After that, he stuck to one story, one that was easy for him to remember and easy for everyone else to forget.
For a while he thought someone might come looking for him. He slept fitfully, his eyes never fully closed, twitching awake at the slightest noise. He envisioned federal agents kicking down his door, armed with questions, suspicions, accusations.
But they never came.
Over time, his memories began to fade, their sharp edges dulled like something out of a dream. He didn’t even know why he was running anymore. What sort of life he was trying to protect? Wouldn’t it be better, he sometimes thought, to have it all be over?
He thought about ending it. He spent days, weeks, planning what he’d do, what it would feel like, how he’d be sure to do it right. He thought through every last detail. Assembled everything he’d need. Spent hours staring at the instruments of finality, spread across his bed like he was packing for a trip.
But he couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it.
He’d never wanted to die. Just didn’t want to be here, in this world that was not his world, answering to a name that was not his name, living a life that was not his life.
But he didn’t have a choice. Not really.
He spent months working up the courage to do what he knew he had to do. He never wanted to go back there, where the ashes of his failure still hung heavy in the air. But there was nowhere else to go.
By the time he returned, it had been years. No one knew him, although he knew everyone. He walked the familiar streets as a stranger, time dragging on like claws in his skin.
And he waited.
SUNDAY
Chapter Twenty-Four
JUSTIN
I’ve been here for less than a day, and I’m already over 1985.
I slept in Rose’s car last night, tossing fitfully in the back seat, jerking awake at every sound, expecting to open my eyes to a hospital, or a riverbed, or the afterlife, or anything that made more sense than this, but I remained stubbornly here, two decades before I was born. Rose sneaked me food this morning—a foil-wrapped Pop-Tart and a box of Hi-C—and told me that as soon as she and her family arrived back home from church in the afternoon, we’d “figure things out.” As if fixing my accidental time-travel problem is something that can be accomplished in a single Sunday afternoon.
That left me with a few more hours to kill, during which I stupidly walked to my house, just because I had to see for myself. Long before I got there, though, daylight revealed all the things I’d missed in my panicked state the night before. Wooded areas where neighborhoods should be. Storefronts that looked nothing like I remembered them, on the rare occasions when they were at least the same business, which, most often, they weren’t. Houses that were different colors, or missing additions, or had totally different landscaping from what I was used to seeing every day.
By the time I got to my house, it was barely even a shock to find the driveway covered in chalked hopscotch grids, and the lawn littered with brightly colored plastic toys. Of course it was wrong. Everything here was wrong.
I ran back to Rose’s house, tears stinging my eyes. I’m not normally a crier, but it turns out that even when home kind of sucks, it’s still a gut punch to realize it’s actually gone. Or rather, that it’s still there, somewhere, but you may never be able to see it again.
Fortunately, I had composed myself by the time Rose got home and finished lunch with her family. They had pot roast; I had a gas station burger whose best feature was that it cost only fifty cents. Good thing I never returned Stan’s Oreo money to him—twenty bucks goes a long way in 1985.
Afterward, the first words out of Rose’s mouth were “let’s get to work.” I could absolutely not have dealt with that level of group-project-leader intensity if I had still been crying.
The first item of “work” on Rose’s list turned out to be finding me a place to stay, which I assumed would be a massive headache but wound up being no big deal. She arranged for me to crash with an elderly woman named Mrs. Hanley, who was the grandmother of one of Rose’s friends. She told Mrs. Hanley I was her pen pal visiting from out of town, and just like that, I had a room to myself, a key to the back door, and a thick-cut turkey sandwich, due to Mrs. Hanley’s assessment that I was “too skinny.”
Once I was settled in Mrs. Hanley’s guest bedroom—didn’t take long, given my complete lack of possessions—Rose revealed her ulterior motive for my lodging situation. The detached garage behind Mrs. Hanley’s house was blackened, blocked off with the tattered remnants of yellow police tape. The fire had occurred a few months earlier, but already the police had lost interest in their investigation, leaving the garage as a charred monument to indifference. Rose was adamant that the odds of there being two arsonists in a small town like Stone Lake were slim. She reasoned that it couldn’t hurt for me to live at the scene of the first crime, where I might stumble upon a clue that could help me solve the second.
Hence, Rose’s presence across a plastic patio table from me on Mrs. Hanley’s back deck, with a yellow legal pad and a pencil, the charred garage looming over her shoulder. “So,” she says, pencil poised to take notes, “tell me everything you know about the school fire.”
“Uh, should we really be talking out in the open like this?” Mrs. Hanley is in the living room with the television on, but the kitchen window is open. Plus, neighbors could walk by and overhear what is bound to be an absolutely unhinged conversation.
But Rose waves her hand. “It’s fine. She’s getting a little hard of hearing, and we can see if anyone is coming,” she says, gesturing to the empty backyards on either side of us.
“Okay,” I say, still feeling pretty dumb. On the other hand, I guess there’s nowhere we could have this conversation where it’d feel normal.
I take a deep breath and begin telling her what I know.
Unfortunately, it isn’t much.
Here’s the thing about my grandparents, and I don’t want to sound like some sort of monster, but the fact is I never really . . . cared how they died. I mean, obviously I knew the same broad strokes that everyone did, but to me, they were strangers. Strangers whose dramatic deaths led to getting a high school named after them, sure, but if anything, that made me even less interested to dig into the details of their lives. To be honest, until I was sitting here across from Rose and her #2 pencil, I’d never really considered them as people at all. They’ve always just been specters, determinedly haunting me no matter how much I wished they—and my entire messed-up family tree—would just go away.
Still, I do know some stuff, beyond just the normal things everyone in town knows, and it’s not because I’m interested, or because I’m related to them.
It’s because Stan. Is. Obsessed.
Look, I get that I’m not exactly fair to Stan or whatever—I don’t really think that’s true, but Alyssa does, and she’s right about most things—but I do not think I’m being even the slightest bit uncharitable when I say that it is freaking weird to have a full-fledged murder board in the basement, complete with red yarn and newspaper clippings and stalker-y black-and-white photographs that Stan probably took while disguised as a tree. Right?