Chapter 26
The clock on my nightstand tells me it’s nearly midnight. Even though I’m grounded, I’m getting ready to go out, and for the first time in my life, I’m not using the front door.
“You’re sure you’re up to this?” Kieran whispers from where he stands outside my bedroom window, which faces the fields at the back of the house. My response is to sit down on the sill and swing my legs out, Kieran reaching to grab me under the arms so he can help me to the ground. I inhale the night air into my lungs, my first taste of the outside world in the week—almost to the hour—since the accident. And although my head still aches sometimes, my legs are still bruised, and my right hand’s still bandaged, stepping out into the darkness works some instant therapeutic magic.
“Never felt better.” I smile, silencing Kieran’s groan at my response with a quick kiss. “Kayla’s parked by the road?” I check with him when we part.
“Just like we planned. Come on.”
Kieran takes my hand, and we start walking in the direction of his house, but we turn toward the blacktop once we’re a safe enough distance from my house anyone looking out the windows wouldn’t be able to see us against the night.
“Any trouble getting over here?” I ask.
“Nope. Once Kayla put the car in gear, I just gave it a little push, and she was able to coast all the way down to the road without starting it. Thanks for the tip.”
“No problem.” I snicker, knowing my mom would regret telling me about how Jimmy McCaffery used to sneak out of his house when they were our age if she had any inkling of what I’m up to right now.
Kayla starts the Jeep once she catches sight of us near the blacktop. She shoots me a quick “hi” as I crawl into the back seat, and after Kieran buckles himself in on the passenger side, she revs the engine to make the u-turn, her right front tire skidding through the dirt on the shoulder before she straightens up to head down the road in the direction of, and then past, the Lanier house. In minutes, Kayla’s slowing to take the left turn onto the gravel path leading to the boat launch. “You might want to hit the brights and take this slow,” I suggest, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in my voice. “Road’s kind of tricky.”
“So I’ve heard,” Kayla says, smirking at me in the rearview.
We rumble down the path at about fifteen miles an hour, a speed that almost seems as if we’re moving backwards compared to the last time I drove down here. Without any reminder, Kayla slows to a nearly complete stop and rolls over the final rut, coasting us out to the boat launch area, where she pulls over next to the tree line at the left and turns the engine off about a minute before we’re scheduled to meet Morgan Levert.
“I still can’t believe you thought meeting here was a good idea,” Kayla says as we gather next to the passenger side of the Jeep, the still-burning headlights casting an eerie glow out on the river’s surface. Both Kieran and Kayla squint into the darkness ahead of us, looking for Morgan to come walking out of the woods, but the water grabs my attention, the tiny ripples revealing no hint of Frank’s car—or Frank—resting on the muddy bottom.
“We needed to meet somewhere private we could all get to easily in the middle of the night,” Kieran starts. “I don’t remember you suggesting anyplace better.”
Kieran switches on the flashlight he’s holding to reveal Morgan Levert standing near the trees on the opposite end of the boat launch, near where the Camaro came to rest after the accident. His sudden appearance, as if he’s a stain only visible under infrared light, makes my skin crawl.
“Light’s in my eyes, you know,” he yells over at us, and Kieran instead angles the flashlight towards his own face. Morgan pulls a smaller, pen-sized flashlight from his jeans pocket and holds it under his chin, prompting Kayla and I to fish our phones out of our jacket pockets, allowing the lit-up home screens to show our faces to Morgan. He takes a few steps toward us, but as soon as he’s more than halfway across the gravel, Kayla holds out her hand and yells “Stop! Don’t come any closer.”
To my surprise, Morgan does exactly as she says. “Your sister?” he asks Kieran.
“Yeah.”
“I’m here to make sure you don’t try anything,” Kayla says, completely serious even though Morgan’s so solidly built he’d probably be able to snap her in half if he wanted. “You stay over there, we’ll stay over here, and the second things even look like they might go bad, we’re in the car and we’re gone. Got it?”
“Got it,” Morgan responds, a smile visible through his scruffy facial hair. And to Kieran: “Way to go, man. Looks like you’ve got two women willing to kick ass for you.”
Morgan’s comment kind of confuses me and doesn’t do anything to ease my nerves over being down here with him, but I don’t get much of a chance to dwell on things as he says “Thank you for looking out for my son—both of you.” He nods towards Kayla before turning to me.
Kieran bristles next to me on hearing Morgan call him his son, but I’m more interested right now in learning whatever it is Morgan wants to tell us. “Thanks for helping us after the accident,” I say, hoping I’ll prompt him to keep talking.
Morgan puts his free hand in his jeans pocket and bobs up and down on his worn work boots, the light swimming in front of his face making me woozy. “Helping was the least I could do since I pretty much caused the accident,” he notes. “I was driving the Dodge.” I lean back against the Jeep, trying to steady myself as Morgan says “You sucker punched Frankie Boy real good. He was lucky he remembered his own name. So he sure as hell wasn’t in any shape to drive. Lucky he had me as his getaway driver—just like old times.”
Kieran’s hand closes over mine, and a searing pain rises in my temple. I get a brief memory flash of pressing up against Morgan’s damp shirt the night of the wreck, which makes sense now—he went into the river with the car.
“You said there were things we needed to know,” Kieran says, voice hard. “We’re here. So talk. You can start with what the hell you were doing driving for Frank Dozier.”
“Well, I need to go back a few months,” Morgan explains, as Kieran leans up against the car and slumps a little, an indication we might lose him to sleep any minute now. Fighting through my own grogginess, I start squeezing his hand rhythmically, hoping the action is enough to keep him with us.
“I’m assuming Jim Lanier told you about everything that happened all those years ago?” Morgan says, as if ‘Jim Lanier’ is some stranger and not Kayla and Kieran’s father.
“Yeah,” Kayla responds.
“Okay, then.” Morgan strokes his chin as if he’s figuring out the best place to begin his story. “About three weeks ago, I’m in New York at a friend’s and the prison forwards me a letter from Frank, postmarked from here, telling me if I had any idea what was good for me, I’d get myself to Illinois pronto because he’d found my son. Now, let’s just say Frank and I weren’t exactly best friends by the time we got sent up. I blamed him for Jenna getting killed—”
Once again, Kieran bristles, this time on hearing his mother’s name. I let go of his hand and put my phone back in my pocket so I can wrap my arms around him, both to comfort him and to try to keep him awake. Seeing this, Morgan pauses. “He okay?”
“I’m fine,” Kieran insists. “Keep talking.”
“Okay. So I blamed Frank for Jenna and he blamed me for…well…pretty much everything. Frank and I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to live for when we went in, and we were going to have even less once we got out. But we both knew I had you…somewhere.” Morgan’s and Kieran’s eyes lock on each other, almost zombie-like in the glow of their flashlights. “I didn’t need to read between the lines to realize Frank was threatening me…threatening you…and so I wrote and told him I was coming. He was using a post office box, but when he wrote the next time, he gave me directions to an abandoned trailer a few miles outside town where he was staying.” Morgan lowers his eyes to the gravel and then raises them again, but his gaze is somewhere in the d
istance. “I don’t know what Jim told you about us meeting years ago, but I’m not that person anymore,” he insists. “When I went in, I had years of nothing in front of me, and I was hopeless and bitter for a long time. I did almost fifteen years, and I wasted a lot of those years being angry over things I couldn’t do anything about. But after a while…I accepted my fate, I guess, for lack of a better way of putting it. And I knew that if I could avoid getting killed or doing something stupid to get time added on to my hitch, someday I’d get out, and I’d need to be ready for life on the other side. So I got some counseling, took classes—”
“Found Jesus?” Kayla interrupts, her voice dripping sarcasm.
Morgan ignores her and turns back to Kieran and me. “What I’m saying is, I was twenty-two when I went in. I’m thirty-seven now. Took a while and a lot of work, but I grew up. And after I got over myself, the last thing I wanted was to interfere with your life. I’d done enough damage, and Jim Lanier would give you a better life than I ever would.” Morgan focuses his attention on a large piece of gravel he starts rolling around with the toe of his boot. “I was never a real father to you, kid, even in the short time we were together. The best way to honor your mother and do right by you was to stay the hell away and start my life over when I got out.”
“Until Frank,” I finish for him.
“Until Frank.” He sighs, still kicking at the rocks. “Frank was in the joint upstate at this place where there was a riot last year…real sorry situation with inmates and guards hurt bad and one guy killed. He told his lawyer he could finger the guys who started the whole thing if he got a deal. His lawyer worked out a protective custody agreement and got him out of state after he ratted. Once the rest of his sentence was commuted, he headed straight for North Carolina.”
“Looking for us?” Kayla asks, confused. “How did he find out we were there?”
“Frank said his lawyer knew Jim had quit working for the District Attorney’s office after we got sent up and that he’d moved to North Carolina. No idea how his lawyer found out, but if I learned anything in prison, it’s that you can find out whatever you need to know about people in those circles if you just ask the right person, and sometimes, if you bribe them. Wouldn’t have been too hard for anybody to find out exactly where you were. Hell, I might’ve told some people after that time Jim came to talk to me and the information worked its way upstate to Frank—who knows?”
I try to sort out in my addled brain everything Morgan’s telling us, and what he’s saying makes sense—when Jim moved the family the first time, they weren’t in any danger, so they didn’t need to be as secretive as they were when they came here.
As if he can read my thoughts, Morgan asks, “Mind if I ask how you guys ended up in this backwater anyway? Frank was stumped on that one—he told me he showed up in Asheville and next thing he knows, you’re moving here and he’s following.”
“The dreams,” Kieran blurts out. “I was seeing you. My mom and dad—”
Now Morgan flinches. I notice his shoulders hunching up at Kieran’s mention of the word “dad,” and Kieran must, too, because he corrects himself. “The Laniers, I mean. That mom and dad. They thought my dreams meant you were headed to North Carolina to find me.”
Morgan nods in understanding as Kayla hisses at Kieran, low enough Morgan wouldn’t be able to hear “Are you seriously trusting this guy?”
“The formula, Kayla,” Kieran reminds her through his teeth. “We need to get him to give us the formula.”
Morgan doesn’t catch the siblings’ side conversation about Kieran’s ultimate goal for this meeting, and he almost talks over them. “So you were running away from the wrong guy,” he says, a tiny smile on his lips.
“Guess so,” Kieran mumbles, having shut Kayla up for the moment.
Morgan shakes his head and continues explaining to Kieran how we’ve all ended up where we are right now. “I get here, and turns out, Frank used you to bait me. See, back in New York, Frank never knew how to make the stuff that…made you the way you are. He was always a user—never wanted to do the dirty work, only came around when the batches were already cooked up. So the deal was, I either give him the formula and help him get what he needed to cook it up and sell it, or he’d hurt you.
I wrap my arms even more tightly around Kieran as Morgan continues. “I talked him into a new plan, though. I said, ‘Let’s grab the kid and go back to New York.’ I told him I knew guys with connections to people who would probably pay big money for the recipe and to do research on someone like Kieran. No need to get our hands dirty being drug dealers. One big sale to the right people and we’d be set for life. Once I told him the kid had the blackouts like we used to, plus the sleeping thing and the dreams, Frank was all in. Of course, I was lying about knowing anybody, though between the two of us, Frank and I both probably know enough shady people we wouldn’t have had to work too hard to find somebody connected.” He shrugs, a smile playing about his lips that almost makes him seem proud to know the people he does. Then he quickly sobers up, saying to Kieran, “I’d never hurt you, kid. You don’t have much reason to believe me when I say I’ve changed, but it’s the truth.” Morgan looks out at the river for a long second before revealing his biggest surprise. “The thing of it is, I don’t even know how to make the stuff. Frank would’ve killed both me and you for sure if he’d found that one out.”
Kieran’s body slackens in my arms, and I grab his flashlight and lean my full weight against the Jeep to keep us upright. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he breathes.
Once again, Morgan drops his gaze. “I used to use the stuff a lot, too, remember? The blackouts…there are whole chunks of things from that period that are completely…gone. How to make the stuff is one of them, and that was more Jenna’s deal anyway. I messed around mixing stuff here and there, but she’s the one who hit on the actual formula for what we were using—that much, I’m sure of. Sometimes, I get bits and pieces of memories when I think back…”
My head starts to pound as the truth takes shape. If Frank had no clue how to mix up the drug, he couldn’t have been drugging me at the diner. Kayla, was right all along, and so was Kieran—my dreams were nothing more than coincidences, symptoms of reading Kieran’s journals and of my own anxieties.
“So, you weren’t lying all those years ago when you told my dad you didn’t remember how to make it,” Kieran states, the flatness in his voice betraying his disappointment.
“No, and that’s one of the few times in my life at that point I wasn’t lying about something. You, me, and Frank—we were the only evidence left the stuff ever existed, and now Frank’s dead.”
“Thanks to me,” I can’t help but interject.
Morgan shakes his head. “Thanks to me. I was stringing Frank along, telling him I’d help him get Kieran and we’d go back to New York to meet my contact. We’d tried a few times to grab the kid, but he was never alone. The night we saw you two at that farm, we figured we had our best chance. You guys got in your car and I drove around to the far side of the field. Frank thought he’d just grab the kid and run, and we’d be gone before you even knew what hit. Dumbass didn’t count on you catching up with him.”
My lips curl into a smile as Morgan continues the story. “So my plan was for Frank to come back to the car with Kieran, we’d get out of town, and I’d…get rid of Frank somewhere and bring Kieran home.”
“You were going to kill him,” Kayla says, filling in the blanks.
“Only if I had to, and I’m guessing I would’ve had to—anything to keep you out of danger,” he says to Kieran. “But that’s beside the point now.” Morgan’s shifts his eyes to the river’s surface, glossy and black save for the small section being lit by Kayla’s headlights. “After you clocked Frank, he was so pissed,” he tells me, flashing a smile. “Frank never was one to stand for getting one-upped by a chick. So, of course, he wanted to follow you so we could grab Kieran and mess you up good.”
I don’
t even want to know what “mess you up good” might mean, because the nightmares I’m probably going to have about that night for the rest of my life will already be bad enough. So I swallow down the bile building up in my throat and let Morgan continue.
“I did the whole car chase for Frank’s benefit. I figured you’d be smart enough not lead us back to town, but even if you did, I was going to turn off somewhere deserted so I could do whatever I needed to do to Frank to end the whole thing. You pulled down that gravel road, and it was almost like you were reading my mind. I thought there had to be somewhere out there in the woods I could pull off. I didn’t figure there’d be a river at the bottom of the path.”
“That was my plan.” I say.
Morgan nods and goes on. “After we went into the water, I opened the window and crawled out before we were too far under. No way Frank had the strength to swim, probably wasn’t even enough in his right might to unbuckle the seat belt. You didn’t kill him, little girl. I did. I let him drown. I had to get back to shore and help you kids. While I was walking you around, I made sure we shuffled the dirt and the tire tracks enough nobody’d notice any signs of another car. The ambulance driving over everything helped, too. Once you two got off to the hospital, I came back out of the woods and smoothed over the gravel some more before the tow truck showed up. Frank and I were never there as far as anyone’s concerned.” He shrugs his shoulders, his demeanor almost humble. “Guess if I know how to do one thing real well, it’s cover up a crime scene.”
Kieran’s head grows heavier against me, and I glance over at Kayla. “Kay…um…I think he’s…”
Kayla puts her arms around Kieran as well, and together we lower him to the ground, leaning his frame against the Jeep’s rear tire. I sit down next to him and cradle him to me.
“Can I help?” Morgan asks.
I look up. Morgan’s taken a few steps toward to us, his face twisted in concern, but Kayla’s flat voice stops him from coming any closer. “We’re fine.”
Morgan nods, his mouth a tight line. He’s obviously a little disappointed Kayla won’t let him get close to his son, and I can’t help but feel bad for him, especially now we know everything he did to make sure Frank didn’t hurt Kieran.
“What happens now?” I ask him. “Do you plan on sticking around?”
“No, no, no.” He shakes his head. “Kid’s got a life here, and I’m not part of that. This is the last you’ll ever see of me.” He seems to be looking at Kayla as he says “This is the last you’ll ever see of me.”
“I’ve got your phone number,” Kieran points out, but Morgan dismisses him. “Pre-paid phone—already dumped it. So don’t try to stay in touch. Don’t really know why you’d want to.” He resumes looking down at the gravel and kicking at it with his boot. “Look—you might feel like you owe me something for helping you out, but you don’t. There’s nothing I could ever do for you to make up for all the bad I’ve done. And now that I’ve explained everything that went down, here isn’t my place. You’ve got your life, and I need to get on with figuring out mine.” An awkward silence passes before Morgan looks up and says, “So long, kid,” and shuts off his flashlight. As he shuffles away across the gravel, Kieran sits up in my arms and leans forward. “Hey,” he yells into the darkness, and the shuffling stops.
“Yeah?”
“What’s my real name, anyway?”
I can barely make out Morgan’s shape in the distance, his face momentarily lit up by the flash of a lighter, leaving the glowing embers on the end of a cigarette behind. “Morgan,” he mumbles, his smoke dangling from his mouth. “Sorry, kid. Jenna’s fault. Said she always wanted a Morgan around in case anything ever happened to me.”
Morgan turns and the ember disappears, his feet crunching the gravel again. In seconds, the only noises are the breeze whistling through the trees, the faint lapping of water against the rocks, and Kieran whispering in my ear “I think I like ‘Kieran’ better.”
I smile, even though he probably can’t see me in the darkness. “Me, too.”