The long way home

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

What Friends Are For I don't know how long I stood there, staring like an idiot. I'm pretty sure it was a good long time.

Finally, Miler said, "You know, you look really stupid with your mouth hanging open like that. No offense or anything."

Then the next thing I knew I was in the room and we were all together, hugging and slapping hands and slugging one another's shoulders and just saying, "Man!" and "Dude!" and "Bro!" over and over again. I don't think I have ever been so happy to see anybody in my life. I don't even know how to describe the feeling. It was like the dawn came up at the windows and the dawn came up inside me at the same time. It was like I didn't realize how dark it was in my heart until the light shone through.

The light. My friends. I could hardly believe they were here in front of me.

I looked around in a daze. There were sleeping bags on the floor and flashlights and empty soda cans and an empty bag of potato chips. I guess they'd been waiting for me a long time.

"How…?" I finally managed to get the words out. "How did you guys know? How did you know I would come here?"

"Josh knew," said Rick. "He figured it out."

Josh touched his own shoulder with a finger and made a sizzling noise to show just how hot he was.

I answered with a gesture of my own: raising my shoulders and lifting my hands in an enormous shrug as if to say, What's the story?

"I saw you on TV," Josh said. "The whole thing about how you were in the library and the librarian called the cops and the cops showed up and started chasing you and everything."

"Yeah?"

"And I thought, well, the last time anyone heard anything about you, you were escaping from the cops all the way over in Centerville. So I knew you were heading this way. I figured you must be coming back to Spring Hill."

"Sure, but…" I gestured around me at the big empty parlor. The room-the whole feeling of the house-was growing less and less dismal as the sun poured in through the windows. "The Ghost Mansion. How did you figure I'd come back to the Ghost Mansion?"

Josh gave an almost modest tilt of his head. "I just tried to think the way you'd think. I figured if I knew you were coming to Spring Hill, the cops would know too. That meant it would be dangerous-more dangerous here than anyplace else."

I nodded. He was right. Spring Hill was probably the most dangerous place I could be right now, the place where I was most likely to get caught.

Josh went on: "And if you were coming to the most dangerous place you could be, then you'd have to have a really good reason for it. There'd have to be something really urgent you had to do, something you had to do whether it was dangerous or not. So I thought, Well, what could that be? What could you do here you couldn't do anyplace else? And then it came to me: you were coming back here to try to prove your innocence, to try to show it wasn't you who killed Alex."

"That's right," I said. "That's exactly right. I am."

Josh stood a little straighter, proud of himself. "So then I thought, well, if you were gonna prove your innocence, it might take some time, so you'd need a place to stay. Your parents moved to Stanton, so you couldn't stay with them. And I knew you wouldn't come to us because you wouldn't want to get us involved; you wouldn't want us to get in any trouble."

I nodded slowly. "That's right too."

"So where else was there for you to go?" said Josh finally. "What other place did you know around here that was empty and secluded, where you could get shelter during the day, and get into town pretty quickly at night?"

I nodded, impressed. Geeky as he was, Josh had always been the smartest guy in our group.

But as I listened to him, a little of my happiness at our reunion started to fade. I moved to the window. As I passed Josh, I punched him lightly on the arm.

"Good going, Josh," I said softly. "That was really good thinking."

"I guess I'm not as dumb as I look," said Josh with a goofy laugh.

"No one could be as dumb as you look," said Miler.

I stood at the window and looked out. The day had now dawned fully. The bright, pale sky gleamed down through the naked branches of the autumn oaks. The branches swayed in the morning breeze. On the ground below, dead leaves blew through the old McKenzie graveyard. They covered the bases of the stones and the obelisks. They danced around the base of the statue.

She was still there. The cowled, mourning woman. Still staring blankly with her stone eyes, still reaching out in grief as if to stop the soul she loved from departing. She was just as eerie as I remembered her too. Creepy and weirdly alive. It still made me shiver a little to look at her.

I stared down into the graveyard, thinking, troubled.

"What's the matter, bro?" said Rick behind me.

I turned to them. The three of them stood together, looking at me.

They had changed, I could see. A year does a lot to you when you're seventeen. They had changed a lot, just as I had.

Miler was still a small guy, still had the short blond hair and the long face with its sharp, piercing green eyes. But the face seemed darker and more serious now that there was stubble on it. And his runner's body had filled out, become sturdy and muscular. He was wearing jeans and a corded sweater with the sleeves rolled up, and I could see his shoulders had gotten broader and the muscles of his arms had become big and ropy.

And Rick-he still had that big, round, cheerful face-but there was something new in his large eyes, some kind of-I don't know-gentleness and understanding that hadn't been there before. It made him look a lot older. Plus, hard as it was to believe, he was even taller than he had been, and more substantial too. In his jeans and basketball jacket, he looked practically massive.

As for Josh-well, he was a geek forever. He still blinked out from behind his big glasses, still had the pale face and short curly hair and the geeky laugh. But instead of being small and slump-shouldered, he was tall and skinny. And instead of a constant nervous smile, his smile was sort of crooked now and cool-ironic, I guess you'd call it. He looked like he was constantly making fun of himself-and of just about everything else too.

They stood in the middle of the room together, watching me, waiting for me to answer them. I tried to find the right words.

"Well, the thing is- I mean, don't take this the wrong way. It's great to see you guys. I can't tell you how great it is."

"But?" said Miler.

"But Josh is right. I came to the Ghost Mansion because I didn't want to get you involved."

Rick gave a big laugh. He stepped up to me, towering over me, looking down at me from his height. "Hey, Charlie, we understand that. We know you want to keep us out of it. We're just ignoring you, that's all."

"Sure," said Miler. "I mean, that's what friends are for, guy. To figure out what you want and then do exactly the opposite."

I laughed. "That's great of you, really, but… this is serious. I mean, this isn't, like, a prank or something, like spending the night here without telling our parents. It's the police that are after me. The real police. I'm a fugitive. They think I'm a killer. If they find out you guys are helping me, you could be accessories or something. You could go to jail."

Rick nodded. He looked over at Miler. "He's right. Let's get out of here."

Miler gave a quick laugh. None of them moved. They weren't going anywhere.

"The thing is, Charlie," Josh said, "we can't leave. You need us. The police are gonna be looking for you everywhere. Everyone in town is gonna be looking for you. You're gonna need help, you're gonna need people who can go out and look around and ask questions without making people suspicious. How else are you gonna find out what really happened to Alex? How else are you gonna prove you're innocent?"

"That's crazy," I said. "It's too dangerous. Besides, you don't even know I really am innocent."

Rick and Miler looked at each other again.

"He's right," Miler said. "Let's get out of here."

Rick laughed. Then he turned to me. "We know you're innocent, Charlie."

Miler nodded. So did Josh.

"We all know it," Rick said.

"Face it," said Miler. "You're just not killer material, old pal."

"Don't get us wrong," Josh added. "You have a lot of other good qualities. I mean, we still like you and everything, even if you're not a murderer. But you're not a murderer."

I turned away and looked out the window again. I had to. I didn't want them to see my face just then, the emotion in my face. The police said I was guilty. The judge and jury said so. The newspapers, the TV. Even I sometimes wondered whether I was really innocent or not.

But not Rick and Miler and Josh. They knew I was innocent. They didn't have a doubt.

When I got my voice back, I said, "It's not that easy. There's more to it than that."

"Like what?" said Rick.

"The police aren't the only ones who are after me. In fact, they're not even the worst of it." I looked from one of them to another, from one waiting gaze to another. "There's some kind of underground group. They call themselves the Homelanders. They tried to assassinate the secretary of Homeland Security."

"Oh yeah," said Rick. "Last month, on the bridge. I heard about that. They said you might have been guilty of that too."

"I wasn't guilty…"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that. But what's it all about?"

"I'm not sure exactly. I know they're terrorists. Foreign. Islamist. Only they recruit homegrown anti-Americans. They think I was one of them… What?"

Rick had laughed. "Sorry," he said. "The idea of you joining a group of anti-Americans. Weren't you, like, born on the Fourth of July or something?"

I had to press my lips together to keep my emotions down. Again, even I had doubts about what had happened to me. Even I wondered: Was I a good guy or a bad guy? But my friends didn't. They didn't wonder at all.

"Well… anyway…" I finally managed to say. "They think I was one of them and that I betrayed them. They want me dead. And they're dangerous, man. I mean, like, really dangerous. If they figure out that you know where I am, they'll come after you for sure."

"He's right," said Rick to Miler. "Let's get out of here."

"Would you stop?" I said-although I couldn't help laughing myself this time. "This is serious. They're serious. One of them tried to knife me in the library."

"In the library?" said Josh. "Gee, I hope he was quiet about it."

Frustrated, I closed my eyes, lowered my head, pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. These guys didn't get it. They thought it was all some sort of big joke, some sort of big adventure.

Rick put his hand on my shoulder. "Hey," he said, as if he was reading my mind. "We do get it. We understand. It's real. It's dangerous. And believe me, Charlie, we'd all rather be somewhere else. But what are we gonna do: Leave you out here alone to fend for yourself? Let you get arrested the first time you stick your ugly face out the door? The way I look at it-the way we all look at it-we don't really have any choice. You're our friend, you're in trouble, and you're innocent. So here we are."

I had to turn away again. I looked out the window, down at the cemetery. It was all blurry for a couple of seconds, but when my eyes cleared, I saw the mourning woman again with her blank stare from under her cowl and her grief-stricken gesture at the empty air. So much was gone, I thought to myself. My family, my school days, my safety, my childhood, a year of my life. I'd lost so much.

But not everything. My friends were here. My friends were still here.

"Okay," I said. I turned back to them quickly, speaking brusquely to hide my emotions. "Okay, if that's the way you want it… But if we're gonna do this, we gotta do it right."

"Okay," said Rick. The others nodded. "Like how?"

"Well," I said. "Like, how did you all get here?"

"We parked over in the Lake Center Mall," said Miler. "Then we cut through the housing development to those woods back there. No one could've followed us without our seeing them."

"Good," I said. I took a few pacing steps into the room. "That's really good. You gotta do stuff like that every time you come. Change things up. Make sure no one's watching."

"Okay," said Rick. "What else?"

"Well, you can't tell anyone. Not anyone." I looked at them, searched their faces. "The more people who know, the more danger there is. No matter who it is, no matter how much you may think you can trust them, you can't tell them I'm here or that you're working with me. Not your parents, not your teachers, not your girlfriends, no one."

There was a long silence in answer. Miler and Rick looked at each other and Josh looked at both of them and then they looked at me.

I felt something sink inside me. They'd already told someone.

"What?" I said.

They all looked away.

"Who did you tell? Don't you understand? There's no one else we can trust."

Rick took a deep breath. He screwed one eye shut and sort of looked off with the other eye at nothing in particular. "There's just one other person," he said.

And just then, as if on cue, I heard the front door open on the first floor. I tensed. I glanced at my friends. They continued to look away from me.

The front door gave the same soft, high moan as before and then a soft thud as it swung shut again. There were footsteps rising quickly up the stairs.

It came to me then. I knew who it was. My breath caught. Suspense pulsed through my body. I turned slowly to face the door.

The footsteps crested the stairs and came down the hall toward us. I saw her in the shadows first, her figure obscure but still recognizable. And then my breath came back and something-my heart, I guess-seemed to crack open inside me and a kind of wild heat flooded through my body.

Beth Summers stepped into the doorway and into the light of day that was pouring through the window.