Matt Davidson had never imagined how long the drive from Vista to Olympia would take. He had never been a slouch behind the wheel—his summer as a pizza delivery driver had tested that theory to its limits—but his fifth hour of staring out the windshield at I-80 like an old man in front of the TV was about to do him in. His little Mazda still purred along faithfully, not at all protesting that he had not put a single minute of maintenance into the poor thing before hauling it across the country.
Awkward worry bubbled up within him every time he stopped for gas or to rest. What was he thinking, disappearing in the middle of the night to follow a hunch? What could he possibly accomplish by connecting himself to the girl who, by the Walkers’ theory, orchestrated Jason’s disappearance and eventual death? Rachel had sent a letter, along with a bag full of authentic jewels, to Jason’s parents—a fact he only knew because they had really become Matt’s family too since Jason had killed himself.
Guilt ripped through Matt at the thought. Jason really had been different after he had returned. He had drawn inward, and despite Matt’s best efforts, most of his friends had eventually moved on to winnable causes.
He could have tried harder. He should have.
Jason had not been the victim of an enraged hippopotamus. He had not toppled over the edge of the tank by accident. And, most incriminatingly, he was passionate about animals. He knew what a hippopotamus was capable of, even one as lethargic as Hank. He knew what he was doing.
Matt supposed that suicide by hippopotamus was one way to write your name in Vista infamy.
As his eyelids began to ache with exhaustion, Matt pulled off of the highway in Snowville, cursing himself for not quite making it to Idaho. He had hoped that he could knock enough of the drive off today that tomorrow would be a cinch, but he couldn’t bear to stare at one more cursed set of LED high-beams. He stumbled out of the car at the Sinclair, pulling his wallet out of his pocket to pay for gas. Ruffling through his wallet, he spotted Dad’s credit card and sighed defeatedly. As alluring as the thought was, he could not let himself use that card for anything but the most dire emergencies.
Even now. Even though, in the hands of his dad, money would pour out of that card like a goddamn waterfall.
Matt pulled his little blue debit card out of his wallet and pressed it into the machine. It beeped happily, freeing him to fuel up. Even though he felt phantom pains as the gas flowed into his car and drained his hard-earned summer savings dry, he figured it would be better than the alternative.
Dad would be furious. If only he could see that Matt had made the decision for his own good, maybe he’d forgive him, but that was a pipe dream better left for a sunnier day. The fewer funds Dad could use to buy himself alcohol, especially without Matt there to chaperone him, the better. He would eventually find a way, but at least Matt had informed the Walkers, the Ilkmans and the liquor store manager of his situation.
Matt drove sleepily over to the Flying J down the street, bought himself a sad, squashed chicken sandwich and slumped into the passenger seat of his car. Neither the sandwich nor his turbid thoughts, as nobly as they tried, possessed the power to keep him awake.
? ? ?
The next day, after a terrible breakfast, six hours on the road, an even worse lunch and another six hours on the road, Matt pulled over in a little park on the side of a quiet suburban street. Rachel had instructed him to park out of sight of her house—something about her parents, Matt presumed—and told him he was free to walk around the left side of the house at any point after nine p.m.. Though the night was frigid, Matt did not bother to extract his sweater from the back of his car. He figured that anyone with a house as big as Rachel’s would have a killer central heating system.
Trying to avoid being seen from the few lit windows in Rachel’s house, Matt eased open the gate to the side yard and snuck around the gigantic building with as much stealth as he could muster. The gravel path inevitably crunched underfoot, but he figured it would be preferable to silently stomping all over Rachel’s vegetable garden. It took him a moment to find the back door—they really should have turned on a light back here—but when he eventually found it, he pressed his back against it and sent Rachel their agreed-upon text.
Matt laughed internally—the signal was a link to a song that Jason had shown him when they were eleven. It was so callously inappropriate, especially for children their age, that he could think of no better way to start a potentially-disastrous late-night intrigue with a supposed friend of Jason’s. That was, so long as Rachel’s parents didn’t pick up her phone before she did. Matt shivered slightly at the thought.
Without any sound to warn him, the door latch clicked quietly, and the door swung open. Soft orange light spilled from the entryway, throwing its shadow across Rachel’s face without obscuring her identity. She was taller than he had imagined—nearly as tall as he was—and she carried herself with an unspoken confidence that almost made Matt shrink back a step. He opened his mouth to greet her, but the words stuck in his throat.
How would one even speak to someone connected to the death of his best friend?
“Get inside,” Rachel whispered. “Before my parents feel the draft.”
Matt nodded tightly and strode inside, feeling a slight rush of cold air as Rachel pulled the door shut behind him. The house, as huge as it was, felt strangely like a log cabin—almost everything was finished in hardwood. The entryway opened to a split-level staircase separating a cozy, carpeted living room from an unlit basement.
“Shoes on or off?” Matt whispered, trying to be respectful.
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Rachel scoffed. “Thirteen hundred miles of driving, and that’s your opener?”
Matt felt blood rushing to his cheeks. “Off, then?”
Rachel looked exasperated. “That’s assuming I let you into my house.”
“I quit my job for this trip,” Matt protested, prying his shoes off with his feet in a vain effort to keep her from noticing. “You could at least hear me out.”
Rachel exhaled sharply, as if to say you’re in no position to ask that of me. She inclined her head towards the living room, then darted up the stairs without making a single sound. Matt followed, though not without trepidation nor without sound. The hardwood stairs looked new enough, but they still creaked dully under his socked feet, the damned things. Rachel glanced furtively around her, then spun to her right and disappeared down a hallway, leading Matt into a smaller staircase, across a small landing and eventually to a cheerfully painted room with a slanted roof and two dormer-style windows.
“Don’t say a word about the paint job,” Rachel muttered. “Thirteen-year-old me had no taste.”
Matt didn’t quite have the stomach to say that he actually quite liked the room, from its pink-and-white color pallet to the pole-vaulting posters and pictures adorning the walls. The only space not covered in art was her desk, though two picture frames lay facedown at either side of her sleek silver laptop.
“I’d have forgiven myself for forgetting that you drove all this way to talk to me,” Rachel said, sliding into her desk chair in a way that told Matt that he was not welcome to sit anywhere else.
“Yeah. Sorry,” Matt sighed, knowing full well that an apology would get him nowhere. “Not my strongest suit.”
Rachel looked for a second like she was about to say something unbearably cutting, but a strange softness battled onto her face. “Tell me what you know.”
Matt nodded, biting his lip and evaluating his chances at wording his speech properly on his first try. They were not good.
“Jason got eaten by Hank,” Matt said, his words rushed. “The hippo, I mean. There’s a zoo in Vista Point with-”
“He got eaten,” Rachel summarized impatiently. “Continue.”
“Yeah. We all thought he was dead. For years. Then, out of nowhere, your package shows up. Jason’s handwriting was never good, but dear God. His parents could hardly-”
“You saw the letter?” Rachel interrupted, leaning forward in sudden interest.
Matt’s words caught in his throat, taken aback by Rachel’s vehemence. “Y-yeah. Was I not supposed to?”
Rachel took a deep breath, emotions warring on her face. Matt tried unsuccessfully to hide the triumph of finally being allowed to finish a sentence.
“You have a golden opportunity to go home right now,” Rachel whispered. Matt waited for her to finish her thought, but she had evidently said all she wanted to.
“I didn’t believe the letter,” Matt corrected hastily. “I came because I was worried about you.”
“About me?” Rachel replied incredulously. “Hard to imagine anywhere I’d be much safer.”
Matt took note of the fact that she had immediately assumed her danger would appear from elsewhere. “Yeah. About you. You and Jason disappeared at the same time, and whatever happened to him while he was gone eventually led him to kill himself.. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else, much less-”
Matt cut himself off on his own terms this time, seeing Rachel’s face morph from shock, to outrage, and finally to fear.
“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re too trusting?” Rachel sighed.
Matt drew back a step, not at all comforted by the direction this conversation was taking. “You would be too in my shoes.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “You quit your job and drove halfway across the country to keep a girl from killing herself. It’s been years, Matt. I don’t think I look suicidal. You’d be a fool for not suspecting me of anything.”
Matt paused to think. He had not considered this course of events. So far, Rachel did seem the kind of type to drive someone to madness.
“What’s stopping me from going to the police right now?” Matt demanded, more petulantly than he had hoped.
“Nothing,” Rachel replied. “Except that I’d be arrested. Detained, maybe. I’d be back in the news for all the wrong reasons. People would ask unanswerable questions. I’d be the only suspect in a case where I’d be forced to lie. It would ruin my life, and maybe then I’d actually do what you came here to prevent.”
Matt suddenly agreed that it would be a terrible idea. “Okay. Then what do I do?”
Rachel sagged. “Either you leave now before anyone sees us, or I tell you the truth.”
“And what would the truth do to me?” Matt inquired.
A scoff escaped Rachel, one that probably masked a much more telling expression. “Seems you’ve already made up your mind.”
A light creak sounded from downstairs, close enough that Matt reflexively launched himself across the floor and under Rachel’s bed. He made a colossal noise in doing so, but he figured that Rachel could cover for him unless her parents were intensely inquisitive. After a long, tense moment of silence, Rachel ducked her head down to floor level to meet Matt’s gaze.
“Self-preservation is a lost art in this world,” she whispered with a hint of disdain. “The closet would have been the superior choice.”
“Haven’t played hide-and-seek since I was a kid,” Matt muttered absently.
Rachel let out a waterfall of a sigh. “Are you ever actually going to pry the truth out of me, or shall I just sit here and parrot unearned information all night?”
Matt did not say that he would much rather that she take the reins of the conversation. “Is anything in the letter actually true?”
Rachel flicked her head sideways, and after a moment, Matt realized that it was an invitation to come out from under the bed. He did so in an embarrassingly awkward sliding maneuver, then stood up and almost sat down on the bed before Rachel met his gaze with a fervent warning burning in her eyes.
Still no seat, then.
“Do you have it?” Rachel hissed.
Matt nodded. “It’s in the car.”
Rachel’s face broadened in an expression of exasperation so obvious it could probably have been seen from space. “You left it in the car?”
“It’s locked,” Matt replied defensively, noticing the tinge of urgency in her voice. Whether or not the letter held any truth, he may have done well to have treated it with more respect.
“Get it now,” Rachel urged. “Don’t let anyone see it.”
Matt nodded and turned to the door, then paused. “You’ll tell me the truth once I come back?”
Rachel nodded impatiently, then shooed him away. “Go!”
And off he went.
