Premeditated (31 page)

There’s a kind of silence and stillness that’s only possible in the center of a cemetery when you’re in the presence of the dead. You don’t choose to stop talking; speech becomes impossible. That’s what happened then. All the whispers and hushed conversations triggered by the scene with me and Brooks cut off at the same time. And while there was no communal shout of “What?” and no giant gasp, with the sort of melodramatic
horror you see in bad movies, the scream of shocked outrage was implied by the length of time during which no one said anything.

“What are you talking about?” Brooks asked finally. He was the outsider, so he was the only one who could have broken the bubble.

“Dinah?” Uncle Paul filled in the space beside Dad so we were blocked from everyone’s view.

“You want to know why Claire cut her wrists?” I asked. “There you go.”

My self-control had reached critical mass; the explosion was coming, and I couldn’t stop it. I stabbed the air in Brooks’ direction.

“She did it because of him. Because he spun her around in so many directions that she didn’t know which way she was going anymore. And then, when he got bored with riding the merry-go-round, he ditched her—two weeks before school started.”

“I—I didn’t,” Brooks stammered.

“Claire spent the next week imagining how her new school was going to go when everyone knew that Prince Charming had made the maid feel like royalty for a while. She couldn’t face them, and she was afraid to tell you and Aunt Helen why she didn’t want to start Lowry. And now he shows up here with a ten-dollar bunch of flowers and can’t even remember the face of the girl he ruined.”

“Is this true?” Uncle Paul turned his attention to Brooks like he’d get an honest answer out of him.

“No! I swear, sir. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I never met Claire.”

“No? Well maybe this will help you remember.” I dug the memory card out of my pocket and slapped it into Brooks’ hand.

“What is that?” Uncle Paul asked.

“Claire’s month-long suicide note, starting the day she met him. The whole story’s there. Go ahead and take it; I have copies.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Brooks asked.

“No, I lost my cousin. Claire will never drive a car, she’ll never go to college, she’ll never have kids—she’ll never live.
Because of you
.”

“I never touched her!”

“You may not have held the razor, but it was still because of you,” I said. “Oh. And guess what. Your little skinny-dipping adventure with Claire, the one that ended up under the dock at Freeman’s Point—that was the day before her fifteenth birthday.”

“What?”

That time, someone did say it. I just wish it hadn’t been Uncle Paul. My stomach clenched as I drove the point home.

“She was fourteen, Brooks. You’re what, seventeen? I’m pretty sure that makes it a felony.”

“Dinah!”

“Kind of knocks the luster off drug abuse, shoplifting, and joyriding in Daddy’s car, doesn’t it?”

“That was you?”

The betrayal on his face didn’t faze me one bit. Nope, not at all. I absolutely didn’t feel my heart drop into my feet.

“What happened to you?” he asked. Brooks reached toward me, but Uncle Paul and Dad stepped between us.

“Get away from me before they have to dig another grave.”

Brucey was back—he and Tabs each had one of my arms.

“I think you should go,” Dad told Brooks.

“Wait a minute, Wyatt,” Uncle Paul said.

“We’ll get things sorted, but this isn’t the time. Focus on Claire for now. Everything else can wait. Dinah, stay here.”

Dad took Brooks by the shoulder and escorted him away from the pavilion back toward his car. He was gone for a while, so I know they had to have talked, but he didn’t give any hint as to what either of them had said to the other. He just came back and took his seat next to my furious mother while I stood in the back of the pavilion holding Tabs’ hand so hard she probably lost feeling, and leaning against Brucey.

I kept waiting for it to feel like it was over, for reality to cross some kind of dividing line, but the world was no different after the truth came out. Claire was still bolted into a box with Brooks’ flowers on it, and the big reveal hadn’t lessened the crushing pressure around my chest. Every note of somber music leeched another bit of life out of me.

Nothing had changed. I’d accomplished nothing. I was nothing.

I felt like I’d left my soul in the cemetery, haunting Claire’s grave. Only my body rode home in the backseat of Dad’s truck, numb and apathetic, while my mother rattled off her endless list of complaints in the front. Most of them were directed at me, but the beauty of losing feeling is that even sharp things don’t hurt so much anymore.

“Did you see how people were looking at us?” she rasped out. “They have to think we’re the worst parents in the world, which of course they’ll blame on me because it’s always the mother’s fault.”

I wished I’d thought to bring my earbuds so I could have blocked her voice completely, but I had to make due with the distraction of my phone. No matter what file I intended to open, they all inevitably became photos of Claire, or copies of the words she’d sent me. I flipped back through her accounts of the month with Brooks, wondering if he’d have the nerve to read it himself. I couldn’t stand reading about her daydreams and hopes for the future, or about sunshiny days at the Point when she was so caught up in her fantasy that au natural became her swimwear of choice. The Claire I left behind for Oregon never would have gone skinny-dipping with anyone—much less a guy she’d only known for a couple of weeks.

I couldn’t stand it. I shut the phone off and let my mother’s continuing complaints wipe everything else out of my mind.

“Honestly, who
does
something like that at a funeral? They’re supposed to be quiet affairs, not full of screaming and screeching. I don’t know where she gets it.”

It went on like that for miles, with Dad’s shoulders shrinking down tighter and tighter beneath his suit. His ears were turning red to match the bald spot he hadn’t worn his cap to cover.

“And you were no better,” Mom snapped. “Joining in like you did. You should have stopped it. You’re her father—you should have ordered her to sit down and be quiet rather than indulging in whatever fantasy she’s got playing out this time. At least there was a nice turnout. All those beautiful flowers. The colors were a bit gaudy, and hardly anything matched, but they were lovely. I wonder if Helen would mind my taking a few back to put around the house. She hates gardening, and they’d look just perfect under the windows.”

That was the point my out-of-body experience ended.

“I’m sure Aunt Helen would love to have you plant reminders of Claire’s death next to the roses, so long as they match, of course.”

Mom’s spine wrenched straight to its full length as her whole body went rigid. Strangely enough, Dad seemed to relax.

“I mean, Claire’s dead, but so long as you get a few nice plants of it, that makes it better, right? It won’t bother you at all to know the spring color in your flower box was bought with your niece’s life; it’s just one less trip to the nursery, and a few dollars you didn’t have to pry out of Dad.”

“How dare you speak to me that way after what you did today?”

“And what about what you did, Mom? Did you even hug
Aunt Helen or offer Uncle Paul a simple, useless ‘I’m sorry’? Because if you did, no one saw you. You didn’t even say goodbye to Claire.”

“Claire was already gone by the time I knew she was that dire. You know I didn’t get the chance—”

“At the funeral! You didn’t even tell her goodbye at the funeral!”

Mom huffed in her seat, crossing her arms as though I were the one being difficult to understand.

“I don’t know why you insist on throwing these tantrums, Dinah Rain, but I can promise you they’re going to stop right here and now. Once we’re home in Oregon—”

“There is no home in Oregon,” I said. “I’m staying here.”

We had reached the outer gates of Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen’s house. Dad turned in behind their car to follow them up the long drive.

“You most certainly are not.”

“Yes, she is.” Dad said each word precisely, with a point on the end. “We’ve already discussed this, Stacy. If Dinah wants to stay here, even without Claire, then she’s going to do it. This family’s lost one child because of something terrible and beyond our control; I’m not having you lose the other one by design.”

“Wyatt.” Mom dropped her voice to what she thinks is a dramatic whisper, but it’s actually loud enough for anyone to hear, even if they aren’t listening. “You can’t expect her to stay here after what happened back there. People will talk.”

“If it doesn’t bother Dinah, then it shouldn’t bother you.”

“I won’t allow it. I’ll get a lawyer and have the police fetch her home if I have to. I refuse to continue—”

I couldn’t stand hearing her anymore, so I did something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. Dad’s old truck has a sliding window in the back where the cab attaches to the bed. It’s short, but it’s wide enough to squeeze through if you’re determined. I flipped the latch and pulled myself into the back of the truck, still holding my phone.

“Dinah!” Dad yelled, slowing down exactly like I thought he would. I took the opportunity to climb over the tailgate and drop to the ground.

Then I ran. The direction didn’t matter as much as the energy release; I ended up tracking the fence line around the house, kicking my funeral shoes off as I went when the heels stuck in the dirt. The cars went on to the front of the house and I kept running, even when the storm that had threatened to break during the funeral cut loose and soaked me to the skin.

Something had to make sense. There had to be a reason; I just wasn’t seeing it. This was no different from one of those ridiculous math problems in not-trig with too many steps, or the cube puzzle I eventually gave up on and rearranged the stickers so it would look like I’d solved it.

I ran harder, because both of those things made me think of Brooks Walden, and I didn’t want to think about Brooks, with his phony perfection and near-rapist friends. How someone like Chandi, who’d known him for a decade, had never noticed anything strange about him, or his stick-figure me hanging out of my tree house palace. His too-convincing sincere-face and the way my stomach cramped at the thought of his shattered eyes at the cemetery. But everything made me think of him, especially the rain as it hit my skin and filled my nose and reminded
me how the two of us had hidden away in his garage because the big bad monster was afraid of water.

My feet ground to a dead halt as the rain poured down my back, dripping off my hair and nose with the scent of three-day-old hair dye, puddling around my ruined and soaked pantyhose.

It isn’t possible
.

My fingers flew across the screen of my phone, searching out the saved messages I’d been looking at in Dad’s truck. I had read something wrong … I had to have. But Claire’s words were still there, and still talking about going into the lake.

I changed direction and headed for the kitchen door, ignoring the groan in my calves from the pain of running so far barefoot.

It absolutely isn’t possible
.

I charged through the door, letting it slam and bypassing the people in the kitchen who were arguing at the table. I wiped out on the bottom step, but clawed my way up, taking the stairs on hands and feet until I could push myself upright again. Snatches of their conversation, mainly my name and Claire’s, mixed with “Brooks,” “Oregon,” and “police,” followed me up the stairs as my mother screamed about dripping on the floor.

“Dinah!”

Dad’s voice barely made a dent in the mantra looping through my head.

It can’t be. Not now. Not after all this
.

I didn’t stop running until I’d hit Claire’s room and pounced on her stuffed animal stash, shaking and squeezing each one in hopes of finding another toy with a voice box, and hopefully hidden treasure. I had to have missed one before.

“Dinah!” Dad called again, closer this time. He was in the room’s doorway, with a horrified expression I wouldn’t have ever thought of seeing on his face. Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen came up behind him.

“Dinah, honey, stop it,” Aunt Helen spoke directly to me for the first time in weeks. “It won’t help, sweetie.”

They thought I’d snapped.

She tried to get her arms around me, but I ducked.

“I’m looking for something,” I said desperately, before I risked having them call the psych ward to haul me away.

“What?” Dad asked. “We’ll help you look.”

“I don’t know.… I don’t know where to look.”

I sat on her bed with a sudden heavy, hopeless feeling. There weren’t any other animals with voice boxes, so there was no telling where she would have hidden something. And then it hit me.

“Her phone.” I jumped off the bed and grabbed Aunt Helen’s hands. “Where’s Claire’s phone?”

“In my purse,” she said. “I thought I’d keep it at the hospital in case one of her friends called, or if she woke up and wanted it.… Why do you need her phone?”

But I was already out the door, racing back down the stairs to where my mother was still at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. She said something, but it didn’t register. I spied Aunt Helen’s purse on the counter and flipped it over, spilling everything into plain sight. A sparkly yellow phone landed on top of the pile, still turned off from being in the hospital.

So much time without use or charging had left it dead, but this time, I finally caught a break. Claire’s phone was the previous incarnation of the one I carried—the megabucks beta
model I smashed against the kitchen counter until the battery popped loose so I could snap it into Claire’s phone.

Everyone gaped, too stunned to do anything that required thought or action.

“Don’t be there … don’t be there … don’t be there … please don’t be there,” I pleaded, scrolling through the pictures she’d saved.

Claire might have had a hard time taking pictures of Brooks after he deleted the first one, but I knew her. She would have found a way to do it.