What Lies in the Woods(57)

I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Naomi, hon. It’s Bill.” Dougherty’s voice was garbled from the poor signal. “How are you holding up?”

I stared at the dead girl’s bones as I answered. “I’m fine.” More than anything, I felt numb.

“That’s good, that’s good,” he said, with more enthusiasm than my tepid response warranted. “I probably shouldn’t be calling you, Naomi. I don’t exactly have the go-ahead from the new boss. But I thought you ought to know, we found the gun.”

The words didn’t register at first. The gun. The weapon that had killed Liv. “Where?” I managed.

“In the pond, like we expected. Just took us a while to sift through all the junk in there,” he said. “Look, I know Bishop has been hassling you. You know how it is, new to town, gotta prove herself. Jim’s told her to simmer down, though, now that we’ve got the weapon.”

“Was it Marcus Barnes’s gun?” I asked.

“Sure was.”

“And you’re sure that … You’re sure that’s the gun that killed her.” I swallowed hard.

“Well, we don’t have the bullet, so we can’t match the ballistics. But there’s no other reason for that gun to be in that pond, is there?” He cleared his throat. “I imagine it’s a relief for everyone, to have things wrapped up.”

“You’re putting it down as a suicide, then.”

“Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?”

I hadn’t thought Liv had killed herself—but I’d been wrong about everything so far. Maybe I was wrong about this, too.

My fingertips found the spiderweb cracks in Persephone’s skull, tightening in toward a center where one fragment had long since fallen away, leaving a ragged black gap.

No.

Liv wouldn’t have shot herself, and she hadn’t been suicidal. She’d been disappointed, but she wouldn’t have given up that easily. Not when she had something that she cared so much about and was so close to seeing through.

Not when she’d promised me.

Dougherty was talking about Bishop again. About how she wouldn’t have any choice now but to admit it was suicide and move on. His voice dipped in and out. “So I don’t think she’ll be bothering you again,” he said. “And if she does, you let me know and I’ll talk to Mayor Green about it. Make sure she understands.”

“Thank you,” I bit out, because it was what he wanted to hear. Bishop saw it. She knew Liv hadn’t hurt herself, but would that matter? If Mayor Green told her to drop it, she’d be risking her job to do anything else.

“It’s no problem, hon,” Dougherty said. “Hey, you made my career. I kind of owe you, I figure.”

“Made your career,” I repeated dully. The words didn’t make sense. And then they snapped into focus. “You mean because you were the one who got Stahl.”

He made a demurring sound. “I wouldn’t say I got him, just put the pieces together. My brother-in-law knew a guy working on the case, and he told me all about the guy they were looking at. I’d been carrying his photo around just in case I spotted him. Figured it was only a matter of time before he came hunting around here. As soon as those girls told me what had happened, it clicked.”

Silence stretched. I heard him shift, chair creaking, like he was expecting me to chime in with a bit of praise and was slowly realizing it wouldn’t come. He had no idea what he’d done. The error he’d set in motion.

And now he was doing it all over again. He’d known from the start it was suicide, like he’d known from the start it was Stahl. He was never going to look for another answer or consider that he could be wrong.

“Look, I—” he started. Then nothing. I kept the phone to my ear, waiting for him to finish, for several seconds before I realized the signal had finally dipped to zero.

The walls of the cave were close around me, and I couldn’t tell if it felt like threat or comfort. I clawed myself free, fleeing both, and staggered through the woods. The trees blurred around me as I made my way toward the road, my thoughts an endless inventory of ghosts.





I drove straight out of Chester, anger a sharp pain behind my sternum. Around Sequim, I pulled off at a rest stop to stretch my legs. A family with a little fluffy dog was playing on the grass nearby. Their car was piled with camping gear, tents and sleeping bags strapped to the roof. I sat at a picnic table, watching the dog chase a ball back and forth.

I’d only gone camping once as a kid. It was the year before that summer. Cass hated camping, so Liv and I spent a week in the woods with Marcus and Kimiko, just the two of us. We shared a tent and stayed up late into the right, whispering. I would sneak my hand out from my sleeping bag, and she would find it, and we would let our fingers slide over each other, lacing and unlacing.

I remembered the feeling in the pit of my stomach as we lay in the tent, an excruciating longing. It would be years later and far away that I’d finally recognize what it meant—that I had been more than a little in love with Olivia. Gay was just a synonym for stupid when we were growing up in Chester. Bisexual was a punch line to a dirty joke. I’d been well into college before I realized I was attracted to women. And by then, even if Liv had felt the same way, things were too complicated, Liv’s stability too precarious.