Chapter 24

24

We were too wet and cold to stay outside any longer, and our eyes were burned with patterns of dancing flame, so we returned to the playhouse. When we couldn't reach anyone off island to report the fire, we scattered to our rooms. Riki had no room, so I brought her with me.

"Here," I said, shoving an unused towel at her. I dried myself with a pair of dirty sweatpants sitting on a chair. My teeth were chattering from cold, from shock. I may or may not have still been under the influence. It was hard to tell. I dug into my drawers and found two pairs of pajama bottoms. I threw one to her, along with a shirt. I felt like we might never be warm again. I climbed into my bed and huddled. She stood, rubbing her arms.

"Get in," I said, holding up the blanket. This was not a romantic gesture—it was purely an instinctual one. Riki didn't hesitate. She slid in next to me. I'd never been in a bed, under a blanket, with a girl before, and these were not the circumstances I'd expected for my first time. I was startled when Riki threw her arms around me in a tight embrace. She was smaller than me, and I wrapped around her. Together, we pooled our warmth into the tiny space between our stomachs.

"We're alive," she said. Her breath was warm on my face.

"I think so."

"I thought we were going to die. I really, really thought we were going to die."

"We didn't."

We reeked of wet smoke and we were streaked with soot. She buried her face against my shoulder and held tighter. I pulled her closer, and we brought each other back, breath by breath.

"Someone tried to kill us. Someone killed Chris and Dr. Henson."

"I know."

"But no one is going to believe all that. They're going to think I caused the fire, because I'm the one with the fire, and that I'm making things up to get out of trouble."

I wondered how much I cared. I was holding Riki. We had this little space under the blanket, humid from our wet clothes and our breath. She pressed her fingertips into the palm of my hand, pulsing them gently.

"I have no fucking idea who did this," she said softly, "but when I find out, I'm going to kill them."

She touched my cheek. I closed my eyes, letting the world swirl away. Then I felt the spring of the bed and saw that she had slipped out and was pacing the floor next to it.

"They say if there's no body," she said, "there's no crime. Up until this point, everyone thought Dr. Henson drowned. But now it looks like things didn't happen that way—just that someone wanted us to think that by putting the paddleboard in the water. Dr. Henson was up on that balcony on the morning she vanished. We know that from the yoga mat. You found her tooth under the balcony, which seems like a pretty strong clue that she landed there. Which means there is a body on the island. So we find the body."

"That body is gone," I said. "It's got to be in the river."

"Does it? When would whoever killed her be able to put her in the river? It was daylight when she was killed, probably. How could you risk rolling a dead body down the lawn in daylight? And it would have been found—they searched the shoreline."

"She's probably out farther."

"How? You'd need to get to the Jet Ski to do that. And think about this—falling from that balcony onto the rocks—that's going to be messy . There's going to be a lot of blood. The body is going to be in bad condition. But there was no blood on there that morning."

"It rained," I said.

"A lot of blood," she repeated. "Hard to clean off jagged rocks. And that wasn't rain like this. You'd need a hose, but you'd need to really be thorough. You'd need a way to contain the situation."

I mused on this for a moment. The answer became obvious.

"When we were gathering the cushions," I said. "There was a tarp missing."

Riki's head jerked up.

"One of those big blue ones? What if... you put that over the spot before she fell. You push her. She lands on the tarp. It's still a mess, but you could wrap her up pretty quickly and pull her out of sight. And say, in the process, a tooth rolls or flies off into the rocks, you wouldn't see it and you might not catch it if you went back and looked. So she's in a tarp."

"Like a burrito," I said. "A murder burrito."

(I was getting kind of hungry. I blame this on the edible.)

"Sure," Riki said. "She's a murder burrito. The body is heavy. It's big. Now what? Drag it all the way to the boathouse, throw this murder burrito on the back of the Jet Ski and go out on the open water and very publicly dump her? There was no time for any of that. The cops were around too much at the start for anyone to go out and dump her, then the storm came in. And again, it would be hard to do on a Jet Ski. No, the easiest and safest thing would be to keep her here until the coast was clear, until you could get the boat, go out far."

"We searched the house," I said. "We searched the grounds."

"It's a big house," she said.

"Yeah, but... she told us, my first night at dinner. Her grandfather was a bootlegger, and there's some crawlspace somewhere."

"Yeah, but where? I've probably read more about this house than anyone, and I have no idea where that is."

"It sounds like Dr. Henson heard it from her grandfather," I said. "It's just as possible other families talk about it. It was concealed but not secret. She said it was dank. Somewhere the family didn't go. What is dank ? Sounds... Swedish. German. Dank. Is that dark?"

"Dark, maybe gross?"

Dark. Gross. Someplace the family didn't go.

"That's the basement," I said.

"It's a big basement, and we searched it. And we can't look again because the house is on fire."

"It's a good idea to burn down a house if you'd hid a body in it. Especially if you have someone nearby who already set a fire once this summer who you can blame it on."

"Jesus." Riki went to the window and opened it a little, letting in a spray of rain and wind and a trail of smoke. I was overwhelmed by the smell of petrichor. The ground after the rain, mixed with fire.

The mix of petrichor and fire smoke lifted my senses again. A smell could completely hijack my brain, take me somewhere else.

"Oh my god," I said. "Oh no. Oh god."

"What?"

"Don't bodies smell?"

"I think so," she said.

I pushed back the blanket and got to my feet. I found I was a little dizzy, but not so much that I couldn't stand.

"That smell coming from near where the bathrooms are?" I said. "The smell that started right after she vanished?"

"Shit," she said.

"Or, not shit," I said. "That's not sewage. It's her . We're going to have to convince the police to dig through a million tons of rubble or climb under the unstable wreckage of a burned-up mansion to see why our bathroom smelled so bad. That's not going to happen."

I knew what I was going to do, and it wasn't the edible—it was the fact that if I didn't do this, I would be the one with the fire forever, and I would know there was a dead woman under a house in the Thousand Islands.

"I'm going," I said. "I'll be fast. You stay here in case I don't come back."

"There is no way in hell," she said, stepping toward me, "that I am letting you do this alone."

"We make bad plans," I said.

"Yeah, well, we live in weird times."

"We're doing this?" I asked.

"We have to."

I grabbed the tube of Midnight Rose. If I didn't come back, I was going out with Akilah's gift. And if I did come back, I needed to keep this safe. I opened the door, and we walked together to the passage that went back to Morning House.

The smoke had not gotten into the tunnel passage. We were far enough from the fire, and the fire door on the house end did its job. Once we opened it, though, the smell was strong. It wasn't here yet, but it was hot, the air thick. Above us, the house sang a strange song—creaking and shrieking as the fire consumed it.

"Fast," Riki said. "Fast, go... go."

We pointed our flashlight forward and ran to the bathrooms. I let my nose lead me, as it had led me into this mess to begin with. I closed my eyes and tried to push the approaching smell of smoke out of my mind.

There it was—that meaty, putrid odor.

"Somewhere around here," I said.

We tapped and smacked the walls around the bathrooms, trying to work out where there might be a walled-off area. There were several small open spaces where tools and supplies were kept. These were creepy, spidery places in the corner of the basement that I had never examined closely.

Inside one of these nooks, I realized the interior walls were shorter than the ones in the other compartments. This was the nook where the metal racks of cleaning supplies and toilet paper were kept. I shook the rack to test its weight. It moved easily. Riki and I grabbed opposite sides of the rack and pulled it away from the wall.

The wall behind was a different sort of brick. I put my face up to the corner where it should have, in theory, met the outside wall of the building. I felt it on my lips first—a slight movement of air. Then I got a noseful of the stench. I saw it last—a space, millimeters thick, between the two walls.

"Here," I said. "Right here..."

"Marlowe!"

Her voice had taken on a new tone. I turned to look at her, then to look behind us. Tom was standing at the opening of the nook, holding up a sledgehammer.