The Possession Page 9

  Once again I was aware of Molly looking meaningfully at me. “Well, I guess it’ll come out in the next few days,” I offered, as blandly as possible. “When the—”

  “Oh, it’ll be sooner than that,” Kristy said, with a fierce smile. “I’m going back tomorrow morning.”

  “Is that wise? Aren’t you done here? You came looking for someone and now she’s back. End of story? Happy ending?”

  Kristy glared at me and walked away to her car.

  Chapter

  17

  Fifteen minutes later I was standing outside the building that held Kristy’s Airbnb. My phone was in my hand. It’d gone to voicemail four times already. In contrast to when I’d called from Santa Cruz, I was confident she was ignoring me in the hope I’d go away. That wasn’t going to happen.

  “What?” she said, when she eventually picked up.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I’m tired, Nolan. And you’ve had some drinks.”

  “So have you.”

  “Not as much. I never do.”

  I considered reminding her this was a discussion we’d had more than once in the bad days. That dismissing anything someone might say on the grounds they’ve had a few beers was a dubiously ad hominem way of making the other party’s opinions inadmissible, even if they might be right. I did not make the observation. It never worked then and it seemed unlikely it would now.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I’m going to keep being here, and simply call you back if you end the call.”

  “So I’ll turn off my phone.”

  “For God’s sake, Kristy—why are you being like this?”

  “Why are you?”

  “Because I’m worried about you.”

  I hadn’t known I was going to say it until the words were out of my mouth. When they were, I knew it was true.

  The line went dead.

  I stood there wondering whether it was worth calling back—or if it would only make things worse.

  I didn’t wonder for long. My dad has never tried to pass on many life lessons: his theory is you have to make the mistakes yourself to understand what count as mistakes, and how they happen. He told me always to choose the beef option on long-haul flights. He told me that you haven’t finished cooking until the kitchen’s cleaner than when you started. But the main thing he’s adamant about is that you never, ever go to bed on bad terms. You travel far while you sleep, he says, and when you come back the world may have changed. Differences have time to solidify. So always get to the other side of them before you say goodnight.

  Just as I pressed Redial, the door in front of me opened. Kristy looked very tired and her cheeks were wet.

  I took a step toward her but her eyes said that wasn’t what she wanted. “Kris,” I said, instead. “Alaina’s back. It’s all good. So what’s going on?”

  “I told you once about a friend I had at school,” she said. “Helen.”

  “Right. Her family moved away when you were fourteen.”

  “Yes, I did tell you that.”

  “But?”

  “I lied.”

  I made chamomile tea—I’m not a fan, but Kristy will not suffer instant coffee to be in a house and so there wasn’t any choice. She sat in the chair by the window meanwhile, staring down at the wet street.

  I gave a cup to her and sat with mine on the sofa. And waited. Sometimes it’s worth nudging people. Sometimes it’s not. Kristy is not nudgeable. I’d learned that.

  “You remember what it was like,” she said, eventually. “Though I think maybe it’s different for boys.”

  “What is?”

  “Boys…I don’t know. They grow up in parallel, it seems to me. Even if it’s a super-close friend. They play and talk and hang out a lot. And I’m not saying that isn’t just as meaningful, or rich. But I get the sense boys stay separate. They walk side by side. Whereas girls, at that age…they blend.”

  “In what way?”

  “A girl and her best friend will create a world, with them as the only inhabitants. When they’re little, it’ll be a fantasy realm. When they start to grow up it’s an antechamber to the Big Wide World, somewhere they can experiment with grown-up feelings. A private universe, a safe space, though it can get intense in there, and if it goes bad, it’s bloody. It’s risky letting someone hold your soul when you’re not even sure what shape it has yet. I don’t think boys do that. Until they fall in love.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. I wasn’t sure she was right. Boys forge intense bonds, too, and create worlds of their own. You could argue that high school shootings conducted in pairs were terrible proof of this, or, more positively, the world’s most successful rock bands. But I understood her point and wasn’t going to get in her way.

  “So,” she said. “Helen Fincher. Her family lived a half mile away. We met in first grade. Hit it off. And after that…Didn’t agree on everything, were different in a lot of ways, but that was okay. Better. Even the fact that we didn’t live next door worked. As we got older it gave us a first step to a shared independence. Our families were friends by then, and when one afternoon when I was eight I announced I was going to Helen’s, my parents looked at each other and said, sure, be back for dinner. I walked over, by myself, feeling amazingly grown up. And after that, Helen’s dad used to say, we became the Quantum Kids, the Kristy and Helen Show. The grown-ups never knew where we’d be at any given time, but they could be sure it’d be in one house or the other. We wound up eating with the other’s family at least once a week. If the other kid happened to be there at mealtime, our moms would set another place without thinking about it.

  “By then the families were going on vacation together, too. A week a year, a couple long weekends. Every Memorial and Labor Day my dad and Helen’s dad would be affably bickering in one of the yards about how to grill ribeye, getting slowly wasted on Coors. And with Helen and me, it was the whole nine yards. Talking into the small hours. Lying on our backs looking at the stars. If you’d put it all in one of the scripts you used to write, the producer would have said, ‘Okay, Nolan, we get it—they’re BFFs. This is too on-the-nose, tone it down, sheesh.’ Even now, twenty years later, I find it impossible to recall my childhood without a visceral sense of Helen standing beside me, a presence at my shoulder.”

  She stopped. Gathered herself smaller into her chair. “Well…I suspect you know where this is going.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was the October of eighth grade. One Saturday Helen and I went to the mall. We did it every weekend. You talk about ritual walkways? We had one, to the Garden Mall, even when it rained. We plotted about outfits to buy when we had more money. We had burgers. We hung out. We were about to leave when I remembered my dad’s birthday, and for once, instead of letting my mom handle it, I had an idea of my own. I’d noticed he seemed to get into this one song whenever it came on the radio. The Fugees. That cover they did of ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song.’ Remember? Totally not his kind of thing, which is why I’d noticed. I went into the Sam Goody. Helen waited on a bench outside. I found the CD. I stood in line, paid. The whole thing took less than five minutes. When I came out, Helen wasn’t there.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What happened?”

  “I waited. Then I looked for her. But you know what it’s like in those places—if you go searching for someone there’s a high chance that you’re going to miss them because they’re on the move, too. And of course in those days kids didn’t have cell phones—so you can’t call or text or Snapchat saying ‘WTF are you?’ I gave it fifteen minutes, then I ran home. My dad drove me straight back and we looked and looked together and then we talked to mall security and they called the cops. It was on the local news every day for weeks. But they never found her.”

  “Shit, Kristy,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I try not to think about it. It was the end. Of everything up until then. Of that life. The end of having a best friend.
I don’t think I ever had one again. Until you, I guess. The end of the families, too. At first everybody was supporting each other, but after a while…I was there, you know?”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” I said. “They must have understood that.”

  “Intellectually. But how would you feel? Don’t you think some part of you would resent the child who didn’t disappear? Even if you never said it out loud?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”

  “Everything died. Stopped dead. And then gradually it started up again. As it does. Helen’s family moved to another town. That part was true. She didn’t go with them, that’s all. She got stuck. Like a lot of things. When my dad died, I found the CD I’d bought that day buried deep in a drawer in his study. It was still shrink-wrapped.” She drank the last of her tea. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you, and why I don’t ever think about it anymore.”

  “Except you’re here now. In Birchlake.”

  She smiled briefly. “Yeah.”

  “And it didn’t go that way this time. Alaina’s back. She’s okay. She’s alive.”

  “And I’m happy for her, and her dad, and for her friends. So happy. But think about it, Nolan. If she’d just got lost, she’d have made her way back out of the woods long ago. Or the cops would have found her. That didn’t happen, which means somebody took her. Somebody tried to steal a girl out of her own life. That is not okay. That cannot stand.” She looked at me, eyes bright. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Get some sleep,” I said. “It’s late. What are the names of the girls who were with Alaina when she disappeared?”

  “Madeline and Nadja Hardaker. Why?”

  “You’re going to the hospital tomorrow morning. I get it. Not even going to try to stop you. But if Alaina doesn’t want to talk, then you need to back off—and we need to go home to LA. Right?”

  “Of course,” she said, not very convincingly.

  I sighed, and kissed her on the top of the head. “At least try not to get arrested, okay?”

  When I got back to the motel the lights were off in Ken’s and Pierre’s rooms. I was surprised to see Molly still up, sitting on a chair on the walkway outside her room.

  “Kristy okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Were you trying to signal something earlier?”

  “Only that she, well.”

  “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  “She was really going off at the hospital, that’s all. I mean, notably so. Angry, tearful…really big.”

  “We just talked about it,” I said. “It’s bad backstory, that’s all. She’ll be right as rain tomorrow.”

  “Good. And we’re still leaving bright and early?”

  I hesitated. “Probably.”

  She nodded, looking glum.

  “You okay, Moll?”

  “Fine,” she said, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. Then she said goodnight and went into her room.

  I heard her lock the door, then check it.

  Twice.

  Chapter

  ​18

  When I went to knock on Ken’s door in the morning I found a Post-it note saying he’d gone to hunt down breakfast. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I know Ken is both a creature of habit and economical with effort, and so I surmised that—like a wily old predator in the veldt—he would likely have returned to the last place he successfully ate.

  I walked to the main street, and when it became clear the Stone Mountain Tap was very not-open-yet, I turned on the spot and spotted the coffee shop on the opposite side of the street. It was open.

  Ken was inside, lurking in a corner, a pot of coffee and an untouched croissant in front of him.

  “Are you on a diet?”

  “This place claimed to do breakfast. They lied,” he added, loudly. The young hipster behind the counter ignored him. “As any fool knows, breakfast has at least one dead thing in it. This has no dead things and is therefore not breakfast. But they don’t have anything else. Fuckers.”

  I sat opposite. “So,” I said.

  “I hear you. In your position, I’d do the same. Do you know what it’s about yet?”

  I gave him a summary of what Kristy had told me the night before. He breathed out heavily. “So she’s going to do what she’s going to do.”

  “Already on it,” I said. “Her rental isn’t out there. She’ll be at the hospital right now, taking names and kicking ass.”

  “And because you laughably feel you might be able to offer emotional support, you want to stick around.”

  “Did you get return flights?”

  “Yes, Nolan. I didn’t fancy walking back to LA.”

  “Nuts. I was going to suggest you took my car. Though I guess you could leave it at the airport in San Jose, and I could get Kristy to drop me off there.”

  “Yes. Or, here’s the thing,” Ken said. He took a mouthful of croissant, and grimaced. “Why do they even make these things? Pierre and I have seats for tomorrow afternoon. Molly’s more than scary enough to get the flight moved up a day and put herself on the plane, too, but I did some deep thinking in the small hours.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “These stone walls of yours, though not the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen, aren’t wholly without intrigue. Yesterday we even discovered one in the woods behind the motel. There may be more. The fact they’re closer to town could mean they’re just eldritch pig pens or whatever, but checking them out might bulk up this thing to a show after all. Which would be good. Because we have spent money on it.”

  “I know. And if I didn’t know you, I’d think that was the actual reason you were thinking of staying.”

  Ken winked approvingly. “Nobody says you’re stupid, Nolan. Okay, of course they do, but you’re right on this occasion. Point one—what do you think would be the very least effective way of getting me to leave a place?”

  “Suggesting you should go. Like someone did via a message on the windshield last night.”

  “So there’s that. Who did it? Why? Also, we’re flailing for mysteries we can afford to investigate. And let’s also face this—The Anomaly Files is struggling to maintain a financially viable audience. Or an audience of any kind. So why not hedge our bets and double up?”

  “Meaning?”

  “We look for more walls. But there’s a real-life mystery here, too. Okay, it’s not a pyramid or lost gold mine or aliens or whatever. But a girl went missing. She is now back. This is an actual mystery, and one with a happy ending. People might want to watch a show about that. And we’re here, complete with a crew and an experienced and attractive journalist.”

  “You’re not talking about me, are you.”

  “Do you think Kristy would be up for it?”

  “I don’t know. This is personal for her.”

  “All the more likely to be worth watching.”

  “We can ask. Molly’s not going to like it, though. She really seems like she wants to go.”

  “I’ll talk to her. How about you?”

  “My ego is robust enough to cope with having a guest presenter on the show.”

  “Even when she turns out to be much better at it than you are?”

  “Remind me why I spend time with you?”

  “No idea, mate. I keep trying to give you the slip. I’m one step away from buying a disguise.”

  I thought about it, but not for long. “Let’s do it. It’s a break from our usual schtick, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. And I’ve even got an idea of where to start. The girls who were with Alaina when she disappeared.”

  Ken shook his head. “They’ll have told the police everything they know.”

  “I’m sure. But law enforcement are maybe not the only people who wanted their ducks in a row. Think about it. You’re fourteen. Your friend vanishes. You freak out, run home. The cops ask you what happened. What do you tell them?”

  “What happened.”

  “Right. But in the context
of a crisis in which you feel horrifically guilty for being okay. Kristy’s friend disappeared when Kristy went into a store. She said something like ‘It couldn’t have taken five minutes.’”

  “So?”

  “Nobody goes into a record store in a busy mall on the weekend, finds the thing in the racks, heads to the register, stands in line and pays, in five minutes. It’s going to take ten, at least. Five extra minutes isn’t much, but how long does it take to get hit by a car? A single second. These girls say they searched for twenty minutes. It could be they only looked for ten—but it felt longer because you’re in the woods and freaked out.”

  Ken looked thoughtful. “I see what you’re saying.”

  “Nobody’s lying. But you underestimate how long it took for someone to vanish, overestimate how long you searched. Because you unconsciously want it to be known that you did the right thing, that the horror show isn’t your fault. But now? Alaina’s back. It’s different.”

  Ken nodded. “The pressure’s off. And so if somebody asks the same questions they might get a more accurate timescale.”

  “That’s my thinking.”

  “For you, it’s not bad thinking. Alright, I’m game. You going to tell Kristy before we try to talk to the girls?”

  “I was considering making it a nice surprise.”

  “You live dangerously, Nolan. I admire that. Can I have all your stuff after she kills you?”

  “It’s a very bad idea,” Molly said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Why?”

  “Seriously? I have no idea how old you are, Ken, but the days of you being carded in bars are long gone. Probably back when shoulder pads were a thing. And Nolan, with respect, nobody’s going to mistake you for a teenager, either.”

  “Ageist, dude.”

  “No,” she said. “Not my point. You’re both fine examples of…well, you’re both men, anyway. And that’s my point. The two of you cannot go try to talk to two young teens by yourselves. Not looking like…that. I’d call the police myself, and I know you.”