The world exhales. This sounds like the father I know. Smoke unwinds against the clouds. “I’ll remember.”
He leans back in his seat, satisfied. As we pass the clutter of tire shops and fast food outlets and new restaurants, Optimal lurches out from the distance again, an ugly sprawl between the trees.
“Look at that,” he says. “All that smoke. Chemical spew. Disgusting.” He shakes his head. “They killed her, you know,” he goes on. “Oh, I know everyone says they didn’t. But they did. They killed her with all their filth. Poison and greed, that’s all it is.”
Mom died right before Optimal finished construction. The day we buried her, the first bit of smoke came up from the chimneys, and I remember thinking at first it was a kind of celebration.
“They didn’t kill her, Dad,” I say, though I’m not sure why it matters. “Mom got cancer before.”
“I’m not talking about your mother.” He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes again. “I’m talking about that girl, the one everyone always fussed about. Kaycee Mitchell.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Only when morning comes do I realize that it must have been night. I remember drinking. My dreams were full of bright-colored bodies. Shades of blue and orange and red. There was fire. It smelled like paint.
In my living room, a girl deformed by terror is leaning on the armchair, screaming: and then I startle up and I realize that I’m the one who screamed. The girl is Kaycee, embalmed in oil on one of her canvases. A self-portrait.
I look around. On the table, another two stacked canvases, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and cigarette butts floating in a filth of dirty liquid.
I haven’t smoked since college. But I can taste the smoke in my mouth.
I try to shuffle back through my memories, but all the images feel like balloons, slipping out of my grasp. I don’t remember going back to Frank Mitchell’s unit at the U-Pack but I must have: I don’t remember why and whether I was seen, whether I was careful, what on earth could have compelled me to steal the paintings and bring them home with me. I’m moved by a desperate, enormous desire to hide them, to burn them, to get them out. But they are staring back at me, refusing to be moved.
I fall onto the couch.
Ten years, and my dad never said a word to me about Kaycee’s disappearance. I tried to press him for information but he had little to offer: only that he turned up Kaycee’s bag down by the reservoir, half concealed by overhanging brush, and thought she must have forgotten it there after a bonfire. He expected her to come looking for it, only to learn everyone was saying she’d run off.
Who runs off and leaves a wallet, cell phone, and driver’s license behind?
I asked him why he didn’t go to the police, and he only shrugged. It wasn’t any of our business, he said. That girl was nothing but trouble, anyway.
I hardly remember the drive back to my rental, then to our makeshift office. Time is moving in jump cuts again. The rest of the team is already assembled when I burst through the door, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Kaycee died.”
Joe sits very still, like the way small prey freezes at the approach of a predator. “What are you talking about?”
“Kaycee Mitchell. She didn’t disappear. She didn’t leave town. She died,” I repeat, and as soon as I do, I’m sure it’s right. The words feel right. They feel as if I’m taking out a piece of shrapnel from my chest. “I think she died here, in Barrens. Because she was sick.” Joe’s face hasn’t changed, so I plunge on. “I think that her family was paid off to lie about it. Maybe Misha, too. Maybe even her boyfriend, Brent.”
“Did you get any sleep last night?” Joe asks, in a way I don’t like.
“I’m fine,” I say, because I am, I think I am, and all my memories feel like dreaming so they must be dreams. And I tell him what my father told me about finding her bag near the reservoir.
“Abby, your dad is sick,” Joe says, very slowly, as if he’s holding a fishing line and just begging me to follow the hook. “We can’t exactly assume he’s dealing in facts. Doesn’t he have Alzheimer’s?”
This isn’t the time to correct Joe, so I don’t. The symptoms are the same. But my father hasn’t lost his grip on the past; it’s the present that seems slippery.
“Kaycee and her friends played an awful game in high school,” I say, ignoring his lead. “They weren’t the first ones to play. But Kaycee was the one who thought of a way to make money off of it.” Briefly, I tell him, tell the whole room, what Cora Allen told me. “Blackmail,” I finish, out of breath.
For the first time I realize how strange I feel. But I won’t sit down; if I do, it would be like admitting that Joe is right, that the interns with their shifty glances are right, that I’m standing here babbling nonsense instead of trying to explain that I’ve finally seen the truth.
“Sorry.” Joe rubs his forehead. “What does this have to do with the Optimal case?”
“Blackmail,” I repeat. “Don’t you see? It was her pattern. She’d gotten a taste for it when she realized she could use the Game to get payouts from people terrified their photos would go public. But how much could she possibly have gotten? Forty, sixty bucks a pop?” I’m filling in holes as I go. “Kaycee must have heard about the case Optimal settled back in Tennessee before they moved to Barrens, and she set her sights higher. So she comes up with her little scam to pretend to be sick, maybe persuades her friends to go along with her, thinking they could go to Optimal for a payout. But she didn’t understand how serious things would get. Optimal was working its own scams, flouting environmental regulations, cutting costs, hiding money, bribing officials to look the other way. They couldn’t afford publicity. They couldn’t afford the scrutiny.”
“So they killed her.” Joe’s face is blank.
And here, under the painful bright lights next to crates of file folders and office supplies, I have the sudden sensation of drowning: It sounds crazy. Of course it does. But I’m right. I have to be. “Or they hired someone to do it. For all I know, they paid off her fucking father. But it fits.”
For a moment, there’s silence. I can feel my heart jumping rhythms in my chest.
It’s Portland who speaks up, slowly. “But the school nurse said Kaycee was really sick,” he says. “The pictures prove it.”
“The pictures prove she was a good actress,” I snap, although once again I see Kaycee on the bathroom floor, a swirl of blood in the toilet. And then another image of Kaycee shuffles up from the past, this time from when we were kids. Kaycee’s face, shuttered like a closed door, when I confronted her about Chestnut. I didn’t do it, she said calmly, biting off all the edges of her words so instead they sounded like a brag. You must be really screwed up, Abby, to even think I would do it. “She was a liar. She was always a liar. Maybe she made herself sick.”
Still, no one looks at me. Anger rises like a quick tide: I want to bury them in it.
“I’m telling you, you didn’t know her. We were friends when we were little. She was fucked up. She killed my dog with rat poison.”