Ellie takes a bite, gets yolk on her hands, wipes her hands and face. “You think there’s any connection between this and . . . ?”
“What happened to Leo and Diana? Maybe. You?”
Ellie picks up a fork and spears her yolk. “I always thought Leo and Diana died in an accident.” She looks up at me. “I thought your other explanations were, uh, far-fetched.”
“You never told me that.”
She shrugs. “I also thought you could use an ally instead of someone else saying you were crazy.”
I am not sure how to respond to that so I just say, “Thank you.”
“But now . . .” Ellie scrunches up her face in deep thought.
“Now what?”
“We know the fate of at least three members of the club.”
I nod. “Leo and Rex are dead.”
“And Maura, who disappeared fifteen years ago, happened to be at Rex’s murder scene.”
“Plus,” I add, “Diana may have been a member too after the school picture was taken. Who knows?”
“That would make three dead. Either way, to believe it’s a coincidence—to believe that their fates aren’t somehow connected—well, that’s far-fetched.”
I pick up my sandwich and take another bite. I keep my eyes down but I know Ellie is watching me.
“Nap?”
“What?”
“I went through the entire yearbook with a magnifying glass. I checked every single lapel for that pin.”
“Did you find any others?” I ask.
Ellie nods. “Two more. Two more of our classmates were wearing that pin.”
Chapter Eight
We start up the old path behind Benjamin Franklin Middle School. When we were students, this path was called the Path. Clever, right?
“I can’t believe the Path is still here,” Ellie says.
I arch an eyebrow. “You used to come up here?”
“Me? Never. This was for the rowdy kids.”
“Rowdy?”
“I didn’t want to say ‘bad’ or ‘rebellious.’” She puts her hand on my arm. “You used to come up here, right?”
“Senior year mostly.”
“Drinking? Drugs? Sex?”
“All three,” I say. Then with a sad smile, I add something I would add only when talking to her. “But I wasn’t much for drinking or drugs.”
“Maura.”
I don’t have to reply.
The wooded area behind the middle school is the place kids went to smoke, drink, get high, or hook up. Every town has one. Westbridge is no different on the surface. We start climbing up the hill. The woods are windy and long rather than deep. You feel as though you are miles from civilization, but in fact, you’re never more than a few hundred yards from a suburban street.
“Our town’s make-out point,” Ellie says.
“Yep.”
“Except more than making out.”
No need to reply. I don’t like being here. I haven’t been here since “that night,” Leo. It isn’t about you. Not really. You were killed on those train tracks on the other side of town. Westbridge is pretty big. We have thirty thousand residents. Six elementary schools feed two middle schools, which feed one high school. The town is almost fifteen square miles. It would take me at least ten minutes to drive from here to the spot where you and Diana died, and that’s only if I got lucky with the lights.
But this wooded area makes me think of Maura. It makes me remember the way she made me feel. It makes me remember that no one since her—and, yeah, I know how this sounds—has ever made me feel that way.
Am I talking about the physical?
Yep.
Label me a pig; I don’t care. My only defense is that I believe the physical is entangled with the emotional, that the ridiculous sexual heights that this eighteen-year-old boy reached with her weren’t just about technique or newness or experimentation or nostalgia but about something deeper and more profound.
But I’m also savvy enough to admit that could be bullshit.
“I didn’t really know Maura,” Ellie says. “She moved in, what, end of junior year?”
“That summer, yeah.”
“She kinda intimidated me.”
I nod. Like I said, Ellie was our class valedictorian. There is a photograph in that yearbook of Ellie and me because we were voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” Funny, no? We knew each other a little before posing for that picture, but I’d always figured that Ellie was a Little Miss Priss. What would we have in common? I could probably go through a mental timeline and figure out the steps that led to Ellie and me being friends after that photo was taken, how we grew closer after losing Leo and Diana, how we stayed friends as she went off to Princeton University and I stayed home, all of that. But off the top of my head, I don’t remember the details, what we saw in each other outside of grief, where the signposts lay. I’m just grateful.
“She seemed older,” Ellie says. “Maura, I mean. More experienced. Sort of, I don’t know, sexy.”
Hard for me to argue.
“Some girls just have that, you know? Like everything they do, like it or not, is a double entendre. That sounds sexist, doesn’t it?”
“A little.”
“But you understand what I mean.”
“Oh, I do.”
“So the other two members of the Conspiracy Club,” she says, “were Beth Lashley and Hank Stroud. You remember them?”
I do. “They were friends with Leo. Did you know them?”
“Hank was a math genius,” she says. “I remember he was in my calculus class freshman year and then they had to make up his own curriculum for him. Went to MIT, I think.”
“He did,” I say.
Ellie’s voice turns grave. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Some of it. Last I heard, he’s still around town. He plays pickup basketball by the oval.”
“I saw him, what, six months ago near the train station,” Ellie says with a shake of her head. “Talking to himself, ranting. It was awful. Such a sad story, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
She stops walking and leans against a tree. “Let’s just go through the members of the club for a second. For the sake of this discussion let’s assume Diana became a member, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
“So we then have six members in total. Leo, Diana, Maura, Rex, Hank, and Beth.”
I start walking again. Ellie joins me and keeps talking.
“Leo is dead. Diana is dead. Rex is dead. Maura is missing. Hank, well, he’s . . . what should we call him? Homeless?”
“No,” I say. “He’s an outpatient at Essex Pines.”
“So he’s, what, mentally ill?”
“Let’s go with that.”
“And that leaves Beth.”
“What do you know about her?”
“Nothing. She left for college and never came back. As our alumni coordinator, I’ve reached out, tried to get a mailing address, you know, to invite her to the reunions and homecomings. Nothing.”
“Her parents?”
“They moved to Florida last I heard. I wrote to them too, but there was no reply.”
Hank and Beth. I would need to talk to them. And say what exactly?
“Where are we going, Nap?”
“Not far,” I say.
I want to show her—or maybe I want to see for myself. I’m visiting old ghosts. The smell of pinecones fills the air. Every once in a while, we see a broken liquor bottle or an empty pack of cigarettes.
We are getting close now. It’s my imagination—I know that—but the air seems suddenly still. It feels as though someone is out there, watching us, holding their breath. I stop at a tree and run my hand across the bark. I find an old rusty nail. I move to the next tree, run my hand down it, find another rusty nail. I hesitate.
“What?” Ellie asks.
“I’ve never walked past here.”
“Why?”
“It was restricted. These nails? There used to be signs all along here.”
“Like, No Trespassing signs?”
“The signs read, ‘Restricted Area Warning’ in large red letters,” I say. “Underneath was a ton of scary smaller print about the area being declared restricted in accordance with some code number and that anything can be confiscated, no photography, you’ll be searched, blah blah blah. It ended with the following words italicized: ‘Deadly Force Is Authorized.’”
“It really said that? About deadly force?”
I nod.
“You have a good memory,” she says.
I smile. “Maura stole one of the signs and hung it in her bedroom.”
“You’re kidding.”
I shrug.
Ellie nudges me. “You liked the bad girls.”
“Maybe.”