chapter twenty-five-1

The barn loomed eerily in the distance as Wilson steered the van onto the dirt clearing, potholes causing the tires to dip under us and my elbow to bang loudly against the door. The apple orchard behind it was barren and brown, snow on the branches, and crumpled, dead leaves weighed down by snow littered the ground. With a dull white sky behind it, it didn't look like the place I remembered it being: safe and warm. "A barn," Wilson observed flatly. "That was close to what I was hoping for. If you took off the letter N." "I think Emily killed someone else. Other than Griffin. Her name was Elizabeth Monner. You remember the body they found in my backyard a couple weeks ago? That was her. And I think Emily did it. I just have to prove it, and maybe there's something in there. I don't know." "Wait, you actually want her to get more time?" I turned toward the apple orchard a couple of hundred feet away from the warped and graying barn, thinking that beyond lifting a couple of old blankets and peering into the stalls for some hint—something that would somehow shift everything into place, locking it all into a picture I could understand again—I hadn't thought about what I would do if I actually found something. "Come on," I said to him, instead of answering his question, yanking on the door handle. "Let's go." The cold air drifted through the spreading gaps between the boards in the walls, brushing against my neck and my bare hands as I stepped into the barn, Wilson a couple of paces behind me. I felt a small pang of disappointment as I looked around. It looked just like it did before. Bottle caps from the afternoon we'd spent here still scattered across the cracked concrete, straw crunching beneath our shoes, the blanket we'd spread out crumpled but still on the floor. Even though I'd already known I probably wouldn't find anything here, the sight created a hollowness in my chest when my instinct was basically confirmed. "She brought me here the day Elizabeth Monner disappeared," I told him, taking another step, noticing a crumpled fast food wrapper in the corner. "I fell asleep after she gave me a beer and said she was going to go get some more. I woke up a couple of hours later and she said she'd been waiting, like, the whole time." "She probably lied. She was probably gone the whole time and told you that. I bet she even drugged you." He laughed bitterly and kicked one of the bottle caps. "She knew how to do it." I glanced at his hands, balled in the pocket of his hoodie, the strands of hair that hid his eyes from me. "She said you hit her," I said. "She had a black eye once and said you hit her because she thought you were cheating on her. Did she give herself a black eye just to convince me you were hitting her?" "No, not really," he sighed. "I did hit her, but not because she thought I was cheating on her. She tried something and I had just had enough, I guess. So I flipped out. Pushed her off and ended up smacking her in the eye and she ran out crying. Her. She was so twisted that she actually made me feel bad about what happened. And then a couple of days later she comes back, tells me that she forgives me, and I'm so relieved I don't even remember why I smacked her in the first place. I knew what she was doing but doing something about it just felt wrong. And then she started telling me my friends are trying to gang rape her when I'm not around, that she thinks my father, my father, wants to touch me and I need to stay away from him. We broke up not long after that, but she didn't really leave me alone until she went to jail, and even now I still get letters from her." "She sends you letters? From jail?" "Locks of her hair too. Says to put them in a jar or something so I can still smell her until she gets out." Wilson took a step away from me and into one of the stalls, the one farthest away in the back corner of the barn. He kicked at the random clumps of hay scattered across the dusty, splintered concrete. I wasn't really sure of how I was supposed to respond to this, if I was supposed to tell him about the letters Griffin used to send me or apologize that Emily Porterfield was my sister. "Aniston told me that teenage killers are sloppy," I said to him instead. "They're so convinced they won't get caught that they make mistakes. But what if Emily wasn't like that? What if she really was good at this stuff? Or what if I'm wrong and Griffin really did kill Elizabeth Monner? I don't know. I don't try to figure these things out! Aniston just does it and tells me in really long sentences." "Well, it would help if you actually looked around instead of just standing there," he retorted, lifting a handful of multicolored blankets from the ground. He shot me an almost amused look, as if to say see, as a water-damaged cardboard box was unearthed. "Emily was sloppy. Manipulative, but sloppy. The only thing that kept her from getting caught sooner was that she was a pretty blond cheerleader." Wilson used the side of his shoe to edge the cardboard box from the corner, the bottom scraping against the concrete, and something rattled inside. Sliding his sleeves over his hands, he reached down and pried it open, ripping the duct tape from the edges and peering in. He looked at me, an uneasiness in his eyes, before he kicked the box toward me. It slid a few inches before it was stopped by a crack in the concrete. "Is it human stuff?" I asked. "Sort of." He grabbed the flaps of the stained cardboard so the sunlight could illuminate its contents. Inside was the pocketknife she'd taken from me last summer, mostly wiped clean but with dried blood still clinging to parts of the steel, two phones, and a roll of duct tape. But that wasn't what my gaze focused on as I stared into the box, my heart sinking somewhere deep and unfathomable. There was a grocery bag filled with women's underwear. And through the plastic, I could see the familiar white fabric crumpled inside—my underwear, the pair Griffin had shoved into his pocket the night he'd raped me. Air lodged somewhere within my throat as I stumbled out of the barn. "Clare?" Wilson said, gingerly sorting through the box's contents, his brow furrowing. He was confused, something contorting the corners of his lips as he noticed the bag of multicolored women's underwear. I gestured vaguely in the direction of the box, tears blurring in my eyes as he glanced between me and it. "That's—" I said. "My underwear. The pair I was wearing when—" He placed the box down on the ground, his sleeve retracting from his palm when he lifted his hand to gesture that he got it. And that almost made me choke on a bitter laugh, because I was suddenly tossed into a world where Wilson Westbrooke understood me. Where Emily was just like the person she'd claimed to be protecting me from. Where monsters were humans and humans were monsters. "She was in on it," I rasped. "She helped him. She knew what he was doing, what he did, and I—that night, the night he was in my room, I was the only one home! Maybe she told him my parents were gone. And my window was open! I never leave my window open. I just thought he was, I don't know, an amateur locksmith or something, but she opened it for him!" "Clare."