What Lies in the Woods(95)

“Liv was basically catatonic at the hospital,” Marcus added. “They were both covered in blood. There was so much blood.” He looked pale at the memory.

Silence settled between us. It lingered, long enough for the conversation to wither, for any sense of connection between us to vanish, until each of us in that room was truly, utterly, alone.

“Naomi, what are you going to do?” Kimiko asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. I gave the marmalade cat one last scratch behind the ears, and I walked out, leaving them to their grief and guilt and fear.





I had reached the end. Or my end, at least. I couldn’t do this by myself anymore. I didn’t even know what I was searching for, why I’d thought that the answers I found would bring me some kind of peace. So Jim was a killer and Liv had almost become one, and there was no truth in any of that. Only sorrow.

The time for keeping secrets was over. I couldn’t hold off any longer—I needed to go to the police. I had to tell them everything.

But I couldn’t just walk in there. Not when it was the mayor I was accusing of murdering a girl—never mind the fact that I’d lied all these years and sent a man to prison for the wrong crime. I had no idea what kind of consequences I was facing. I needed help, and there was no one left to help me.

No—that wasn’t true.

Cody Benham’s business card was in my glove box. I cast around blindly for a minute before I remembered that my phone was long gone, thanks to Jessup Consulting. Instead, I drove until I found a pay phone at the edge of town, next to a bulletin board warning about keeping food where bears could get at it. I dialed the number with shaking hands. He picked up on the second ring with a distracted hello.

“Cody.” I gulped against a rising surge of panic.

“Naomi? What’s wrong?” he asked, voice sharp with concern.

“At the station, you said that you could help me find a lawyer,” I said. I braced myself, forcing the words out. “Well, I think I could really use one right about now.” I bit back a hysterical laugh and dug a thumbnail into my wrist.

“Are you in trouble?” Cody asked, low and serious.

“I don’t know. I don’t—” My voice broke off in a sob. “I’m not sure where to even start answering that question.”

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he said, quiet and steady. “Where are you?”

“I don’t know. I…” I forced myself to focus, look around. “I’m near the Anderson loop trail, I think.”

“Good. All right, stay put. I’m going to come to you. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, relief flooding through me. I leaned my forehead against the pay phone’s housing.

“We’ll figure this out,” he promised. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“I’ll be here.”



* * *



The rain had blurred the world outside the car to an indistinct haze of green by the time the SUV pulled up beside me. I clambered out and went over to the passenger side, sliding into the seat next to Cody. “Thanks for meeting me,” I said quietly.

“I would have invited you over to the house, but Gabriella is in bed with a headache and a backache and a number of other aches that are all somehow my fault,” Cody said. I chuckled like I was in on the joke, but right now domestic bliss seemed more of a fanciful daydream than the goddesses and unicorns of my childhood. “You sounded pretty rough on the phone. What’s going on?”

I hunched over, wishing that I’d thought to change into something more substantial than a cotton dress. I couldn’t answer at first, but he just put a hand on my shoulder.

“You said you need a lawyer,” Cody pressed gently. “Is this about Liv?”

“It’s hard to know where to begin,” I said. A bird, rendered into a streak of brown by the rainy windows, flashed past. “I keep thinking it started that summer, but it was earlier than that. It didn’t even start with me.”

“What didn’t?”

We’d kept the secret so long. It had seemed impossible to tell anyone, but now I couldn’t remember why. I’d told Ethan, and maybe that had been enough to make it easier to tell again, but I didn’t think that was really it. It was never that the secret was too powerful to speak. It was only ever that we didn’t want to. Too selfish and too timid to even try. Now the words came easily. They’d been there all along.

“That summer, we found something,” I said. The wind moved the trees in a gentle undulation, and the sound of the rain was like static, drowning out the rest of the world. “It was a skeleton. A human skeleton. We should have told someone, but instead we made it our secret. We called her Persephone, and we visited her every day. We brought her offerings. We did things for her. It was a game, but it wasn’t. We believed.”

He made a sound, a startled huh, half swallowed like he didn’t want to interrupt me.

“After the attack, we kept that secret. We kept it for years. But Liv couldn’t live with it. She wanted to find out who Persephone really was. And she did. Her name was Jessi Walker.”

A breath went out of him. “That’s why you were asking about her,” he said. I nodded. “You knew where she was the whole time?”