I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

  She’d been amazed to learn how easily fans gave up money to support whatever project their favorite artist was working on. Fund My Film! Fund My Book! As far as she knew, no one had tried Fund My Vacation!, but she was sure someone enterprising would get to that soon enough. So long as it was for a legitimate project, Owen had no qualms about doing this. Liddie was embarrassed for him at first, but when she saw how excited the fans were for the perks—a Skype call from Owen, a signed picture, even a “date” if you donated enough money—she reconciled herself to it, though she’d insisted on rules for the “date.” Harder to accept was the way strangers felt like they could intrude on their private time in restaurants, theaters, on the street.

  “Okay, but no date with you this time.”

  “Babe, you’re adorable when you’re jealous.”

  Liddie pumped her arms and crested another hill. She stopped to catch her breath, staring at the placid cows grazing in the field behind a thin wire fence.

  “You still there?” Owen asked.

  “Still here.”

  “Should I come get you?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “And what about Ryan?”

  “What about him?”

  She’d left out Ryan grabbing her arm. She knew if she told him that, Owen would come down in a flash, and she wasn’t ready to have her Owen world collide with her Macaw world. Not yet.

  “He’s dangerous, isn’t he?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But if he was the one who did that to . . . What was her name again?”

  “Amanda.”

  “If he was the one who did that to Amanda . . . You guys should go to the police.”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Liddie looked at the animal closest to her. Its life was so simple—stand in a field and eat grass all day, not even aware that he was being fattened up for the slaughter. Or was it the women cows who got eaten? That would figure.

  “I’m not in danger, and no one’s going to the police. Besides, they already investigated all of this when it happened.”

  “But they never charged anyone.”

  “There wasn’t enough evidence to go forward. That’s what they said. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I was twelve. I didn’t really know what was going on. None of us did.”

  Liddie thought back to her sessions with the detectives. How her parents needed to be there because she was a minor. How it all felt like a game, one she was winning because secrets were her thing. Where were you that night, Liddie? Were you with Kate the whole time? How did you feel about Amanda?

  “Not enough evidence to go forward against who?” Owen asked.

  Liddie didn’t want to talk about this anymore. What she wanted to do was run.

  “Liddie? Are you still there?”

  She held the phone away from her and spoke loudly. “Owen? I can’t hear you. It’s a bad connection. I’ll try again later.”

  And then she hung up.

  Amanda

  July 23, 1998—6:00 a.m.

  It was the twins who found me.

  I don’t know what they were doing at Secret Beach. Later, they’d tell the police, under the watchful eye of their parents, that they’d been out looking for flowers for a project they were working on in Craft Shop. It was weird, though, those two, up before the wake-up bell, scurrying around in an area they weren’t supposed to go to unless they were with an adult. But they were twelve and the owners’ children, and this immunized them from too much scrutiny.

  I could hear them. Not the words but their voices. Panicked whispering. The brush of their legs through the long grass near the beach. Then I heard the word trouble—I think it was Kate, but that might be because it makes the most sense that it was Kate—and in my helplessness, I felt angry. That they cared more about getting into trouble than saving me, someone who’d been like a sister to them, or so I always thought.

  Then one of them said something about dead. Dead body or Dead girl. And I screamed, I’m alive, but that was in my head, and they couldn’t hear me. Help yourself, I thought. Do something. But everything was pain and frozen. Move something. Move something. I concentrated as hard as I could and managed to move my hand. To me, it felt as if I was waving frantically, but I know that can’t be right because then I heard them quite clearly.

  “I saw her hand move!”

  “What? No, dummy, you’re imagining it.”

  “Am not. I mean it, Liddie. She moved.”

  “I’m going to check if she’s breathing.”

  “How?”

  “Shhh!”

  A hand pressed over my face, right over my mouth, making it even harder to breathe than before.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  Oh, the pain, the pain. Move, move, move. I moved my hand again. Someone screamed. The hand over my face fell away, and then everything was black.

  Amanda

  Margaux

  Ryan

  Mary

  Kate & Liddie

  Sean

  9:00 p.m.

  Lantern ceremony

  Lantern ceremony

  Lantern ceremony

  10:00 p.m.

  On the Island

  On the Island

  On the Island

  Crash boat

  11:00 p.m.

  Back Beach

  Back Beach

  On the Island

  6:00 a.m.

  Secret Beach

  Secret Beach

  CHAPTER 13

  STORM COMING

  Ryan

  Ryan had never been so mad and scared in his life. Equal parts mad, equal parts scared. It was an odd seesaw of emotion. Normally, when he was angry, he couldn’t sit still. He’d pace the house, the yard, the streets for miles if it was particularly bad. Kerry understood that, and she’d rather he walk a hole in his shoes than punch one in the wall. But this new anger, this anger/fear, had him paralyzed. What was he supposed to do now? How was he supposed to make this come out right? What the hell had his father been thinking?

  He was punishing him, obviously, but for what? For all the trouble he’d caused in the family? Despite what his father had written in that terrible letter, he still couldn’t believe it. Didn’t he deserve the chance to defend himself? If his father had told him of his suspicions, he could’ve explained so much better now than when everything happened, when he was twenty. Instead, he had to convince his sisters—a group of people with their own interests and no reason to rule in his favor.

  He’d tried talking to Kate, but that had been a mistake.

  “Come on,” he’d said when they were alone. “You know I had nothing to do with what happened to Amanda.”

  Kate sat there on the couch, her hands playing with the ends of the pink sweater that was tied over her shoulders. Even that sweater made him angry; she didn’t play tennis and it wasn’t the eighties—she must barely even remember them—so why was she dressing like that? What part was she playing now?

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “You know why, Ryan.”

  He shivered, though the house was still warm from the meeting; all that body heat and anger almost fo
gged the windows.

  “You mean . . . Because I was on the Island that night?”

  He’d never understood how the police knew he was there, even before he’d confirmed it. Maybe it was just a cop’s instinct. They’d been aggressive, trying to get him to confess. All their questions, their fear tactics—they’d worked. He’d been terrified. We know you were the one that hurt her, Ryan. This would be much easier if you told us the truth. Over and over. Somehow, he held fast—he’d been there, but he’d left, and he hadn’t seen anyone else—and when they asked him what he thought had happened, he mentioned the houses on the other side of the lake. There had been a group of guys staying there that summer, guys in their twenties who drank on a pontoon boat and who used to come a bit too close to the beach during free swim when Amanda and Margaux were lifeguarding. You should check those guys out, he told the police. They were always whistling and catcalling . . . They’d taken notes, they’d written it all down, but did they actually look into it? They weren’t about to tell Ryan that. Besides, they had their man.

  Then the questions stopped. There were a few anxious weeks when nothing happened and Ryan felt like a pendulum swinging. The police had closed their investigation; all the notes, he imagined, were packed up in a series of boxes marked unsolved. If you’d asked him back then, he would’ve told you his parents paid someone to make it all go away, or they’d had Swift do it because that’s what people like Swift were for. And that’s what happened to his kind of people, wasn’t it?

  He knew now that this was impossible—his parents might run a camp for rich kids, but they were far from rich themselves. And maybe it was possible to get the cops to look the other way if you were, say, a Kennedy. But a MacAllister? No way.

  So he didn’t know why the police had given up, and it had never occurred to him until then that if his father had paid someone off, it was because he thought he’d done it.

  “Ryan?”

  “What?”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “What does it matter? If I tell you everything, are you going to believe me?”

  “I might.” Kate stood up. “I don’t want to hear your confession.”

  “I’m not confessing anything. I’m just asking you . . . where you stand, I guess.”

  “I don’t know. I only know you’ve been lying all this time, and that must be for a reason. If there was nothing to hide, you would’ve told the whole truth.”

  “People lie for all kinds of reasons, Kate.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that before,” Kate said sarcastically.

  “You should try though. Life isn’t so binary.”

  She gave him a look that reminded him, again, of Liddie. “That could be true, but you’re a liar just the same.”

  CHAPTER 14

  FUSS

  Mary

  Mary unhooked Cinnamon’s reins from the porch rail and led her up the road to the stables. The horse nuzzled her neck, blowing out through her nose in a way Mary knew meant she was content.

  She felt surprisingly content, too, but my goodness, what a lot of fuss her father was causing. And all because of that girl Amanda, who her father hadn’t even liked because he thought she was a bad influence on Margaux.

  Mary remembered that night on the Island well. She’d been excited because it was her first overnight as a counselor-in-training, and also, because it was with Margaux. She and Margaux were close in their other lives, their winter lives, which took place in Montreal. They always arrived back in town two weeks after the school year started, and this had cemented their reliance on one another when they were small. Friendship groups were formed in those first anxious hours in the schoolyard. By mid-September, no one new was going to break in. But at camp, Margaux didn’t need Mary. She belonged automatically, and she had Amanda, and so Mary was cast off like last year’s fashion.

  They’d had a fight about it that night, when Margaux had left her in charge to go check on where Amanda had gotten to. “She’s probably waiting for some boy,” Mary had said. “She’ll be fine.”

  “What boy?” Margaux had asked, frowning. “You don’t think . . .”

  “What?”

  One of the kids near them coughed, and Margaux stopped. She wiggled her sleeping bag closer to Mary. “Did you see her dancing with Simon last week?”

  “Maybe?”

  “They were dancing real close.”

  “Simon’s a jerk.”

  “That’s not the point. Friends don’t date exes.”

  “I don’t think Amanda cares about Simon.”

  “Really?”

  “You know she only has eyes for Ryan.”

  Margaux laughed quietly. “That’s true. Poor Amanda.”

  Margaux unzipped her sleeping bag. She pulled a dark sweatshirt out of her backpack and slipped it over her head.

  “Where are you going?” Mary asked.

  “Watch the kids. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Margaux . . .”

  But she hadn’t listened.

  Mary walked past her parents’ house. After the kids had all graduated from high school, they’d sold the house in town and moved out to camp permanently.

  Mary thought about the last time she’d seen her parents, two months before their deaths. Her mother had been chipper and focused; they were taking a train across the country and wasn’t that wonderfully old-fashioned of them! They were going to see something, see the country, see it the real way. Mary should consider coming along. When was the last time she’d taken any time off?

  “Six days on a train?” Mary had said. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d feel cooped up. Have you seen how small those rooms are? They make the rooms above the lodge look ginormous.”

  Her mother had given her an unfocused look. She wasn’t fixated on the details of the plan but the plan itself. The grandeur of telling her friends at the bridge club that they were going on a journey. Mary felt small for feeling any kind of contempt about it. Her parents worked hard and made little money and weren’t often able to take a trip. She should be encouraging them, not running them down.

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “What for, dear?”

  “I’m glad you and Dad are going. It’s not for me, but I hope you have a great time.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  She’d spent the rest of the visit acting the part of the dutiful daughter. She helped prep dinner and cleaned up afterward without being asked. She asked her father about the latest environmental disasters that were playing on the news: ice caps melting and tornadoes and the fires in California. She showed her mother how to look up the places they’d be visiting and promised she’d come over for a slideshow of the pictures her mother would take on the trip. She didn’t check her watch once and let them determine when it was time for her to go. When her mother mentioned bed, she kissed them both goodbye, feeling as if this might be a new chapter, that perhaps they’d turned a page and she could relate to them as adults, the way people were supposed to with their parents, not that lingering relationship formed when she and her sisters were teenagers.

  She never got a chance to find out. Her parents’ train had derailed after colliding with a large moose somewhere in Ontario. The first-class cabin had survived intact; the conductor and the first two berths in the second-class cabin weren’t so lucky. Mary wondered whether she would have survived if she’d gone on the trip. Would she have paid the extra money to be in the larger—and safer—car? Would she have upgraded her parents as well? Stupid, errant thoughts were better than the sense of . . . well, there was no other way to put it but relief.

  Because Mary knew deep down that it wouldn’t have been any different between them. For that to happen, she’d have to have been different. She’d have to care enough to try and change.
Was it her fault she didn’t, or theirs?

  “Mary, wait up.”

  It was Kate, trotting up the road, the muscles in her thin legs well defined from a lifetime of competitive sports. That was one thing about the MacAllisters—they were all active. A childhood of outdoor activity burned into their DNA.

  Mary stopped, holding Cinnamon’s head steady.

  “You walk fast,” Kate said, slightly out of breath.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. You headed to the barn or back to your place?”

  “The barn. For now.”

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  Kate frowned. Her face didn’t carry the lines that Mary’s did, wind whipped and sun scarred. “What the hell, Mary? Will you talk to me or not?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. This stunt of Dad’s has us all out of sorts. I was just talking to Ryan and—”

  “He was trying to convince you to vote for him?”

  “Well, not exactly. He was more feeling me out, I guess, wondering which way I’d go.”

  “Which way will you go?”

  “I want to hear what other people think first.”

  Mary wasn’t surprised. Going along with what others wanted was kind of the leitmotif of Kate’s life. How else did you end up with a pink sweater tied around your neck?

  “So what do you think?” Kate asked.

  Cinnamon tugged at her bit. Mary patted her nose, calming her. “I don’t know, to be honest. The whole thing is kind of nuts. I guess it all depends on the outcome you want.”

  “If I want to be an owner with Ryan?”

  “What do you want to happen to camp? Ryan wants to sell; that’s obvious. He needs the money, right? Sean, on the other hand, wouldn’t sell this place if it was the only way to save his arm.”

  “Is that how you’re going to decide? I don’t think that’s fair to Ryan.”

  “Why not?”

  “That means we think he did it.”