“You’re sweet,” I told him.
“Is that a good thing?”
“I think so,” I allowed. “But don’t let that go to your head.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I hung up. The first line was moving now, and with each second that I got closer to being able to move, my body got tenser. Finally the lane beside me cleared, and the security officer waved me off to the side. I peeled off, then paused, watching until the Camry drove onto the ferry.
There. He was gone. And I was left idling in the parking lot, feeling like a paranoid fool.
I couldn’t get on that ferry. I’d started to think of it as a prison and now I couldn’t stop. I pulled up the map on my phone. The drive wasn’t that much longer than waiting for the next ferry, I told myself. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
As lies went, it was weak, but I sped away from the terminal.
I pulled up to the apartment late. I winced as I spotted Mitch’s car in his spot. He’d said he wouldn’t be in, but that was before I decided on my detour. I braced myself as I unlocked the door. He was on the couch, a beer on the side table next to him and his laptop open to a blank page.
“Hey,” he said, sounding surprised as if he hadn’t known perfectly well I was coming by.
“Hello, Mitch,” I said. I dragged my bangs back from my eyes. “I’ll just grab my stuff and get out of here.”
“You’re not staying?” he asked.
“No,” I said slowly. “I was just going to get a hotel room.”
He set his laptop aside and stood, tucking his hands in his pockets in a way that made him seem smaller, more vulnerable. “You should stay. It’s your apartment, too.”
“Not really,” I said. I’d never been on the lease. Hadn’t picked it. Hated the neighborhood and the color of the curtains.
“I’m not trying to get back together,” he said, which did not allay my suspicions. His apparent earlier surrender aside, breaking up with Mitch was going to be like trying to pry an octopus off your leg. “I can sleep on the couch. It just seems silly, you getting a hotel room when your bed is right there. And free.”
He had a point. The motel in Chester wasn’t expensive, but it was chewing its way through my savings at a steady pace. Though at least the motel didn’t come with strings. Or tentacles. “Mitch, I’m exhausted. I just want to sleep. If you’re serious, I’ll take you up on it, but it doesn’t mean—”
“I know, I know,” he said, holding up his hands as if to ward off the accusation.
“Thanks,” I said, still not quite believing him. We stood for an awkward second, and then I headed down the hall. I shut the door behind me and stood in the familiar room, feeling adrift. This had stopped being home the moment I left for Chester, and being back in it unsettled me. Like I was an intruder, and I was going to get caught.
I changed out of my car-stale clothes into a tank top and sweats. Despite what I’d told Mitch, I wasn’t quite ready to sleep yet. I propped my laptop up on the bed and plugged “Alan Stahl son” into the search engine. A few articles and associated images popped up right away. The photo from the article I’d seen earlier of the police raid was the clearest picture of him.
Ethan was right—there was next to nothing about the guy. I had a notion kicking around in my head that I’d known a few things about him. The phrase muddy soccer uniform kept popping into my mind, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in the scant information available. And it wasn’t like I was an avid reader of Stahl articles.
But I had read Cass’s book. I shut the laptop and went over to the bookshelf. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with the thing, but Mitch kept a copy. Claimed that it gave him a glimpse into my “shrouded psyche,” whatever the fuck he thought that meant.
There wasn’t much of me in these pages. Cass’s picture of that summer, as relayed by the author, Rachel Devereaux, was sun-drenched and flawless. Its version of the Goddess Game was a twinkling bit of fantasy, the kind of magic with no bite to it. It had none of the desperation that had suffused those months.
Things had been changing. Where I’d had two worlds, one cruel and one fantastical, I was about to have only one. I remembered it as a period of stomach-churning dread, but in Cass’s words it was a time of delight and whimsy.
The “Cass” sections were interwoven with straight reporting. The index pointed me toward a few small excerpts from these. Alan Junior’s birth, mentions of him in the context of the marriage. Nothing much about him as a person, though you got the sense that the author was doing her best to conjure up a personality behind the name. The closest she got was in a passage about his bedroom, glimpsed only in one photo among many in the police files. That was the one I remembered:
Trophies and ribbons crowd one small shelf. Second-and third-place wins in soccer tournaments and track events, not one blue ribbon among them. The muddy soccer uniform draped over the side of a hamper suggests a boy still trying to earn that first-place ribbon, that trophy—still trying to impress a distant and indifferent father.
Or it suggested he was a decent but not great athlete who hadn’t done his laundry. The passage was illustrated with the photo I remembered—a nine-or ten-year-old AJ with his father. Lightly curling brown hair and a tentative smile. He was a wisp next to his broad-shouldered father. He looked like a normal kid—a nice kid. But Stahl looked nice, too. If I’d seen the photo without knowing who he was, I might have said he had kind eyes. The same eyes that seemed to radiate pure evil in the photos from the trial.
The answers I wanted weren’t here. There was no wicked version of the boy, no mini Psycho Stahl, to conjure from such scant details. If he was a monster like his father, the proof wasn’t in these pages. I flipped idly through the book, recognizing passages here and there. I’d read the book in a rage, searching for tiny factual details that weren’t quite right so that I could discount the rest. The parts that called my father a drunk, a man who couldn’t protect his daughter. That cast me as the helpless victim of life and circumstance and Stahl, reduced to what was done to me. As for the other “characters” Devereaux constructed …
Cody’s name caught my eye.
Cody Benham, the best friend of Cassidy’s brother, Oscar, is an unlikely figure to become the shining white knight of the story. Frequent run-ins made him a common subject among the local police, and Chief Miller described him as a hot temper in search of a brawl.
She’d somehow neglected to mention that all of Cody’s youthful indiscretions had occurred with Oscar’s willing participation—and instigation. And that the closest Cody had come to actually getting charged was … well. It was because of me, and it had ended their friendship. An act that I hadn’t honored, in the end. Cody had tried to save me from Oscar, and I’d thrown that away, like I threw everything away.
My eyes skipped over the page.
Oscar Green, Cassidy’s protective older brother, is a muscular young man, with long lashes and a slow way of speaking. He oozes that kind of backwoods charm, a lumberjack with a Shakespearean vocabulary.