She lay down on warm boards over the flume and folded her hands behind her head. There were a few clouds, harmless white puffy things in funny shapes. An elephant, a face with a big nose, one looked like a penis. She started thinking about Billy Phillips again. Something dug away at the edge of her memory. She chewed on the end of her braid as she tried to think. It was important, whatever it was.
The evening of the day Billy Phillips died, Liz Shepherd tried to tell her parents what had happened. Twice she went into the study where her parents worked after dinner. She had practiced her speech, not wanting to waste their time. A bad accident had happened. Hannah got scared. Billy Phillips did something nasty . . . Her father read in his Eames chair and her mother sat at the desk correcting papers.
“Yes, Liz?” She liked the way her father looked at her over the top of his glasses with his eyebrows raised a little. Long after he was gone, she remembered that look and missed him.
Her mother asked, “Are you ready for bed?”
“Can I talk to you? Both?”
Her father’s gray eyes smiled, but her mother said, “Can’t it wait, Liz? I’m going to be up late as it is.”
The incident at Bluegang lived in her, squirming and twisting and knotting her insides, invading her lungs so she could hardly breathe. She should have insisted. Liz knew it then and she knew it later, but at the time she could not override her mother’s chilliness.
“Tomorrow,” her father said, still smiling. “We have an appointment for a conversation. You and I.”
“At breakfast, Liz,” her mother said. And then, “Close the door after you, dear.”
That night her mattress had lumps and ridges she had never felt before and the fluff in her pillow bunched up and got hard. Her stomach cramped but three trips to the toilet didn’t help. She heard the screams and the crows and imagined Billy Phillips struggling to climb up out of the canyon. But he was dead, wasn’t he? She could not recall if his eyes had been open or closed, and the more she thought and worried the more likely it seemed that he wasn’t dead at all. There had been a mirror in her pack. She should have gone down and held it in front of his mouth.
On the floor below her turret room she heard her mother and father turn out the lights and close their bedroom door. For a while the sounds of something classical—her parents never listened to music with words—drifted up from below. Usually the sound of that peaceful, boring music put Liz to sleep but not this night. This night she was wide-awake as a coyote prowling backyards in the moonlight, hunting cats. She imagined a coyote sniffing around Billy Phillips’s comatose body. Maybe he’d had candy in his pocket and the sugary smell would make the wild dog burrow. She imagined Billy Phillips teetering on the brink of consciousness, trying to breathe, trying to make a sound and the dog shoving at him with its wet nose and its sharp teeth and claws.
Liz sat up and reached for the clock on her bedside table: 11:45. Not so late really. Sometimes she stayed awake until midnight reading and listening to Sepia Serenade. But she didn’t want to listen or read tonight. She could not get the image of the hungry coyote out of her head and the more she thought, the more sure she was that Billy Phillips was still alive, alive and in pain and struggling helplessly.
She should have checked to see if he was breathing. She should have stood up to Jeanne. She should have insisted that they get help. She should have made her parents listen to her.
She pulled her shorts on over the bottoms of her baby doll pajamas and dragged a shirt out of the pile of dirty clothes on the floor of her closet. She carried her sandals in her hand as she crept down the ladder steps from her room to the second floor of the house. The hall floor creaked under her feet but her parents were sound sleepers and it didn’t matter even if they woke up. They’d think she was going to the bathroom again.
Years later she would think about how she ran up Casabella Road that night, about how strong and healthy she had been at twelve and how she had taken stamina and energy for granted. She would remember the security of those times. The confidence. When had rape and abduction and molest entered her consciousness as more than words? They certainly weren’t there when she was twelve, not as real events that happened to girls like her.
At the vacant lot, she left the road and sped across the field to the hill down to Bluegang making a wide detour around the spooky chicken coop. She’d come this way a hundred times. She might have been able to find the path through the wildwood by starlight alone but tonight there was a half moon and that was more than enough light for her to see the break in the oaks, the worn away dusty path down the hill. Moonlight came through the canopy in dapples, like stepping-stones. When she was halfway down the hill she saw someone standing in moonlight by the rocks. She froze where she was and squinted. After a second she relaxed.
“Hannah?”
The figure looked up.
“Jeez-Louise, you scared me. What are you doing here?” Liz slipped down the hill sideways and fast, filling her sandals with dirt and throwing up dusty clouds. She skirted the saddle and roots of the great oak and half-slid down to the rocks. She got as close as four feet from Billy Phillips’s body and stopped. He lay as they had left him hours before. On his pale flaccid chest his nipples stood erect, frozen forever in a moment of terror. One arm flopped at his side; the other stretched out, palm up.
“He’s dead,” Hannah said.
His eyes were open.
“My panties—”
Liz had forgotten all about them.
“They have my name on them.”
Liz stared at the body on the rocks.
“They should be in his pants pocket.”
“You looked?”
Hannah nodded.
“You touched him?”
“His pocket.”
“And they aren’t there?”
Hannah shook her head. In the moonlight the shadows made her face look long and tired, as if drawn in chalk and charcoal.
Liz thought a moment.
“You probably got confused.”
“Where are they then?”
Liz knew where this conversation was going.
“You think they’re under him?”
“Maybe,” Liz said.
Hannah folded her arms across her chest and shoved her hands into her armpits. After a moment she said, “I can’t turn him over.” She looked at Liz. “Will you do it?”
“Me?” Her stomach rolled.
“But what if they’re under there?”
“You said you saw him put them in his pocket.”
“Yeah, and they’re not there now. I told you that.” She stared at Liz. “Someone took ’em.”
“Why?” It was an easier question than who?
“You think someone watched? Saw what happened?” Hannah looked back up the dark hillside.
Liz looked up too. She thought about Hilltop School. The boys there often broke school rules and sneaked down to Bluegang to swim and smoke and catch crawdads. For a while they kept a secret clubhouse in a cave farther up. It was possible one of them had watched Hannah shove Billy Phillips off the oak saddle onto the rocks.
“Why would they take your