Ricky’s eyes were bloodshot and swollen in the moonlight. Slobber ran down his chin. He released my ankle and pulled my kitchen knife from his waistband, holding it in both hands overhead, like he was about to sacrifice me.
Junie screamed.
Ricky wobbled.
Then he slipped and fell into the water.
Or I kicked him. The story I told myself changed from day to day.
Beth swore that was all right.
“Any way you need to survive, baby,” she’d tell me.
CHAPTER 55
That night at the police station, I tried to explain to a cramp-faced Sheriff Nillson what the Anacin bottle had contained. “Some of it was heart medicine, some happy pills, some aspirin,” I said, a blanket wrapped around me even though I’d stopped shivering over an hour ago. “I tried to warn Ricky before he took it.”
“Of course you did,” Sheriff Nillson said absently, drops of filmy sweat dripping down his hairline. He had me in a room all to himself, his tangy smell overwhelming in the tight space. He’d been scribbling mountains of notes until I reached that part of the story, the part where Ricky swallowed the pills I’d brought with me to kill Ed.
I pointed at his notebook. “Aren’t you going to write it down?”
He tapped his head. I keep it all up here, his gesture said. “Not necessary.”
I frowned. “Will there be an autopsy? To find out if that’s why he drowned, because of those pills I gave him?”
Sheriff Nillson’s mouth formed a cold impression of a smile. “Not necessary,” he repeated, before getting up to leave the room.
I watched him walk out, finally understanding what we’d been up against.
Finally.
It wasn’t just that us Pantown girls were on our own. It was also that Dad and Sheriff Nillson got to write the story. Any messy details that happened outside their narrative, like my dad with his hands in Maureen’s hair, pressing her to him, or Sheriff Nillson taking pictures of scared girls trembling on his apple-green carpeting, it just didn’t happen.
Erased. Wiped out.
Sheriff Nillson telling me there’d be no autopsy on Ricky meant they could even wipe out the things we did when they broke us.
And they’d been teaching us to use that eraser on each other, too. That’s why we avoided talking about Mom burning off my ear, or Mrs. Hansen’s house.
Realizing that tasted like poison, like something dying. As much as I’d learned, as hot as my fire had burned since I’d discovered that copper bracelet, it still twisted to learn we’d never stood a chance. Not if we played by their rules.
If that could happen in my home, my neighborhood, where else was it happening?
I was thinking on that when Agent Ryan poked his cinnamon-colored head into the room. He wanted to know if I needed anything—water, maybe another blanket. That was it. That was all he’d come for. Something about that, and about how he was holding himself, like he wanted to both apologize to and fight someone for me, reminded me of Claude.
“Sheriff Nillson made my friend Maureen do awful things before she died,” I blurted out. I knitted together courage, preparing to do the hardest thing I’d ever done, even harder than biking out to that cabin.
I was going to tell on my dad.
Agent Ryan tipped his head, glanced over his shoulder, and then stepped all the way into the room, quietly but firmly closing the door behind him. “What did Sheriff Nillson make her do?”
Even after everything I’d realized, I almost couldn’t go through with it.
We kept our secrets in Pantown.
But you wouldn’t believe what happened next. Maureen and Brenda joined us in that dingy room, Maureen with her fierce, take-no-shit attitude, Brenda with her steady strength. They showed up when I needed them the most. I couldn’t see them, couldn’t smell them, but I felt them, the three of us growing up together, making music in Valhalla, laughing, forever connected. I touched my single earring, rubbed the mood ring Brenda had given me right before the only concert we’d ever play together. It was still a yellow-green color, but it didn’t matter because with them here, I could do this. I had to.
“Not just Sheriff Nillson. My dad, too,” I said, and it felt like I was walking through a sheet of ice, but there was no turning back. “They both made Maureen do terrible things, and she was only sixteen. She wasn’t the only one. I have pictures.”
Agent Ryan listened to my whole story, reaching over to pat my arm when I would start sobbing so hard I couldn’t speak. He’d wait, patient, his eyes sad, until I got back on track. Even better, he believed me. I could see it in his face.