What Lies in the Woods(34)

“I can feel them sometimes,” she whispered, and burrowed against me. I put my arms around her, her head tucked under my chin. I held her until she went slack with sleep, but my eyes never closed.

“Of course I believe,” I whispered to the dark, but there was no one to answer.





The summer we found Persephone, Dad’s drinking spiraled out of control. He’d been seeing a woman, but when she realized he wasn’t the fixer-upper she thought, just a money pit, she bailed. Up until then, he’d held down a part-time job tending bar and kept food in the cupboards, but he lost interest in both. I spent most meals with Cass’s family or Liv’s. Found five dollars tucked in my coat pocket more often than not. Got invited for sleepovers even on school nights. That’s how Chester took care of its own: quietly, so you wouldn’t seem to be interfering.

The weight of all that pity was almost unbearable, but Liv never once made me feel lesser. We’d been outsiders together. We were all friends, and I’d never have said I loved one more than the other, but I’d harbored the secret truth that Liv was my best friend, the one who understood me.

And now she was dead.

My coffee cup had gone cold in my hand. A fleck of grit floated slowly over its surface, finally clinging to the waxed cardboard rim. I tipped the cup, dislodging the fleck, and watched it drift away again.

“Ms. Cunningham?”

It was the third time Bishop had said it. I looked up through bleary eyes. I sat in a conference room at the Chester police station, a gray blanket wrapped around me, wearing borrowed sweats and a department T-shirt. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been there. I couldn’t seem to anchor myself in time. I kept slipping back to the pond, to that summer, to a hundred days in between. Anything but now.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Bishop said. No if that’s all right or other niceties that might imply I had a choice.

I nodded like I didn’t have anything to hide. Bishop took the next seat over from me, setting a folder on the table in front of her. I stared at it, trying to guess what was inside. Information about me? About Liv?

“When is the last time you spoke to Ms. Barnes?” Bishop asked.

“Yesterday. We met up at Cassidy’s house and then I dropped her off at home afterward.”

“Did she seem agitated?”

“Did you know Olivia?” I asked, head tilted. Bishop’s lips thinned. “Olivia being agitated doesn’t mean much. She gets anxious a lot.”

“More agitated than usual, then.”

Agitated, like she’d ripped open a poorly healed wound we’d been ignoring for twenty years. Agitated, like she was dragging our secrets out into the light. “I’m not sure.”

I wanted Bishop to stop talking, but her questions kept coming, relentless, leaving my thoughts no time to find solid ground before they were sent skidding away again.

“Why were you meeting up?”

“Stahl died. We wanted to see each other. You know. Survivors’ club.” My voice sounded distant. I hadn’t made the active choice to lie. It was just habit. Easier than telling the truth. The lies let me stay numb.

“Did Olivia own a gun?” Bishop asked.

That jerked me out of the haze momentarily. “What? No,” I said. “She hates guns. They scare her.” Growing up in a logging town, you’d have thought she would grow out of it, but she never stopped getting antsy around them.

Bishop made a noise in the back of her throat that I couldn’t interpret. “Her father has two guns registered to him. A shotgun and a Ruger SP101 revolver.”

“Right,” I said. “He bought those for protection when we were kids, but Liv never touched them. Why are you asking about a gun?”

“She was shot,” Bishop said without inflection, and there was a strange kindness in that, stripping it down to a simple fact without either gentleness or malice. “The bullet entered the temple and exited on the other side, toward the back of her skull. Her hair might have concealed the wounds,” she added, more softly, seeing the confusion in my eyes.

The world shifted around those words, reality reordering itself. I hadn’t thought about how she died, only that she was dead. When she had attempted suicide, she had overdosed on pills. Shooting herself was too violent. “Liv wouldn’t use a gun. She hated them. She hated blood, she—”

“Do you own a gun, Ms. Cunningham?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I guess.”

“You guess? Which is it, yes or no?”

“My boyfriend bought me a gun, but it’s registered to him,” I said impatiently. Mitch had thought it would help my anxiety. I’d left it in its case. PTSD meant my brain wasn’t able to sort out the difference between real threats and imagined ones. I didn’t want it making that error while I had a gun in my hand.

“What kind of gun?” Bishop prompted.

“I don’t know. It’s black. I think it’s a nine-millimeter,” I said. “I don’t know guns. But it’s in Seattle. I’ve never even taken it to a gun range.”

“We may need to take a look at it,” Bishop said.

“Why?” I asked, baffled. “I told you, it’s in Seattle. In the back of my closet.”

“What were you doing in the woods last night, Ms. Cunningham?” Bishop asked. I stared at her, uncomprehending. And then I understood, and my breath caught. “What were you doing in the woods?” Bishop repeated.