Jan scribbled something down. He was left-handed and writing looked awkward for him, as if he were a Ken doll with parts assembled slightly wrong. I hoped he was writing down Never ask that question again. “Okay. Um. Your EP One/Or the Other just debuted in Billboard’s top ten. What are your thoughts on that incredible success?”
“I’m buying my mother a BMW,” Victor said. “No, I’m just buying Bavaria. That is where BMWs are from, right?”
“Success is an arbitrary concept,” Jeremy said.
“The next one will be better,” I said. I hadn’t said it out loud before, but now I had, so it was true.
More writing. Jan read the next question from his paper. “Uh, that means that you guys knocked out the Human Parts Ministry album from the top ten, where it had been for over forty weeks. Sorry, forty-one. I swear there won’t be typos in the final interview. So, Joey of Human Parts Ministry said he thought ‘Looking Up or Down’ was such a long-lived hit because so many people identified with the lyrics. Do you think listeners out there identify with the lyrics of One/Or the Other?”
One/Or the Other was about the Cole that I heard in the monitors on stage versus the Cole that paced the hotel halls at night. This was what One/Or the Other was: It was the knowledge that I was surrounded by adults with lives that I could never imagine living. It was the humming noise inside me that told me to do something and found nothing to do that meant anything, the bit of me that was like a fly smashing itself again and again on a windowpane. It was the futility of aging. It was a piano piece gotten right the first time. It was the time I picked Angie up for a date and she was wearing a cardigan that made her look like her mother. It was roads that ended in cul-de-sacs and careers that ended with desks and songs screamed in a gymnasium at night. It was the realization that this was life, and I didn’t belong here.
“No,” I said. “I think it’s about the music.”
Jeremy finished his breakfast bar. Victor cracked his knuckles. I watched people the size of germs fly overhead in a plane the size of an ant.
“I read you were a choir boy, Cole,” Jan said, consulting his notes. “Are you still a practicing Catholic? Are you, Victor? Jeremy, I know you’re not.”
“I believe in God,” Victor offered. He didn’t sound convincing.
“You, Cole?” Jan prompted.
I watched empty sky, waiting for another plane. It was that or look at the blank sides of the buildings. One/Or the Other.
“Here’s what I know about Cole,” Jeremy said. Punctuated by the silence, it sounded like he was in a pulpit. “Cole’s religion is debunking the impossible. He doesn’t believe in impossible. He doesn’t believe in no. Cole’s religion is waiting for someone to tell him it can’t be done so he can do it. Anything. Doesn’t matter what that something is, so long as it can’t be done. Here’s an origin story for you. In the beginning of time there was an ocean and a void, and God made the ocean into the world and he made the void into Cole.”
Victor laughed.
“I thought you said you were a Buddhist,” Jan said.
“Part-time,” Jeremy replied.
Debunking the impossible.
Now, the pines stretched up so high on either side of the road that it felt like I was tunneling to the middle of the world. Mercy Falls was an unnumbered stretch of miles behind me.
I was sixteen again, and the road unwound in front of me, endless possibilities. I felt wiped clean, empty, forgiven. I could drive forever, anywhere. I could be anyone. But I felt the pull of Boundary Wood around me and, for once, the business of being Cole St. Clair no longer felt like such a curse. I had a purpose, a goal, and it was the impossible: finding a cure.
I was so close.
The road flew by beneath the car; my hand was cold from being in the wind. For the first time in a long time, I felt powerful. The woods had taken that void that was me, the thing I thought that could never be full, never be satisfied, and they’d made me lose everything — things I never knew I wanted to keep.
And in the end, I was Cole St. Clair, cut from a new skin. The world lay at my feet and the day stretched out for miles.
I slid Sam’s cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Jeremy’s number.
“Jeremy,” I said.
“Cole St. Clair,” he replied, slow and easy, like he wasn’t surprised. There was a pause on the other side of the line. And because he knew me, he didn’t have to wait for me to say it. “You’re not coming home, are you?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
SAM
They questioned me in a kitchen.
The Mercy Falls Police Department was small and apparently ill-prepared for questioning. Koenig led me past a room full of dispatchers — they stopped mid-conversation to watch me — and two offices full of desks and uniforms bowed around computers, and finally into a tiny room with a sink, refrigerator, and two vending machines. It was lunchtime and the room smelled overwhelmingly like microwaved Mexican dinners and vomit. It was excruciatingly hot.
Koenig directed me into a light wooden chair at a folding table and cleared off a few napkins, a plate with a half-eaten lemon bar, and a can of soda. Dumping them in the trash, he stood just outside the door, his back to me. All I could see of him was the back of his head, the straight edge of his stubble-short hair on the back of his neck eerily perfect. He had a dark burn scar at the edge of his hair; the scar trickled to a point that disappeared into the collar of his shirt. It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar — maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless — and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.
Koenig was speaking in a low voice to someone in the hall. I only caught snatches of his words. “Samuel Roth … no … warrant … body? … what he finds.”
My stomach felt instantly sick, crushed by the heat. It was churning and turning over and I suddenly had the horrible feeling that, despite the heat, because of the heat, I was going to shift here in this little room and there would be no way out.
I lay my head on my arms; the table smelled like old food but was cool against my skin. My stomach pinched and squeezed and, for the first time in months, I felt unsafe in my own skin.
Please don’t shift. Please don’t shift.
I repeated this in my head with every breath.
“Samuel Roth?”
I lifted my head. A pouch-eyed officer was standing in the doorway. He smelled like tobacco. It felt like everything in this room was designed as a specific assault on my wolf senses.
“I’m Officer Heifort. Do you mind if Officer Koenig is in the room while we talk?”
I didn’t trust myself to talk, so I just shook my head, my arms still pressed against the table. The contents of my chest felt weightless and loose inside me.
Heifort pulled out the chair opposite — he had to pull it out quite a bit to make room for his paunch. He had a notepad and a folder that he laid on the table in front of him. Behind him, Koenig appeared in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. Koenig looked infinitely more like a cop to me, very official and built, but still, the familiarity of his presence had a calming effect. The paunchy detective looked far too delighted by the concept of questioning me.
“What we’re gonna do,” he said, “is we’re gonna ask you a few questions and you just answer them the best you can, all right?” His voice had a joviality that didn’t make it to his eyes.
I nodded.
“Where’s your daddy at these days, Sam? We haven’t seen Geoffrey Beck around for a long while,” Heifort asked.
I said, “He’s been sick.” It was easier to say a lie that I’d used before.
“That’s too bad,” Heifort said. “Sick how?”
“Cancer,” I said. I looked at the table and mumbled, “He’s getting treatment in Minneapolis.”
Heifort wrote this down. I wished he hadn’t.
“What’s the address of the center, do you know?” he asked.
I shrugged. I tried to invest the shrug with sadness.
Koenig said, “I’ll help track it down later.”
Heifort wrote that down, too.
I said, “What am I being questioned about?” I suspected that this was not really about Beck, but about Grace, and some essential part of me resisted the idea of being taken into custody for the disappearance of someone I had been holding in my arms the night before.
“Well, since you asked,” Heifort said, and slid the folder out from under the notepad. He removed a photo and put it in front of me.
It was a close-up of a foot. A girl’s foot, slender and long. Both foot and what I could see of the bare leg rested among leaves. There was blood between the toes.
There was a long pause between my breath and the next one.
Heifort placed another photograph on top of that one.
I winced and looked away, both relieved and horrified.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
It was an over-flashed photograph of a naked girl, pale as snow, thin as a whisper, sprawled in the leaves. Her face and neck were a disaster zone. And I knew her. The last time I’d seen that girl she’d had a tan and a smile and a pulse.
Oh, Olivia. I’m so sorry.
“Why are you showing me that?” I asked. I couldn’t look at the photo. Olivia hadn’t deserved to be killed by wolves. No one deserved to die like that.
“We were hoping you might tell us,” Heifort said. As he spoke, he laid out more photos in front of me, each a different vantage point of the dead girl. I wanted him to stop. Needed him to stop. “Seeing as she was found a few yards from Geoffrey Beck’s property line. Naked. After being missing for quite a long time.”
A bare shoulder smeared with blood. Skin written with dirt. Palm to the sky. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t stop seeing the images from the photos. I could feel them burrowing into me, living inside me, becoming something to populate my nightmares.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I said. It sounded false when I said it. Like it was in a language I didn’t speak, and I said it with inflection so wrong that the words didn’t even make sense together.
“Oh, this was the work of wolves,” Heifort said. “They killed her. But I don’t think they put her on that property naked.”
I opened my eyes, but I didn’t look at the photographs. There was a bulletin board on the wall, and there was a piece of paper tacked there that said PLEASE CLEAN THE MICROWAVE IF YOUR LUNCH EXPLODES IN THERE. THNX, MANAGEMENT.
“I swear I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know where she was. This wasn’t me.” I had this heavy, heavy feeling inside me that I knew who it was, though. I added, “Why would I possibly do that?”
“Honestly, son, I have no idea,” Heifort said. I wasn’t sure why he said son, as the rest of his tone was entirely at odds with it. “Some sick son of a bitch did this, and it’s hard for me to get in that mindset. What I do know is this: Two young girls who knew you have disappeared in the last year. You were the last person to see one of them. Your foster father hasn’t been heard from in months and you’re the only one who seems to know where he is. Now there’s a body near your residence, naked and half-near starved, and it seems like the sort of thing only a really troubled SOB would do. And I have right now in front of me a guy who was abused by his parents and they tell me that screws you up pretty well. Would you care to comment on that?”