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Danny takes a quick step backward as if to flee, but there’s nowhere to go. “You were cheating on me,” he flings again at Meg, who flinches. He swivels around the van, but when no one else reacts on his behalf, he turns to implore Walters again. “Jessica was the only person who understood what I was going through! Why would I hurt her? Why?”
It’s like his honor is being questioned, and it’s this, even more than Jessica’s fate, that seems to completely unravel him. Walters widens his stance, squaring his shoulders in a way only decades of law enforcement can teach. “I’m only going to give you one more chance to tell me how you know the precise location of her death.”
Something shifts in Danny as his complete entrapment becomes clear. The rule follower in him causes self-preservation to give way to self-righteous animosity, and he keeps talking long after he should have demanded a lawyer. “She came back up the trail, yeah. But it wasn’t to help me find the others. She only came back to tell me she was done.”
“Done?” Walters reaches for a pad of paper, but machines whir with life all over the confines of the com van; how many radios, phones, and computers are already catching Danny’s words?
“Done trying to get Silas’s attention.” Danny raises his head, stares Meg in the eye. Meg presses hers softly shut, as if unwilling to view this scene head-on. “She told me I should give it up, too. That it was over for me and Meg.” Danny’s face reddens again at the memory.
“She saw them, in the woods?” Walters pressed.
“Together,” Danny spits out. “And not asfriends, either.” Each word leaves his mouth like shards of glass. “She kept saying it was pointless, that she just wanted to go home, that Silas only noticed Meg and always would. She just kept going on and on and I just ... I couldn’t stand hearing it anymore.” He crumples in on himself at this, collapsing against the wall of the com van in racking sobs. “I didn’t know there was a cliff, I swear. I didn’t know she’d fall in those stupid sandals.”
This time the silence in the com van is a roar. It builds on itself as Danny’s confession reverberates off the tinny walls. Silas wants to clap both hands over his ears and squeeze. “You?” he says. “You ...” It takes extreme effort to link the words in the correct order, each stubbornly refusing to fit where he needs it to go. “You ... killed ... Jessica? All that time ago? And you never ... said a word?”
It seems unfathomable: do-gooder Danny, the community-service king. But Silas replays the aftermath of Jessica’s disappearance in his mind. The resentment that seemed to radiate from Danny’s core. Bubbling underneath it had been the same fury Silas saw today. Aimed at him, he could see now. At Meg. For what they’d done to him. And for the fact that Danny couldn’t even confront them on it. Not until today.
Silas feels as though he has been yanked back from a ledge of his own, the role his own actions had in this cutting deep, even knowing how willing Danny would have been to pin the entirety of this on him. Meg still stands frozen, her face reflecting this same conflict. Her eyes are wide on Danny, like she can’t believe she was proven right. She’s breathing hard, as if midclimb up Marble Peak, and when she does speak, she seems to have the same difficulty stringing together words. “All these years,” she gasps. “My God, Danny. All these years?”
It’s a complicated thing, to reshuffle years’ worth of blame, most of which you’ve grown accustomed to carrying on your own shoulders. Of course, lessened culpability mattered very little in the face of such tragedy.
“I’m sorry,” Danny only says hollowly, hugging his knees to his chest, spine bent like the weight of an entire winter’s worth of Sierra snow blankets him.
“Sorry?” Meg has less trouble finding her voice now. “Jessica has been lying there, all this time, and you’resorry?”
She lurches toward him, and Silas reaches for her, ensnaring her torso. “Okay, okay now,” he says, trying to pull her back. He’s furious, too; fifteen years’ worth of fury is now battling with all that guilt, vyingfor dominance as it courses through him in red-hot waves. But if he gives in to it, what good does that do? Danny is a crumpled form on the ground at this point, far from able to withstand the trial of Silas’s emotions.
Walters takes the opportunity to regain command of the room. “Get up, man,” he says, though his usual authority sounds strained. There can’t be any precedent for situations like this, and there’s a tremor to his movements as he holds out a pair of cuffs he’s unclipped from a holder on his belt. “Stand up and face this.”
As he begins to read Danny his rights, Silas feels the fury dilute in his veins as other emotions rush in: despair, regret, sadness ... for Jessica, but for Danny, too. He pictures the pebble arcing through the air. Can still hear the dullplunkit made, landing in the dirt. Hears the startling echo of Jessica’s scream off the granite. He and Meg, they went about things all wrong; they caused pain. They told their own half-truths and outright lies so many times, it was easy to forget, until today, that Jessica’s story had still not been fully told. All this time, all of them—Walters, Meg, Silas—have been trying to solve the puzzle of her disappearance from the wrong angle.
He thinks of the rides in the Jeep, and the hikes and the dips in the mountain lakes ... all the minutes that, when combined, led up to this moment. To Danny’s anger and jealousy and violence. Eventually, he turns away from watching Danny being led out of the com van, his brain bleached clean with shocking finality.
On his way out, Danny hesitates next to Meg, twisting awkwardly in his cuffs to address her one more time. Her face is now abnormally pale, her hair dark in contrast, the color of rust when wet. “You know me,” he says. “You know how I would never have meant for any of this to happen.”
“You messed with Rick’s flight plans. You told Walters to call off the lake.” Her anger is still right on the surface, but somewhere deeper down, she has to be grappling with the knowledge that Danny’s not theonly one in this stifling van who is capable of sabotaging a search. But then Meg adds, “You could have cost Spencer hislife!” And Silas no longer has any room in his brain for anything but his boys.
Walters yanks Danny forward, passing him off to an assistant deputy outside. He returns almost immediately, and he looks shaken—Silas imagines they all must—and his face is red with exertion and stress, but he seems just as eager as Silas to refocus their efforts on the Matheson kids. “Listen, folks,” he says gruffly. “We’ll need to get official statements, but that can wait until forensics confirms cause of death and collects any DNA on the scene.” He clears his throat. “Priority number one: we have a search to get back to.”
With that, the room slowly resumes a hum of activity. “I’m going to dispatch the forensics team and check in with our ground pounders,” Santos says. He speaks into the radio, conversing with Team Eight, who still have nothing to report. Surely, this can’t be how it ends, Silas thinks, in this room, in a splintering of memory and pain. He fights back against this possibility.Somefragment of redemption must remain to be salvaged today.
Because there’s still the key piece to this puzzle, here and now. There’s Cameron.
28
MEG
Matheson search
November 21, 2018
9:40 a.m.
Marble Lake Staging Area
Meg’s not sure how she expected to feel after finally purging herself of the secret that’s been sitting like a stone in the pit of her stomach for fifteen years, just to have an entirely different truth bomb detonate, but it’s not like this. In all the moments she imagined telling Danny what really transpired the night of Jessica’s disappearance, it never, in her wildest imagination, included him one-upping her with a confession of this magnitude. It casts every day of their past fifteen years together in shadow, and she bends at the waist, hugging her knees to her chest, willing herself to hold it together.
Next to her pack at her feet, she spies Spencer’s jeans, which sit awaiting inventory on Waggins’s report, still balled up and wet from when she plucked them from the marsh by the pond. They’re filthy, coated in mud and grime, and the denim is so wet the material bends stiffly where she attempted to fold it. Silas wants to believe Spencershed them after they became soaked: wilderness survival 101. But Meg knows the confused mental state of hypothermia could be just as likely, which calls Cameron’s well-being into more question than ever. It’s all too much; Meg can practically feel the oppressive dampness, the cold that surely sank all the way to Spencer’s bones, the same cold that is undoubtedly still penetrating Cameron’s skin,somewhere out there.
