Burn Our Bodies Down(17)

Anderson doesn’t move. “Not yet,” he says, eyes fixed on me. “Margot? Okay, Margot. Can you tell me what happened? What were the two of you doing out there?”

A fire engine blares past, its sirens at a shriek, the sound so loud it seems to shake the whole world. I can feel my body trying to get back to normal, trying to settle in spite of the adrenaline racing through my veins.

“The two of us?” He must mean me and Eli. Unless—

“You and your sister here,” Anderson says.

It jolts something loose in me, hearing it from him. “No,” I say, and I manage one step toward him before Officer Connors hauls me back, fingers tight around my arm. “No, that’s not. She’s not. I’ve never seen her before. Not ever.” I want to keep talking. I have to make him understand. I have to understand it myself—that this girl is not mine. She is not my mother’s. She can’t be.

“Never?” Anderson raises his eyebrows. “Not once? I’m sure you can understand why I have a little trouble believing that.”

“Margot was with me all morning,” Tess says from over his shoulder.

He barely blinks. “And I’m sure you can understand why I have a little trouble believing Miss Miller.”

“She’s not lying,” Eli calls. His face flat and pale with shock, his fingers flexing like he’s trying to shake the feeling of that body in his arms. “We brought Margot out here. She didn’t do this.” His eyes meet mine for a fraction too long. I can almost hear him ask it: Right?

“I swear,” I say, my voice unsteady. “I just came to Phalene this morning.” It feels ridiculous to be standing here talking about this when there’s a body like mine laid out on the pavement. But she isn’t impossible to them like she is to me. She’s just another girl they’ve never seen before. A simple story. Two girls go in, and one comes out.

“All right,” Anderson says. Indulgent. Fake. “You just got here and you’ve never seen this girl before. Let’s say that’s true. So what happened?”

“Tess and Eli heard there was a fire,” I say. I want to look to Tess, want her to confirm it, but I know if I look away even once, Anderson will call it guilt. “They wanted…we wanted to see. So we rode out here.”

“And you’re sure it had already started?” Anderson says.

“Yes.” I try to remember what happened in town, whether it was Tess or Eli who got the message. “Someone saw it and told us.”

“Because this is Nielsen land.” Anderson nods to the fields, to the fire sweeping closer. “And you can tell me any kind of lie you like, Margot, but you two are Nielsen girls. That means something in this town.”

“And what’s that?” I ask. A challenge, sure, but more than that, something I need to know.

Anderson smiles grimly. “Trouble.”

The blur of adrenaline is leaving my body, and pain is taking its place, prickling over my skin, throbbing and fuzzy. “I’m telling the truth. We were watching and I saw someone out there.” I sway suddenly, the heat gripping me hard and letting go. I need some water. I need to sit down.

Take a deep breath. Eyes back on him. “So I went to look.”

“You just ran out into a fire?” Anderson leans in. “You weren’t scared?”

I have to be careful. I’m alone here, and there’s a reason they’re not talking to Eli, even though he’s the one who carried the body out of the field. Treat it like Mom, I tell myself. Only what you’d say to her on her very worst day. “Of course I was scared,” I say. “But I thought someone needed help.”

“Sure.” Anderson nods like he believes me, but nothing about him relaxes. “So you went out there to help. Then what?”

“Leland and Polk are on their way,” Connors says. He nods to the third police officer, the one setting up traffic cones across the highway behind Tess and Eli. “Mather can hold the scene until then. Let’s go, yeah? They need some water and a medic.”

A medic. I glance down at my flushed hands, feel the sting of a burn along my hairline like it only just now occurred to my body to feel any pain.

“Then what did you do?” Anderson presses, ducking to meet my eyes. “I want to get you looked after just like Officer Connors does, but we have to do this first. We have to do it now, Margot.”

Ignore it, I tell myself; ignore the flush of your skin and the roar of the fire, still there, still in your veins. Get this over with. “I tried to lift her. But I couldn’t. So Eli came. He carried her out. And that’s when you got here.”

For a moment nobody moves. I think maybe I’ve done it. Maybe this is just a mess we’re all in together, and there’s no blame hiding in any of it.

Then Anderson sighs. “I really wish you wouldn’t lie,” he says. “It’d be so much easier.”

“I’m not,” I say. It’s all I have the energy for. I am so tired and I don’t understand any of this. These men, asking about the fire when the real question is there on the ground, her eyes open, her heart still. Half of me wants to kneel over her again, to touch my forehead to hers and make sure I saw what I think I did; the other half is sick at the thought of it.

“All right,” Anderson says. “Then we need to go to the station.”