Page 50 of You Belong Here

Maybe Cliff hadn’t been wrong when he’d said my parents had sent me overseas to prevent the police from questioning me more.

Maybe they were afraid of what I would say.

Maybe my father knew, if the police pressed too hard, they would stop checking the keys that had been issued to the security guards and end up in the archive room, looking for me.

A car honked behind me. I shook off the memory and drove through the intersection. “I know what this town thinks of me, Cliff. We both know there was no way I could’ve stayed here.”

I felt him turn to stare at me. “Did you know I had to leave, too, Beckett? Except I didn’t have quite the same opportunities as you. I never did. You and I, we were never going to have the same life after high school. I always knew that.”

“I didn’t know…” I hadn’t seen what had happened to others in the aftermath. I hadn’t checked. Hadn’t asked. I’d left everything and everyone behind, very careful never to look back.

“Uh-huh. What do you think it was like for me? I grew up with those guys, knew their families. They all knew I told the cops that Charlie and Micah were coming after you and Adalyn that night. It didn’t help their case against the school. Made it seem like I thought they deserved it…”

“I’m sorry,” I said, voice small. Because I was. Because I hadn’t looked back, hadn’t seen the fallout, hadn’t seen what other lives had been ruined in the process.

He had picked a side, too. He had chosen. The school or the town. I shouldn’t have been surprised—deep down, he’d always wanted this life instead.

“I was supposed to be with them that night,” he said, his eyes haunted. I’d always assumed he was the one who had driven them and dropped them off on campus. That he’d found his moral line, and that was as far as he could go.

I felt trapped—in the car, in the past.

We’d both been changed by the proximity—the almost of it all. My hands were trembling on the steering wheel, and I gripped tighter, hoping he couldn’t tell.

But he noticed; I felt his gaze on me. Maybe that was the point of this: To see my reaction. To hold me in one place and shake the truth free.

“They had friends,” he continued. “Parents. Siblings. A fiancée. Trust me, I’m no one’s favorite person around here since I moved back. But in twelve years, if I’m lucky, my kid will get to go here for free. Just like you. And have a different sort of life from me.”

I swallowed. I didn’t know what else to say. “You made a different life for yourself.” We both had, in our own ways. A second life, unrecognizable from the ones we once expected for ourselves.

“I tried to stop them, you know. I begged them not to go.” His voice turned raspy, tight with emotion.

“I believe you,” I whispered. Like I’d tried to stop Adalyn.

I imagined him in the truck, saying: We can turn around right now. You don’t have to do this—

I’d thought I could protect Adalyn if I was with her. I’d thought I could keep everyone safe.

I turned onto Main Street, the deli in sight, grateful for the break in conversation.

There was a patrol car parked in front of the Low Bar, in the spot Charlie’s truck once was, where Adalyn had taken a key to the side of it.

The bar door was propped open, and I could see an officer in the doorway, talking to someone inside.

When I went to turn into the deli parking lot, I saw that another police car blocked the entrance there.

“They must be interviewing everyone,” I said, idling at the front curb.

Cliff frowned, peering at the two police vehicles, diagonal from each other. “Be right back,” he said, before heading into the deli.

I sent a text to Trevor while I waited: Sorry, got held up. Be home soon. But it got stuck sending—I was probably in another dead zone.

I peered in my rearview mirror and saw the officer just outside the entrance of the Low Bar now, talking to a man in jeans and flannel, pointing up. I thought it was that same young bartender—Wes. The one who gave Mayhew his daily updates. I twisted in my seat to see more clearly.

The passenger door flew open, and Cliff slipped inside, white paper bag in his lap. “Something’s happening there,” he said. “Half the department is in the deli, talking to the employees. They didn’t even charge me for my order.”

I gestured to the scene through the back window of my car. “Looks like they’re checking for footage,” I said.

Like they’d promised to do when we were searching for Delilah.

The paper bag rustled as he folded the top down, sealing it tight. “Can you drop me back home?”

As if the police presence was making him nervous. Here and on campus. Something he couldn’t seem to escape.

We drove the rest of the way in silence, as if something had shifted between the school and the deli. There was a small construction vehicle at work on the empty plot beside his, digging out the brick of the foundation. Progress at last, days before the parents were set to arrive in town again.

“I didn’t even know she applied here,” I confessed. “Not until it was too late.”

He tucked the paper bag under his arm, then stared out the side window, straight through the empty plot to the rise of campus.

“Didn’t you read her essay for the scholarship?

It started with something like: ‘My mother is a ghostwriter. She tells everyone else’s story but her own.

’ She talked about the words on your bedroom wall.

” He smirked. “I remember that wall. She wrote about the feeling that your history was all around her here but still unreachable. That her father is an art historian. And that you’re both complete mysteries to her. ”

I turned to stare at him, understanding what he was saying. She was looking for the story of her own history. She was digging into the past to understand her origins.

I wondered if somehow she’d managed to draw Adalyn back in her searching.

“Do you think she did it?” Cliff asked suddenly, voice low.

A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck. “What?”

“Adalyn. Do you think she set the fire.” He gestured to the empty plot. The place he was supposed to be living before the fire swept through. He’d just started moving things in, he’d said. It must’ve been his seared photos in the dumpster. Here, then, was the reason Cliff had been so shaken.

“I don’t know.”

“First it was the house. Then the bell tower.” He squinted into the distance. “Dill’s keys went missing at the start of the year. It was a whole fiasco. Now all I can picture is Adalyn sneaking into his house and taking them.”

Now I did, too. Adalyn sneaking into Delilah’s dorm. Sneaking into my childhood home. Taking the key from the weathervane when my parents were away; taking Dill’s security keys while he slept.

“Someone’s been harassing Delilah since she started school,” I said. “Stealing her things. Writing threatening notes. But it doesn’t make sense. Why her?”

“Why her?” he said. “And why me? Don’t you see a pattern?”

The fire. The deaths.

In a way, we had been the only ones to escape.

Adalyn was messing with everyone. She’d become the ghost in the story the kids had always talked about.

Was she angry and back for revenge? But it had been nearly twenty years.

She’d managed to live an entire second life.

She’d escaped. She must’ve known the dangers.

And now she’d died because she’d come back.

“I blamed my parents for Delilah coming here,” I said. “When they retired, I really hoped they’d decide to move.”

There was a long pause when I could feel Cliff looking at me. “They didn’t retire, Beckett. They were fired.”

I jolted, leaning away. “No, they weren’t.” They had retired back-to-back, one right after the other, five years earlier.

“They made an agreement to go quietly, but make no mistake, it wasn’t their call,” Cliff said.

“That’s not…” I began. But what did I know about their lives, really? Only that they said they weren’t suited for retirement. They took gigs, wrote papers.

But also: Their house had been remortgaged. They needed money.

Maybe they hadn’t gone willingly into the night.

“It happened before I started,” Cliff said, “but I heard the stories. Something about your father selling pieces, using the college’s name.”

I shook my head, confused. “That doesn’t prove anything,” I said. But my mind kept going to the boxes in the attic and the ones they’d packed for Peru. The clock that had caught Trevor’s eye in the basement, that needed fixing up. Their desire to have me out of the house.

“Maybe not,” Cliff said. “But whatever they were presented with must’ve convinced your parents it was better to see themselves out the door instead of mounting a defense. The school, as always, was happy to sweep it under the rug to protect its reputation.”

He finally opened the car door, as if that’s what he’d come to tell me all along.