What Have We Done (54)

“I know Benny,” Donnie says. “He’s gonna need to go after them. Get justice.” He exaggerates the word. “He said his dad went to prison for something he didn’t do. He never forgave himself for not being able to stop it.”

Jenna understands Donnie’s fear. But she thinks of Marta’s eyes the night she woke up Jenna to get her safe … Annie telling off Derek at the lunchroom. They wouldn’t walk away if Jenna disappeared.

She watches across the library as Nico comes out of the bathroom. He says something to Ben, grabs a handful of the papers, the folded stars, then throws them on the floor, and charges outside.

Ben comes over to them.

Jenna says, “Sorry I didn’t get the book, I needed to—”

“It’s all right. I found what we need. We gotta get the Feds interested. It’s the only way to deal with corrupt local cops and officials.”

Jenna nods. “Is Nico okay?”

Ben looks at the floor. “He’s…” Ben searches for the word. “Devastated.”

“He should be,” Donnie says. “We need to drop this.” His eyes are red and watering.

Ben crouches low. “Look at me, you redneck.”

Donnie raises his glance to Ben’s.

“You want them to get any more of our friends?”

Donnie shakes his head.

“You trust me?”

Donnie nods this time. “Brothers from another mother.”

Ben nods. “That’s right. And you know what else?”

Jenna watches as Donnie stares in admiration at his best friend.

“They’re not going to get away with this.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

NICO

Nico traipses through the forest, branches smacking his face, the hum of insects in his ears. The old path through the weeds, the one they’d worn down trudging back and forth, isn’t visible. But he knows he’s headed in the right direction. He remembers the summer they built the tree fort—the sticky heat and fatigue of carrying lumber stolen from a construction site—Ben hauling more wood than all of them on his strong shoulders. And he remembers laying on the planks up high, watching the stars.

Today, the woods are dreary, the tree canopy making the day an even darker shade of gray. He hears a snap of twigs up ahead. Probably a deer, one of the Chestertown woods variety, thin and malnourished.

There’s a brief quiet from the insects, but they start up again. Whoever was chasing Nico didn’t track him here, that’s for sure. These woodlands are difficult to navigate, tangled and unkempt.

He’s on a fool’s errand right now, he fears. If the FBI is running a cell tower report tracking his movements from the last time he was in Chestertown, it probably wouldn’t ping out here. But he doesn’t know that, so he needs to assume they know he was trudging through this same area a month ago. He sees his marker up ahead, the tree he carved with a pocketknife so many years ago: N + A

It’s two trees behind this one. He stalks over, looks up. It’s still nearly impossible to see the fort if you don’t know it’s there. He finds the rusty nail that served as a foothold to start the climb and hoists himself up. It’s not as easy as it was when he was a kid. Even worse with one arm. He’s ditched the sling, but he can’t put much weight on his arm or shoulder. But this needs to be done.

He clasps a branch, struggles to pull himself up one-handed, swings his leg over, then stands, balancing on the huge limb. He continues to climb until he finally reaches the platform.

It’s four by eight. Wide enough for them to lie flat or sit cross-legged in a circle. It has plywood walls but no roof. He remembers how Annie brought them snacks. Donnie always managed to have a bottle, hiding his stash of convenience-store rotgut somewhere in the woods nearby. The summer they built the tree fort was exactly two summers after Mom took Nico to the beach that last time, and the only time since that he’d felt something close to happiness. Nico, Ben, Donnie, and Annie would spend hours talking and joking. Jenna hadn’t been there long enough to face the initiation ritual of the G.R.O.S.S. club, so named by Donnie based on some comic strip he loved. Artemis was too engrossed in his coding projects to screw around in the woods.

It had been their haven. Their place to talk about their dreams. Their place not to talk about their lives before Savior House. The place Nico fell in love for the first time.

He looks up at the sky and inhales deeply through his nose. It smells the same. But the sky is murkier. Maybe it wasn’t all as incandescent as he remembers. Maybe he’s rosied up the memories.

But that summer was the last time he felt something other than a void in his core. And it was that summer that also broke each of them. When Annie disappeared. When that cop took something from each of them at the riverbank.

He remembers afterward, leaving the library, pounding on Ned Flanders’s door. Arty and Flanders are at the dining room table that’s lined with computer monitors, the room strewn with cords.

Flanders brings in a tray that has glasses of lemonade, listens as Nico rants and rages and tries not to cry.

Flanders disappears to make a call. When he returns, he says, “I spoke to a different person this time, a supervisor. She told me that her records show that Marta is in a new home,” Flanders pauses.

“But she has no record about Annie missing or that she or the other girls are even staying at Savior House.”