“Jane, do you know who I am?”
My lips parted, but I couldn’t make a sound.
“Do you know me?” she asked.
Finally, I managed a scratchy whisper.
“Sis … ter.”
“What?” She bent down, her ear close to my lips.
“Creep … Sis … ter.”
Lexi leaned back, smiling. She was so choked up it took a minute before she could make her own voice work again.
“Don’t go anywhere. Let me run and get your mom. She just went for coffee downstairs.”
But before she left I had to make sure about something.
“Hey,” I whispered in my sandpaper voice. “I’m … not dead … right?”
“Not dead.”
I lay there stunned by every breath I took, every heartbeat. Everything that said: not dead.
A lot happened while I slept those six days.
Billy Hughes was returned to his family in Mill Valley. He’d been missing three weeks. What he went through during that time I don’t have to imagine. I saw enough when I shared my ghost’s memories.
When the investigators dug into Starks’s past they found no criminal history, until they uncovered his juvenile record, which had been sealed by law when he hit eighteen. Growing up, he’d been arrested for everything from indecent exposure to unlawful imprisonment, with some molestation charges that were dropped. By the time he became an adult he knew how to cover his tracks better, how not to get caught.
After a search of the hut and the surrounding woods they turned up no sign of other victims.
Then they found the map. Part of a park ranger’s job is tracking wildlife. In Starks’s computer they pulled up maps of animal migration patterns, nesting sites, dens and burrows. Another ranger who was called in to consult discovered something strange. There was a map showing the burrows of Western black-eared gophers. An animal that’s been extinct for over a century. And the location for one burrow matched the burial site of Leo Gage. When they checked out the other “gopher” sites they found more bodies.
Five more lost boys. The graves were spread out deep in the forests of Raincoast National Park. The police think Starks kept track of the sites so he could visit his victims and relive what he’d done to them.
His trappers’ hut is located just outside Edgewood but hidden in dense woods. I ran a crazy unconscious marathon that night to get there.
They did an autopsy to determine the ranger’s cause of death. Dad said I didn’t need to hear about that, but I wouldn’t let it go.
Starks’s death was declared a cardiac arrest, with a contributing heart defect. When they cut him open they discovered that the walls of his heart had totally collapsed. There was no external trauma to the chest, so the coroner couldn’t explain why the heart appeared to have been crushed flat. He’d never seen anything like it.
When it came time for me to explain what happened that night—how I ended up in the hut in the woods—
I kept my lies real simple. I told them the last thing I remembered was passing out in our bathroom at home. Then I must have gone sleepwalking, gotten out of the house. For everything past that, I claimed I had a killer case of amnesia, no memory of what, how or why everything went down the way it did. I had my recent surgery to blame for that.
I left it to Dad and the task force cops to come up with some theories.
Their best guess was this: Starks must have been out driving and spotted me sleepwalking down the middle of the street. I would have been easy prey in my unconscious state. But what they couldn’t explain, what didn’t make sense to them, was why he’d abduct a girl. Because predators like Starks almost always stick to a very specific type of victim. He was into boys. This left the profilers puzzled. But as far as the task force was concerned, whatever Starks’s motives were in grabbing me, he took them to the grave.
Billy Hughes came to visit me in the hospital a few days after I woke. His mother was with him, but he asked to see me alone.
He was all cleaned up now, hiding behind the mousy brown hair that hung down over his eyes, still looking thin and sickly from his captivity.
He stood by the foot of my bed, head bowed. When he spoke it was just a mumble, as if he was scared of waking something up that would be better left lying.
“I thought you were dead,” he said. “Back there, that night.”
I was dead, but I didn’t tell him that. “I thought so too.”
He crossed his arms, rubbing them like he was cold.
“You saved me,” he muttered, staring at the floor, at the walls, everywhere but at me.
“Yeah, well, you saved me right back. So we’re even.”
Dad told me how it was Billy who called for help using Starks’s cell phone. Billy couldn’t tell them where we were exactly because he didn’t know. So they located us with the GPS on the phone.
The paramedics got my heart beating again in the ambulance. Fighting with Starks and getting my skull bounced off the floor made the nail in my head shift enough to cause the brain bleed that flatlined me in the hut.
Billy leaned in a little closer now and spoke in a hushed voice. “I didn’t tell them.”
“About what?” I asked.
“How you killed him.”
Our eyes met, and it was like a whole conversation happened without us having to say a word. He’d seen what my shadow did to Starks.
I nodded. “And you dealt with that rotten bird.”
“Wasn’t hard,” he said. “I grew up on a farm. A crow’s neck snaps the same as a chicken’s.”
I tried to see in Billy’s eyes if the damage was too deep. Was he going to change the way Leo had? The victim becoming the monster? I knew it would be a long way back from the hell Billy had gone through. But he wouldn’t be alone, hiding in the dark like Leo. Billy had a chance.
“Anyway,” he said. “I came here because … I just needed to make sure you were real, that I didn’t imagine you. Doesn’t make any sense, I guess.”
“Yeah, it does. I know.”
I know. Because when our universe shrank to the size of a cage, all we had was each other. It felt like I was in that pit for days, but I found out later it was only one endless night.
Billy stepped back from my bed then, like he was ready to go. But he had one last question.
“It sounds crazy. But sometimes I get scared, thinking I’m really still down there. You know, that I never got out, and I’m just dreaming all this.” He was shaking his head and hugging his arms tighter. “So I need to know—is it really over?”
He was asking for himself, for his own nightmare, but I answered him for mine too.
“It’s over.”
“Show me,” Mom says.
Home from the hospital, I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast after my first night’s sleep in my own bed for over a month. They took out the stitches yesterday.
“It’s not pretty,” I warn her.
She’s been washing dishes, and dries her hands off on a towel as she comes over.
Dad’s sitting across from me, blinking sleepily over his coffee. He’s out of uniform on his day off, wearing a ragged old wrestling-team T-shirt.
I take off the wool cap I’m wearing to cover up the scars on my head. Mom leans in close.
“Seems to be healing up nicely,” she says. “How does it feel?”
“Stings a little if I frown or raise my eyebrows. Besides that, it just itches a lot.”
Of course, it goes deeper. My manual dexterity is still recovering. My handwriting’s a mess, my typing is terrible. Buttoning and zipping things is still kind of tricky, but the neurologist says I’m improving on schedule. He’s sure I’ll be back to normal soon.
No other problems. I mean, I’m no dumber than I ever was. My senses are still sharp. I can smell the lemon from the dishwashing liquid and feel Mom’s warm fingertips on my bare scalp. I don’t think I’ve lost any memories.
But something’s gone, and it?
??s hard to describe what’s missing. It’s like the sound of the rain, that never-ending background of white noise that you forget to hear after a while, the way you tune out the sound of your own breathing. And you don’t really notice it till it stops. So what I feel is like the absence of a feeling that’s always been there. Because my ghost is gone, and that takes some getting used to.
Now I’ve just got Mom watching over me.
“You know,” she says, resting her hands on my shoulders, “when you were really little, my bald little baby, I couldn’t get enough of your smell. I was always sniffing your smooth head. It was like fresh cream with a hint of vanilla.”
I bend my neck back to look up at her.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“For what?”
I shrug. “For saving me, more times than you even know.”
She leans down to kiss my head.
Across the table the constable has got us under surveillance. I brush my fingers over my mangled scalp.
“What do you think, Dad? Could I win the Bride of Frankenstein beauty pageant? Or will I be zombie prom queen this year?”
“Be proud of your scars, Boo. They tell your story—what fights you won and lost. And when your hair grows in, who’s gonna know but us? Just be glad you don’t have to look at this busted mess in the mirror every morning.”
He taps the fallen bridge of his nose and gives me his best snarling-dog grin, zigzag eyebrow raised high.
Dad always says thank God I got my looks from Mom and didn’t take after him. But with my scars it’s like we go together, a matching pair. Maybe I should be proud of the story they tell, what they say about me.
That I’m the Bulldog’s daughter.
“Is that me?” I ask.
The girl in the mirror stares back, looking shocked.
“The new you,” Lexi says.
Two months after they shaved my head for the surgery, all I’ve got is an inch of peach fuzz. And now it’s dyed midnight black.
“How does it look on top?” I ask. “Can you see anything?”
I’m sick of wearing hats, but when my fuzz was blond you could see my scary scars.
Lexi gives her dye job an inspection from every angle.
“Nothing. It’s perfect camouflage.”
I run my fingers through it, feeling the hidden lines and bumps on my scalp.
We’re up in her room above the garage, where she’s worked her magic on my hair. Black Magic, that’s what this shade is called.
“Now we really do look like sisters,” I say, seeing our reflection and our raven-black hair.
I’m not her only makeover project. Lexi’s room has been transformed, and the “wall of death” is gone.
Lexi’s the only one who knows the whole truth about what went on in the hut, and afterward in the Divide. She’s my secret vault.
The rest of her walls are bare too; the photo gallery of her old life in sunny San Diego has been stripped away. She’s still editing her own home movies from back then, splicing the footage together a thousand different ways, trying to figure it all out, why her father left and everything fell apart. But she’s given up on finding a final version. Now she says, “No matter how I cut it I can’t change the ending.”
“So what’s the new decor going to be?” I glance around. It looks like somebody’s moving out, or moving in.
“Don’t know yet. I’m starting from scratch.”
Lexi’s been riding a high lately. Her minimovie A Thousand Words for Rain is getting some good buzz online. In the end, she went without the music by Max. Instead, she used the nature sounds we recorded and let the rain speak for itself.
She’s deleted Max. Every photo, music file, message and video. Erased all trace of him. But as with any addiction, she has to kick it one day at a time.
Lexi holds up a little hand mirror so I can check out the back of my head. Not bad.
“Now let me finish,” she says. “I’m thinking blush, some gloss, a little eyeliner. Then you’re good to go.”
Where I’m going is over to Shipwrecks. To meet Ryan. It’s not a date, just coffee. But tell that to my shaky nerves.
I sit back and let Lexi do her magic on me.
Can I handle this? Is it too soon after all that’s happened? I don’t know.
But I am so ready!
No more playing dead for me. I’m done with living in fear.
I walk down to the waterfront, with the sun hot on my back and the sky a clear, true blue all the way to the horizon. The rainy season is over, and it feels like the whole town is waking from the longest dream.
Fishing boats are heading out, swarmed by seagulls. The water is a calm green-blue. The same shade as Ryan’s eyes.
I catch my reflection in a store window and barely recognize myself. Who are you now? I ask the girl in the glass. Lexi’s not the only one starting from scratch. I’m still getting used to being alone inside my own head.
I look at my shadow stretched out in front of me on the sidewalk. It doesn’t look back. Nothing hiding there.
Up ahead, Shipwrecks comes into view.
I spot Ryan sitting at the window. There’s a small potted plant beside him on the counter, the love log. I can tell what the plant is by the shape of its pointy leaves: aloe vera. The kind they call the crocodile’s tongue.
I smile. He came, and he brought me tongue.
I take a moment to just breathe.
Closing my eyes, I turn to catch the bright sunshine on my face and remember the promise of that other light. Waiting for me. Someday.
I open my eyes.
But not today.
Graham McNamee won the Edgar Award for Acceleration. He’s also the author of the thriller Bonechiller. Both were named ALA Best Books for Young Adults. Graham McNamee lives on Canada’s Rain Coast. He says, “Beyond was inspired by my mother, who died when she was a little girl and was brought back to life.”
Graham McNamee, Beyond
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