One of Us Is Back, page 23
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” she said tightly.
That was the last she’d let me say on the subject before we flopped down onto our beds for yet another sleepless night. When Mom got up for work this morning, Emma and I were already at the kitchen island, yawning over massive cups of coffee.
“Why are you two up?” Mom asked.
“Early shift at the café,” I lied. I’m off today, but I don’t usually get out of bed before ten o’clock unless I’m working.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Emma said. At Mom’s worried look, she added, “Phoebe snored so loudly last night. I’m not used to sharing a room.”
“Oh well,” Mom said, relaxing. “It’s probably good that you’re up. Owen’s due back soon, so make sure he eats something, okay? Ben’s family is vegetarian, and you know how picky Owen can be.”
“I know,” Emma said.
Now Emma and I are sitting ramrod straight on stools behind the kitchen island, watching the lock on our dead bolt turn with agonizing slowness.
“Oh God,” Emma murmurs. “It’s like we’re in a horror movie, isn’t it?”
“For the past three months,” I say.
The door creaks open and Owen steps inside, a blue duffel bag slung over one shoulder. His strawberry-blond hair hangs in his eyes, and the T-shirt he’s probably been wearing since Saturday is a wrinkled mess. “Hey,” he grunts at Emma and me, shoving his keys into his pocket as he heads for his bedroom.
“Not so fast,” Emma says in her most commanding voice.
It used to make me snap to attention when we were younger, but Owen doesn’t even hesitate. “I’m tired; I need sleep,” he yawns, pulling his door open. When it clicks shut behind him, the tiny noise feels like a slap in the face after everything we’ve done for him. Even if he didn’t know we were doing it.
“The nerve of him,” I say, jumping to my feet and pulling Owen’s backpack off the floor. I stride for my brother’s room with Emma at my heels, then loudly rap on the door and shove it open before Owen has a chance to answer.
“What are you doing?” he yelps. He’s sitting on his bed with one sneaker off, and he glares at me as he unties the other. “Get out. I said I’m going to sleep.”
“Not till you explain this.” I drop his backpack onto the rug and settle myself down beside it, keeping a watchful eye on my brother’s face. Emma sits next to me, her expression grave.
Owen scowls. “What are doing with my stuff?” He lunges for the strap, but I lift the backpack out of his reach. Emma plucks it from my grasp and fishes in the front pocket. “You guys suck,” Owen complains, shoving at my arm. “Give it back.” He’s on the floor now, tugging at the backpack with both hands, and he falls backward when Emma lets it go.
“Why do you have this?” she asks, holding up Reggie’s necklace. The silver beads rattle against one another, and I turn my gaze to Owen to see his reaction.
“What’s that?” he asks, sitting up. And he looks…genuinely baffled.
“You tell us,” Emma says.
“Tell you what?” Owen asks. “Why’d you put that in my backpack?”
“We didn’t,” I say. “We found it there.”
The scowl returns to Owen’s face. “You can’t go through my stuff!”
“Too late,” I say, taking the necklace from Emma. “You need to tell us how you got this, Owen.”
“I didn’t get it,” he says irritably. “It’s not mine.”
Emma and I exchange glances. I’ve been bracing myself for all kinds of reactions from Owen, but I wasn’t expecting his typical sullenness. He doesn’t look guilty or afraid; he looks annoyed. “Are you telling us that you don’t recognize this?” Emma asks.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“Then why was it in your backpack?” she asks.
Owen shrugs. “How should I know? Maybe it was there when we got it from Goodwill and I never noticed.”
“Owen,” I say, carefully folding the necklace into my palm. “This necklace belonged to Reggie Crawley. It went missing when he did, and his parents have been looking for it.”
Owen blinks. “Reggie? But that’s…I don’t get it.” It’s as if he’s so confused that he’s forgotten to be irritated with us; he looks at Emma and me in turn with wide, guileless eyes. “Reggie’s never been near my backpack. How could he put it there?”
“We thought you did,” Emma says. Owen’s mouth opens to protest, but before he can, Emma takes a deep breath and adds, “We thought that you might be involved, somehow, in what’s been happening in Bayview lately. The flyers about playing a game, and maybe even—”
“Me? Are you serious?” Owen swings his head between Emma and me, his voice pitching up so high that he sounds like a preteen again. “Why would you think that?”
I pin him with my gaze, my heart cracking as I stare into his light-brown eyes, so similar to mine. And to our father’s. “Because we know you were involved in the Truth or Dare game, Owen. We know you stepped in when Emma bowed out and kept the game going with Jared. When we read the chat transcripts with Emma’s lawyer, there was a message that spelled the word bizarre as B-A-Z-A-A-R. Just like you did when we practiced for your spelling bee.” Owen doesn’t say a word, but his eyes get shiny and his cheeks flame. “Emma and I protected you. We pretended not to understand what it meant, and we let Emma take the fall. And—”
But before I can get out another word, my brother bursts into noisy sobs that make his entire body shake. He draws his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them, crying like he used to when he was an overtired toddler. Harder, even, than he did at Dad’s funeral. For a few beats, Emma and I are both too shocked to move. Then we’re on either side of him, propping him up as he sags against us.
“I’m s-sorry,” he chokes out. “I d-didn’t mean…I never wanted B-B-Br…”
He’s sobbing too hard to continue, but I understand his meaning. I never wanted Brandon to die. It’s what Emma and I believed all along, and it’s why we were willing to lie to protect him. I think Emma always understood the burden we were taking on, and she did it willingly, as penance for her own part in Brandon’s death. I was a lot more naïve; I thought that once Owen was safe I’d be able to go back to normal, not realizing that the secret would start to feel like a ball and chain wrapped around my neck. And I never fully processed—even when Knox tried to tell me—what keeping silent would do to Owen.
“It’s okay,” Emma murmurs.
“It’s not,” Owen rasps. “It’s all my fault. Everything. Brandon dying, that bomb going off, Nate getting hurt, you having to move away—”
“That was Jared’s fault,” I say. “He used you, just like he used Emma.”
“B-but I let him,” Owen chokes out. “I w-w-wanted him to.”
“You didn’t know what you wanted,” Emma says. “Neither did I.”
It takes a long time for Owen’s sobs to die down, and when they finally do, he can’t look at either of us. “I guess you’re gonna tell, huh?” he asks.
“I think we have to,” Emma says. “Starting with Mom. She’ll know what to do next.” Emma meets my eyes over Owen’s bent head. “We should have done that as soon as we realized you were involved. We didn’t do you any favors, Owen.”
“I don’t want to go to jail,” he whimpers.
“You won’t,” Emma says with so much confidence that I almost believe her.
Maybe I would, if it weren’t for the brand-new problem that we have. “Owen, we need to figure out what happened with Reggie’s necklace,” I say. “How could it have gotten into your backpack?” I believe, one hundred percent, that he didn’t put it there—there’s no way he could have faked that kind of surprise or the breakdown he had when we finally confronted him about Jared. “Who else had access to your backpack?”
“I don’t know,” Owen gulps, wiping his eyes. “It was here all weekend.”
“What about before that?” I ask. “Did you leave it anywhere?”
He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I mean, sometimes I leave it on my chair in the library when I go to the bathroom. Same for Café Contigo.” His brow furrows. “Those chairs don’t have anything to hook onto, so it falls onto the floor a lot. Ahmed picked it up for me once, and then then last week…” He trails off.
“Last week what?” I prompt.
“A girl was holding it when I got back from the bathroom. You know her. That kind of hippie-looking girl who lives with Nate?”
“Sana?” I ask, blinking in surprise.
“Yeah. She was like, ‘Oh, some stuff fell out of your bag; I put it back in,’ ” Owen says. “Then she zipped up the front and handed it to me.”
I catch Emma’s eye. Her face is a confused blank because she doesn’t know Sana, and mine is the same because I do. I never imagined for one second that Nate’s roommate could be involved in any of this—but then again, she was Reggie’s roommate too. “When exactly was this?” I ask. “Was it after Reggie died?”
“Yeah. It was…” Owen scrunches his face. “Last weekend, I think?”
“Nate knows this girl?” Emma asks.
“Nate lives with this girl. And Reggie did, too,” I say. What had Maeve’s latest text said again? All-points bulletin for Chelsea Alton, who as it turns out is NOT in Oxford.
“What’s her deal?” Emma asks.
“I don’t know, she’s just…” I’m not sure how to finish that sentence. She’s just there? I don’t know much about Sana, and I wonder if Nate does either. Is there any possibility that she’s not who she says she is? I know she’s lived in Nate’s house for only a few months, and she’s never mentioned family during our infrequent conversations. She doesn’t look much like the pictures I’ve seen of Chase or Christopher, but she’s around the right age. And she was arguing with Reggie the night he disappeared. At the time I assumed she was lecturing him about being gross, but maybe there was something else going on.
“I think I need to talk to Nate,” I say.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Phoebe
Tuesday, July 21
Unfortunately, talking to Nate is easier said than done.
He hasn’t answered any of my texts. He’s working, Addy responded when I asked where he was. So I drove to Myers Construction headquarters, and now I’m picking my way through a parking lot littered with pickup trucks, cement mixers, and other yellow, industrial-looking vehicles with names I don’t know on my way to the main office.
“Help you, miss?” a gray-haired man in a yellow vest calls before I get there.
“I’m looking for Nate Macauley?” I say, shading my eyes against the sun.
“He’s at a site,” the man says.
“Do you happen to know where?” I ask. “I need to talk to him. It’s kind of an emergency.”
“Sorry to hear that,” the man says. “Let me check.”
Another text from Addy comes through while I wait: Everything OK? I’ve been meaning to catch up with you. Want to get coffee?
Ugh, I do, but not now. Maybe later, I write.
“No luck, miss,” a voice calls. The yellow-vested man is in front of me again, his expression apologetic. “Nate’s not on the schedule, so it was probably a last-minute add. If you want to come back in an hour or so, Keith Myers should be here then. He owns the place, and he always knows exactly where everyone is.”
I don’t bother telling this helpful man that I already know who Keith Myers is, seeing as I’ve climbed through a window in his house multiple times. “Thanks so much,” I say.
I head back to my car but don’t unlock it, hovering next to the passenger-side door while I debate what to do next. Wait for Mr. Myers? Meet Addy for that coffee after all? Go to Nate’s house and confront Sana, demanding to know whether she slipped a dead boy’s necklace into my brother’s backpack?
No, that’s a terrible idea. Obviously. But maybe I could do some indirect poking around. I could drive to Café Contigo and ask Ahmed and Evie whether they ever noticed anything. That would kill some time before Mr. Myers returns.
Are you at work? I text to both of them. Ahmed doesn’t reply, but Evie answers instantly. No, home today, she writes. I have more questions, but I can’t ask them over text. Leaving a digital footprint on this subject is probably a bad move.
I glance around me. The last time Evie and I had a conversation about Bayview, she mentioned she lived in an apartment complex called something like Glasstown. It’s kind of in an industrial area, she’d said. That’s why it’s so cheap. I plug Glasstown into Google Maps and get nothing closer than Sacramento. But when I try glass, the first result is Apartments at Glassworks, just 0.2 miles away.
Worth a shot.
I follow the directions on my phone until I reach a four-story, gray-brick building. The entire front lobby is made of glass, but other than that, the name seems like false advertising. It’s the right address, though. There are sixteen buttons on a pad beside the front door, and all of them except apartment twelve have names beneath them. None of them are Evie’s, so I’m about to press the button for twelve when the door opens.
“Hey,” the guy leaving the building says, holding the door open for me.
“Thanks,” I say, ducking beneath his arm.
Inside, there are hallways to both my left and right, and an elevator in between. A quick walk around shows four apartments on the first floor, so I figure that Evie’s is probably on the third. I take the elevator upstairs, my phone chiming as the doors close.
It’s Nate, finally. What’s up?
I need to talk to you. Are you around? I write back.
I’m at work, but I’ll be done at 3.
Can I stop by?
Sure, Nate texts, dropping a pin with his location.
Thanks!
I pocket my phone as the doors open and step onto the dimly lit third floor. I make my way down the right-side hallway first, then backtrack after passing apartments nine and ten. Number twelve is in the left-hand corner, and I say a quick prayer that I guessed right before knocking on the door. There’s nothing but silence for a few beats, and then a familiar voice calls, “Hello?”
“It’s Phoebe,” I say.
The door opens and Evie stands within the frame, a puzzled look on her face. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“I need to ask you something,” I say, brushing past her to enter the apartment. I definitely don’t want to have this conversation in the hallway.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Evie says.
“This won’t take long. Wow, cute place,” I say, gazing around me. I could’ve guessed that Evie’s apartment would be as bright and organized as she is: the living room walls are painted a cheerful blue, the love seat is decorated with a half-dozen patterned throw pillows, and there’s lots of botanical-themed art everywhere. A small kitchen is to my right, and there’s another room to my left that…
“Oh my God.”
The words slip out of me before I realize I’ve said them, as I stare at the green vine-patterned wallpaper that’s been haunting my dreams ever since the night I was kidnapped. Delicate stems and heart-shaped leaves, twisting and turning every which way. I’d convinced myself that the wallpaper didn’t really exist. That my drug-addled brain conjured it out of nothing, creating a false memory that sent Addy, Maeve, and Nate on a dangerous wild-goose chase to Ramona.
But it does exist, after all. Here, in Evie’s apartment, which means…
“What,” Evie says, but there’s nothing question-like about the word. When I look at her impassive face, I get the eerie sense that she can see inside my brain—that she knows exactly where my thoughts are headed, and she’s simply waiting for me to get there.
All Sana did at Café Contigo was pick up a backpack that somebody else had already slipped Reggie’s necklace into. Somebody who was at Nate’s party the night I disappeared, who’s been at the edges of every Murder Club conversation over the past few weeks, and who had plenty of opportunity to wait for my brother to leave his backpack dangling from a chair at Café Contigo while he used the restroom.
“Evie?” I ask. “Is that really your name?”
Her eyes are like chips of blue ice as she closes her front door with one swift motion and says, “You shouldn’t have come here, Phoebe.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Nate
Tuesday, July 21
“Cheers,” Addy says, clinking her glass with mine, and then Bronwyn’s and Cooper’s.
It’s just seltzer water, since I’m not rich enough—or old enough—to uncork a bottle of champagne at the bar where I’m supposed to be working. But I still grin when I take a sip. “Who would’ve thought, huh?” I ask. Then I feel compelled to add, “Nothing’s a done deal, though.”
“Nate, please allow yourself to be happy,” Addy says, reaching over the counter to grab a lime wedge that she squeezes over her drink. “Your dad will come through.”
Cooper gazes around the half-full bar that Gavin started managing without me once my friends showed up. “Are you gonna quit this job?” he asks.
“No. Why would I? The pay’s great, and Gavin does all the work,” I say as he sails past the bar carrying a tray of dirty glasses.
“One of these days, we’re going to have a discussion about workload balance,” Gavin calls over his shoulder.
I wave him off and reach into my pocket. “Hey, guess what I found while I was cleaning out the old junk in my closet—”
Addy cuts me off with such a loud gasp that I whip around, half expecting to see Jake behind me. Then she says, “I’m sorry, did you say you were cleaning your closet?” She clasps a hand over her heart as Bronwyn tries—not very hard—to hold back a snicker.
“Look at him, so fancy already,” Cooper says with a grin.
