The Quarry Girls(73)

“What?”

“Brenda was wearing clothes that weren’t hers. Why’d they put her in them?”

Dad looked out the front window, then back at me. He looked confused. Or betrayed. “How do you know they weren’t hers?”

He hadn’t asked me how I knew what she’d been wearing when her body was discovered. He’d asked me how I knew the clothes weren’t hers. “I know. They weren’t.”

His mouth tightened, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “Maybe you don’t know your friends as well as you thought.”

A pilot light in my belly sparked on, one I hadn’t known was there.

Flick. Hiss.

His words should have made me small, frozen me, my own dad telling me that I was wrong about the people I loved. But they’d done the opposite. They’d heated me up. I did know my friends. I might not have known everything they’d been doing, or who they’d been doing it with, but I knew the kind of people they were.

I knew their hearts.

I let that new fire burn, quietly. I wasn’t ready to show it yet. Not to my dad.

“Was Maureen strangled?” I asked.

Dad made a scoffing noise, stood. “Let her lie in the ground, Heather.”

I stared up at him, my strong dad, handsome as a Kennedy, though not the famous one, and I saw him, really saw him, for the first time. It unhinged something in me, allowing the flame he’d ignited to suddenly tear through all the paper truths he’d built. I could smell the burning, hear the crackle of the flames. It felt good, and terrifying, and like too much. I had to get away before it burned down everything, the good along with the bad.

I stood, wobbling a little. “I’m going for a walk.”

“It’s too hot out.”

“In the tunnels,” I said, shuffling toward the basement.

I still had just enough of my old blinders clinging on that I expected him to stop me, to say it was dangerous, that we should gather Junie and deal with this like a family.

He instead poured himself a drink.

It was a relief, almost, that we were done pretending.

I padded downstairs, grabbed the flashlight, opened the door. The cool of the tunnels was like a kiss. I considered which direction to go, but in the end, there was only one person who could give me relief, one person I could hurt like I was hurting.

Ant.

I walked to his house, stuck my good ear to his basement door. Nothing. I thought I heard a scraping shuffling coming from the dummy door across the way, the one tucked in the alcove, but that was my imagination.

I’d hoped to do something to Ant, something raw, like shredding his skin with my fingernails, ripping out his hair, making him suffer the fire that was now burning out of control inside me. But I couldn’t hear him inside his basement.

I turned and went home.

But the flame still burned, quietly.

For now.





CHAPTER 45


“What are you doing?”

Junie spun away from my bed, where she’d had her arm stuffed up to her shoulder between my mattress and the box spring. She hid her hand behind her back. Junie never came in my room, not without me in it. But then I remembered she went in Dad’s office.

Maybe she sneaked everywhere.

“Show me,” I demanded, the cool of the tunnels having firmed up my sedated edges.

She produced her fist, eyes lowered. She opened her hand to reveal a brown glass bottle with a yellow label. “I had a headache,” she said defensively.

The ground shivered beneath me, and I grabbed the doorjamb for support. The Anacin bottle held the pills I’d stolen from Mrs. Hansen. If she’d taken them . . .

“Give me those.”

She walked them over meekly. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find any aspirin in the medicine cabinet.”

“So you looked under my mattress?”

She appeared pained. “I looked everywhere. My head hurts. I ate too much ice cream at Libby’s.”

“When’d they drop you off?” I asked, leading her down the hall and into the bathroom.

“About ten minutes ago. Dad’s in his office. He told me not to bother him, so I came up here. You were gone.”

“So you looked under my mattress,” I repeated. I opened the medicine cabinet, grabbed the bottle of Bayer chewables, and handed it to her. I wanted her to admit that she’d been searching for my diary, but she just took the aspirin bottle, tapped two into her palm, and ate them without saying anything.

My mouth watered like it did every time I thought of that flavor, orange and sour. Maybe that’s how Anacin tasted, and that’s why Ed chewed it. Maybe it wasn’t really bitter, and Dad had lied about that, too. Suddenly, I wanted my mom so bad it was like I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care what shape she was in, that other than a blip here and there, it had been years since she’d mothered me. I needed her.

“I think I’m going to the hospital,” I said. “To visit Mom. You want to come with?”

“You don’t look so good,” Junie said, digging some aspirin out of her back teeth. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

I hurried to my room to grab my hospital-approved slippers. Junie followed.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.