The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

don’t really care. I just want to get out. I don’t want to know what Bruce is writing in his report. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about anything.

“I’ve already called someone. Go home. I don’t need you for this paperwork. If I do, I’ll call you.” Bruce waves me away and turns to his computer.

I stand up uncertainly and walk to the door. I make my way to my locker, where I reach with shaking hands for my bag. I glance around for Roger, but he’s probably down at the alum tank, overseeing the clean-up. I’ve just created a shitload of extra work for everyone and I’m walking away. It feels wrong.

Everything in my whole fucking world feels wrong.

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER I GOT home, my phone rings, and I answer without even looking at the number, thinking it’s probably Bruce. It’s not. It’s Mom’s friend Linda, and her voice is all strained and fake-chipper. “Oh, hi Zoe. I didn’t think you’d pick up, but I wanted to get in touch with you to let you know your Mom’s in the hospital. She had a little heart attack.”

“She had a heart attack? Like an actual heart attack?” My stomach drops and my own heart begins to race dangerously. “Is she okay? What happened?”

“She’s fine, Zoe,” Linda insists. “She couldn’t catch her breath this morning so she called me. By the time I got there she was having chest pain, worse than usual, so I called an ambulance. They’ve given her some medication to thin her blood and now they’re monitoring her.”

“Is she awake?”

“Yes, she’s been talking up a storm. It was really just a minor blip. But it scared her. And me, too. I think she’s worried that the next time it could be more serious.”

“I’ll be there right away. I’m not at work so I can come now.”

“Actually, she’s not supposed to have visitors. She’s meant to be resting. I was just going to leave you a message so you’d know what happened.”

“How long will she be there, in the hospital, I mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably a few more hours. Maybe overnight. It depends on how she responds to the medication.”

I sink onto my couch, slumped over with worry and an aching fatigue. I don’t know what to do. I can’t protect anyone. I’m almost afraid to check the news, but I need to see if there have been any new developments in the case. Is that what caused Mom to have a heart attack? Did she see something that put her over the edge?

Just typing in Amy’s name on my laptop brings up a torrent of results. Every article starts with the same information: the excruciating details of her unsolved murder and how the case is being re-opened after twenty-nine years, but now there are also timelines and maps and multiple experts conjecturing about what really happened the day Amy disappeared.

On one map, Lindell Drive is highlighted in bright yellow with a large black X indicating the precise spot on the street where Amy was last seen. By me. Although I’m never named, just labelled as a young witness. The only witness. A dotted line runs from that black X to the location in the ravine where her body was found. Parents desperate to learn the truth about daughter’s tragic journey, the caption reads.

I close my laptop abruptly. The truth is such a tricky thing.

CHAPTER SIX

•

RIGHT AFTER AMY’S BODY WAS found, rumours swirled around my elementary school and the neighbourhood. Mom wouldn’t let me watch the news for weeks and although I knew we still got the Dunford Chronicle, she never left it out where I could see it.

“I heard her head was cut off,” Gabby Kloster confided to me by the bike racks, looking around to make sure no one else could hear her.

I didn’t consider Gabby a trustworthy source. She was the kind of kid who said the teacher was dead when she was really sick with the flu. She once told me that she’d seen a house burn down with people inside it. “They were standing at the window looking at me when they caught on fire. I watched them burn up.” Still, there was a ring of truth to her comment about Amy’s head.

A few days earlier, I’d overheard my mom saying to someone on the phone, “One of her braids cut off, like some sort of sick souvenir.” Then, noticing me in the doorway, “Oh, Zoe just came in. I’ll talk to you later.”

“What’s a souvenir?” I asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about. How was school?”

“Fine,” I mumbled. “We made paper flowers. For a remorial or something.”

“A memorial,” Mom said, nodding sadly and, before she could open her arms to hug me, I turned and ran to my room.

Now, leaning toward Gabby by the bike racks, I hissed back at her, “It wasn’t her head, dummy. It was her hair. For a souvenir.”

“A what?”

I shrugged. Gabby made a face just as the bell rang and we had to run to line up. As we were walking inside, she turned around and grabbed a piece of my hair, making a snipping motion with her fingers. I tugged my hair away and glared at her.

I dreamed that night about finding Amy’s headless body in my closet, stuffed inside a plastic bag. I searched and searched for her head, growing more frantic by the minute, because I knew that if I could find it, I could put her together again and she would be fine.

We would all be fine.

I STOPPED HANGING OUT WITH Gabby. I stopped hanging out with anyone. By grade six, I had no real friends. If I had, I might have been able to stay with one of them instead of with Ricky when Mom went on her women’s retreat to Niagara Falls. And then maybe I would have watched something like The Brady Bunch instead of Friday the 13th — which would have meant