Page 21 of The Girl from Widow Hills
Everything slowed. My breathing, my thoughts, my movements.
His steps retreating. Images flashing and lingering—the phone, the body, the blood. The feeling of pins and needles in my fingertips. A sour taste in my mouth—the walls were too close, and the drip of the faucet behind me grew louder, more insistent. I couldn’t get a deep breath.
I pulled the door open, desperate for air.
I HEARD RICK ONthe phone from where I waited in the living room. He was pacing in the kitchen as he talked. “Yes, there’s the body of a man at the edge of my property. Deceased, yes. No, I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”
He spent a while in the kitchen, even after the conversation stopped. And he didn’t look my way at first when he came back to the living room. Stared, instead, out the front windows. Eyes slightly narrowed, a twitch at the corner.
“It takes so long,” he said, “for help to get here. For the police to make it out this far.”
“Rick, did you see? Who it was, I mean?”
He turned in my direction, blinking slowly. “Never saw him before, that I could tell. There was a lot of blood, though.” Eyes drifting away again. Drifting straight to the cabinet beside the television, to the bottle of liquor sitting on top. Then he turned back to me, glancing at my hands, my pants, my bare feet. “Sit down, Liv. Sit down and take a breath.”
I walked to the couch, though the stiffness in my left leg, and the electrical-tape bandage, turned my walk to a slight limp.
“What’s the matter?”
“My knee,” I said, sitting on the edge of his sofa. “I cut it. On a root, I think.”
He frowned at the tear in the fabric. “You tripped out there,” he said, but he said it like a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I said, and he nodded once. And I realized he was saying it like it was a story, my story, something I had to cover up. “Rick, I tripped over the . . . over the body.” I couldn’t say the name. Who I imagined might be out there. Couldn’t even think it.
“Okay,” he said. And then, “They’re here.” Even before a flash of light cut through the front curtains. “Stay in here. I’ll show them.”
A man was dead, and how many men could it be, lurking outside my house? That phone I’d heard must’ve belonged to whoever was out there. My mind kept drifting back to Jonah, to the text I had sent him—Thinking of you, too—and the one he had sent back, seconds later:
What are you thinking?
Because that was Jonah, always digging deeper, to find the heart of the meaning. Always asking it of others but not himself. The dynamic of his classroom carrying over, seeming like a natural extension—though it wasn’t.
What I was really thinking: That I knew it was a mistake as soon as he responded. That I was smart enough this time to see him clearly, not as Professor Lowell, the thrill of his extra interest, but as a forty-one-year-old man trapped in a perpetual state of late adolescence, in danger of trapping me there, too.
When I didn’t respond, falling into my bed instead, into a sleep I couldn’t find the beginning of—a haze of wine and adrenaline and exhaustion—had he driven out this way?
Or had I texted him to come? Had I responded in my sleep?
The blackout I’d had from drinking during that episode at the end of sophomore year in college was the closest I’d ever felt to sleepwalking. Knowing, after, that something had happened, seeing the evidence, hearing others talk about it, but never able to get there myself. Another thing forever lost to me.
The night and the rain; the drainage pipe. The cold earth and stagnant water.
It had been only one glass of wine last night, but Dr. Cal’s words echoed in my head, faintly accusing.
The voices of several people out front carried through the thin window, and the sound of footsteps made me sit upright, unsure what to do with my hands. I folded them awkwardly in my lap until my fingers felt numb, hooked together unnaturally.
A woman followed Rick inside. “Liv, this is Nina,” he said. He introduced her so casually, I couldn’t tell at first what her role was. Whether this was someone he had called to the house personally; whether this was someone on our side.
Nina stepped inside carefully, her gaze roaming the room—she was smaller than I was, wearing gray slacks and a black windbreaker. Boots that seemed in contrast to her dress pants. She had light brown skin and sleek dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail.
Her face gave away nothing. “Nina Rigby,” she said. “I’m with the police department. Mr. Aimes said you’re the one who found the body?”
Her face was completely delicate, as if made of glass—tiny upturned nose, gently sloping cheekbones, rounded chin, like I could fit her entire face in my hand. But it was unlined and expressionless, even now, when discussing a body just steps away. And when her brown eyes set on me, I changed my mind: stone, not glass.
“Yes. Do you know who it is?” I asked, the words scraping against my throat, wondering if she could hear my heartbeat from there. I concentrated on slowing my breaths, counting the seconds, in and out.
She paused, sat beside me on the couch, barely making an indentation. “We’re not sure just yet. But what I’d like to do right now is get your statement while it’s all still fresh. Why don’t you tell me what happened. How you found him.”
