True Places(71)

She crossed the lawn, picking her way around overturned chairs, beer bottles, and red cups, and crossed the street, to where it was quieter and darker. She hurried, keeping to the shadows, and pulled the knife from her purse, holding it at her side.

Iris could not go back to the Blakemores’, not now. She desperately needed somewhere familiar, somewhere safe. She’d made a mistake trusting Brynn. She’d been foolish in thinking Brynn was letting her into her life, accepting her, helping her become someone she had never in a million years expected to be. For a short time, Iris had thought she could fit in, and she had wanted to become the teenager everyone expected her to be. She’d even imagined Sam was attracted to her, but it was only a game. She didn’t understand its purpose and she didn’t want to. There was nothing to learn except this: she didn’t belong.

When she reached the area with stores and restaurants, Iris crossed the main road and entered the campus. She knew the layout from walks with Suzanne and from her own nighttime excursions. As late as it was, a few people were around, including what she guessed were some sort of police, but it was simple to avoid them. She slipped along the shadows.

Ducking between parked cars, she crossed a narrow, empty road and found the place she was looking for. She jumped the low stone wall and zigzagged between row after row of upright slabs and towers of stones. A nearby streetlight cast a dim light as far as the center of the cemetery. She moved into the dark, drawn by scent to an evergreen, an unfamiliar species, and lay down beneath it on her back.

She had no one. Ash would never come here. He might never come again, knowing how fully she had abandoned him, how she had sold her soul (and his) to this barren world in exchange for exactly nothing. Iris listened to the never-ending traffic noises, the whirring of machines whose purpose she did not know, the barking of a chained dog, the insistent piercing whine of a siren in the distance. She listened: passive, uncaring, lifeless.





CHAPTER 31

Suzanne awoke on the living room couch. A black-and-white movie was playing on the television. The sound was off. She pushed herself to a sitting position and checked her phone for the time—3:35—then checked her texts. Nothing unread. She had texted Brynn around one a.m., and her daughter had replied that she and her friends were playing Apples to Apples. The text had seemed lucid enough. Suzanne had texted her again an hour later and gotten no response. She had considered contacting Kendall’s mother but didn’t want to second-guess the woman who had done plenty by hosting the party and who had promised to check on the kids. The boys were due to go home before two. Suzanne surmised that Brynn hadn’t responded because she was occupied with her friends—or fast asleep.

Reid eschewed check-in texts, citing their pointlessness. Mia had called just after eleven to say the pizza she’d ordered for the boys had disappeared from the kitchen counter, prima facie evidence that they were alive and well. Suzanne had giggled at the phrase prima facie. After she had hung up with Mia, Whit had gone to bed, but Suzanne had stayed, saying she wasn’t tired yet. And then she’d fallen asleep.

Now she carried the empty wineglasses into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. A car stopped on the road in front of the house. The bushes along the sidewalk partially obscured her view, but she heard a door shut, and when a flashlight swept over the car, she saw emergency lights on the roof. She dropped the glass in the sink, where it shattered, and ran to the front of the house. Torn between going to the door and running upstairs for Whit, Suzanne stood paralyzed in the entry.

“Whit!” She scrambled halfway up the stairs. “Whit!” A light came on in the upstairs hall. Suzanne rushed to the door and opened it. Two figures were on the walkway, cast in shadow by the streetlight. Suzanne flipped on the porch lights. A female police officer was half carrying Brynn toward the house. Suzanne ran toward them. Brynn’s face was slack, her eyes unfocused. Her hair was matted, and one sleeve of her shirt was torn, the bra strap hanging off her shoulder.

“Brynn!” Suzanne grasped her daughter by the arm to help support her. The sour smell of beer and vomit coming from Brynn’s hair and clothing told Suzanne what was wrong. She spoke to the officer as they hoisted Brynn up the steps. “Where did you find her?”

“Let’s just get her inside; then we can talk.”

Whit appeared at the door in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

“She’s drunk,” Suzanne said.

“Here, let me take her.” He slipped his arm around Brynn’s waist.

In the light of the entry, Suzanne noticed Brynn’s jeans were unzipped. “No.”

Whit followed Suzanne’s gaze. “Jesus.”

“I’d get some towels,” the officer said to Suzanne. “She made a mess of my cruiser.”

Suzanne hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper towels and two water bottles from the pantry, and returned to the living room. Brynn was propped up on the couch, her head lolling on Whit’s shoulder.

The policewoman pulled a phone and a paisley ID case from her pocket and placed them on the coffee table. “At least she was carrying ID. You be surprised at how many don’t.”

“What should we give her?” Whit asked. “What if she took something else, like pills?”

Suzanne’s throat locked tight. That hadn’t occurred to her.