The Leaving(82)

Miranda had been watching, too? How did she even fit in?

Chambers said he needed the transcripts or recordings immediately and offered to drive her home. When they got up to leave, she caught Lucas’s eye and he walked them out, followed her to the squad car.

“Good work,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “You, too.”

Chambers had already started the car, was calling ahead to her house.

She watched out the window as they passed the psychic’s storefront, a candle flickering beneath the neon sign: Know Your Future.

As if.

Dad was waiting at the door.





Scarlett


“Do I look like him?” Scarlett asked her mother. “My father?”

Chambers had dropped off her clothes and photographs earlier that day, while she’d been at Anchor Beach. Now she sat at the dining room table in pajamas—her hair wet from a long bath—studying her younger self. She held a photo out to her mother and said, “I really don’t think I look like you, so . . .”

“He’s not the answer you need,” Tammy said, taking the photo.

“Answer?” Scarlett said.

“I know you feel like you don’t belong here . . . with me.” Her voice shaky.

“It’s not that . . .” Scarlett ran out of steam.

“No, it’s okay.” Her mother waved a hand. “When you were little I was like, where did this kid come from? ’Cause you were so smart—smarter than me, and I didn’t know what to do with that.” She put the photo down. “So I’ll give you his name and address, even, and sure, you have his eyes and something around the chin that’s similar, but I’m tellin’ ya. He ain’t what you’re looking for.” Looking up, finally, she said, “It’s late. I’m turning in.” She got up and came over and kissed Scarlett on the forehead.

The warm, damp spot on her head became so distracting.

The whole day such a jumble.

Miranda’s betrayal.

The principal’s role in the whole thing.

The revelation that she’d witnessed the shooting.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the shooting?” Scarlett said. “That I was there.”

Tammy shrugged one shoulder. “Didn’t seem like a happy thing to remind you of if you didn’t remember it yourself. And the truth is, I don’t really remember it, either.”

“You must.” This time it was Scarlett who Comet came to visit. Scarlett reached out to pet her, for the first time.

“I remember I got blood on me, and you asked me if I was going to die, and I said, no, of course not, but you said, ‘But everybody dies, right?’ And you started to cry and said, ‘Promise me you won’t die.’” She ran a hand over Scarlett’s hair. “That’s when I realized we were stuck with each other, you and me. Maybe that was the first time I got terrified—that you needed me so bad—and then, you know the rest, the drinking got real bad after that. I remember it the way you remember a dream, and that’s fine for me.”

Scarlett nodded and Tammy smiled and padded down the hall. “He brought that weird jacket, by the way. It’s in the closet.”

Scarlett got up and went to the closet and gently pulled it off a hanger. She turned it around in her hands, inhaled it—some familiar perfume—and then was about to put it on when her eye caught on some stitching on the inner lining.

Rectangles, like the ones she’d sewn absentmindedly a few times now.

Only here they had little circles of stitches on top of them.


So not rectangles.





Cylinders.

Four of them.

Smokestacks, to be precise.

She laid the jacket flat on the table, best she could.

Her fingers tingled as she ran them over the bumps of thread.

Near the smokestacks, spotted stitches that took the shape of a

. . . pier?

The entire inner lining was stitched with lines, maybe indicating streets?

And up by an armhole . . .

Stitched thicker than all the rest.

Thread upon thread to form:





Lucas


Rain turned roads to rivers. Frantic wipers failed. Ryan put the hazard lights on and slowed the car to rowboat speed.

They were on their way to an address Chambers had given them. Using Scarlett’s jacket as a map, he had sent officers out looking for the house Sarah had drawn, and they’d found it overnight.

It all seemed too long in coming and sudden at the same time.

Lucas didn’t feel . . . ready . . . even though he’d been waiting and waiting.

They were the last to arrive—just as the rain eased to drizzle—at a house that looked exactly like Sarah’s sketch: a boring two-story, shingled ranch with a two-car garage. A house you’d drive by and not even notice. Chambers stood on the front porch with Scarlett, Sarah, Kristen, Adam, and various adults who had come. He and Ryan got out of the car and, closing his eyes for a moment at the bottom of the path, Lucas tried to imagine himself on that porch, walking up those steps. His brain conjured images of shoes—smaller shoes, beat-up sneakers—but he could have been imagining them.

“Everybody ready?” The raindrops clinging to Chambers’s black jacket looked like snow.