“Just that my car looked like the one in the doorbell video,” I say.
“Do you think she suspects it was your car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even if she suspects it, Christian, that’s not enough to get you in trouble. She’d need something more substantial than a hunch.”
“No, you’re right, Lily,” I say, trying to make myself believe it.
In the coming days, the details of the body emerge painfully slowly. I look for them online. I watch the news, neurotically, obsessively, waiting for something. And yet, there is practically nothing. It’s as if no one’s even talking about the body, as if no one is even thinking about the body but Lily and me. All we know at this point is that it was discovered early the other morning by some youth group camping overnight at Langley Woods. No surprise, it was in a lesser-known, hard-to-reach part of the forest preserve. The youth group was searching for some secret waterfall that hardly anyone has ever heard of before and is incredibly hard to reach. It’s hidden. The forest preserve doesn’t want you to find it because they want to keep the land around it unadulterated. The youth group didn’t find it, but what they found was even more memorable. These kids will never forget seeing a dead body.
The body had yet to be identified. On the news that night, they referred to it interchangeably as abodyand ashuman remains, so there’s no way to know what exactly was found, but I’ve already decided: they found Jake, or whatever is left of him. It’s been well over a week, almost two, since Lily ran into him at the park. How much decomposition happens in that time? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, though I do know that the fresher the body, the more lurid it is. It has probably swollen to twice its size and was likely crawling with maggots. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that when the body is identified and Jake’s name gets released, it will change everything. He will no longer be missing. He’ll be dead. And then people will start to wonder why and what happened to him. The medical examiner will do an autopsy. They’ll find a skull fracture, from where Lily hit him with the rock. They will say it was blunt force trauma. I don’t know how, but they’re pretty good at knowing the difference between homicide, suicide and accidental death.
“When they identify the body,” Lily says, “Nina will know where he was when he died. She already knows I was there at the forest preserve, remember?”
Of course I remember. How could I forget? It’s all I’ve been thinking about since we first heard about the discovery of the body: that people know that Lily was there, and soon they’ll know that Jake was too.
“Maybe it’s not even him,” I say, trying to stay optimistic. “Other people have died in those woods.”
Lily just gives me a look. Of course it’s him.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that you did something to him, Lily. That forest preserve gets a lot of foot traffic. You remember how busy it was when we were there. It was hard to even find a place to park. Anyone could have been there. Anyone could have done it. Anyone could have hurt him, like that Brady guy.”
“Jim,” she says, the husband of her colleague, the man who saw Lily there that day.
“Right, Jim Brady. He could have done something to Jake.”
“Why would Jim Brady do something to Jake?”
“He didn’t. I’m just thinking out loud. Creating reasonable doubt,” I say because that is all we need. Reasonable doubt. “Or maybe Jake did something to himself. Maybe he slipped and fell and hit his head.” I’ve asked before, but never gotten a clear answer. I try again now. “How many times do you think you hit him with the rock, Lily?” If it was once, maybe twice, a skull fracture could be ruled an accidental death, maybe. There are plenty of things to trip over at the forest preserve, plenty of places for a head to hit, like a boulder or concrete. I went to school with a kid who fell off his bike and hit his head on the curb. He wasn’t wearing a helmet because no one did back then. I was there when he fell off his bike. I watched him fall over the handlebars and onto the street. He got up, dusted off his pants, got back on his bike. I laughed at him. We all did. He laughed at himself, too, which later helped lessen my guilt. We went to the store for candy. He thought he was fine. Six hours later he was dead.
“I don’t know, a few,” Lily says. This whole thing with the body has her visibly rattled. Lily didn’t sleep again last night. All night, I felt her tossing and turning in bed. She mumbled in her sleep, things likestopandno, and unconsciously she whimpered so that I had to shake her awake and tell her she was okay. For a long time, I stayed awake with her, rubbing her back, trying to get her to relax.
“Do you think it was like twice,” I ask, “or like six times?”
“I think more than twice.” Lily is on the verge of tears. I hate bringing it up because I know it upsets her. “I just, I don’t know, Christian, I just reacted. It was involuntary. I don’t even remember doing it, but I know that I did because I remember what he looked like after, how he was bleeding.”
When I think of Lily fighting back, I picture something wildly uncontrolled.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” That’s good to know. Not the answer I was hoping for, but good to know. “Where do you think you hit him? Like here?” I ask, pointing to my forehead, “Or here?” pointing at the base of my skull. I ask because I know that a fracture at the base of the skull can be more deadly because it’s stronger there and harder to crack. If you do, you’re essentially screwed, which is what happened to my friend from grade school. When he came down on the curb, he came down on the back of his head.
Lily shrugs. “Maybe both,” she says. She thinks about it, trying to decide, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t know, Christian. I really don’t know. It happened so fast. I reacted.”
“But if he was coming at you,” I reason, “he would have been facing you, right? You probably got him here,” I say, pointing again at my forehead.
Lily forces herself to think. I’m quiet. I let her think. I see in her eyes that she’s going through it in slow motion, watching it play out all over again. Her face changes. She’s remembering now. Something is coming into focus. “I think I hit him in the forehead. And then I remember that he turned around. He started to walk away from me. I don’t know why, I think I didn’t believe he was really through with me, that he wasn’t going to hurt me again. So I hit him again, maybe here,” she says, pointing at the back of her skull. “That’s when he looked at me, over his shoulder, when his eyes went wide and he fell.”
I didn’t expect that. Lily hit him when his back was turned, when he was walking away.
I don’t blame her. She was scared. She was a quarter mile from help, at least, and there was nothing to tell her he wasn’t going to reel back and come at her again. She wanted to make sure he was subdued.
“And then that was it?” I ask. “Then you dropped the rock and ran?”
“Maybe,” she says, still noncommittal.
“What do you mean maybe?”
“I don’t know, Christian. I just don’t know. I can’t remember exactly.”