“Yeah, I know it,” I say.
“You know what I’m looking at right now?” Riley asks me.
“Nope,” I say.
“My desk calendar. You know what one of those is?” Those is comes out in a slurry that I’ve got to pick apart and translate before I can answer.
“I know what a desk calendar is,” I say.
“Well, you kids with your phones these days—” Riley begins, then cuts himself off, like enunciating these days wore him out. “I’m looking at tomorrow,” he goes on. “I boxed it off in red and drew a big happy face in the middle of it. You know why?”
“No,” I say.
“Because it’s my retirement day, and if it wasn’t, I would’ve hung up on you the second you said who you was.”
Were, I think quietly.
“But you didn’t,” I remind him, and he sighs.
“No, I didn’t.” He’s quiet for a second, and I think maybe he’s got a hard little ball of words in his stomach, too, one that he’s been waiting to unload on someone.
“No trace of your parents has ever been found; we have no leads on this case. And by that I mean forensic, and otherwise. You’re the only person who’s ever called the tip line—you know that?”
Of course I didn’t know that. But I stay quiet, let him cough out the thing he’s been choking on for years.
“Lee and Annabelle Montor are the only missing-persons case we’ve ever had, and it’s locked up tight. Not solved; I mean locked up. Nobody’s talking. You know what it means when nobody’s talking in Amontillado?”
“It means somebody important wants it kept quiet,” I say. It’s an old lesson, one I knew even before I came to live with Cecil. It might not be taught like the alphabet in school, but it’s learned around the dinner table, inferred with down-turned mouths and quick subject changes.
“Uh-huh,” Riley agrees. “And what makes you an important person in Amontillado?”
“Your name,” I tell him.
“Or your money,” he says back.
I let that sit, collecting it with the other words forming the hard ball in my gut.
“And, kid, one more thing—”
“Yeah?”
“What do you see when you turn over a rock?”
“Bugs,” I say automatically, having watched Rue search for a snack more times than I can count.
“Bugs and worms and all kinds of shit—sorry. All kinds of gross stuff you didn’t know was there and maybe didn’t need to know,” Riley says. “You turn over this rock, you’re going to see those things. Things that people want left under there, in the dark.”
“I do need to know,” I tell him.
“Then be careful,” he says. “And only believe about half of what you hear.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you. Thank you for talking to me.”
“And, kid?”
“Yeah?”
“If half of what you hear doesn’t make your parents sound like great people . . . well, that’s probably the half that’s true.”
I clench the phone in my hand, the hard ball of words turning into something else, hot anger, surging, ready to come up and blister Riley’s ear, giving him something to take with him into retirement. But I don’t have time to turn the emotion into words before he hangs up.
I think of the Turnado car, splashing past me. I think of Lenore Usher, her lips a thin line when she tells me nobody knows what happened to my parents.
“Somebody knows,” I say into my phone, even though no one is listening.
“Felicity Turnado knows.”
Chapter 35
Felicity
“I don’t know!” I spit back at her. I’m pissed, but it’s lacking the sharp edges of earlier, and not just because before when I got rowdy I think she might have broken my ankle. No, I’m not kicking and screaming because this time . . . I think she might have me.
That day that we drove past Tress in the rain is something that never stuck well with me, watching my former best friend flipping us off in the rearview mirror, dirty water running down her face. It’s a moment that might have come up in truth or dare, if someone asked me what I’m most ashamed of in my life. Or, at least, in seventh grade. But we stopped playing truth or dare a long time ago, moved on to spin the bottle and strip poker.
I never was very good at cards.
Driving past Tress that day was a shitty thing to do, and I know it, deep down. I told Brynn about it once, when I’d had too much to drink and we were both taking a time-out at one of Gretchen’s parties, just kind of chilling in lawn chairs and staring up at the stars.
“Well,” Brynn had said, brow furrowed and thinking hard. “If it was a dog, would you have stopped and picked it up?”
The truth is that yes, I would have. The truth is, that I would treat a dog better than I treated Tress Montor that day.
But it’s also true that I wasn’t the one driving. I remember my mom flicking on the windshield wipers, Tress’s figure disappearing in the rain. Mom left her there on purpose, leaving a not-so-subtle message in her wake. Did she do the same with the cops? Let them know that if the Montor disappearance was not-so-thoroughly investigated, the Turnados would appreciate that . . . possibly in the form of a donation that made it possible for them to buy a new fleet of police cruisers that year?
Whatever is left in my stomach rolls at the thought, and my mind revolts along with it. If that happened, it wasn’t my fault.
“I couldn’t just force my mom to pull over, you know,” I say, adding a brick to my defense, just as Tress reaches for one of her own. A more solid one to trump my metaphor, because another truth is that I can construct quite the wall of self-righteous, blustering excuses to defend myself, but the one Tress is building is very real, and growing rapidly.
22 rows of bricks / 3 = 7.333
I’m nearly a third of the way toward being dead. I don’t like math anymore.
It’s like the boa constrictor song we sang as kids, with the snake slowly swallowing us up, except I’m not sliding down a snake’s throat. The bricks are rising like the tide, and once they close over my head—
“Tress,” I say madly, hoping to distract her as she lays some mortar, sliding the first brick of the sixth row into place. “Have you really thought about this? Like actually, truly, really sat down and thought about this?”
“Yep,” she says, tapping the brick into place.
“And you thought about the fact that you could go to jail?”
She’s on her knees, fitting the last one with precision, when she leans back and gives me a long, cold stare.
“Have you thought about it? Actually, truly, really thought about it? Yeah, I could go to jail, Felicity. But there are spaces between the bars of my cell. Things like light and oxygen can get in. You”—she taps her trowel against the brick—“you won’t have that.”
“Light,” she says, tapping the brick again.
“Oxygen.” She adds one last tap. “So have you thought about it? Jail is another word for punishment. I’ll take it, because I’ll deserve it.”