan said, angling around my side as if to block Joaquin out.

  We walked down the stairs together, conspicuously not touching. Near the bottom step, I glanced back up and caught Joaquin lingering at the top, watching us with a brooding expression.

  Tristan held the front door open for me, and as we passed through, I saw that the door to the mayor’s office was slightly ajar. A second later, it banged shut.

  “Did you see that?” I whispered.

  “See what?” he asked, closing the front door behind us.

  My reply caught in my throat. The fog was creeping in slowly from all sides, rolling over the grass and crowding out the flower beds at the foot of the stairs. Just like that, the mayor was forgotten.

  “Someone else is being ushered,” I said flatly.

  “Looks that way,” Tristan said.

  I bit my tongue to keep from saying what I wanted to:

  I hope they end up in the right place.

  I stood in the doorway of Aaron’s room, a small, square chamber at a one-storied bayside motel called, in a very dead-on way, the Bayside Motel. Tristan hovered a few feet behind me, keeping a respectful distance while the fog continued to thicken around us. I waited for some sort of epiphany to strike me—a deep thought to occur that would put everything in perspective—but all I could think was this: Aaron was a minimalist.

  There wasn’t a shred of clothing in sight. No soda cups or candy-bar wrappers or magazines. No razors or cookie crumbs or crumpled tissues. The only personal items were his canvas beach bag, which was slung over the back of a desk chair, and a hardcover copy of Tales of the City, which lay on his nightstand next to the motel’s old-school telephone, its spine perfectly aligned with the edge of the table.

  “So…what do I do?” I said quietly.

  “Find his suitcase, pack everything inside, and—”

  “And then we take it back to the relic room,” I finished, turning to look over my shoulder.

  Tristan cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  “So everyone can go through it and take what they want,” I said bitterly.

  “It’s not like that,” Tristan replied, shoving his hands in his pockets. “People don’t just raid the place every time someone moves on. We just leave it there, and it may or may not eventually get used.”

  I nodded as the hissing fog swirled around us. “However you want to say it, it still doesn’t seem right to me.”

  Tristan’s blue eyes looked pained. He glanced down, dragging his toe across the wood-plank walkway that stretched the length of the building, serving as a sort of front porch. “Rory, about last night—”

  My heart thumped. I wasn’t ready to talk about this with him. Not yet. “I should get started.”

  I took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold. The gray carpet inside the motel had been worn paper-thin, just like in a real motel in the real world. I wondered why they couldn’t fix up the place a little bit, considering it was the last stop before eternity. Would visitors really get that suspicious if the rooms in the motel happened to have new carpet?

  “Do you want me to—?”

  “No,” I told Tristan. “I’m fine.”

  I looked in the small closet and found Aaron’s newish tweed suitcase, which I placed on the bed. The opening of the zipper sounded like a bomb going off in all the fog-induced silence. When I opened the top drawer of the dresser, a chill went through me that was so fierce I had to stop and force myself to breathe. There was Aaron’s rugby shirt, the one he’d worn to the Thirsty Swan with Darcy and me just a few days ago. His folded beach towel. His plain white T-shirts. I lifted them out and got a whiff of Aaron’s cologne. The scent brought tears to my eyes.

  Suddenly, all I could think about was getting this over with. I placed his things in the suitcase and moved on to the next drawer, trying to ignore the pang in my heart when I touched the wetsuit from our windsurfing lessons last week. When I found the sneakers he’d worn on the beach my first night on the island—the ones that had made me feel like less of a loser for having worn mine—I had to bite back a sob. I tossed them in the bag and closed it.

  There were no drugs, no alcohol, not even a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t uncover a journal filled with maniacal, violent drawings illuminating the inner workings of Aaron’s mind. No serial killer–style magazine tear-outs with faces x-ed out in red. No lists of names of the people who’d wronged him and deserved revenge. No beheaded dolls or dead puppies or bags of hair. I did, however, find a folded picture of David Beckham in his underwear drawer.

  Yep. This guy was a real threat to society.

  I emptied Aaron’s bathroom of its perfectly aligned bottles of shampoo, conditioner, gel, and body wash, checked under the bed, then opened the drawer on his bedside table. Something slid out from the back and knocked against the front stop of the drawer. My heart caught in my throat. It was his cell phone.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw nothing but the open doorway; Tristan was giving me my space. Shakily, I turned the phone on, and it let out a loud, jaunty bing as it powered to life. There were, of course, no new messages, but when I scrolled to Aaron’s outgoing calls, a tear slid down my face.

  There were twenty-three calls to his father over the past three days with a few to his brother and sister mixed in. Next to each of them was the awful message: CALL FAILED.

  I sat down on the bed, clutching the phone in both hands, silent tears pouring down my face. Aaron had been a good son who wanted to make up with his father. I knew it. I had felt it last night when I’d held him. He was sorry for what he’d done, and all he wanted in the world was to have his apology heard. There wasn’t a bad bone in Aaron’s body, and this room proved it. He was just a person, a good person who had befriended me and my sister, all while suffering with his guilt.

  The light in the room shifted, and I looked up at the four-paned window. The fog was starting to roll out, revealing the empty parking lot, the manicured hedge across the street, a seagull-shaped windmill stuck in the center of the front lawn across the street.

  Tristan stepped into the doorway, his expression pained. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I replied bluntly. I turned the phone screen toward him. “Look at this. Just look. All he tried to do the entire time he was here was call his father so he could apologize. That was all that mattered to him. How can he deserve to be in the Shadowlands?”

  Tristan blew out a sigh. He sat down next to me on the bed, the weak mattress buckling beneat
h our weight.

  “I’m sorry, Rory,” he said, putting his arm around me. “I’m sorry you have to go through this on top of everything else.”

  Anger flashed through me, so hot and sudden it made me spring to my feet. “Stop it!” I demanded. “Just stop! I don’t want you to tell me how sorry you are. I want you to fix it!”

  “I can’t,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “I can’t fix it.”

  “You’re telling me that you guys sent all those poor people off to the Shadowlands over a hundred years ago and you haven’t even tried, in all that time, to figure out a way to get them back?” I demanded.

  An awful jolt of pain crossed Tristan’s face. “How can you say that to me?” he demanded, rising from the bed. “I told you how awful it’s been for me to live with that. You don’t think I would have brought them back if I could have?”

  “There must be a way, Tristan,” I said. “There has to be.”

  “Rory, look, I know that you’re a problem solver,” he said, irritated. “That you’re a questioner and a scientist, but I can tell you that this is one problem you’ll never find an answer to.”

  “I can’t believe you,” I said, turning toward the door. “It’s like you don’t even care. Like you want him to rot in hell.”

  Tristan just stood there, glowering at me, his jaw working under his skin.

  “How can you be so complacent?” I ranted.

  “You know what, Rory?” Tristan said, his eyes on fire. “I think we both need to cool off a little. I’m going to head out.” He slipped right past me out the door and into the bright sunlight.

  “But what about Aaron’s stuff?” I shouted at his retreating back.

  “Leave it!” he yelled without looking back at me. “I’ll get it later.”

  He got to the end of the sidewalk, turned the corner, and was gone. At that moment, the phone on the nightstand rang, its old-fashioned bell pealing so loudly I jumped. A moment later, it rang again. Slowly, I walked over to the table and picked up the receiver, my hand shaking as I brought it to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  Outside the window, four crows landed on the fence across the street, watching me with their glassy black eyes. On the other end of the line, there was the faint sound of slow, rhythmic breathing. My heart hammered against my rib cage.

  “Hello?” I said again, clutching the phone.

  Laughter echoed through the line. Quiet at first, but growing rapidly louder. I banged the phone down and bolted from the room, leaving the door wide open behind me.

  I ran for home as fast as I could, my pulse throbbing in my eyes, my ears, my fingertips. The chill ocean breeze did nothing to cool my overheated skin. Had that call been intended for me? Had it been placed by someone who knew Tristan and I were there, or was it just a random coincidence? A crow cawed overhead as I raced across the square, and I got this awful feeling in my gut. A feeling that on Juniper Landing, there were no coincidences. I tore through the park, turned the corner onto Freesia, and smacked right into someone.

  “Where’re you going in such a hurry?” Officer Dorn asked, staring down his nose at me with piercing eyes.

  I took a step back, shaking like a leaf. “Nowhere,” I said automatically. His eyes narrowed. “Home.”

  He moved, infinitesimally, out of my way, and I took off again down the hill. When I got to the bottom, I checked back over my shoulder, and my heart thumped. Dorn hadn’t moved; his suspicious glare was still fixed on me.

  I clenched my jaw and kept moving.

  “Rory!”

  I collided with Joaquin’s shoulder so hard he had to grab the trunk of the nearest peach tree to keep from going down. A startled bird flung itself from the tree’s branches, raining dozens of shriveled brown and gray leaves onto our shoulders. It swooped across the street, disappearing behind the flowery hedge on the opposite side. Joaquin reached for my arm, but I wrested it away.

  “I don’t want to talk to you right now, Joaquin,” I said, pushing past him. “I just want to be—”

  “Stop!” he shouted. “I need to know why you were asking about people being ushered to the wrong place.”

  I froze in my tracks. The breeze lifted my hair from my neck and sent chills down my arms. Slowly, I turned. Joaquin was gasping for breath, like he’d just been sprinting. Sweat dotted his upper lip and hairline.

  “Why?”

  “Because I just ushered that girl—Jennifer? The one with the pixie cut?” he said. “And she went to the Shadowlands.”

  I blinked “Wait. How is that even possible?” I asked. “You were with us when the fog rolled in.”

  “I…got the call about two seconds after you left, so I went over to her room and got her,” Joaquin explained. “I wasn’t that surprised, because she was so simple. There was no unfinished business there, so it wasn’t like she’d need my help to get ready to move on. I just picked her up and brought her to the bridge. But then, when I got back to town…”

  “The weather vane was pointing south,” I finished flatly.

  “Yeah.” Joaquin tipped his face toward the ground for a second, his hands on his hips. When he looked up again, his normally cocky gaze was searching, almost pleading. “What you said before at Krista’s, about someone going to the wrong place… Why did you ask us that?”

  “Oh, that was just—” I looked away. My knee-jerk reaction was to keep the peace, to not make any more waves than I already had.

  “Rory, don’t mess with me right now. Please,” Joaquin said in an urgent voice that cut me to the core. “Jennifer didn’t…she doesn’t deserve what she’s getting.”

  He was desperate. I could see it in his eyes.

  “Aaron was sent to the Shadowlands last night,” I told him. “And I know for a fact that he doesn’t belong there.”

  Joaquin dropped my hand, his eyes going flat. “And let me guess, Tristan told you that’s just the way it is. That you had to accept it and move on.”

  “He did,” I said.

  Joaquin pivoted and took a few steps away. His fingers curled into fists, then stretched. Finally, he took a deep breath and faced me.

  “There’s something you should know,” he replied. “All this?” He looked down at the leaves that blanketed the sidewalk. “It shouldn’t be happening.”

  I squinted, confused. “What? You mean the leaves changing? I know it’s early, but—”

  “No! You don’t get it. This stuff never happens,” he said, pacing the width of the sidewalk in front of me, the dry, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet. “Leaves don’t turn, flowers don’t die, birds don’t drop out of the sky, fish don’t pile up on beaches, and there are definitely, definitely no hornets.”

  I shook my head. “But the other day, you got stung right outside—”

  “I know, Rory. And in almost a hundred years on this island, that was the first hornet I’ve ever seen,” he said vehemently. “We have bees because we have flowers, but no hornets, no wasps, no other insects, nothing like that.”

  “That’s insane. It’s—”

  Then, ever so slowly, realization began to dawn. Joaquin’s weird reaction to the hornet sting. The marigolds withering in their pot on the porch—alive one minute, dead the next. The reeds near the bridge that had made Tristan go pale.

  “And these things…when did they start happening?” I asked, Nadia’s accusations ringing in my mind. “Was it when I got here?”

  “I don’t know,” Joaquin replied. “No one really knows exactly when it started, but it’s definitely been recent. They think that it might be because the balance of good and evil around here has been thrown off somehow. That maybe a Lifer has—”

  “Gone bad,” I breathed. My gut twisted as I thought of Jessica. “Joaquin, the other night Nadia accused me of being responsible for all this strange stuff that’s been going on around here. Does that mean she thinks I’m the reason things are dying?” I demanded. “Does she think I’m pure evil or something?”

  J
oaquin just stared at me. I felt like I was going to throw up. What if Nadia took her suspicions to the mayor? What if the mayor believed her?

  “She’s going to get me sent to Oblivion,” I said under my breath, my vision blurring.

  “No,” Joaquin said. “Rory, she’s not. No one thinks she’s right about you.”

  “Dorn does!” I insisted. “And maybe Grantz, too. What if she starts convincing other people? What if she convinces everyone?”

  Joaquin reached for my shoulders and held on tight. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I won’t let it. Tristan won’t let it. Nadia is just grasping at straws. Now, take a deep breath.”

  I did, and blew it out slowly through pursed lips. I felt slightly better. But only slightly.

  “Okay?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good.” He released me. “Look, I know you’re not the cause of all this, but there’s definitely something up. And now, on top of everything, good people are going to the Shadowlands. Whatever it is, it’s not good.”

  I cleared my throat. “So what do we do?”

  “There’s only one person to talk to around here when something’s wrong,” Joaquin said, starting for town. “And whatever Saint Tristan thinks, something is clearly wrong.”

  “We’re going to the mayor?” I asked tremulously.

  Joaquin nodded, his fists now tightly clenched. “We’re going to the mayor.”

  Joaquin walked right into Tristan’s house without knocking. Somewhere nearby I heard voices whispering urgently, but they fell silent when I closed the door. Joaquin was already striding toward the mayor’s office.

  “Just go,” I heard Tristan’s voice hiss.

  A female voice answered. “But, Tristan, you have to understand—”

  “I don’t want to hear it! Go!”

  I was still trying to figure out who the girl’s voice belonged to when Tristan and Krista appeared from around the corner in the living room.

  “J.,” Tristan said, his eyes smoldering. “We need to talk.”

  I hesitated in the center of the entryway. Krista fidgeted with her bracelet. A door near the back of the house banged shut.