Chapter Twenty

I continue to stare at my phone, studying the picture of a picture. I zoom in on my mother. A long-ago version of the woman she is now. Her hair is the chestnut brown I remember from my youth, and her face is narrower, the skin tighter.

Looking at it, I'm hit with a jarring thought: I'm older now than my mother was when that photo was taken.

Even more jarring is the fact that she never told me she worked at the Hawthorne Institute the summer Billy vanished. Knowing it now changes everything I've thought about that place, about that time, about her. Did she know what went on there? Was she aware that Billy had been there? That I had been there? Most of all, I wonder if there are other things she hasn't told me about that summer.

Yet I'm also mad at myself. I'm her son. I should have known where she worked. The fact that ten-year-old me was so self-centered that I couldn't be bothered to find out fills me with so much shame it brings heat to my cheeks. They remain red as I steady myself with a deep breath and FaceTime my mother.

"Hi, honey!" she says when she answers, bobbling the phone enough for me to see she's working on a jigsaw puzzle.

"Is Dad there, too? I need to talk to both of you."

My mother summons my father into the frame, and the two of them sit shoulder to shoulder, like they've done all my life. The familiar sight brings with it years of memories, to the point where I see them not just as they appear now, but as they did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. They are simultaneously young and old, an idea that carries over to myself. I feel both childlike and utterly ancient.

"They found Billy's remains," I announce, still uncertain if I'm allowed to be telling them and beyond caring if I'm not. "Two miles from our house. He was murdered."

A moment passes in which my parents sit as if spellbound while memories of that time come at them from all sides. I know because I felt the same thing. The past crashing like a wave into the present.

"That poor, poor boy," my mother eventually says.

Nodding in agreement, my father says, "Does his family know?"

I tell them the same answer I was given. That Mary Ellen Barringer's doctors were told, which isn't quite the same as telling her, and that Billy's brother currently can't be located. Then I utter the words I've been dreading to say.

"We need to talk about that night."

Until now, I never once considered my parents suspects. They had no reason to hurt Billy. They loved Billy. Most of all, they love me, and I know they would never purposefully do anything to cause me pain. But suspicion has a way of breaking through even the strongest barriers. It slips through the cracks, seeping in drip by drip. That's what finding out my mother worked at the Hawthorne Institute has done to me: let in enough doubt that I can no longer avoid it.

"Of course, sport," my father says, his voice earnest, as if he not only knows what's coming but expected it decades ago.

That doesn't make what I'm about to do any easier. There's a dull thud at my temples. A headache coming on. I try to ward it off by tilting my head back and pinching the bridge of my nose.

"I'm going to ask you this only once. So please be honest with me." I pause, tremulous, fighting the urge to hang up. The very last thing I want to do right now is pose this particular question to my parents. A willfully ignorant part of me thinks I'm better off not knowing. I've gone thirty years without answers. What's another thirty more?

But I also think I've earned the right to ask. I was there when it happened. In that tent, inches from Billy. I deserve if not answers, then at least the opportunity to seek them out.

"Did either of you do something to Billy that night?"

I huff after saying it. A small, guilt-ridden exhalation riding the words like a punctuation mark. It's made even more noticeable by my parents' silence, which lasts seconds but feels like hours.

"Ethan," my mother says, the disappointment reverberating through those two terse syllables making me feel like the shittiest son in the world. "How could you ask such a thing?"

"It's okay, Joyce," my father says.

"It's not okay."

"He's naturally curious. He's not accusing us of anything."

My mother sniffs. "It certainly feels that way."

"It doesn't mean I think you killed Billy," I say. "It just means I need to hear you say that you didn't."

"I understand, sport," my father says, his voice patient and his expression calm. "We both do. And I swear to you that neither your mother nor myself had anything to do with what happened to Billy."

I exhale, releasing the breath I hadn't known I was holding in.

I believe him.

Truly and deeply.

"Thank you," I say, on the verge of tears for reasons I can't quite fathom. Maybe it's relief. Or guilt. Or some combination thereof. Or maybe it's simply because seeing my parents in a different home in a different state makes me miss them. I lower the phone so they can't see me wipe away the tears that are threatening to fall. When I raise it again, I'm all business, ready to tackle why I called them in the first place.

"There's a reason I had to ask. Billy's remains were found on the grounds of the Hawthorne Institute." I pause to register my mother's look of surprise. "I know you worked there for part of that summer. What went on at that place?"

"I was just a secretary." My mother looks to my father, who gives a nod, urging her to continue. "But one night, I saw something. Something I wasn't supposed to see. So they fired me."

I remember when she lost her job because it was clear how much it upset her. I can still recall, with vivid clarity, the moment I walked into the kitchen to find her literally crying on Ashley's shoulder.

There is, of course, another reason it stands out in my mind.

That was the day Billy was taken.

"Mom, what did you see?"

My mother shakes her head. "I can't tell you. He swore me to secrecy. He made me sign something promising I wouldn't tell anyone. Not even your father. He said I'd be sued if I did."

Another memory slithers into my thoughts. Something the man in the suit said as we fled the mausoleum. Something intended not for the rest of us but solely for Billy.

I told you yesterday to stay away.

The ever-increasing ticking in my heart switches from fear to an unwieldy combo of dread and excitement. Billy was on the institute grounds the same day my mother saw something so sinister they fired her. Is it possible Billy saw something similar? Did someone at the Hawthorne Institute go to even greater lengths to silence him?

"This is important, Mom," I say. "I need you to tell me what happened."

There's an extended moment of silence as my mother considers it. Her face gets distorted, her mouth twisting as if she's physically trying to keep words from coming out of it. She looks to my father for reassurance, which he offers without hesitation. Seeing it brings a punch of sadness that I once had a relationship as loving as theirs. Now it's gone.

"A ritual," she eventually says.

I lean forward, peering into the phone. "What kind of ritual?"

"I don't know, Ethan. But it was terrifying."

The rest of the story rushes forth like water from a broken dam. For twenty unbroken minutes my mother talks, telling me about her job, her coworker Margie, the strange place that was the Hawthorne Institute.

"I was just so happy to be working that I didn't really stop to think how weird it all was," my mother says at one point. "But looking back on it now, it was like something out of The Twilight Zone."

After mentioning buying my father a watch for his birthday and leaving it in her desk, necessitating a nighttime trip to the office, my mother gets to the heart of the story. "The incident," she calls it, using air quotes to express its importance.

Without a key to the front door of the Hawthorne Institute, she went to the rear of the mansion, hoping to find an unlocked back door. Instead, she found the area behind the mansion aglow with firelight.

"Torches," my mother says. "They were placed in a large circle on the grass behind the mansion."

She tells us that inside the circle were Ezra Hawthorne and several other men, all dressed in black robes. They, too, were arranged in a circle, surrounding a small fire and chanting in a language she couldn't place.

"Latin?" I say.

My mother shakes her head. "No. Something different. It sounded, I don't know, almost primal. But that wasn't the worst part. Ezra Hawthorne held what appeared to be a copper plate. There was something on it."

"What?"

"I shouldn't tell you. I'll get in trouble."

"I'm not going to tell anyone. I swear. Now, please, what was on the plate?"

My mother pauses a bit longer before forcing out the words. "A heart."

I stare at my parents, suddenly woozy, their faces on my phone's screen blurring in and out of focus. While I don't know what I was expecting, it certainly wasn't that.

"I couldn't tell from what," my mother continues. "Human or animal, I don't know. It was slick with blood, like it had just been removed. Mr. Hawthorne picked it up with his bare hands and lifted it over the fire."

"Then what did he do?"

My mother tells me she doesn't know, because she was already trying to run away, only to come face-to-face with her boss. Although he wasn't taking part in the ritual, it was clear he knew it was going on, especially once he took my mother inside to his office and fired her.

"He made me sign something forbidding me from talking about it with anyone," she says. "An NDA. Legally binding. I was told that if word got out that I talked, Mr. Hawthorne would sue me. I know, I know. Saying you're going to sue someone is usually an empty threat. But I knew this was serious, especially after what I saw. A man like Ezra Hawthorne would go to extreme lengths to make sure that stayed a secret."

"Extreme," I say, the word a bombshell in my thoughts, obliterating them until a new one emerges.

All this time, I'd harbored a vague theory that someone associated with the Hawthorne Institute abducted and killed Billy because of something he'd witnessed after I and the others abandoned him at the mausoleum.

But what if that wasn't the case?

What if it had nothing to do with what Billy potentially saw and everything to do with what my mother actually did see? Yes, the Hawthorne Institute made her sign an NDA and threatened to sue if she talked. But what if they thought that wasn't enough? How far would they go to ensure her silence?

That brings forth another, far more frightening theory.

Maybe Billy wasn't the intended target.

Maybe I was.

The idea sends me slumping against the sofa, my mind reeling. I think about Billy and me tucked into our individual sleeping bags and how indistinguishable we must have looked in the darkness. I picture a person in a black suit—maybe Ezra Hawthorne, maybe one of his followers—still clutching the knife used to slash the tent, blindly grabbing Billy while thinking it was me. I imagine him carrying Billy through the woods and not realizing his mistake until they reached a car parked on the access road halfway between here and the institute.

I force myself not to think about what likely happened after that.

"Mom, other than the NDA and mentioning a lawsuit, were you threatened in any way?"

"No," my mother says. "Frankly, that was enough. I could tell that my boss meant every word."

I furrow my brow. "You keep mentioning this guy. What did he do there?"

"He was Ezra Hawthorne's right-hand man. The institute was named for Mr. Hawthorne, but everyone knew that my boss was the one who really ran the place."

Which makes her boss the person most invested in making sure everything that went on there remained a secret. If the institute did have something to do with Billy's murder, he would know about it. In fact, it's likely he's the one who orchestrated it.

"Mom," I say. "I need you to tell me. Who was your boss?"