“Cody.” I gulped against a rising surge of panic.
“Naomi? What’s wrong?” he asked, voice sharp with concern.
“At the station, you said that you could help me find a lawyer,” I said. I braced myself, forcing the words out. “Well, I think I could really use one right about now.” I bit back a hysterical laugh and dug a thumbnail into my wrist.
“Are you in trouble?” Cody asked, low and serious.
“I don’t know. I don’t—” My voice broke off in a sob. “I’m not sure where to even start answering that question.”
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he said, quiet and steady. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know. I…” I forced myself to focus, look around. “I’m near the Anderson loop trail, I think.”
“Good. All right, stay put. I’m going to come to you. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, relief flooding through me. I leaned my forehead against the pay phone’s housing.
“We’ll figure this out,” he promised. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I’ll be here.”
* * *
The rain had blurred the world outside the car to an indistinct haze of green by the time the SUV pulled up beside me. I clambered out and went over to the passenger side, sliding into the seat next to Cody. “Thanks for meeting me,” I said quietly.
“I would have invited you over to the house, but Gabriella is in bed with a headache and a backache and a number of other aches that are all somehow my fault,” Cody said. I chuckled like I was in on the joke, but right now domestic bliss seemed more of a fanciful daydream than the goddesses and unicorns of my childhood. “You sounded pretty rough on the phone. What’s going on?”
I hunched over, wishing that I’d thought to change into something more substantial than a cotton dress. I couldn’t answer at first, but he just put a hand on my shoulder.
“You said you need a lawyer,” Cody pressed gently. “Is this about Liv?”
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” I said. A bird, rendered into a streak of brown by the rainy windows, flashed past. “I keep thinking it started that summer, but it was earlier than that. It didn’t even start with me.”
“What didn’t?”
We’d kept the secret so long. It had seemed impossible to tell anyone, but now I couldn’t remember why. I’d told Ethan, and maybe that had been enough to make it easier to tell again, but I didn’t think that was really it. It was never that the secret was too powerful to speak. It was only ever that we didn’t want to. Too selfish and too timid to even try. Now the words came easily. They’d been there all along.
“That summer, we found something,” I said. The wind moved the trees in a gentle undulation, and the sound of the rain was like static, drowning out the rest of the world. “It was a skeleton. A human skeleton. We should have told someone, but instead we made it our secret. We called her Persephone, and we visited her every day. We brought her offerings. We did things for her. It was a game, but it wasn’t. We believed.”
He made a sound, a startled huh, half swallowed like he didn’t want to interrupt me.
“After the attack, we kept that secret. We kept it for years. But Liv couldn’t live with it. She wanted to find out who Persephone really was. And she did. Her name was Jessi Walker.”
A breath went out of him. “That’s why you were asking about her,” he said. I nodded. “You knew where she was the whole time?”
“She wasn’t real to us. Not that way,” I said. “We didn’t know it was Jessi.”
“But when you asked me about her. You knew then.”
“I knew. Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I wanted more answers first.”
He looked away. Silence held for three seconds, four. When he spoke his voice was hoarse. “We hadn’t been talking much. At all, really. Not for days. She was angry with me.”
“Why?”
“The guy she was seeing. I tried to get her to tell me who it was, but she’d just tease me with it. I knew he was bad news. I tried to get her to break it off. To be honest, I was more than a little in love with her. And because of that, I didn’t exactly go about it delicately. The things we said to each other … Well. It wasn’t surprising that she wouldn’t bother to say goodbye. But I never thought … You’re sure. You’re sure it’s her.”
“She had a bracelet with her niece’s name on it,” I said. “Everything matches up. The night she left, she never got out of Chester.”
“Ah.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Ah. I see.”
“The person she was seeing was Big Jim,” I said, pushing on. “He told her he was going to leave Meredith for her. I think that they argued. I think that he killed her—or Oscar did, because he was jealous. Maybe it was an accident. I don’t know. But she died, and she’s in those woods.”
“You’re talking about the mayor. And his son. You’d better be sure before you go after them,” Cody said, looking at me.
“I’m as sure as I can get on my own,” I said. “I need to tell the police. About Jessi, and…” And the rest of it. A part of me still wished the rest could stay silent. No one would have to know what Liv had done. Or what I had done. But I knew that if I kept any piece of this silence, I would never be free of it.
“You have to be careful about how you approach this. Jim’s got a lot of power in this town. And yeah, you definitely want a good lawyer. Hiding a body…”
“I know it’s awful. We were awful. There was so much happening, and then before it seemed like it had been long enough that we could say something, it had turned into too late to say anything. But we should have told. We should have.”
Cody put his hand over mine, and I realized that I had been thumping my fist rhythmically against my thigh, over and over. “It’s going to be okay,” he promised me.
I looked at him helplessly. “I’m sorry to drag you into this,” I said. “You’ve done so much for me already, and all I’ve done is lie and…”
“Don’t,” Cody said. “You don’t need to apologize. I’m glad you came to me. We’re going to figure this out. You and me. Just sit tight, and I’ll make some calls.”
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak. He shifted to put his arm around my shoulders and pressed his lips to my forehead, warm against the chill of my rain-slicked skin.
“I’m going to take care of this,” he said. And then he opened the door and stepped out of the car, pulling his phone from his pocket. I scrunched down in the seat as he paced away, already putting the phone to his ear. He should be home with his wife, not dredging up old tragedies and calling in favors to protect the fuck-up kid he used to know.
The effort to keep myself from crying had left my eyes blurry and my nose snotted up. I groped around for something I could use as a tissue, hoping for takeout napkins. Nothing. I tried the glove box, but all that was in there was the owner’s manual and a phone.