Page 97 of The Death Row Club
“Well, shit,” he says. “I saw smoke in the rearview mirror and figured I should turn around, make sure you’re all right.”
“Aw. Thanks.”
“You need a lift?” He places one palm flat against his chest and raises the other. “Promise I’m not a serial killer.”
We both laugh, and he pops the passenger-side door open. I stare through his dirty windshield into the distance. At acres of grassland. At telephone poles and rusted exit signs. At the vanishing point—the little dot where the impossible happens.
Where you finally break free.
40NICOLA
NO ONE’S OUTon the trail today.
It’s sweltering, and by the time I’m halfway there, my toes are squishing in their socks, and my backpack’s damp from the sweat on my lower back. I keep pushing forward, though. The sound of rushing water grows louder, until finally, the grasses thin, and Ellicott Creek comes into view.
It hasn’t changed much since the days when my dad brought me out here. Shattered beer bottles still litter the creek bed, brown and green glass catching the light like a nicotine-stained church window. Crumpled potato chip bags and brightly colored bottle caps mark the path to the waterfront.
I step onto the dock, its planks weathered and creaking, and stare down into the murky water. Are there still traces of Claire down there? A lock of her hair snagged on a log? A fingernail lodged in the mud? Or is she finally gone for good?
I drop my backpack onto the dock and unzip the front compartment. Reaching inside, I pull out a necklace.
One with a lucky horseshoe charm.
After Claire went missing, I searched the house, desperate for any clue as to where she might’ve gone. I started in the upstairs bathroom;if she’d forgotten her phone there, maybe she’d left something else. My fingers slid around the drains, under the toilet seat, down the wall, until they caught on a single loose tile. Inside was jewelry—cheap stuff, like what a teenager might buy from JCPenney. I reached in and weeded out a necklace with flecks of rust barnacled across the metal, probably from being so close to all those damp pipes. The previous owner’s daughter had probably tucked it back there for safekeeping. Still, when my dad knocked on the bathroom door, instead of returning the necklace, I tucked it into my pocket.
It wasn’t until weeks later, studying photographs of the Ellicott Creek Ripper’s victims, that I realized Heather Dickerson always wore a necklace just like the one in my pocket.
I wipe it clean of my fingerprints and drop it into the creek. It shimmers, a minnow darting through the currents, before disappearing into the mud.
Back in the car, the air conditioner clatters as I stare through my windshield at the trailhead. My vision tunnels, drawing me back to the morning my train was scheduled to leave. My ticket was tucked safely into my wallet, while Claire’s remained on the kitchen table, unclaimed. Dad was supposed to take me straight to the station, but instead, he veered onto a narrow side road. As the pickup truck rattled over loose gravel, it felt like all the stones on the road had been dumped into my stomach, and now were being pitched around like a tin-can shaker.
“Where are we going?” I asked, feigning an easiness that I didn’t feel.
“Just taking a quick detour.”
We drove until we reached this same parking lot—empty that early in the morning. The shadows had started to clump together into familiar landmarks: the maples penning the hiking trail on either side; the porta-potty that made us pinch our nostrils shut whenever wewalked past, desperate to avoid the plasticky stink; the sun-bleached flyer notifying visitors of Upstate New York’s tick epidemic. CHECK YOURSELF AFTER TIME SPENT OUTDOORS, it warned. IF YOU DISCOVER A BULL’S-EYE RASH, CONTACT YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY. LYME DISEASE CAN BE DANGEROUS IF LEFT UNTREATED.
My dad turned the key; the engine went dead. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, “before you went back.”
“Okay.”
“I wanted to make sure you knew, what happened to your friend wasn’t your fault.”
“Okay.”
“She made her choices. Now, you have to make yours. You need to move forward with your life, all right? You need to go back to the city and do well at school and stop thinking about what happened here.”
Silence burned up all the air in the truck. My fingers dipped into my pocket, traced the fine-link chain of the necklace, rubbed against the flat side of the horseshoe charm. Some of the rust—if it even was rust—flaked off onto my skin.
“And of course I’m here to help. Whatever you need to be successful, you know you can always count on me.”
A spider, legs spindly as knitting needles, scuttled across the windshield. It faltered directly in front of me, and I found myself wondering what would happen if we started the truck right now. Would its little Post-it feet stick fast to the glass? Or would my dad knock the lever next to the steering wheel, activating the windshield wipers, crushing it into a lacteal smear? Maybe he hadn’t even noticed it was there.
I couldn’t see the spider clearly—it was too dark for that—but I tried to imagine the eight beady eyes peppered across its face, all of them witnessing this scene transpiring between father and daughter. What did it think of us? What did it think ofme?
“I’m just afraid,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “that it’ll happen again someday. I don’t know if I could live through that.”
The spider continued its journey across the windshield. I knew the moment my dad noticed it; his hand reached for the lever. But before he could press it down, my hand enveloped his—the pinkie that had doubled as a makeshift pacifier during sleepless nights, the index finger that had twisted my ponytail into the perfect ballerina bun before recitals, the thumb that had tucked an ice cube into a terrycloth boo-bunny every time my knee was brush burned.
