Burn Our Bodies Down(39)

Turn the corner onto the highway. Ash opening up on our left and the heat like cotton, like a clean sheet brushing my body, hotter and hotter, until there’s nothing else. A haze, a fog, a shimmer on the road. Tess weaving back and forth, dress fluttering in the wind, hair long and loose. Sometimes life looks exactly the way you think it should.

And then we pass it and it doesn’t anymore. The crime scene tape. The place where Eli laid her body. The scene is clear now, no cruisers and no techs, no camera flashes, but it was barely a day ago. Like it or not, it’s easy to remember.

Tess slows down, her path taking her right to the edge of the road, and for a moment I think she means to stop, to put us back there. But I stay steady, and she catches up. Slides her bike alongside mine, and for a minute we just coast.

“Okay?” Tess calls to me over the rush of the breeze.

And I have no idea, but I say, “Sure.”





fourteen





tess does take me past the pool, but I barely see more than the stretch of concrete and the flash of brightly patterned bathing suits before we’re into the thicket of the houses and breaking out onto the town square. I wonder if she’d be back there on any other day, watching her friends put on sunscreen and shrieking as Eli throws her into the water. But now I’m here, and I’m asking for her help. Never mind that she offered.

She pulls over by the bike rack at the corner of the town green, and I follow. My mouth is dry from the ride, and I can still feel every place that yesterday’s heat touched, but away from Gram, away from Fairhaven, I’m more of the person I was two days ago, before any of this happened. Just Margot Nielsen.

“So,” Tess says, getting off her bike. “I’m showing you around town?”

She didn’t ask on the ride here, with the wind and the road ahead of us, and I didn’t explain. But I have to now.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry about all that before.”

“No, I should thank you,” she says. I watch her slot her bike into the rack, wait for her to lock it, although with what, I don’t know. Nothing to worry about for Tess, in Phalene. “You saved me from one of my dad’s ‘let’s talk about farming’ moods. Besides”—and the smile falls from her face, leaves the earnest girl I got a glimpse of yesterday and again this morning—“I saw what you saw. I’m not exactly fine about it, you know?”

That’s one way to put it. I walk my borrowed bike up to the rack and settle it home. Yesterday it was her asking me what I knew. Now it’s my turn.

“What I was trying to say before is that I found something,” I say. “My grandmother told me I was staying in a guest room—that no one ever really lived there. But my dresser was full of clothes just like the girl was wearing.”

Tess follows me toward the rack, leaning against it.”Did you ask her about them?”

“Yeah,” I say, clearing my throat. “She had an explanation. She always has an explanation, except they don’t make any sense. I think that girl must have been my sister. Maybe she was living at Fairhaven and I was with my mom.”

Tess’s eyes go wide. “Like…” And I can see her try not to say it. It comes out anyway. “Like some kind of Parent Trap shit?”

Jesus. “Sure,” I say. “If that’s how you want to think about it. But nobody’s seen anyone else at Fairhaven. You haven’t. The police obviously haven’t.”

“I’m guessing Vera hasn’t had much to say about it.” Tess sweeps her hair over one shoulder, a breeze catching the swing of it. “What about your mom? You could ask her. It’s her shit too.”

It is, but that doesn’t matter. “I think,” I say instead of answering, “that I need to figure out why she left.”

“The fire,” Tess says immediately, and then she winces. “Well, the first one.”

“Right.” That’s not enough. Luckily, I think I know where to find more.



* * *



—

Anderson told Gram his father’s old case notes were in storage, and that, Tess says when I explain, means the police station. Which is how we end up at the station’s back door trying to pick the lock with a safety pin Tess found in the grass.

“I swear I’ll get it,” she’s saying. “I saw this in a movie once.”

I don’t exactly have a better idea, but I take a step back from her, press one hand to my stomach to settle the nausea there. I don’t like this part of her, don’t like how she can treat my life like it’s an adventure she’s on. No matter what attraction I can feel sparking sometimes, it’ll never be strong enough to burn that away.

I step back, try to gather my thoughts. That’s when I realize we’re standing next to the parking lot, and it’s empty of cruisers. Anderson and Connors and whoever else are all out in town. “Look,” I say. “They’re not here. Can’t we just go through the front?” I have no doubt that Tess can talk her way past whatever receptionist is on duty.

Tess straightens, one hand going up to shield her eyes from the sun. That’s not as fun, I can imagine her saying if I were looking at her with a little less frustration. Instead she says, “Sure. Hang back, though. Just in case.”