Page 71 of Forget Me Not
“She started to get a little obsessed.”
I stare at the outline of his face in the dark, remembering how Bethany had said the same thing.
“I mean, I get it,” he continues. “Imagine being eighteen years old and realizing your father wasn’t actually your father at all. She was having something of an identity crisis. All of a sudden, she wanted to know everything there was to know about Mitchell.”
“So, what happened?” I ask, the cogs slowly lurching as I attempt to work it all out. “That last night she came here, what went wrong?”
Liam is silent for what feels like a full minute before I hearthe sudden shuffling of feet, the outline of his body moving back toward the doors.
“Please,” I beg, understanding that I’m losing him now. That he brought me in here for a reason and the fact that he just told me all these things means he’s not intending on letting me leave. “Liam, please. How did Natalie die? What did she ever do to deserve that?”
I hear the shed doors creak open, the clanking of the padlock as he slips it back in.
“I really am sorry,” he says at last. “I just thought you deserved to know.”
CHAPTER 47
There’s no sound at all but my own breath, rough and ragged as I try to stay calm.
The doors are shut and it’s pitch-black in here. The blackest black I’ve ever seen. Then I hear Liam locking the handles and I attempt to yank my arms out again, though nothing moves as I jerk my full weight against the leg of the bench.
It’s bolted to the floor, there’s no way I’m getting myself free, and I feel my body start to deflate. The bleakness of it all beginning to take hold.
I close my eyes, open them again. No difference at all in the cavernous black. Now my adrenaline from before is starting to seep out, a slow leak that leaves me grim and alone, and I force myself to take a deep breath. Hands shaking as I decide that if Liam isn’t going to give me these final few answers, then at least I can try to piece it together myself.
I lean my head back, trying to concentrate as I imagine my sister sneaking into those very same woods, finding Marcia’s diary and thatpicture of our parents. The roll of old film she never had the chance to develop. Then she had brought them back to our house, tucked them into a box she hid in her room—and now my neck snaps up as I take in the silence around me, the same smothering silence as my bedroom back home, as I think about how I used to lie in the dark, just like this, listening to Natalie’s noises from the other side of the wall.
The scrape of her window on the nights she snuck out, the flipping of pages on the nights she stayed in.
Natalie was reading the diary, too.
I picture her body curled up in a blanket, the very same diary as the one I’ve been reading propped up by two angular knees. Marcia’s quaint cursive working its way through her brain like a fever dream that I know so well. Liam said she had gotten obsessed, that she wanted to know everything there was to know about Mitchell, and my body perks up further as I remember that acronym scrawled in the corner, the handwriting so different than every other page. It was written in silver, just like those gel pens Natalie kept in her desk, and now I realize it was a license plate number. She must have jotted it down when she noticed the California plates, decided to search for it later in her quest to learn more.
I imagine her booting up our family computer, typing in the number before coming across the article about Katherine Ann Prichard. The picture of her standing in front of the camper, the BOLO issued for that exact car.
I lean my head back again, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that, twenty-two years apart, Natalie and I have been doing the exact same thing. We’ve been investigating the same man, coming to all the same sickening conclusions, and despite the fact that I grew up thinking my sister and I were so different, that our appearance was the only true thing that we shared, a wet sob escapes from the depths of my throat as I realize we might be more alike than I thought.
I sigh, my body slumped against the legs of the bench as the warm wet of a tear trails down my cheek. Then I close my eyes, everything about that summer suddenly looking so different. My entire family cast in this strange new light.
All of them had been in on the same, sick secret as I stood on the outside, just trying to peer in.
I think of them now, the irony that my parents are about to lose their second daughter in the exact same place they lost their first… though I know my body won’t be found, either. Whatever happened to Natalie, the exact same thing is about to happen to me. Mitchell will hide me in the same place he hid her, a fifty-acre grave that will stay eternally lost. Chief DiNello will visit my mother again, ease himself down at that very same table as he breaks the news that another daughter is dead. I should have stayed with her. I should havetalkedto her. I should have demanded we both purge ourselves of our secrets instead of leaving her in that house all alone… and then I open my eyes, picturing my mother standing in the living room, that big black cast wrapped around her leg.
I reach down now, dragging my hands across the floor beneath me as I remember the hole in the porch from where she fell through, the boards buckling after years of neglect.
I curl my fingers into a fist, knocking as I hear the faintest echo below. The sound is hollow like there’s some kind of open space beneath and I think about the shed’s proximity to the marsh, the fact that it must be raised up a few feet.
I knock again, realizing, with a little shudder of excitement, that if the shed is elevated like I think it is, then there should be space beneath the floor and the ground. I had to climb a step to get in here. The water out back floods at high tide. It’s probably not much, maybe a foot or two, but if I can rip up the board the leg of this bench is resting on top of, then there should be a gap underneath it for me to slip the chain through.
My heartbeat starts to pick up its pace as my fingers grope around in the dark. All the boards are firmly nailed down but the wood is in such terrible shape, there has to be a crack wide enough for me to get a good grip. Finally, I find a spot that’s warped just enough for me to wedge the tips of my fingers through, and I curl them down, trying to pry the board loose, when I feel my nails rip straight from the skin.
“Fuck,”I mutter, yanking my hands out as I feel the sharp sting of torn flesh. There’s fresh blood dripping down my wrists now, my heartbeat starting to throb in my hands, but I know I have to keep trying.
I know if Liam comes back and I’m still stuck to this bench, there’s no way I’m getting out alive.
I stick my fingers into the gap again, curling them around the same edge as before as my nerves scream in pain—but then I stop, realizing that instead of trying to pry the boards up, maybe I should try knocking themdown. I release my grip, instead flexing my fingers into a fist and slamming it down as hard as I can. It barely does a thing, considering my arms are chained so low… and then I look down at my feet.
My feet that aren’t chained to anything at all.
