The Leaving(73)

“Where are we going?” she asked, looking around.

“I need to see something,” he said. “It’s not far. We’ll talk there.”

They walked in silence until they got to the RV and Lucas pushed through tall weeds behind it, stepping on dry branches with his boots.

It was propped up on cinder blocks and caked with dirt. Lucas brushed away and cracked some of it off to see:



He squatted down to better see. “It reads like a joke now.”

“He couldn’t have known how it was all going to play out,” Scarlett said.

He shook his head, put his hands on his thighs, and pushed up to stand. “How do I keep his memory alive if I can’t remember him?”

“I’m so sorry, Lucas,” she said.

“I know.” They walked back toward one of the reflecting pools and stopped. “So what do you need to tell me?”

Thunder rumbled, and she looked off toward the direction it had come from. “Kristen remembered seeing me with Adam.”

A drop of rain landed on his nose, had to be wiped. “What does that mean, ‘with Adam’?”

“Kissing Adam.” She looked away. “And I don’t know, when we kissed—you and I—when we were in Anchor Beach . . . I felt happy on the one hand but there was something underneath it, too. Like guilt? And I think I thought or hoped it was just a weird feeling about us being there together and not knowing our past. But . . .”

The rain was starting to feel personal, like it had some kind of grudge against him.

“I think I was remembering feeling suffocated.” She seemed not to notice or care about the rain. “I don’t know. Maybe I was cheating on you? Maybe you found out? I think I wanted out and you weren’t happy about it. At all.”

He wanted the storm to just get on with it, to really let loose and get it over with, but it seemed liked it was already stopping. They weren’t in its path after all. He said, “I would never try to pressure you into anything.”

“See, I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”

Him wanting more than she wanted from him?

Him caring more, or about the wrong things?

Yes, maybe that did feel right.

He went and sat on a low stone wall, pulled a weed that had sprung up between two rocks, releasing the smell of dirt into the air. Drops from trees shimmied the water in the pool, stirred some of its murk. “I’m starting to really not like this picture of who I was,” he said. “Jealous and angry?”

They turned at the sound of footsteps and voices.

Chambers was walking toward them, this time with his partner in tow.

“I’m really sorry, Lucas.” Chambers stopped a few feet away. “It wasn’t my call on this one. I’m sure you can argue self-defense, but the feds, well . . .”

His partner kept coming.

“You were right about the fingerprints on the gun . . . ,” Chambers said.

“. . . and there’s gunshot residue on a jacket that also has your DNA all over it.”

“. . . and the coroner put John Norton’s time of death as the day you all escaped.”

Escaped?

They didn’t escape.

“Lucas Davis,” Chambers’s partner said. “You are under arrest for the murder of John Norton. You have the right to remain silent . . .”





AVERY



Her cell phone rang during episode six of a web series she’d decided to binge-watch to kill time. At long last, Emma had remembered that her phone was a phone.

“Hey.”

Emma: “Are you watching the news?”

“No. Why?”

“Just turn on CNN.”

So now even talking sounded like texting.

Avery got up to stop her show and switched over to regular TV, then found CNN.

“. . . arrest made in the case of The Leaving . . . but perhaps not the arrest people expected or hoped for. The perpetrator of the crime has been identified as one John Norton, and he has been found dead. A gun with fingerprints belonging to returned Leaving victim Lucas Davis is alleged to be the weapon used and Davis has been taken into custody.”

Another guy said, “Now, I understand there is some speculation here, as to whether Davis might have also played some role in the death of Max Godard.”

Then the original guy: “I’m not sure there’s much to that theory but . . .”

Avery said, “I gotta go,” and hung up and turned off the TV and went up to The Shrine and looked through a desk drawer until she found the picture of herself—Smurfette—and Max and Lucas as pirate and sailor. She looked for signs. Signs that Lucas was not who she thought he was. Something maybe in his eyes that would reveal some dark side he had spent his life learning how to disguise.

She couldn’t see it, but also didn’t want her memory of Max to be tangled up with him, just in case.

She took the photo and went back downstairs and out to the lanai and to the grill, where a trigger lighter hung from a side hook.

She clicked it a few times before it lit, and then she ignited the corner of the photograph and watched as the image started to melt away.

There was no point in keeping a photo like that, in keeping a memory like that.

Not with him in it.