The Storm King(80)
Knowing Tom’s secret now, Nate marveled at how composed his friend had seemed. Tom thought he’d killed his best friend’s girlfriend just hours earlier, and there he was, lying to everyone and covering his own tracks with the talent of Greystone Lake’s villains of lore.
We are truly wonders.
The shrouded sky allowed a faint glow into the interior. Wreckage from the abandoned shops and cafés that flanked the promenade littered the place like grave markers. Nate expected it to feel strange to return here after so much time. He thought he might notice something different with his older eyes, but the promenade looked and smelled and felt the same. Impossibly so. Being there felt as familiar as if he’d walked this hall this morning and every morning that had preceded it. There was something immutable about this place. In the last age, when the world turned to ash, he could believe the Night Ship would endure, still groaning under the burden of its secrets.
But Nate revised this fantasy when he reached the sign with the galleon speeding for the harvest moon. The doors to the old nightclub were warped to the same spare width they’d always been stuck, but a spike of bloody light from the interior lanced the shadows of the hall.
Nate slipped inside. A lantern was lit on the corner of the bar, its glow muted by a scrim of red fabric. The dusty dance floor had been swept clean and was studded with neatly organized piles of gear. Coolers, cooking supplies, sleeping bags, books, and bottled water, their shadows casting totem silhouettes against the peeling crimson walls.
“Took you long enough.”
A lean shadow separated itself from the threshold of the velvet-cloaked staircase.
“James.” Of course these vandals had made the Night Ship their home. “Long time.”
“Where’s Pete?”
The missing boy. “I don’t know,” Nate answered.
“Did you kill Maura?” The thin young man paced the edge of the dance floor, his gaze never straying from Nate. Nate had known James as a boy, but not well. He and Lucy both had good reasons to keep their romantic and family lives separate. The odd light and broad shadows of the room gave the bones in the young man’s face a delicate geometry.
“No.”
James wheeled on him. “Lucy?”
“No.” Nate had questions for James, too. Just the sight of the young man in this place made the thing inside of him wrench itself with blood hunger. Grams was in an ICU, and there was no question this boy was somehow responsible. But the circumstances required the finesse of a surgeon, not the black rage of the Storm King.
“She said you were a good liar.”
“Lucy told you that?”
“She told us everything.”
“I doubt it. You were what, five years old?”
James circled around the far end of the bar, careful to keep his distance from Nate. His face shone like a stoplight in the lantern’s glow. Nate heard him open a cupboard or a drawer, and a moment later he dumped a thick stack of documents fastened with binder clips onto the scratched bar. The packets slid across the black wood like a deck of cards.
Nate approached the bar and picked up the first sheath of paper. As he did, James backed away. As though they were two magnets with the same polarity, an invisible barrier repelled the young man.
The pages of the document were filled with lines of strong, confident script. Nate flipped through enough of them to be sure. They were photocopies of Lucy’s journal entries. From the heft of the packets strewn across the bar, Nate guessed these were the complete contents of the journals the chief had shown him this morning.
These journals were how James and the others had learned about the Storm King, the Thunder Runs, and all of Lucy’s high school friends and enemies. This was how they’d made their list of suspects, and this was how their list of suspects became a list of targets.
“The chief gave you odd jobs at the station, and you thank him by ransacking the evidence room.”
“They weren’t in evidence. It was a cover-up from the start. The guy spent the last fourteen years trying to convince Mom that Lucy’d run away. Guess where he came up with that ‘goodbye note’ she left?” James jutted his chin at the pages spread across the scarred bar. “You know how it wasn’t dated? That’s because the chief trimmed the top of the page to get rid of it. Luce wrote it over a year before she disappeared. It’s from right after that douchebag Decker emailed the whole planet those pics.”
“How do you know?” Nate had to ask, though he believed it. That note had never felt right to him. Yesterday, he wouldn’t have thought the chief capable of fabricating evidence, but now he knew better.
“The original’s missing a page. Six notebooks filled, and only one torn-out page. Right between the entries for November thirtieth and December second. The tear matches the edge of the note. The chief didn’t tell anyone he found the journals, then he read through them, found that note, and thought: Hey, here’s a neat way to avoid investigating my son and his best friends for murder. He sold that whole runaway line of bullshit to Mom right up till those tourists found her body.” James’s voice rose with each sentence. “I worked at that place for months before I found them. Making their coffee, filing their transcripts.” The Bennett family resemblance extended beyond coloring and cheekbones. The look on his face was pure loathing.