The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(26)

Enzo looked at me for a long time. I held his gaze, even though it made me feel completely exposed, even though I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.

And then he said, “You want to get out of here?”

It took me a second to process what he was saying, because it was so close to something I would have imagined that I almost thought I was experiencing an auditory hallucination.

“I have an hour before the diner closes.”

“The cook will cover for you. He did it for Lizzie all the time.”

I hesitated.

“I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No. I wasn’t thinking that.” I paused a moment longer, which was just long enough for me to make up my mind. “I’ll get my things.”

? ? ?

Enzo didn’t have a car.

“I can barely afford a bus pass,” he said.

I shrugged, and we climbed into my Rabbit.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Anywhere. Just away from people.”

Mostly, we didn’t talk. I drove around aimlessly, sneaking glances at him from the corner of my eye. Only maybe it wasn’t that aimless, because we ended up near Wolf Creek Road.

“Are you driving to where Lizzie disappeared?” Enzo asked, right about the same time I realized where we were.

“Not on purpose. I swear. I’ll turn around.”

“No, it’s OK. Go there.”

That’s how, not even a month after Lizzie Lovett disappeared, I ended up at her campsite with her boyfriend.

“I haven’t been here since that night,” Enzo told me as we walked around a small clearing. “I haven’t gone out with the search parties.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I kept thinking, what if I was the one who found her? Her body, I mean. I couldn’t deal with seeing her that way.”

I wanted to tell him there wasn’t a body to find. Instead, I made myself busy looking around the campsite.

The tent was long gone, but the ring of stones where they’d built their fire was still there. What had it been like that night? Did they laugh and talk while roasting marshmallows? What were they talking about right before they went to sleep and Lizzie disappeared?

I wanted to ask Enzo a million questions. But he seemed skittish. If I said too much, he might dart off into the woods and become as lost to me as Lizzie was. So instead, I just watched him and hoped he would share some clues.

He pulled something out of his pocket, and for a moment, I thought it would be a gun or knife. Then, right before he murdered me, I’d have time to reflect on how dumb it was to go off with him, and Emily would tell people, “I told her not to trust Lorenzo Calvetti.”

But a second later, Enzo was rolling a cigarette, which I guess was still dangerous but not a weapon. He walked around the clearing, his shoulders hunched and the tip of the cigarette glowing. I thought maybe, probably, I’d never seen someone look so broken.

“This place seems haunted now,” Enzo said.

“The woods always seem haunted to me.”

He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew smoke at the sky. “Have you heard about that suicide forest in Japan?”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I said, trying not to sound too intrigued, since it was kind of morbid.

“People from all over the world go there to die. It happens so often, they have signs up, you know, encouraging people to think twice. It’s, like, the most fucked-up tourist destination ever.”

“How do you know about it?” I asked.

“Read it somewhere. I wrote a song about it a few years ago.”

“You’re a musician?”

“Not really,” he said. He circled the clearing silently, and I wondered if that would be the end of it, but then he spoke. “I always wondered if a place could be bad. Not what a person did there, but the place itself. Like, if you went to the suicide forest, would you feel that something was wrong as soon as you stepped in?”

It was the most fascinating thing anyone had said to me in a long time.

“Do you feel that way here?” I asked.

He laughed and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “Yeah, I guess. I know it’s in my head though, because I didn’t have that feeling when I was here with Lizzie.”

“What happened that night?”

“What happened? Nothing. We had fun. Then I went to sleep and woke up in a parallel universe.”

“You didn’t hear anything weird during the night?”

Enzo sighed. “No, officer. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. Lizzie’s mood was fine. We hadn’t fought. Everything was normal. Wherever Lizzie went, I slept through it.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess you’ve been getting a lot of questions.”

“It’s a wonder I’m not in jail.”

“In the paper, the police chief said you aren’t a suspect.”

“Sure, that’s what he said.” He tossed his cigarette on the ground and crushed it out.

The silence was uncomfortable. I searched for something to fill it.

“I went to high school with Lizzie,” I said. “Well, sort of. I was a freshman when she was a senior. She was friends with my brother.”