What Lies in the Woods(29)

“No, of course not,” I said. I opened my mouth, shut it, unable to put it into words. It didn’t matter whether I believed them, in a way. It didn’t even matter whether Stahl was guilty. A righteous lie was still a lie. A wicked life was still a life. I had destroyed a man, and I couldn’t trust my own memories to tell me that I’d done the right thing. I had to take it on faith. I had to trust in what other people had seen.

I’d never been good at trust.

“So why are you so freaked out now? Just because he died?” Cass’s lips wrinkled into a frown.

“I got a letter from Stahl’s son,” I said. “He knows that I lied. He says his father wasn’t the one who attacked me. Is there any way—if you were wrong—”

Cass held up a hand. “Hold on. He knows you lied? How?”

“I…” The letter hadn’t gone into detail, had it? My memory was foggy. “I’m not sure.”

“If he knew that you’d lied, if he knew his dad hadn’t done it, don’t you think he would have said something? The guy is probably just messed up about his dad dying and lashing out. I think you need to ask yourself why you’re so eager to find something that’s your fault.”

I flinched. She gave me no ground, keeping her gaze locked on mine.

“Bad things happened to you. It doesn’t mean you deserved them. You have earned the right to protect yourself. You don’t owe the world anything. It owes you.” She adjusted her jacket. “Let’s go.”

She stalked off. I followed, half dazed. Guilt and doubt had been my constant companions for decades. I didn’t know if I could let them go. Cass didn’t understand. She couldn’t. She knew what she’d seen—she had the certainty of her own memory. And maybe it should feel horrible—the knowledge of what I had caused with my words. That wasn’t the kind of weight you should just be able to leave behind. Was it?

“There it is,” Cass said at last.

The boulder had been dropped here millennia ago by some glacier and settled into the landscape to stay. Soil had built up above it, letting the forest grow over it, forming a gentle hill. Only the face of the stone was visible, gray and craggy. It reached about a foot above my head. At its base was a seam of shadow. It seemed impossibly small.

I knelt by the seam and bent down, shining the flashlight into the gap. All I could see was dirt and stone; the shape of the boulder obscured the area beyond. “We’re going to have to go in,” I said.

“Liv’s not here. There would have been some sign of her. We should just go,” Cass said.

“We have to be sure,” I insisted. Liv could be in there. And even if she wasn’t, I needed to see. Ever since Liv had spoken the name, Persephone had been haunting my thoughts. Part of me needed to know that she was real—that she wasn’t just part of the game we’d played.

Cass didn’t budge. I set my jaw. Fine. I dropped to my stomach and carefully wriggled my way under the lip of stone, into the narrow gap beneath. Rock scraped my back. This had been easier at eleven.

The dirt floor sloped away as soon as you were inside. I levered myself down bit by bit and then I was past the lip of stone and the space opened up into a miniature cave, barely three feet tall.

Cass squeezed down behind me after all, and the two of us sat with our backs to the entrance, breathing hard, my flashlight beam fixed on the middle of the chamber. On Persephone.

She was exactly as I’d seen her last. I hadn’t been back since that day, but here she was, and the past twenty years collapsed into nothing, into an instant.

She lay curled on her side. Her hands were curved in toward her chest, like she’d been cold, but the skull faced upward—toward the single shaft of light that fell from above, as if in the moments before her death she had turned her face to seek the sun.

Her flesh had long since rotted away, her clothes been reduced to rags. They had clung to her until our clever fingers plucked them away from her arched ribs, from the long, pale bones of her legs. Our whispers still seemed to fill this space, caught echoing between its walls.

Trinkets and treasures lay scattered around her. Our offerings. Beads and coins and jewelry, a crystal ballerina three inches tall, a river stone with a hole worn through it. We’d laid them down around these bones, to worship and to claim her.

“Persephone,” I whispered, and the whisper joined the other echoes.

Something touched my hand. I jumped, but it was only Cass. She laced her fingers with mine. “The flowers,” she said.

I nodded. There were flowers set in the skull’s gaping eye sockets. Lilies. And they were fresh.

The past wasn’t the past anymore. It was lying in front of us, and we were eleven years old again, and we were still playing the game.





There’d been a fire at the mill that summer. A faulty bit of wiring had thrown a spark, and with all the sawdust, that was all it took. There wasn’t much damage, but it was all anyone was talking about—the what-if of it all. What if Cassidy’s dad, Jim, hadn’t been working overnight. What if the lone employee working with him hadn’t noticed the orange glow across the yard. What if Jim hadn’t called it in right away, not bothering to confirm if it was in fact a fire, knowing that flames in this place would spread fast enough that seconds counted.

It would’ve only hastened the inevitable. The mill would close eight months later. A fire at least would’ve gotten the Greens a fat insurance payout. But to the three of us, the fire at the mill didn’t signify a risk to jobs or money; it was an omen of greater things.