Annie considered that. Her fingers stroked the throw tucked around her lap.
“I’m sure no one was on the trails,” Lena said, “but did anyone see you leave the party?”
“Maybe Jen?”
“She wouldn’t say anything,” Lena said.
“How do you know? I was awful to her.”
“Just a feeling.”
Annie made a sound between a gasp and a laugh. “Oh my god, how will I explain it to Laurel?”
“You won’t,” Lena said. “What is there to explain?”
Neither one of them verbalized the thought that passed between them: Who would ever know?
It was all so clean, Lena marveled. Annie didn’t even know to be grateful for how clean it was.
Lena moved right next to Annie on the sofa, faced her, took Annie’s hands—slightly thawed—in her own.
“It can be surprisingly easy,” Lena lied, “if you let it.”
FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER, 1:45 A.M.
Lena palmed her keys, opened the door.
Tim’s car had been parked at an awkward angle in the darkened garage. The windshield was cracked and torn in two spots. Its edges peeled up like it was made of a flimsy plastic. Rachel sat upright in the driver’s seat.
Lena ran through the shards of glass that covered the garage floor, flung open the car’s front door, and touched Rachel’s arm, which was cold and clammy. “What happened?”
Lena moved Rachel’s heavy limbs, tried to assess damage. The splotches of blood on the skirt of Rachel’s dress seemed to be from a wound on her palm. The cut didn’t appear deep.
“What happened?” Lena pressed both of her hands against Rachel’s cheeks, forced eye contact.
Rachel’s lids squeezed shut. Lena pinched her bare upper arm, and they flew back open.
“I don’t know.” Rachel sounded genuinely perplexed. Her breath was sour and hot. “I feel really sick.”
“But the windshield…” Lena’s voice screeched out of her. “What hit it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Tell me where you went, Rachel. At least tell me that.”
* * *
Lena’s headlights were the only illumination on Canyon Road. Her grip on the wheel was tight and dry and she drove slowly, scanned the blue grama grass on the roadside.
She got out of the car after she felt the bump underneath her car, bent down to look at a blue sneaker planted upright in the middle of the road.
The wind died down, diminished to a gentle rustle that waved through the tall grass as if beckoning Lena closer.
He’d landed mostly on his back, the leg with the shoeless foot stretched toward the road, the other tucked under him at an awful angle.
His face was unblemished but for a golf-ball-sized crater collapsed in the middle of his forehead. The hair on the side of his head was soaked with blood and matted with tiny seed heads. There was a spread of darkness under him. Lena couldn’t tell where he ended and the earth began.
She kneeled, pressed two fingers lightly against his exposed wrist, and averted her eyes from his, which were open and vacant. His skin was soft and a bit warm, but she felt no pulse other than a beat deep within her.
You could hide him, Lena.
Quickly, hide the body so no one finds out.
But her legs were running to the Nessels’ house and she was knocking and ringing the bell.
When Harriet came stumbling to the door in her nightshirt, Lena’s voice was an unfamiliar shriek. You need to call 911.
“What happened,” Harriet demanded.
It wasn’t a decision. It wasn’t thought-out. It was something essential that clicked together within Lena.
It was Tim. The lie felt true as it spilled out of her mouth. It was Tim.
She waited for questions, a challenge, but Harriet nodded gravely, wrapped her arms around her chest.
* * *
At home, she had to assume that there wasn’t much time.
Lena moved the car’s seat and mirrors back to Tim’s setting. She wiped its interior with hand towels, which she threw in the washing machine along with dirty napkins from the party.
She coaxed Rachel upstairs, stepped her out of the rest of the bloody dress and forced her into the shower. She bandaged the cut on her hand, used pillows to prop her in her bed.
She threw the dress on the logs with the gauze and the blood and the wrappers, lit the outdoor fireplace, watched the fire jump as it consumed it all.
There were so many mistakes, too many.
But when the police knocked, they didn’t focus on them.
Lena led them to Tim’s study, let her shock unspool as she told them how she had woken up, seen his car, and raced down the hill. Seen that poor boy, that poor boy, that poor innocent child—