When the Sky Fell on Splendor(38)

“What are you talking about?” Nick said.

“Orgasming microphone?” Levi asked.

Arthur’s brows knit together. “What do you mean, you don’t believe my theory?”

Sofía focused on Nick. “Someone else was at Jenkins that night. We don’t know who, or what they saw, or what they want. But there’s a stockpile of magnetized wreckage in a cave behind the abandoned house. At any moment, someone could connect us to what happened, and we need to have a better explanation than ‘we didn’t do it!’ We need the truth.”

The truth. The words rattled through me. If Bill was right, that was something I couldn’t let them have.

Nick took a few steps back and lowered himself onto the front steps. “Shit.” He shot me a cautious glance, and, misreading my expression, said, “I’m sorry for acting like that, Fran. This thing’s really messed with me. I’ve barely slept since that night. Whenever I close my eyes, I see that damn piano, and when I saw your message—it doesn’t make sense, but I felt like if I saw it in real life, maybe it would all be over.”

“I think I get it,” I admitted. It was how I’d felt about the necklace, like it was the final piece connecting me to something I wanted to forget.

It’s not the final piece, though.

There were the bullets, whoever had moved the magnetized debris, the questions from the sheriff, the scars on our skin, the malfunctioning technology and surging light bulbs and the e-mail from Bill about people who’d want to vanish me, and the YouTube video that had been removed for reasons I didn’t understand.

There was Arthur determined to make an extraordinary discovery, and Levi determined to find new ways to keep us together, and Sofía determined to find some truth that would justify her momentary lapse of judgment when she’d climbed that fence.

But I’d briefly convinced myself that finding the necklace would end all this, so I understood how Nick could think resolving the mystery of his piano dream could close the box we’d opened.

“So what do we do now?” he said.

“We get a long night’s sleep,” Arthur said. “We need to be ready to get back to work tomorrow. This is just getting started.”

Nick seemed wary, but he let Arthur lead him inside anyway. We all did.

Maybe we were just used to Arthur leading the way. Or maybe Levi, Sofía, and Nick all knew, like I did, that my brother was right.

This was only the beginning.





FOURTEEN



A LITTLE AFTER ELEVEN, I lay awake, listening to the easy rhythm of Sofía’s breath in the bed beside me. She slept on her stomach, but whenever she seemed nearly out, she kept twitching awake again, shifting in the bed.

Not yet. I couldn’t sneak out to walkie-talkie Remy until she was out. I flipped onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

I used to fall asleep like this every night, gazing at the Milky Way Mark had painted overhead for my eleventh birthday.

I rarely glanced at it these days. Not just because it reminded me of him. That I didn’t mind.

But it also reminded me of Mom.

Whenever I looked at it, I pictured her floating through space in an astronaut suit, alone and happy among the stars, happier than she ever was or could be in Splendor, especially now that her one tether to the Great Beyond, the son who understood the awe it struck in her, was lost to her in all the ways that mattered.

Sofía let out a snore. It was time. I turned onto my side, untangling the sweaty sheets from my legs, and slid out of bed.

At my dresser, I stopped and carefully removed the rubber gloves and walkie-talkie, then sneaked out.

I stepped over Droog at the bottom of the stairs, and her tail gave one thump on the mat as her eyes slitted open, but she didn’t follow me back to the kitchen.

I moved a stack of mail from the chair onto the table, then sat and turned on the walkie-talkie, tuning it to our usual channel. “Remy?” I whispered after a beat.

A few seconds passed. A crunching sound came over the speaker. “You’re okay,” Remy said in a rush.

“I am,” I agreed, though it didn’t feel true.

“Did he e-mail you back?”

“He did.”

“Well?” Remy rasped. “What did he say?”

My stomach dipped.

That some mysterious entity is going to kidnap me and anyone who knows what happened.

“Basically he said not to tell anyone, and little else,” I said.

“What the hell. What are you supposed to do with that? Why did he even bother e-mailing you back?”

I’d reached out to Remy because I was dying to tell him about what had happened in the Jenkins House, but now that I could hear his voice, now that he wasn’t so far away, I couldn’t bear to drag him any deeper into this.

I cleared my throat. “I’m going to e-mail him back and try to get more.”

Remy was silent for a beat. “Maybe we should tell someone. For all we know this guy’s a fraud, Fran.”

“No,” I said quickly. We fell into silence again. Moonlight pooled across the floorboards from the window, and the ceiling fan was still whipping dust through the air, but the air-conditioning unit in the window was silent.

“I’m sorry I can’t be there with you,” he said.