Phoenix

  “In the old newspaper archive. There was a report of a murder.”

  “Sure, it was big news way back then. Hunter and Marie Lee. Peter Mentone shot Hunter Lee dead.”

  “I read about it. They hanged Mentone.”

  As things turned out, Jardine was a local history nut himself. “There was a baby girl born later that year. The belief was that she was Mentone’s daughter, though Marie went to an early grave denying it.”

  “Marie died?” I didn’t even try to disguise the shock I felt.

  “When the little girl, Hester, was ten years old. Afterward, Hester came to live here in town with her aunt, Marie’s sister—a lady named Alice Harper, as I recall.”

  “And?”

  “Alice Harper was a good woman. She raised Hester like she was her own, sent her to school then to college. Hester trained as a schoolteacher.”

  “Just like her mom,” I said.

  Jardine gave me one of his close, quizzing looks. “You sure know your history,” he muttered. “You’re certain you never stumbled across any of those old ranch buildings out there by Angel Rock?”

  “I’ve been looking, but I never saw any sign,” I swore.

  “When you do, remember to take photographs,” the deputy sheriff told me. “Illustrations for your history project,” he pointed out. “A photograph is as good as a thousand words any day.”

  • • •

  “You don’t understand,” I told Laura early Friday morning. For two nights I hadn’t slept, and today I wasn’t eating breakfast. All I could focus on was finding Zak again, until Laura opened the mail and dropped the latest bombshell.

  “No way am I leaving Ellerton.”

  “The house is sold,” she’d told me in a flat, final voice. There was a letter laid out on the table in front of her. “This is from the realtor. Finally, we found a buyer, but we have to vacate before the end of the month.”

  “You and Jim can leave. I stay.”

  “That’s not how it works. You’re still in school; you’re my responsibility, remember?”

  “I don’t want to leave town. You can’t make me.”

  “Darina…”

  “You can’t,” I told her, getting up from the table. We were six days from Phoenix’s anniversary. This was the last thing I needed. “I want to stay here!”

  What you want is not what you get. I ought to have learned that the day Phoenix died. The truth is, the more you want something, the more certain you are to lose it. It doesn’t stop you from wanting it anyway.

  Phoenix, stay with me, don’t leave me here alone.

  • • •

  Kim says it’s how you deal with your loss that counts.

  I hold the lumpy black lava stone in my trembling palm. “Anger,” Kim says. “Deal with it. Who are you angry with?”

  “Everyone. Myself. I’m angry with me. Phoenix wouldn’t have gotten into a fight if it hadn’t been for me.” The stone is dark, rough, heavy.

  “Lay it on the table, Darina,” she tells me. “Look at it long and hard.”

  • • •

  Laura told me we were leaving Ellerton, and I stormed out of the house. I was halfway down the drive when suddenly my wave of anger crested, broke, and rippled onto the shore. I turned back. “Mom, I’m sorry!” I sobbed.

  She stood waiting on the porch. She put her arms around me. “Baby!”

  “It hurts so much I wish I could die!”

  “Baby, baby, baby…”

  • • •

  Red-eyed and still shaky, I drove over to the Rohrs’ house. Too bad if Sharon was there.

  It turned out she wasn’t, but Brandon was.

  “Hey, Darina, it’s been too long.” He came out of the front door before I had a chance to knock.

  I knew right away that he wasn’t about to let me in, that the atmosphere in the Rohr house was at an all-time low. “That cut on your face—did you go to the hospital?”

  Brandon fingered the strips of dressing on his jaw then took my elbow and steered me back onto the sidewalk, where his Dyna stood gleaming in the morning sun. “You want a ride?” he asked.

  No wasn’t an option, so I slid onto the passenger seat behind him. Soon we were cruising through the streets, downhill past the old psychiatric hospital and the Baptist church on the road to Deer Creek. When I realized where we were headed, I got ready to deal with a thousand Phoenix memories. Phoenix sitting on a rock watching the clear water whirl and ripple. Phoenix with his arm around my shoulder, wading into the creek. Phoenix with the wind lifting his hair back from his face, staring up at the mountains.

  Brandon stopped right by the creek, overlooking a big smooth boulder in the middle of the stream—the exact spot where I’d waited for Phoenix the night he was killed.

  Brandon cut the engine and sat in silence, legs still straddling his shiny silver and black machine.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  I’m waiting for Phoenix as the sun goes down. I wait a whole hour, playing a track from Summer’s CD, wondering why he didn’t at least take out his phone and call. The sky turns red then gray then black. Logan shows up in his white Honda, says, “There’s a fight in town. A big one. Brandon’s involved. So is Phoenix.”

  “It’s almost a year,” Brandon said, still staring at the clear water.

  “Yeah.” Do I need you to tell me? Do I really?

  “Every day I wish I could turn back the clock.”

  I got off the bike and walked down to the water’s edge. I remembered how we held the wake here, after the official funeral. Kids from Ellerton High decided to party, they said that’s the way Phoenix would have wanted it—music in the open air, a celebration.

  It angered me. Nobody understood what Phoenix would have wanted except maybe me.

  After he died I’d seen him in school before I knew about the Beautiful Dead, then I saw Phoenix at his own funeral, smiling down on me in a halo of shimmering light. A glimpse and he was gone.

  Now Brandon joined me by the creek. For a long time after he said he wished he could turn back the clock, he didn’t say anything.

  “It’s OK,” I told him. “It’s been a year. You can stop doing this.”

  He walked downstream. “Doing what?” he asked with his back turned.

  “Taking care of me like Phoenix asked you to. You already kept your promise. Thanks.”

  “So now I walk away and you mess up?”

  “What do you mean, I mess up?”

  He walked a little farther. “You know what I mean. You see trouble, and you walk right into it. Take the other day—my family can’t settle a dispute without you turning up.”

  “Hey, listen! Your dad came looking for me, not the other way around. Plus, I see why he needs something to remind him of Phoenix—I totally understand that.”

  “No, you don’t.” Brandon turned and strode back toward me. “How can you? You’re not family.”

  I took a sharp breath and backed off. My foot slipped into the water.

  He grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me clear.

  “I only want to help,” I protested. “Let me, please!”

  “Who do you want to help—my mom, Zak, me, my dad…or yourself?”

  “I want to help Zak,” I said, and I told him the latest about his kid brother hanging out with Miller and Stafford, and the link with Nathan Thorne and drugs.

  This is what makes guys back off from Brandon Rohr—the way he slams a steel door in your face. His eyes go blank. It’s like there’s no one home.

  “Brandon, did you hear me? I said Zak is in trouble. Alcohol, drugs—it’s all there.”

  He let go of my wrist and walked slowly up the bank toward his bike.

  I ran after him. “This is serious. Are you listening to me? No way can Nathan Thorne be good news. He
’s Oscar’s brother. You need to do something!”

  Brandon swung his leg over the saddle and fired up the engine. “Didn’t you pay attention to anything I said?” he muttered. “Family stuff stays with the family.”

  This was running away from me fast. “Don’t shut me out,” I pleaded. “What about the fact that Nathan was the guy who started the fight with Phoenix? You were there; that’s what you told the cops.”

  He turned the bike around and pointed it toward the track.

  I ran in front of him and grabbed the handlebars. “You said you didn’t see who stabbed Phoenix, it all happened too fast. But I bet you have your own theory. You think it might be Nathan!”

  Brandon stared at me with his dead eyes, then he swung the handlebars out of my grasp. The engine roared, the tires kicked up dirt, and he was gone.

  • • •

  I knew Phoenix was there, right beside me and invisible, on my long walk home.

  “Were you down by the creek with me? Did you see how Brandon reacted?” I muttered.

  Zoom—whoosh—zoom! A steady stream of traffic raced by, and my Beautiful Dead boyfriend stayed out of sight.

  “How am I going to get the whole story if your family slams the door in my face? Nathan Thorne sure isn’t the one to ask. And I don’t want to mess with his big brother, either.”

  How many times do you see a crazy girl walking by the side of the highway, talking to herself? Car drivers slowed down to give me a hard stare then drive on.

  “Plus, there’s Zak,” I told Phoenix.

  I hear you, he said. Let me think about it. Let me discuss it with Hunter.

  I stopped at the junction, swamped by a rising tide of frustration. “I wish we could go somewhere to talk properly.”

  Walk up the bank toward those trees, he told me.

  He was already waiting for me in the shadows, with cars whizzing by below. He looked troubled and unsure. “It’s a big ask—the whole story.”

  “I know it. But that’s what we’re doing, right?” Now that I could see Phoenix, I felt my heart twist with pity. I longed to smooth away his frown, kiss him into a state of forgetting.

  “Is it?” He drew a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t feel good about putting pressure on the people I love—my mom, Zak, and now my dad is here, too.”

  “I understand. But getting to the truth was always going to be hard—the way it was with Jonas, and with Arizona and Summer.”

  Phoenix gave a small shake of his head. “If it gets uglier—what then?”

  I took both of his hands and made him look right at me. “Then we stand together and face it, you and I. We don’t back off. We get there.”

  Slowly he nodded, his eyes locked on mine, his hands grasping mine. But a mist was surrounding him, a halo of light forming. He faded and was gone.

  I felt a soft, warm wind in my face. It stayed with me all the way down the bank, along the road past the white church and the boarded-up hospital, along the streets leading to my house, then it disappeared.

  I reached home at noon and found Laura’s car parked on the drive when she should have been working.

  “Where’s your car?” she asked, back to old-style gestapo mom.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I threw back. There was a pile of papers spread out on the table, and I’d noticed a stack of big cardboard boxes on the porch.

  “Come and look,” she invited. She showed me pictures of houses and details giving square footage, information on garages and basement space, bathrooms, views of the lake. “We’re looking for a quick and easy move so it has to be a rental property. Jim visited two realtors’ offices this morning, and they came up with these.”

  “It’s still no,” I insisted, pushing the papers away.

  “How about this one in Forest Lake? It has lakeside views.” She showed me a picture of a small gray house with a gable and a porch, pretty much a replica of the one we currently live in.

  “Not even remotely interested.”

  “Forest Lake is only fifteen minutes from here. You could still drive into school.”

  Suddenly everything was different. “I’d stay as a student at Ellerton High?”

  “If that’s what you want,” Laura offered.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Then this is the right house for us.”

  • • •

  What did I care, so long as I got to keep my friends? I stayed to eat lunch with Laura then walked into town to pick up my car from outside the Rohrs’ house, where luckily there was no sign of life.

  For me, driving my car with the top down frees up my thinking, untangles the knots. I need to be clear on my way through this mess, I thought, stopping at a red light. The only member of Phoenix’s family who will even talk to me is Michael Rohr, and there’s no point going there. The light changed—green for go. I cruised on, out of town, following the route Brandon and I had taken earlier in the day. Then there’re the cops. Hunter told me that Dean was able to check out some files on the killing—the official investigation didn’t find a weapon, and there were no named suspects. For me that looked like another blind alley, though the new sheriff was back on the case, digging the dirt about Foxton.

  Maybe he would turn up something new.

  Coming out of town and heading for the open road, I passed the gas station. Why don’t you check out the scene of the crime? a familiar voice inside my head suddenly suggested.

  I braked hard. “Arizona?”

  Concentrate on your driving. Take a left into the service station. Try to pick up a new lead.

  I signaled, mistimed my turn, and cut across an oncoming driver. There was a squeal of tires followed by a blast from his horn.

  Jeez, Darina! said Arizona-in-my-head.

  “I know. My nerves are shredded. Anyway, you’re not even supposed to be here on the far side!”

  I’m not. You’re hearing imaginary voices, going seriously crazy like everyone says.

  I pulled up on the oil-stained asphalt in front of the gas station. “This had better be good,” I grumbled, getting out of the car and walking right into an example of what the media would call compassion fatigue.

  • • •

  The name on the gas station cashier’s plastic badge read Kyra. She glanced up at me from behind her display of gum and chocolate bars. “Gas?” she asked.

  I picked up a packet of gum then dug in my pocket for change. “No, just this, thanks.”

  Kyra went back to reading her magazine as she held out her hand for the coins. She had black, beehived hair, Cleopatra eyes, French-manicured nails, and an expression that said I hate my job.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said. “Were you working here the night my boyfriend got stabbed?”

  The question broke her off from her astrological chart for a whole two seconds. “You’re the girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. I got here too late.”

  “Now I remember.” Kyra went back to her magazine.

  “You were the person who called the cops?”

  “That was me.”

  “You saw what happened?”

  Sighing, she folded down the corner of her page and closed the mag. “Honey, I already answered questions from the cops, the TV, the newspapers, a million rubberneckers—they were crawling all over this joint. What’s left to say?”

  “Could you just go through it one more time?” I pleaded.

  “Somebody, give me a dollar bill for every time I tell this story.” She sighed as she looked me up and down.

  “Please. It’d mean a lot.”

  “You’re really young.” She sighed, softening at last. “I guess Phoenix was, too. What was he—nineteen?”

  “Eighteen, a year older than me.”

  “I never knew him before this happened, though I went to school with some
of the older guys—Vince Hall, Oscar Thorne, Robert Black.”

  “They were there, right? That’s why you called the cops.”

  “Yeah, the late arrivals were bad news.” Kyra finally got over her fatigue and was warming up. “The place was already a mess—kids had overturned trash cans, there were hoses spilling gas everywhere. Those punks were wild. But Vince Hall and his buddies put the thing into a different league.”

  “Scary.” I shuddered.

  She nodded. “You get five or six guys in leather jackets riding up on serious Harleys, you know you’re in trouble.”

  Soaking up every detail, I tried to steer Kyra toward my main question, Who killed Phoenix? “Up till then no one got hurt?”

  “No, but those kids sure did a great job of wrecking the place.”

  “And how did the whole thing start?”

  “Wouldn’t you and everyone on the planet like to know?”

  “Did you get it on the security camera?”

  Kyra shook her head. “The camera ran out of tape two days earlier. I informed my boss, but he let it slide. And that night I was here in the office doing my job, so I didn’t see the fight break out. The first I knew, seven or eight kids were throwing punches, bouncing one another off car hoods, throwing stuff around.”

  “And one of them was Phoenix?”

  “Actually, no,” she said. “He drove a black truck, right? And the way I remember it, he was standing by his truck, having an intense conversation with a kid in a black Chevy.”

  “What did the Chevy driver look like?” I double-checked my facts.

  “Round face, long hair. Dark.”

  “Nathan Thorne. Let me get this straight—Nathan and Phoenix were talking, but they weren’t fighting?”

  “Not when I saw them. I didn’t pay too much attention. I was speaking to my boss on the phone, and he was saying call the cops. Then Oscar and Vince plus the rest joined in, and it was World War Three.”

  I needed time to think this through while Kyra took care of a customer. When she was done, I was ready with my next question. “So you know that Brandon Rohr was there, too?”

  “Yeah, I noticed him. What’s not to notice?”

  “He’s hard to overlook,” I agreed, offering her a piece of gum. “According to Brandon, it was Nathan and Phoenix who started the fight.”