Come Find Me(74)

I stare back into the woods, remembering what Nolan said—that the picture of Liam was sent from the library. It could’ve been anyone. And yet, it could’ve been sent from the library to make it seem like Nolan. He used to pretend he had a job tutoring there. Mike would think he worked there. Nobody knew it was a lie.

In the pit of my stomach, there’s the feeling of wrong.

I try to open Nolan’s car door, but it’s locked. Thankfully he’s left the windows half down, because his air conditioning is always broken, so I reach my arm in until I can disengage the lock, stretching down until it clicks.

Then I open the door and pop the trunk. The noise cuts through the empty parking lot, and I pause, looking around—with the feeling that someone is watching me.

His baseball gear is still tucked in the corner of the trunk, the mitt beside the bat. I can feel his hands on my hands, his body pressed behind mine, his words, explaining how to get more power.

Don’t swing like you’re afraid, he said.

One more look over the lid of the trunk, into the trees.

I’m not afraid, I tell myself. My hands shake anyway.

I pick up the bat.





Everything sounds so far away: across an ocean, a void of empty space. When I look up, the branches move, and the sky shrinks, and it’s like I’m falling into a black hole.

This cannot be what had me coming out here—to find this? This nothingness?

What was the point? Of the signal, and the signs, leading me here?

All this, to find he’s been dead, all this time?

There are footsteps, slowly trudging up the path—the sound cutting its way through the fog, back to me. It must be Kennedy, but I don’t want to look at her. All I’ll see is her face when she told me not to look. Her expression, which said everything.

“Nolan?”

It’s a man’s voice. The footsteps pause for a moment and then continue.

“Nolan? Is that you? Is everything okay?”

I look up, and I’m disoriented. In the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere—it’s Mike. I shake my head. No, everything is not okay.

    Did Kennedy call him somehow? Did he know how to find us? Did time slip from me just like Liam did, here and gone? I look beyond Mike, for Kennedy. For someone to make sense of things.

“Hey,” he says, coming into the clearing. “It’s okay.” He reaches a hand down for my shoulder, where I’m sitting on the stump of the tree.

“Mike? What are you doing here?” There are no police behind him. My parents aren’t here. No one is here.

His shadow falls over me, his feet braced apart, and my shoulders tense.

“Mike?” I ask again, except this time, I’m asking something else. Something tingling in the back of my mind. “Mike, did you know…” But what? What did he know? That there was a picture of my brother, taken from this location? That my brother had been here once? That my brother was dead?

“Oh, Nolan,” he says, crouching down. “I want you to know how sorry I am.” His hands are shaking on his knees, and I can see that he is. Sorry. Except I’m face-to-face with the thing that is wrong, that makes no sense.

It’s his hands. They’re covered. He’s wearing thin leather gloves, in June, in the middle of Virginia.

“What are you doing?” I ask, leaning away. And then I look around frantically—for the police, for my parents, for anyone.

Who is this person, who’s been in my house since the earliest days of my parents’ organization? This man who gave us his condolences, told us what a gift Liam had been to the shelter they worked at together. Did he ever really lose his sister? Or was it Liam, all along, that brought him to us?

    “Did you do this?” I ask, fueled by anger instead of grief. I stand abruptly and my head spins. But my body is full of rage, and adrenaline, and everything’s on edge. I can’t tell which person is in front of me—the Mike I thought I knew, or the Mike I’m seeing now. I don’t know which instinct to trust.

He holds his hands up, palm out, and on instinct I step back, losing my balance over the stump, scrambling to stand again as Mike walks closer. I can tell now, this is not the expression of someone here to help me. His face has shifted, set and determined.

“Stand up, Nolan,” he says. He reaches a hand down for me, but I push myself upright on my own. He steps closer, and I move back again, into the center of the clearing.

“You sent that picture,” I say, pointing my finger at his chest. “You knew he was here all along. You—”

He raises an eyebrow, not denying it.

The pieces start clicking together. “Is this why you work for my parents? You’ve known all along? Were you in my house to protect yourself?” After the first press conference, the police scanned those images from the television stations for potential suspects. They told my parents that suspects often like to insert themselves into the cases directly.

We didn’t look close enough, though. We didn’t check our own home. Mike gave us a story, and we believed it, because Liam knew him and my parents wanted answers.

    Now I’m here, finally getting answers, only they’re not the ones I want. I’ve been racing toward the thing that would devastate us all, and for what? For this? One more betrayal?