Page 67 of Fragments of the Lost
The rugs are gone, bound up in the garage, ready to be taken to the dump; the watch has blood. They’re stripping the house down, piece by piece—and suddenly the scene replays, from a different angle.
She kicked him out. He’s leaving.
It’s over. It’s done.
But what if that wasn’t what happened at all?
Don’t call the police. Don’t make it a thing.
My breath catches, and I can’t focus. All these things I’ve been sorting through. Digging deeper, looking for the Caleb I thought I knew better than anyone. Only to discover something worse, something I don’t want to imagine at all.
Caleb,I think,what have you done?
—
Inside, Eve answers a ringing phone. “Thanks for returning my call. Yes, I have some large items I’d like to sell,” she says, and I can hear her scribbling down some notes.
I need to get out of this garage. I pull back the window shades as quietly as I can, but the windows are just for decoration—they don’t open. I suppose I could break them, throw something through, and make a run for it, but not without drawing attention to myself.
I remember where the circuit breaker is, feel Caleb beside me as I go to it. I do the same maneuver, using the side of my hand to take the entire house offline. I flick it all back on, then open the garage door, and hope she will think it’s an unexpected, unexplained part of the power surge.
Max takes my hand, pulling me around the corner of the garage, in hopes we won’t be seen. He has the box of photos tucked under his other arm, from upstairs. I hear the door from the house to the garage swing open, but we don’t look back.
It’s not until we’re around the corner, tucked out of sight, catching our breath with our hands on our knees, that I realize, in the clenched fist of my other hand, I still have Sean’s pocket watch.
We are sitting in Max’s car, but the engine is off. The only sound is of us both trying to catch our breath. The pocket watch is on my knees, and the blood looks more like rust in the light of day. Max keeps looking over my shoulder, out the window, as if expecting Eve to come along at any moment, but nothing happens.
“Did she see us?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was running.” His throat moves as he swallows, and his eyes drift to the pocket watch in my lap. “What’s going on, Jessa?”
My fingers tighten on the watch. “I don’t know. But I think…I think something happened to Sean. I don’t think he left.”
“And you think…Caleb?”
“I don’tknow,Max,” I say. The lies are bigger than I thought. If he is truly alive, then this is a deception, and he’sdone it to all of us. “I showed up at his house the dayhis mom kicked Sean out, and they’d been fighting. Sean had hithim. Caleb had a mark on his face, and this watch has blood on it. I assumed that’s why his mom kicked him out. But now Sean’s clothes are in the garage, in suitcases. Hiswedding band and his phone are still there, in the garage.And this.” I hold up the pocket watch. “She’s pulling things back out of Caleb’s boxes. What am I even doing up there?”
“It doesn’t make sense, Jessa,” he says, but his voice is low, unsure. “You think Caleb did something and took off because of it? Where would he go?”
“I don’t know.” I laugh to myself, a hollow, pained sound. “And here I thought he was just meeting up with some girl.”
“What girl?”
“Ashlyn Patterson. From sleepaway camp.”
Max frowns. “He didn’t go to sleepaway camp.”
I pull up her profile on my phone, show him the picture. “I thought this was her, but she said she didn’t know him.”
He shakes his head, then grabs my wrist and pulls it closer. “I know her.”
“How?”
He narrows his eyes. “I don’t know. But I know I’ve seen her before.”
“They were talking at the slopes, last year when we went skiing.”
He wrinkles his nose. Like he’s trying to place her there. Slip her back into focus. “No, no, I remember now. That game we drove to. Remember? The one when you got stranded in the boys’ locker room and Hailey had to bail you out?”
