They bent toward the body. Afraid to get closer.
“I don’t know,” Makani said from the center of the pit. “I don’t think so.”
Darby hesitantly stepped forward and then rapidly backed away. “Screw this,” he said, dropping the skeleton. “Meet you on the other side!” And he took off, sprinting around the perimeter.
Makani’s mind shouted at her to run.
Her gut hissed that David was alive.
She saw her grandmother lying in the hospital. Heard Alex crying out into the night. Felt Ollie crumpling against her to the ground. A hooded figure lurched out from behind a grandfather clock. A hooded figure lurched out, a hooded figure lurched out, a hooded figure lurched out—
“What are you doing?” Darby’s voice sounded muted. “No!”
The parking lot was still packed with people, and the highway was clogged. Makani couldn’t hear any sirens. If she ran, David could kill someone else.
David would kill someone else.
Makani waded toward his prostrate body. His hands were empty. Desperately, she foraged until she spotted it: a nub of black rubber poking out of the yellow corn.
She lunged for the handle. It slipped out as David rolled onto his back. His eyes were groggy and unfocused. She towered over him. Her hand was sweating. It was heavier than she’d expected, heavier than the knife in her memories.
David began to blink as his awareness returned. He gazed up at her. The blade flashed in the light of a distant strobe. It was long and sharp and vicious.
“You don’t have it in you,” he said.
“You don’t know me,” she said.
David didn’t know her, but Makani knew herself. And neither of them was a monster. She was a human who had made a terrible mistake. He was a human who had planned his terrible actions.
You’ll be here forever, he’d said. And I get to leave.
Standing above him, she realized it was about Osborne. Everyone on David’s checklist had been destined to move away—whether it was because they were bound for greater things, or, like herself, they had never belonged there to begin with.
Growing up in a town like Osborne made it difficult to leave. It was easy to get tied down to family or the land or the community. Everybody depended on one another to survive. It took a person with extraordinary drive and ambition to break from the pattern.
Haley, Matt, Rodrigo, Caleb, Katie, and Rosemarie—they were ambitious. They rose above their peers. Makani used to be ambitious, but David didn’t know that. He just viewed her as temporary.
It’s why he’d chosen her over Darby, or even Ollie. They dreamed of other places, but to someone who didn’t know them well, perhaps they seemed destined to become stuck here, too. Perhaps they seemed too passive. But it was impossible to know what was inside a person, or how they might change over time.
Years ago, Makani’s mother had been ambitious enough to get out of Osborne, but as quickly as she’d left, she’d gotten tied down to a new place. She hadn’t changed at all. Maybe that’s why she resented Makani. When she looked at her, she saw the loss of her freedom, and she was too selfish to notice what she’d gained.
David had planned to turn himself in. He knew that he’d be sent to the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, the same maximum-security prison Chris had visited a few days ago for work. Ollie had told her that it was only two and a half hours away.
For an instant—all this burned through her mind in an instant—Makani felt sad for David. His big, ambitious dream . . . it was so small.
Running away from home didn’t change the fact that a person still had to live with themselves. Makani had learned this, though perhaps her mother never had. Change came from within, over a long period of time, and with a lot of help from people who loved you. Osborne wasn’t David’s problem. For Makani, Osborne had even been restorative. Being a psychopath was David’s problem.
David was David’s problem.
Maybe there had been more people on his list, or maybe she and Rosemarie were the only ones left. Maybe he had a bad childhood, maybe he was born this way, or maybe he just felt trapped. Whatever his plans, whatever his reasons—they didn’t matter anymore. He’d made his decision. And now she had made hers.
As David dove at her legs to knock her down, Makani stabbed him in the middle of his back. The blade went in up to its hilt. His body collapsed into the corn.
She tugged out the knife and struggled toward Darby’s voice.
Slowly, David crawled. A vile trail of blood slathered across the kernels behind him as Darby hefted her over the edge. Makani was shuddering in his arms, still grasping the knife, when she became aware of the crowd. They were circling the pit. Surrounding it. She didn’t know if David was dying, but he wasn’t getting away.
Osborne wouldn’t let him.
He had underestimated them all. He had terrorized the community, but instead of tearing them apart, the townspeople had grown closer. As the sirens broke through the silent, snowy night, his body stopped crawling. And then it stopped moving altogether.
David Thurston Ware died knowing that he would never leave Osborne.
David Thurston Ware died knowing that he would be buried there forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The police rushed toward them. When Chris saw Makani’s wretched face, his body seemed to shatter. Officer Bev grabbed his arms to keep him from falling.
“Where is he?” Chris asked.
Makani could only point. He shook off Bev’s grip and ran.
She approached Makani and Darby with caution. “May I take that?”
It took a few seconds for Makani to realize that Bev was asking about the knife. Bev removed an evidence bag from her jacket, and Makani dropped it in.
“Rosemarie,” Makani said, remembering as the paramedics swarmed them.
“She’s all right. Three college kids found her and stayed with her. One of them was wearing a David Ware costume,” she added wryly. “The media’s gonna love that.”
At least it meant the kids had also stayed with Alex.
Darby lost control, sobbing, and Makani knew he was thinking about her, too. He’d been holding Makani, but now she held him as they were hurried into an ambulance. Bev stayed with them. Makani checked to see if her phone’s signal was strong enough for a call. She needed to hear her grandmother’s voice, or she’d lose her mind completely. The clock turned to midnight. It was officially Halloween.
Bev’s shoulder radio fuzzed: “—alive! Do you copy? My brother is alive!”
All the atoms in the universe became motionless.
And then Darby whispered to Makani, “Go.”
As the paramedics reached to close the doors, Makani burst back out of the ambulance. She tore through the fairgrounds and down the path of demolished cornstalks, officers and medics racing behind her.
Please, please, please.
Gasping and panting, she ran straight to him. He was still lying on the ground. Chris was holding his hand, and his police coat was bundled under his head as a pillow.
“Ollie,” she said, falling to her knees beside him.
His eyes lit up when he saw her. Snow dusted his lashes. “Makani.”
“I thought . . . I would have never left . . .”
He broke into a smile, but his voice was weak. “Darby?”
“He’s okay. We’re both okay. How are you?”
His smile widened. “Nothing your grandma’s doctors can’t fix.”
Makani laughed, wiping the tears from her cheeks, and put on a brave smile of her own. She kissed his forehead. His skin was warmer than she’d expected. He tilted his head, and she moved to his lips. Softly, she kissed them.
A faint but reassuring pressure answered back.
Chris was still holding one of Ollie’s hands. With his other hand, Ollie fumbled for hers. She grasped it, and the autumn moon shone brighter—rendering the night soft and cold and safe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wanted to read this book, but my dear friend Kiersten White suggested that I should write it instead. This book exists because of her. She’s also read it more times than anyone else. She’s read all of my books more times than anyone else. She is a saint and a beautiful magic rainbow unicorn. Thank you, Kiersten. I love you.
Thank you to my fantastic agent, Kate Testerman, who made it happen, and to my brilliant editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, who worked and worked and worked and worked to turn it into a fully functioning novel. I’m so grateful that they both took a chance on it.
Thank you to Lindsey Andrews, Lindsay Boggs, Anna Booth, Melissa Faulner, Rosanne Lauer, Bri Lockhart, Natalie Vielkind, and everyone else at the Penguin Young Reader’s Group. Additional thanks and hugs to Sean Freeman, Eve Steben, and their team for creating such a gloriously eerie cover.
Writing this book required six years of research, critique partners, and in-depth discussions. Humble thanks to Leigh Bardugo, Luce Beagle, Lauren Biehl, Holly Black, Emily Brock, Cassandra Clare, Brandy Colbert, Alexandra Duncan, Shannon Fang, Leslie Golden, Manning Krull, Myra McEntire, Marjorie Mesnis, Chris Prahler, Rainbow Rowell, Jon Skovron, Amy Spalding, Robin Wasserman, Jeff Zentner, Heidi Zweifel, and all the readers who answered my questions on Twitter and my surveys over email. And to David Levithan: I’m sorry. Ha! That happened before we became friends.
To the real Katie Kurtzman: Thank you for being more excited than anyone. Your enthusiasm gave me courage and strength.
So much love and endless thanks to my family: Mom, Dad, Kara, Chris, Beckham, JD, Fay, and Roger.
And thank you to Jarrod Perkins. My family-family. My partner in horror movies, life, and everything in between. Thank you for the laughter and for cleaning the mud off my boots in that cold Nebraskan cornfield. I love you the most of all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Perkins is The New York Times and international-bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After. She also edited two short-story collections: the winter collection My True Love Gave to Me, and the summer collection Summer Days & Summer Nights. She was born in South Carolina, raised in Arizona and attended universities in California and Georgia. Since 2004 she has lived in the mountains of North Carolina.
Edited by Stephanie Perkins from Macmillan
My True Love Gave to Me
Summer Day & Summer Nights
First published in the US 2017 by Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
First published in the UK 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-5981-8
Copyright © Stephanie Perkins 2017
The right of Stephanie Perkins to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Designed by Anna Booth
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