Of the Trees(76)

There were many vigils, always on the street in front of her house. Cassie hoped that they were bringing the Blakes some comfort, though she couldn’t see how. They made her uncomfortable and depressed at first, but now they just triggered a destructive rage whenever the mellow songs rose up over the candlelight.

Flyers were stapled to telephone poles, the halls in school, the post office, the pizza place. Aidan’s eyes followed her everywhere. She hated them, hated that it was because of her that he was everywhere. She felt watched and exposed, whispers followed in her wake wherever she went. It was easiest to spend her time at school with Rebecca. They hid as often as possible in the library or in her father’s empty classroom during their combined free period. They didn’t talk much, both content to sit in relative silence. Cassie had never before gotten so much homework done on time. The mindless work was distracting, something to keep her thoughts off what else was going on at the school. People were less hesitant, the more time passed, to ask the girls what happened.

Almost everyone assumed that Jessica’s death and Laney’s disappearance were related. It was a small town, awful things like that just didn’t happen independently of each other.

It was two weeks after Laney’s disappearance before Cassie spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Blake. She had run outside, still in her pajamas and slippers, wanting to grab the mail. Laney’s mother dart out of her front door, calling out to her as she got to the end of her driveway.

“Cassie,” she repeated, pleading, “please.”

Cassie couldn’t say no. She went to their house, Laney’s home, sat in the living room she knew as well as her own. The smells were so achingly familiar, not unique to Laney, but an echo of the time they had spent together. The nights they ate popcorn and watched scary movies, the sleepovers, the puppet shows when they were kids.

“Tell us, please,” Mrs. Blake begged. Cassie did. She spoke slowly, trying to put any little truth of the afternoon Laney left into her story. She kept to the basic facts, the same things she had told the police, but the details were where she spent the most time.

Cassie told them about the peanut butter pie, about how Laney read the recipe wrong and Cassie added what she told her and how it was the most disgusting thing they had ever eaten. She told them they stayed in their pajamas most of the morning, laughing and watching cartoons. She told them how much she loved Laney, how much she missed her. She cried and broke and told them she was sorry, so sorry, and that she’d give anything to have her back. They held her, Mrs. Blake crying too, the three of them rocking together until there was a sharp knock at the door.

When Mr. Blake opened it, coughing loudly as though that would cover the tears in his eyes, her father was waiting on the porch.

“Are you okay?” he asked. She shook her head, and Laney’s mom squeezed her fingers. She thanked Cassie for talking with them, as though it had helped in some way. But that was idiotic. Nothing would help.

Ryan had become relentless in his pursuit of Laney. Ever since Cassie had told him about the carnies, about how she knew that none of them went to St. Paul’s, he had been scouring the internet. It was he who discovered the name of the carnival company that staffed their local carnival. He brought his laptop to her house, hunched over it every night after dinner, trying to pull up faces for employees that Cassie could recognize, trying to match those faces with names.

It was harder than she would have thought to match the faces. Either they weren’t there to begin with, or the shifting that she knew they did, the way their skin seemed to flex, distorted the images, made them unrecognizable.

Ryan suggested they drive out, hit the carnival circuit in the nearest towns, to see if Laney might be hanging around them.

“Have you talked to the cops about any of this?” Cassie asked one night. Ryan had written out a list of carnivals within driving distance, a row of dates next to random town names. He nodded.

“I get the impression that they think it’s not much to go on,” he said. “That one guy, Gibbons, he spoke with me a while. Said they checked the carnival company already and no one matched the description you gave. They were told that none of the employees had gone missing or quit, and I think they gave up after that.”

Cassie hummed in consideration. They would have had to leave their jobs, at least for the few weeks they were here, somewhere in town.

“I think they’re focusing on finding out the names of these guys,” Ryan continued, folding his notes and tucking them in his jacket pocket. “They were asking me about shelters and places in the area that someone could lay low.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I don’t know much about it,” Ryan said, shrugging. “I guess if it were me, I’d probably just camp.”

The weather turned colder and the search parties dwindled by the day, from hundreds to dozens to only a handful. Soon the woods outside her home were quiet. The flyers stapled to telephone poles were torn and mud-splattered.

Cassie stepped out her front door to an empty, quiet street. She looked at her neighbor’s home and found them all seemingly empty. They weren’t. There was life inside. Somewhere in their home, the two little boys she babysat for must have been quietly playing. Their parents hadn’t let them out of the house in a while. Cassie could understand why. Fleetingly she wondered if they’d ever allow her to babysit again. She thought, probably not.