In Search of the Rose Notes (31 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

May 28, 2006

I awoke to the sound of Charlotte screaming.

“When? WHEN? Jesus!”

I sat up in bed. What time was it? Charlotte and I had stayed up way too late, drinking Riesling with our burgers and s’mores. I’d collapsed into the bed but found I couldn’t sleep, worrying about the details of my plan to help Toby. Could I possibly lie to the police? Would it be obstruction of justice if the death was an accident and the driver was dead? Could I go to jail if someone figured out I was lying, even if the story I was telling was essentially true? Now I had a headache from all the worry and all the wine. But I still planned to meet Toby and get down to business.

“Last night, I guess” was the response Charlotte received from Porter.

He was here at the house, in the living room. Whatever news he’d had, he’d come to give it to Charlotte in person.

“I saw the press conference on Channel Eight, just about an hour ago.”

I put one foot out of the bed and stood up. I squinted at my phone. Ten o’clock. As I checked the screen, I saw I had a voice mail.

“They’re saying a family member of the person responsible has come forward. A very credible source, apparently. And the story basically checks out with skeletal forensic evidence. Probably a vehicular incident, followed by a cover-up, is what they’re saying. A sort of hit-and-run. ‘Vehicular incident.’ Why they can’t just call it a car accident, I don’t know—”

With a trembling finger, I hit “play” on the voice mail. It had arrived around eleven the previous night.

“Hey, Nora. It’s Toby. I just wanted to say thanks for that thing you offered, but I don’t think it’s gonna work out. I’m glad you came back here, though. I probably forgot to tell you that.”

There was silence and then a shifting noise on the message. I thought Toby was about to hang up, but he continued.

“Isn’t it funny how the people you grew up with know what you’re really capable of and what you’re not? Kind of annoying, actually, isn’t it? Anyway. Thanks, Nora. Take care.”

The voice-mail lady asked if I wanted to erase, replay, or save the message. I was too stunned to make a choice. I sat on the bed as she asked again.

“Where’s Nora?” I heard Porter ask from the living room.

“Still sleeping,” Charlotte said.

No. I wasn’t. But it
was
late.

I pressed a button to replay Toby’s message.

I’d awoken way too late.

Chapter Twenty-three

October 15, 2007

Charlotte called me to ask if I’d be attending the ten-year reunion.

By then Toby had been put on probation for moving Rose’s body and had since left Waverly. The court had been lenient, in no small part due to the Bankses, who testified that they did not wish to see him punished for a crime his father had committed when he was just a child. But Deans’ Auto Body business had declined due to the scandal, and Toby and Joe had put the house up for sale. They’d sold it dirt cheap to a big family desperate to put their kids in the high-scoring Waverly schools. Joe was still around, though, Charlotte assured me—living with a new girlfriend in Fairville. Toby had moved up to Vermont or New Hampshire somewhere and was working in a garage up there, if the intelligence gathered from his brother’s occasional visits to Atkins could be trusted.

And as far as I knew, Charlotte herself still hadn’t any plans to move from Fox Hill. But she was getting her master’s now, thinking of being a reading specialist, and looking into jobs in other districts.

We didn’t discuss these things during this particular call, though. The topic of the call was the reunion. Charlotte was helping organize the event herself. She’d even seen Kelly Sawyer on the roster—it was going to be interesting. She knew it was a long shot, she said, but could she coax me to come?

Of course we both knew that the answer was no. I cited the long drive as an excuse, plus an extra class and a particularly busy fair season. The truth was, I hadn’t the energy or the inclination to return to Waverly quite so soon—to fret again about a girl lost in the trees at the top of Fox Hill, a girl trapped in silence, a girl I’d probably never understand.

Right before we hung up, Charlotte promised me a full report on the reunion. I almost told her not to bother but stopped myself. I wanted to hear. And I wanted us to have a reason to talk again.

Mysterious Lands and Peoples:

July 1990

The first time I saw those Easter Island statues in the summer, we were sprawled out on Charlotte’s trampoline with a few of her books, eating pretzels and drinking Pepsi, trying to get a suntan with Rose. I was so curious about the statues that I stopped looking through the pictures and actually read a bit about them.

The statues weighed as much as fifty tons, I reported to Charlotte and Rose. But no one knew how they got from the quarry to all the different places on the island where they now stood. Some islanders believed that in ancient times the statues had magically walked from the quarry on their own.

“Nobody really believes that,” Charlotte said, applying a second layer of 35 SPF sunblock to her arms. Unlike Rose and me, she didn’t seem to have any actual interest in making her skin any browner.

“They wouldn’t say it if they didn’t believe it,” I countered.

“Forget believing it,” Rose said without opening her eyes. “Maybe it really happened.”

“No,” Charlotte said confidently. “It didn’t.”

“How do you know there weren’t magic moving statues way back then?” Rose asked. “There’s no way you can know that, Charlotte.”

“Magic didn’t exist then any more then than it does now,” Charlotte said with a shrug.

Rose finally sat up and squinted at Charlotte. “And how do you know
that
?”

“Magic was how people explained things they didn’t understand,” Charlotte informed us both. “They needed to believe in magic because they didn’t have science.”

“That’s just one way of looking it,” Rose said, lying back and closing her eyes again, as if dismissing the topic. “Magic could’ve existed then even though it doesn’t now. Just like penicillin exists now but didn’t then.”

“Penicillin exists now because we
invented
it,” Charlotte pointed out.

“
‘We’?
Who’s this
‘we’
?” Rose asked. “Did you have some hand in it?”

Charlotte glared at Rose and murmured something under her breath.

“Penicillin exists because we need it,” Rose reasoned. “And maybe we need it because there’s not magic anymore, like they had then.”

“They had magic then because they had nothing better to believe in,” Charlotte insisted.

“Did it ever occur to you that it was easier to believe in it because they
had
it?”

“No,” Charlotte said, grabbing a pretzel and crunching on it with angry vigor.

Rose let the conversation drop there. Neither of them asked me what I thought. But it seemed to me Rose could be right. I wondered about the people who lived on Easter Island in ancient times, back when magic maybe existed. Was their magic there one day and gone the next? Were they upset and confused the day it left them? Or did it fade gradually?

Either way, it could be true. Magic had existed in the past. But it had left the earth at some point, and there was no way for us to pull back the years and see it and feel it again—or even to prove that it had once been real. It felt true because Rose had said it. It probably wouldn’t feel true always, but it did for that moment, that hour, the whole rest of that afternoon.

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to extend a huge thank you to my awesome agent, Laura Langlie, for believing in this book from the very beginning and working so hard on my behalf.

I would also like to thank my wonderful editor, Carrie Feron, as well as Tessa Woodward and the whole Avon/HarperCollins team.

And, of course, thank you for everything, dear Ross—but especially for your patient multiple readings despite my stubborn refusal to add explosions, cowboys, or rescue dogs.

I also owe many thanks to my gracious early readers: Cari Strand, Mason Rabinowitz, Nicole Moore, Megan Gregory, Jessica Bundschuh, Emily MacFadyen, and Eric Kaye.

Also, thanks to my family for their support, Leigh Anne Keichline for her encouragement, D. T. for her spirit, and Kristen Kertesz Patterson for the good old days.

About the Author

EMILY ARSENAULT
has worked as a lexicographer, an English teacher, and a Peace Corps volunteer in rural South Africa. Her first novel,
The Broken Teaglass,
was selected by the
New York Times
as a Notable Crime Book of 2009. She grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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By Emily Arsenault

In Search of the Rose Notes

The Broken Teaglass

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © by Amy Hopp/Trevillion Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

IN SEARCH OF THE ROSE NOTES.
Copyright © 2011 by Emily Arsenault. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-201232-6

EPub Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780062092458

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