The House in the Pines(30)

“Mom?”

In the kitchen, she finds a note from her mother, scrawled in her big, messy hand.

Call me when you get in.

Maya flips open her cell phone. She hasn’t checked it in hours. Four missed calls from her mom.

“Where are you?” her mom says as soon as she picks up. Her voice is low and restrained, and Maya can hear the other EMTs sitting close by, huddled together in the back of an ambulance.

“Home,” Maya says.

“You knew I had a shift tonight. I was hoping to see you before I left.”

Maya remembers her mother mentioning this, but doesn’t see what the problem is. “But your shift isn’t until eleven, right?”

Her mom is about to say something when ambulance chatter erupts in the background. “Shit,” Brenda says. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

“But—”

On her mom’s end, a siren starts to wail.

“Love you,” her mom says. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“Love you too.”

She hangs up, and Maya registers the time on her phone. 12:02. It doesn’t make sense. She met Frank at seven. Did she really just spend five hours with Frank at Balance Rock?





SIXTEEN




Maya walked headlong into the icy wind sweeping down North Street. Her face was numb beneath layers of makeup. She hadn’t fallen back asleep after the phone call, whoever it was from, and now it was ten a.m., but she still wasn’t tired. She felt, if anything, too awake, like she had to keep moving. She was sleep-deprived and wired yet somehow more clearheaded than she’d felt in years, and her mom’s suggestion that she’d imagined last night’s ringing only deepened Maya’s certainty that someone—Frank—had called.

Passing St. Joseph’s, she entered the downtown area and found it decked out for the holidays. Wreaths hung in the windows of shops and restaurants, and the giant Christmas tree was up at Park Square, covered in lights. The street was mostly empty, the cold wind blowing. She pulled up the collar of her coat.

She hadn’t told anyone about the hours she lost that night at Balance Rock. Not at first. At the time, she had chalked it up to the weed; Frank had said it was his father’s special stash. Between that and the deep connection she’d felt, it seemed reasonable enough to Maya that she’d simply lost track of time, and wasn’t that just how all the love songs said it would be? Like losing yourself completely? It’s not like she had ever been in love before. Two of the three boys she’d made out with were friends of guys who were after Aubrey. Guys who happened to be there.

Now she wished that she could reach back through the years and shake herself. Why had she trusted Frank so completely? And what had he done to her? She’d blacked out plenty of times in the past several years, usually on alcohol, sometimes on Klonopin, but never on weed. She would have thought that Frank had laced the joint with something, but that wouldn’t have explained the second night she lost time around him.

Or the third.

By the time she told an adult about this, Aubrey was dead, and the missing hours at Balance Rock were just one more thing Maya couldn’t prove. Neither could she explain why—if Frank really had done something to her—she hadn’t gone immediately to the police. Or why she had continued to see him afterward.

Part of her would prefer never to know what went on during those hours.

But if Frank knew she’d seen the video, she couldn’t afford to stay in the dark.

As she neared the museum, Maya spotted what appeared to be an elderly woman with stooped posture, frizzy gray hair, and an oversized coat making her way along the sidewalk. Only when she was a few feet away did Maya realize that this was Aubrey’s mom.

Elaine West wasn’t old—she was several years younger than Brenda—but her daughter’s death had aged her. She and Maya had seen each other only once since the funeral, in the frozen food aisle at Big Y, and the sight of Maya had seemed to pain Elaine.

Or maybe it was Maya who had made things awkward. The guilt she felt, her secret certainty that Aubrey would still be alive if Maya hadn’t brought Frank into their lives.

The encounter, an exchange of no more than two minutes, had felt interminable.

Maya braced herself as Elaine looked up and met her eyes, and for a moment, it seemed they would greet each other. But they didn’t. Each looked down at her feet as they passed each other on the sidewalk, and neither said anything.

What was there to say?



* * *



— The Berkshire Museum was housed in a faded brick building with a stone walkway and a statue of a dinosaur out front. Maya hadn’t been here since middle school. She was here to see Steven Lang, who had yet to write back.

The lobby looked smaller, its marble floors less expansive. “Welcome,” said a man at the counter who wasn’t Steven Lang. This man was slim with a head full of dreadlocks pulled into a knot on top of his head.

“Hi,” she said. “Is Steven working today?”

“Security guard Steven?”

Maya nodded.

“Is he expecting you?”

“I was just hoping to talk to him for a minute.”

The man looked at her with suspicion, or maybe she was just feeling paranoid. “Yes, he’s here. Walked by not too long ago. I think he’s down in the aquarium.”