What Lies in the Woods(100)

Cass was wearing a sensible windbreaker and hiking boots, her hair slicked back in a ponytail. She carried a black duffel bag. As she approached, she glared at Cody, eyes burning with anger.

“She was going to the police. She was going to tell them about Jessi,” Cody said.

Cass looked at me, and it was like she’d never seen me before in her life. There was nothing to connect to in her eyes. Nothing but calculation.

“Cass,” I whispered, and for one dizzying moment nothing made any sense. She couldn’t be here. And then I stilled.

I looked beneath the surface, and I saw what had been there all along.

Cass put her hand on Cody’s wrist, pushing the gun down gently. “Give us a minute, will you?” she said.

He nodded reluctantly and paced away a few steps, but he kept hold of the gun. Cass dropped the duffel bag on the ground and approached me, rubbing her palms on her jeans. She crouched down a couple feet away.

“Fuck. This is messed up,” she whispered, darting her eyes toward Cody. Making a conspiracy out of the two of us. “What did he tell you?”

I stared at her. She sounded so worried. Almost panicked, and desperately concerned for me. Two minutes ago, her face had been so devoid of emotion it could have been carved from stone, and now I could have believed she was on the edge of tears.

“I’m tired of lying,” I said.

“What?” she asked, a line appearing between her perfect eyebrows.

“That’s what Liv said after she tried to kill herself, eight years ago. Kimiko told me. It’s what she said in the letter, too.” The note that proved I was wrong, that Bishop’s suspicions and Sawant’s insinuations were misplaced. Liv had killed herself. Except she hadn’t, so who left the note?

The same person who had known where Marcus Barnes kept his gun. The person who had put the gate code in at 4:47 a.m.

I thought of Liv, glancing back toward the car before slinging herself easily over the gate. Liv at fifteen, skirting the living room because her father had the gun out to clean it.

Liv looking me in the eye. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Liv never used the gate code—she just climbed over. But Cass knew the code and she knew where the gun was kept.

There hadn’t been a note eight years ago. Not that we’d found, at least. That time, I’d known it was coming. We’d all known, hoping we were wrong and terrified we were right. The meds hadn’t been helping. They were part of the problem—the high dosage that made her hands shake until she couldn’t hold a pencil to draw a straight line. Her notebooks were full of abandoned, sloppy sketches.

Her handwriting had been huge and messy, slewing across the page. Nothing like the tiny, precise lettering she usually had. But exactly like the suicide note.

The note was from eight years ago. It seemed so unlikely—who would have such a thing? After eight years, carefully preserved?

Tucked away in a box of secrets.

Cass frowned at me, uncertainty disrupting her careful mask of concern. “Listen, Naomi. I can try to talk Cody down, but I’ve got to know what exactly is going on here,” she said.

“As if you don’t know.”

“All I know is that I got a panicked call from Cody saying that you knew something and he was going to take care of it, and I should come meet him,” she said.

“And you know about Jessi. You know what he did to her.”

“Sort of,” she hedged. I could almost see the shift behind her eyes, her lies rebalancing. It was a neat trick.

“He told me what happened to Liv.”

Her lips parted. Her head cocked slightly, curiously, as she tried to rebalance again. “What happened to Liv,” she repeated softly. Not sure how much I knew.

“He killed her so she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about Persephone. But, Cass, there’s no way he could have known that she was about to tell us. Unless … unless you already knew,” I said.

Cass’s lips pressed together. “I knew my dad was fucking Jessi. And I knew what it meant when Cody showed up at our house in the middle of the night, covered in blood and panicking. My dad talked him down. They didn’t know I saw.”

“And when we found Persephone…”

She drew something out of her pocket, staring down at it. Then she held it out to me. A plastic bag. Inside it was a chipped plastic name tag. CODY. A scrap of fabric still hung from the pin, and a splotch of what looked like dried blood marred one corner. “It was raining. I guess Cody gave her his work jacket,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t you say anything?” I asked, still unable to comprehend what I was hearing.

“Can you imagine what a mess that would have been?” Cass said. She looked back at Cody. “Cody’s life would be over. And my dad would get dragged into it, too, and you know this town. Even if he could prove he hadn’t killed her, that would be it for him.” She looked at me, tears swimming in her eyes, and put a hand on my knee. “Besides, we needed Persephone. We needed something to tie us together before we went to middle school. Keep us from drifting apart.”

I nodded slowly, as if this made sense. As if it was anywhere in the neighborhood of sane. “But, Cass, how did Cody know?”

She let out a heavy sigh. “Okay, I’ll admit I screwed up there. It was when I was trying to get the lodge up and running. We were out of money. Completely out. I was going to lose everything—all the work I’d put in, all the money my parents had invested. So I called and asked Cody if he could invest some of Gabriella’s money. He didn’t feel like he could ask her for that much, so I … provided him with an extra incentive.”