You Can't Catch Me(90)

“She told you about Serene?”

He nods. “I think it was because she could tell that I cared about Kiki. But I’m not sure. She seems a bit off.”

“She is, obviously. Your parents too. Because they’re living there also, right?” I say. “That’s how you knew how to find my parents?”

“They can’t seem to quit one another.”

“Apparently. You never suspected about Serene?”

He shakes his head. “After you left, there was this strange three months or so where we were all forced to live in the Gathering Place together, but then all the kids were sent back up the hill, including me and the few others who’d been allowed to stay with their parents. I didn’t see my parents for months, only Todd and the guardians. When we were allowed to come back down the next summer, Kiki was living in the house she built with Sarah. Only we were supposed to call them Tori and Thalia. And your parents had Serene. They told us that she was your mom’s kid.”

“She was too old to have a kid.”

“I know that now, but I was only fourteen. I didn’t understand that kind of stuff.” He looks at me. “Did you know?”

“No. Kiki never told me.”

“I wondered. Anyway, once I learned all of that, I decided to go to Kiki’s college in Ohio.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I wanted to know what had really happened to her.”

“And you didn’t trust me to tell you.”

“Frankly? No. That’s how I found out about her suicide. There was an article in the school newspaper about her.” He reaches into his pocket. “I also found this.”

He hands it to me. It’s a newspaper clipping. I unfold it. It’s a picture of Kiki and her roommate from college. They’ve got their arms around one another and are laughing into the camera. They’re wearing Hawaiian leis for some luau party. Did she tell me about that? I can’t remember. My eyes trail away from a happy-looking Kiki to her roommate, Jessie. Only she went by the name Karen then.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Covington says. “Jessica Two? I recognized her from the wanted poster I found online.”

They’d used a picture of Jessie from the school where she worked. She didn’t look that different at thirty from how she had looked at twenty-four.

“It’s her.” My hands flutter at my sides. I’m not mad, or scared. Not yet, anyway. “Why are you here, Covington? To tell me all of this?”

“No.” He pulls out his phone. “I read this online this morning.”

I take it from him. It’s a wire story that hadn’t made it into the Jackson Hole News & Guide yet. A badly decomposed body was found in Jackson Lake. Female. Late twenties to early thirties. They haven’t been able to identify it, but they think it might be associated with a woman who’s wanted by the authorities for theft and identity fraud who was last seen in Jackson.

Jessie.

“Is this her too?” Covington asks.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Come on, Jess.”

I stare at him.

“Look, I don’t know all the details,” Covington says, “but I think I’ve figured out enough. And I’m not saying I blame you, okay? I might’ve done the same in your place.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“I came to warn you. Liam’s been asking questions too. About Kiki. Once this gets out . . . He’s not stupid, Jess.”

“I know.”

He puts his hands on his knees. “That’s what I came here to say.”

“So what now?”

He stands. “I’m going to go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

He moves toward the door. I stand to follow him. I feel detached from my body, strangely disconnected.

“You okay for money?” Covington asks with his hand on the knob.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Just . . . don’t leave without telling him goodbye, okay?”

“Who, Liam?”

“He wouldn’t take that well.”

“He’ll be all right.”

Covington shakes his head. “He’s in love with you.”

“He’s never told me that. Not really.” Only that one text last summer. Same, he’d written. Same.

“Would’ve thought it was obvious. Anyway, tell him something, okay? Something he can live with.”

He opens the door, stops, then leaves without saying anything more.

I sink back into the couch, and the world tilts away from me.

So close, I think. I came so close to getting away with it.





Ohio, May 5, 2016

Dear Jess, By the time you get this, I won’t be here anymore. That sounds more dramatic than I wanted, but I’m not quite sure how to do this. The actual part, I’ve figured out. I’ve been seeing a doctor and she’s given me pills, only I haven’t been taking them. I’ve saved them and saved them, and I’ll take them all at once. Then, hopefully, I’ll fall asleep.

They’ll find me in the room I shared with her. I don’t know what made her do it. I would’ve given her the money if she’d asked. I never cared about it, anyway—that’s why I told her about it in the first place. About Todd, all of it. This isn’t because she took the money. I loved her, you see? I thought she felt the same. I trusted her. I shared myself with her. She was the first person in my life that I chose. That felt different and so much less complicated than what we’d been through. I thought it was real, but it wasn’t. She betrayed me, and it’s that I can’t live with. Another person I love letting me down like that.