“STAY IN THE CAR,” Seth says. “Lock the doors.”
He means well. Caleb isn’t who we thought he was, and he’s certainly been lying to me. But at the same time, I don’t think he’s dangerous. In my heart, I don’t believe he killed Dawn. I don’t think he’s capable of it. Even with all the lies, I can tell he’s not the sort of person who would do something like that.
And even if he is, he’s not going to kill me right in front of Seth, right on the street. If nothing else, he’s smarter than that. He’s certainly not impulsive. Whatever he’s done was planned over months—maybe years.
So I unlock the car doors and get out, despite Seth’s protests. Caleb is walking toward me but there’s nothing threatening about him. He doesn’t have a weapon. This is going to be okay. I need to know what’s going on. I need the truth.
“Hey, asshole!” Seth yells. He’s getting out of the car just behind me. “You need to stay away from Natalie.”
Caleb is about three feet away from me now. He looks up at Seth, shakes his head, and looks back down at me. I notice now that his brows are knitted together. “Natalie,” he says in a shaky voice. “We need to talk.”
“Damn straight,” I say. “You’ve been lying to me all along. You planted that hair and blood in my car, didn’t you?”
Caleb looks taken aback. He didn’t expect me to say that. He stands there for a moment, not sure how to respond.
“Well?” I prompt him.
“Fine.” His voice is gruff. “I did it. I put the hair and blood in your trunk. Okay?”
I stare at him, stunned he admitted it. Even though I had suspected it, I can’t believe he would really do it. And why?
Seth jogs over, joining me next to Caleb. “You killed her, didn’t you?
You killed Dawn, you bastard.”
Caleb’s face turns bright red. “No. No, of course not. I would never do that. I would never hurt her. She…”
He stops himself mid-sentence.
“She what?” I press him. “What is it?”
He shakes his head. “I… nothing. I can’t…”
“Caleb, tell me what’s going on here.” A vein throbs in my temple. “I deserve an explanation.”
Caleb looks at me for what feels like an hour, but it’s probably more like a few seconds. He lets out a long breath. “Dawn isn’t dead.”
“How do you know that?” Seth shoots back.
Caleb holds up his hands. “It… it’s a long story. But she’s not dead, okay? I promise.”
“Then where is she?” I ask.
“I…” He rakes a shaking hand through his hair. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. I need your help.”
“No chance.” Seth glares at Caleb through the darkness. “You put Natalie through the wringer. She was in jail because of you. Why did you do this to her? What the hell is the matter with you?”
Caleb’s Adam’s apple bobs. “Listen, there’s no time. Dawn—” “Bullshit. You need to tell us right now why you did this. Otherwise,
we’re calling the police on you.”
Caleb takes a step back. “No, please…”
Seth opens his mouth to say something else, but I hold up my hand to silence him. This isn’t about him. This is about me and Caleb. I need the truth.
“Caleb,” I say, “I’m just trying to understand why you did this. I need to know. I don’t think I deserve to be treated this way.”
I watch as his chest rises and falls, considering my statement. “I’ve watched you these last few months,” he says. “Organizing your little 5K. Getting on all the podcasts and local news stations. Talking about how you
were raising money for your good friend Amelia… But she wasn’t your friend, was she?”
There’s venom in his voice now. I have a sinking feeling in my chest. “Caleb…”
“I’ll tell you who she was,” he spits at me. “She was my sister. And she was Dawn’s best friend. Not that you ever even thought of her as a person.”
My legs feel like Jell-O. I’m scared if I don’t grab onto something, I’m going to fall flat on my face. “Amelia was…”
“My sister is dead because of you!” He is shouting loud enough for the neighbors to hear, but he’s beyond caring. “And you just moved on. Like she meant nothing to you. Like she was nothing. Worse—you’re using her to promote yourself. How could you? Are you really that heartless?”
I dig my thumbnail into my palm. “I’m trying to raise money for charity.”
“Yeah, whatever. You’re just doing it because you like the attention. It helps promote the company. I get it. You used her back then, and you’re using her now.”
Caleb’s eyes are burning with hatred. He hates me. He really and truly hates me. How could he have kissed me and joked around with me and taken me to dinner when he hated me this much?
“I was seventeen years old,” I manage. “Yes, I was awful to Amelia. But I was a kid.” I look over at Seth, who appears thoroughly confused. “She was a girl I knew in high school. I was mean to her. I know I was…”
“Mean to her!” Caleb bursts out. “You drove her to slit her wrists! My baby sister is dead because of you!”
I can’t believe Caleb is Amelia’s brother. I didn’t even know she had a brother. They have different last names. Hers was Hodge. It’s hard to forget what happened that year. Things just got out of control. I’m not going to deny any part of that.
I don’t know why we were so mean to Amelia, in retrospect. I guess because she was different. And because we could. When you’re seventeen and you’re pretty and popular, it makes you feel good to pick on somebody weaker than you are. It makes you feel powerful.
“What do you want me to do, Caleb?” I say. “What can I do?”
“I want you to rot in prison for the rest of your life,” he hisses at me. “Like my little sister is rotting in the ground.”
His eyes bore into me, smoldering with an anger that he will never be able to let go of. He can never forgive me for this. He will never stop believing that I should be punished for the rest of my life. There’s nothing I can say or do to make this right.
“So why are you here, Caleb?” I finally say. “To tell me how much you hate me?”
My question seems to take some of the fight out of him. “Look,” he says, “I hate you for what you did, but you need to know that this whole thing—Dawn planned the whole thing out. It was her idea. And she’s taking it too far, because… well, you know Dawn. That’s how she is.”
Clearly, he knows Dawn very well. Much better than I could have imagined.
“Damn straight she’s taking it too far,” Seth chimes in. “You sent an innocent person to jail.”
Caleb shoots him a withering look. “Right, but she doesn’t think the charges will stick if there isn’t a dead body. Her dead body—not whoever they found in the woods. She kept talking about that. And… now I don’t… I don’t know where she is. She used my phone to call for a Lyft back to the south shore, and now I don’t know where she went. She called me from a phone somewhere and left this disjointed message. She was giving me all these instructions for how to take care of her turtle and it sounded like… like she was going to…”
I gawk at him. “What are you saying?”
His face crumbles. “I’m pretty sure she’s planning to kill herself. To make sure there’s a dead body.”
I clutch my chest. “Oh my God.”
Caleb is crying now. He buries his face in his palms, his shoulders shaking. It’s at that moment I realize something shocking. Caleb loves Dawn. He truly loves her. When he was with me, it was all an act, but he’s not acting now. He’s terrified of losing her.
He pulls his hands away from his face, and his eyes are red and puffy. “Natalie,” he croaks. “You’ve got to help me find her. I’ve been driving around for hours, and I don’t know where she is. Please. You owe me this. You owe her.”
“How could we possibly find her?” I say.
“It’s impossible,” Seth says. “We’ve got to call the police.”
“No.” Caleb’s voice is unwavering, despite his puffy face. “You can’t do that to her. Do you know how much trouble she’ll be in?”
“As much trouble as Natalie was in this week?” Seth retorts.
“Seth, stop.” I raise my eyes to look at Caleb. “Do you have any idea where she could be?”
Caleb looks down at his watch. “If I had to guess, I’d say she has been hiding out near one of the beaches. It’s high tide tonight.” He grimaces. “She probably figures if she drowns herself, she won’t be found for long enough that they won’t be able to place the exact time of death.”
It’s the same thought I had while I was sitting in jail. Wait for high tide, throw myself in the ocean.
“We can find her,” I say. Too bad there are about a million beaches around here, depending on how far she went. What if she’s all the way in Cape Cod? “We need to split up. How far do you think she could’ve gone from here?”
“She took all the cash in my wallet,” Caleb says. “But there wasn’t a lot.
Maybe a hundred bucks. So she couldn’t have gotten very far.”
“We’re going to find her,” I say with more authority than I feel. “We’ll stop her before she does anything stupid.”
I hope I’m right. I need to stop Dawn from killing herself. I need to make this right.
