Page 20 of Everything You Want Me to Be

“Must have made you mad, what she said.”

He lifted his head again and his eyes were dripping. “It was cold out. I thought, let her walk home then. Fuckher,you know? Sorry, Mom.”

“Anybody else in the parking lot?”

“No.”

“You pass anybody on the way in?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And you just let her walk off and went home?”

“I—yeah, I left, but I drove around for a while before going home. I was pretty mad.”

“You pick anybody up? Call any of your buddies to talk about it?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t want to tell anybody. I even... doubled back and drove around the back roads for a while, thinking I might see her and maybe she’d apologize. She just wasn’t like that, you know? We were going to do things. We were getting a limo for prom and all of us were going up to Derek’s cabin in July. It’s been all planned for months. Everyone’s bringing their girlfriends.”

“Did you go back to the parking lot? Try to find her there?”

“I just drove by without stopping.” He swallowed and took a shaky breath. “It was cold.”

“Then what?”

He looked at the door. “I came home.”

“When did he get home that night?” Jake asked his parents.

“Didn’t hear him,” Mr. Kinakis said. “We were already in bed.”

“I’m sure I heard him come in.” Mrs. Kinakis jumped in. “It couldn’t have been later than ten thirty.”

“Tommy?” I turned back to him.

“Yeah, it was probably around then,” he mumbled.

We kept after him for more details and his story didn’t waver. He kept his head down and wiped tears from his eyes with meaty forearms. As we wrapped up the interview, Mrs. Kinakis wasted no time shooing us out the door. Before she got us all the way out, I shot Tommy one last question.

“Hattie ever talk about a curse?”

“Curse? Like a voodoo curse?” He looked up blankly and shook his head as Mrs. Kinakis hustled us out of her house.

After that Jake and I headed over to the east side of Crosby to check on Shel, the deputy who’d won the coin toss to search the lake. The rest of the boys had made a full search of the shoreline first thing this morning and turned up nothing. Most of them were combing Winifred’s fields with the dogs now while Shel had the boat out on the lake, scanning the bottom. It was a shallow lake. Twenty feet at the deepest point. If there was anything to be found, Shel would see it soon enough.

While Jake radioed him, I poked around the parking spot by the beach. The gravel was dry and snow-free, so no chance of pulling tire tracks to see who else might have driven in here. I walked over to where the trail started and squatted down. It was a dirt path that you could hardly see in the summer, winding through the surrounding weeds and grasses, but now, just after the thaw, it was exposed plain as day. The ground was smooth, tramped down by years’ worth of feet hiking around the lake. There were a couple half-prints here and there—not much to go on. A dozen people could have walked this path Friday night and you wouldn’t know.

I followed the trail around to the barn—it wasn’t far, maybe half a mile—and checked the shoreline to see if anything had washed up in the last few hours. Nothing.

When I got back, Jake was fiddling on his phone next to the beach. “So far Shel’s got a case of empty beer bottles with the labels all washed off. Looks like leftovers from last summer.”

“How much area has he got left?” I asked.

“He’s covered over half the lake. Or so he says.”

I glanced at Jake, who sneered. “He drives a boat like a twelve-year-old girl.”

“Better than whining about opening a case file like a twelve-year-old boy.”