“Anyway, he sits back on one of these leather sofas near the front and I start fumbling around in the kitchen. I mean, I’m so nervous and I ask if he has anything to drink. He tells me to look in the fridge. There’s a Coke. I grab a can and go to take a drink and when I do, I pour some down my front, you know, like an accident, but on purpose.

“I kind of squeal and pull off my T-shirt.” She closed her eyes and I felt three thumps of my pulse before she continued. “I know what I’m doing, okay. When I crossed my arms to pull up my shirt, I hooked my fingers under…” she lowers her head, her eyes still shut, “under…my bra, you know, it’s a running bra, and I pull everything over my head together, all at once. The T-shirt and my bra and everything.

“And I said, ‘Oops,’ and I laugh. And I let him look.” She opened her eyes and looked past me into someplace I would never visit and crossed her arms over her chest. “I let him look. I kept asking myself what would Madison do, and I knew she would laugh, so I just laughed some more and then I said, ‘Well, do you have anything dry?’”

I had the same useless urge I’d had when Merritt was telling me about her decision to go into Dead Ed’s house. I wanted to tell her not to. I wanted to tell her to run.

Thirty-four

“He didn’t move. He just sat there with his hands in his lap and he, and he…he, um, stared at my chest, you know, at my breasts. And I…I, I let him. I didn’t do anything to cover up. I kept saying to myself, I’m Madison, I’m Madison. It wasn’t that hard to be there, you know, naked. I thought it would be harder than it was. I don’t know how long I stood there. Time sort of disappeared, kind of like I wasn’t really there at all. Finally, I put my hands on my hips and I said, ‘Well?’ and he mumbled something and pulled off his stupid sweater and he gave it to me. He was really fat.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But this is all really, really gross.”

“It’s okay,” I said, just to say something. That she thought Ed Robilio was fat was the least vile thing I had heard since she began her monologue. The truth was that nothing about any of this was less than vile.

Her voice lowered and the speed of her words increased. “My parents can’t know any of this. They just can’t. You promised, right? You’re not going to tell them, right?”

“I promised.”

The irony stunned me like a blow to the chin. This girl was willing to let her parents think she killed a man to save her sister. But she wasn’t willing to let them think she sacrificed her virtue for the same goal.

Her shoulders sagged. “Nothing else really happened. Madison drove up in her car and honked her horn and honked her horn until he got up and looked out the windshield and said, ‘What the hell is that all about?’ I could see her car on the street and while his back was turned, I dropped his sweater and pulled on my T-shirt and said, ‘That’s my friend, she must be looking for me. I have to go.’

“He stood between me and the door. The motor home or whatever it is only has one door, so I had to go past him. He says, ‘Maybe you would like to go for a drive sometime? See how it handles.’ I’m scared again now, my heart’s pounding like crazy, and Madison’s horn is honking. I don’t know what to do. I say something like, ‘I run every day.’

“He says, ‘Good. Same time tomorrow? I’ll wait for you. We’ll go somewhere.’

“I say, ‘Sure. Tomorrow.’ And I ran out the door.”

As I listened to Merritt’s young voice my own heart was breaking. I wanted this terrible story to be over. But an important piece was missing; Merritt hadn’t lost her earring, yet. She hadn’t been in the back of the RV, in the bedroom, yet.

So I knew there was more to come.

“I jumped in Maddy’s car. She said she couldn’t get any pictures. There was no way she could see what was happening inside the stupid RV. That’s why she was honking the horn. She didn’t want me to waste it-doing it with him. Without the video it would be a waste. That’s what she said. We needed a plan so that she could make sure she could get some pictures while he and I, you know…did it.

“She wanted to know what happened. I told her. I told her what happened on the sidewalk and inside the motor home, what I did, what I said. Pulling off my shirt and everything. She said, ‘No! You didn’t! No! What did he do? Did he grab you? Did he like have a heart attack?’

“I said, ‘No, he just looked. He said he wants to take me for a ride tomorrow.’

“She said, ‘I bet he does. What a prick. We’re gonna get him, Merritt, we’re gonna get him. All we need now is a little plan on how to get me inside that bus with the camera. Because none of this does any good without some video.’”

It seemed like a good place to stop. My watch told me it was ten minutes after one. My joints ached and my brain seemed starved for sleep. I asked, “Would you like to stop for tonight? Finish this up tomorrow?”

“No,” she said, her voice so sweet. “I don’t want to think about it all night. It’s better that I finish this now, I think. Anyway,” she smiled that intriguing flat smile I’d come to know, “tomorrow is reserved for good news. Tomorrow is for Chaney. We’ll bury everything ugly tonight. Promise?”

“Your call,” I said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

She didn’t hesitate. “That night, we made a plan, Maddy and me. Anew plan. I thought it was a pretty good plan, we’d thought of more things, were more careful. We were going to use two cameras, one for some pictures, you know, photographs, and one for the video. I was more confident, I told myself I could go through with it. That time would stop again, that I would disappear again. And when I came back, that Chaney would get her procedure. That’s all that mattered.

“The next day I caught up with him-Dr. Robilio-when he was on his walk. He had his keys with him this time. Went into this long thing about how he wasn’t allowed to park his precious motor coach at his house and that he had to take it up to his ranch where he stored it and I could come maybe and we could stop for dinner if I wanted. Madison had told me to act kind of uninterested with him, which wasn’t hard, so I did. He kept trying to convince me that it would be great-he even told me I could watch a movie on the way up if I wanted.”

Don’t go.

“The plan was that I would go with him. So I said okay, like I had nothing else to do. Maddy was ready. We figured he would drive the RV someplace and park it, like he said he would. We figured a campground or something, or maybe he wasn’t BS-ing about the ranch. She had her mom’s car and a lot of gas. Fresh battery in the camera. She was ready, figured it would be easy to follow something so big. The drive up to the mountains was fine. He wasn’t gross to me or anything on the way up. Mostly wanted me to be impressed with his stupid RV and his stupid mountain ranch and his stupid cabin and all his stupid money.

“We’re new here. I don’t know the mountains very well. I didn’t know where we were going. We were on the freeway for a while and then a smaller road and then we pulled onto a dirt road. When we turned, I could see Maddy’s car a little ways back. She had pulled over.

“He got out of the RV to open a gate and then he got back in and pulled through the gate. He stopped again-I guessed he was going to go back and lock up the gate. If he did that, Maddy couldn’t get through. To distract him, I touched him on his leg and said, ‘We can get that later, right?’ He smiled this sick smile and said, ‘Sure.’

“We went up the hill. First he showed me his ‘cabin,’ which is huge, bigger than our house. I’m like wanting to ask how many kids died so he could build this stupid cabin, but I don’t. I’m acting kind of cool and annoyed, impatient, like. It’s easy. And then we drove back down the dirt road to a barn. It’s not really a barn, he built it just to hold the RV, but it looks like a barn. I was getting worried. I didn’t know where Maddy was, I couldn’t see her car anywhere. I didn’t know whether she had made it inside the gate. I didn’t know whether to go through with it. You know.”