The House in the Pines(34)

They skip across the water, faster than before, and she brims with excitement spiked with fear. What if they get caught? She’s nervous as they pull up at the dock. Frank hops out, agile and quick but not in a hurry. He smiles as he helps her out, but the heat from before is gone. She thinks back over the past half hour, tries to see what she did wrong. He ties the boat to the dock and returns the key to its place in the unlocked storage box.

“Can I ask you something?” she asks as they arrive back at the car, parked in the trees as if hidden. She asks carefully, not wanting to offend him. “Is Gary the guy who owns the boat?”

“He is.”

“Did he really say you could borrow it?”

“Ha!” Frank says. “You can’t be serious.” They get in the car. “Gary and my dad have known each other since the ’80s,” he says. “My dad helped him out once.” There’s a weight to the words, something he’s not saying.

Maya lets it go. She’s inclined to believe him, not for any reason she can point to, but instinctively.

“Speaking of my dad. I need to get back to him.”

“Of course,” she says.

He’s quiet as he drives her home. His mood has shifted. He stares ahead, eyes dark, and she thinks it must be about his father. Frank rarely talks about his father—she still doesn’t know what’s wrong with him or how long he has left—and she assumes this is because the subject is too painful. She wants to ask Frank if he’s okay, but there’s a hardness to him now, a tuck to his chin, a tense jaw. The silence stretches out around them and she starts to worry she’s upset him.

“I had a really good time today,” she says.

“Yeah, me too. Hey, why don’t you throw on a CD?”

Maya feels stung. She’s only known him for two weeks, but it feels like so much longer, and she’s never seen him act this way. She picks up the CD case on the floor. “Any requests?”

He shrugs. “Surprise me.”

She unzips the black case, begins flipping through the plastic sleeves. She sees The Downward Spiral, by Nine Inch Nails, and There Is Nothing Left to Lose, by the Foo Fighters, two bands she hasn’t heard in a long time. Green Day and Rage Against the Machine; apparently Frank likes music from ten years ago. She stops when she sees a homemade mix CD. Her stomach clenches as she reads the words sharpied in black across its shiny front: Songs for when we can’t be together. Love you forever, Ruby.

Who the hell is Ruby?

Maya pretends she didn’t see the message. She flips the page and chooses the next album she sees, Mama Said, by Lenny Kravitz. Frank turns it up, and a few minutes later they’re in front of her house. She dawdles on her way out of the car. “Thanks for the boat ride,” she says. “That was really fun . . .” Do you have a girlfriend, by the way? Maya can’t bring herself to ask. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?”

“Hoping to get some work done on the cabin.”

“Cool,” she says, like she doesn’t care. “See you around, I guess.”

“See you. Have a good time with your friend tonight.”

He doesn’t drive away immediately, and for a moment, she thinks he might call her back, having changed his mind about tomorrow, but the hope fades as she keeps walking and Frank says nothing. He’s just being a gentleman, it seems, waiting for her to get inside the house. The door opens, and her mom pokes her head outside, greets her daughter with a smile. “There you are,” she says, glancing over Maya’s shoulder just in time to see Frank’s taillights as he drives away.





EIGHTEEN




Maya paced back and forth in the kitchen. Her body ached from all the walking she’d done earlier, but her feet moved as if trying to outrun her thoughts, every neuron and nerve ending on the fritz. The kettle shrieked. She made chamomile tea when what she really wanted was the pint of gin she’d bought at the package store on her way home from the museum—but she’d told herself she wouldn’t drink before five p.m. The metal spoon clattered noisily in her mug as she stirred in honey.

She’d all but forgotten the strange key Frank had showed her, the key to his cabin, but hearing about Cristina’s tattoo had sparked Maya’s memory of Balance Rock, and though she couldn’t be certain, she sensed that this wasn’t the only time she had seen the key.

She heard a text message come in on her phone. Maya spilled hot tea on her fingers as she rushed to her room to answer it. Please be Dan, please be Dan. He still hadn’t responded to her text from last night, but she’d been trying not to worry.

It was her mom: Chili tonight?

Brenda was clearly trying to make amends—chili was Maya’s favorite—but it wouldn’t make up for last night.

Sure, Maya wrote back. She wasn’t expecting an apology, but neither did she intend to offer one. She knew that she was right. The key. The cabin. The late-night calls on the landline. They all pointed to the same truth that lay just beyond the dark spots in her own memory.

The problem with Steven’s theory about Cristina’s damaged heart was that it didn’t explain what happened to Aubrey. Steven had never met Frank. He didn’t understand. What Maya needed was to talk to someone who knew him in the way she and Cristina had.

She thought of Ruby.