The House in the Pines(5)

She closed her laptop with shaking hands.

The video had been posted less than three days ago and already had 72,000 views. Frank had every reason to think she would see it, which meant she had every reason to be afraid. After all, this wasn’t the first time Maya had witnessed someone drop dead in his presence.





TWO




Aubrey West, Maya’s best friend in high school, had fallen over dead on a bright summer day shortly before Maya left for college. Aubrey’s death hadn’t been caught on video but had garnered attention nonetheless. TV coverage, newspaper articles, gossip. A healthy seventeen-year-old dropping dead out of nowhere. If it could happen to her, people thought.

Like the girl in the video, Aubrey had been having a conversation with Frank when it happened. And Maya had been convinced that Frank killed her. She couldn’t explain how he’d done it (even if she did have a sense of why), and in the end, because she lacked proof (and eventually confidence in herself, her own perception, her own sanity, even), she had no choice but to move on.

Or try to, anyway.

Maya had always liked a good buzz, ever since the first time Aubrey swiped a pint of her mom’s vodka and they drank it stirred into Sunny D. But drinking was different then. She and Aubrey sought out highs of all kinds as teenagers but saw themselves as separate from the burnouts at school, the kids who snuck out to the parking lot between classes and slouched at their lockers with red eyes. Maya got all A’s without trying, and Aubrey, though her grades never reflected it, was smart in her own way. She understood people, saw through their acts. Her family had moved around a lot when she was little, so she had a lot of practice when it came to making friends, but one thing she hadn’t learned was how to keep them.

She was the new girl when Maya met her in ninth grade English, mysterious and intriguing to all, especially the boys, with her green eyes and sly grin. Maya was only one of many new friends Aubrey had made in her first few weeks of school, but out of all of them, their friendship was the one that lasted. The one they both cultivated.

They’d been paired up for a report on Emily Dickinson and bonded over poetry. Poetry was part of why they worked, the shared ability to be swept away by a beautiful line. But it was also that neither quite belonged—Aubrey, the perpetual new girl, and Maya with her nose in a book. She looked Hispanic but had grown up with a single white mom and knew very little about her family in Guatemala. She didn’t feel she fit in with the other Hispanic kids, while not being white meant she stuck out in Pittsfield.

Maya spent most of her time reading and making up stories. She was more popular with teachers than with her peers, but she was okay with that. She was going to be a writer, just like her father had been. She was going to write books and be famous. She was going to leave Pittsfield behind.

She got into almost every college she applied to and chose BU because of its creative writing program and because of the scholarships she was offered. But the week before she was supposed to start, Aubrey died.

And Maya’s life was divided into a Before and an After.

She lost her closest friend. Saw it happen before her eyes, yet to this day sensed that there was more to the incident than what she saw. Like watching a magic trick and understanding that it was an illusion, but not knowing how the magician had pulled it off.

It didn’t make sense. Aubrey was healthy, didn’t have any preexisting conditions. Her parents had an autopsy performed, but that didn’t answer anything, and the medical examiner eventually labeled it “Sudden Unexplained Death”—the name for when someone drops dead for apparently no reason. It was often blamed on an arrhythmia of the heart or a certain kind of seizure.

Only Maya felt sure that it was Frank.

There was no weapon, no poison, no contact of any kind. No bloodshed or wounds on Aubrey’s body. Maya couldn’t prove it—couldn’t explain it, even—but she insisted that he had deceived them all somehow.

Maybe if she’d had a shred of evidence, the police would have taken her seriously. But as it was, they questioned Frank and, finding no reason to keep him, let him go—with a warning to Maya about false accusations. They said she could ruin a man’s life that way.

Her mom had more patience for Maya’s suspicions, but when they failed to add up, she began to worry about her daughter’s mental health. Mental illness ran in the family like a curse, and at seventeen, Maya was right at that age when it could strike.

This was how she wound up under the care of Dr. Fred Barry, who Maya’s mom had found in the Yellow Pages.

Within an hour of meeting her, Dr. Barry diagnosed Maya with brief psychotic disorder. Grief could bring it on. He said her fears about Frank were delusional but assured her that she wasn’t the first to react with magical thinking to a death so sudden and unexpected. Less than two out of every hundred thousand people suddenly drop dead for reasons that can’t be explained by an autopsy.

Some cultures blame such deaths on evil spirits. The mind will always try to explain what it can’t understand—it will make up stories, theories, whole belief systems—and Maya’s mind, Dr. Barry said, was of the type that saw faces in clouds and messages in tea leaves. Patterns where others saw none. It meant she had a good imagination—but one that could trick her.

The antipsychotics dulled the certainty burning in her gut that Frank had deceived them all somehow, but the feeling never went away completely. It came over her sometimes, a dark crawling. The horrible conviction that Dr. Barry was wrong, even though everyone believed him, and that Frank had, in fact, murdered her best friend.