• One •
SMITHEREENS
This is where it happened. This is where they found Kane’s body.
It was on the verge of September, and the Housatonic River was swollen with late summer’s weeping. Kane stood among the bishop’s-weed frothing at the bank, trying to imagine what it’d been like the night of the accident. In his mind, being pulled from the river would have been violent. Moonlight sliced to confetti on the black, broken water as paramedics wrenched him up. But this river, during the day, seemed incapable of violence. It was too slow. Just gold water marbled with pollen, kissing his bare legs, and a fleet of silvery fish slowly wreathing his ankles.
Kane wondered if the fish remembered that night. He had the urge to ask them. He remembered none of the accident himself. All that Kane knew, he’d learned in the five days since waking up in the hospital.
Something struck his head. A pine cone. It bobbed into the water and the silvery fish vanished.
“Stop daydreaming and help me.”
Kane blinked, turning to Sophia. She stood on the bank where the weeds pressed up through crumbling pavement. He considered ignoring her, but she had several more pine cones and was a good shot. Actually, Sophia was a good everything. Just one of those people. Kane normally resented people like that, but she was his younger sister. He adored her. And he was intimidated by her, just a little. Most people were. That’s why he’d brought her along today.
“I wasn’t daydreaming,” Kane said. “I was thinking.”
Sophia whipped another pine cone at him, and he batted it away. “I know that look. You were thinking sad and poetic thoughts about yourself.”
Kane suppressed a smile. “I was not.”
“You were. Remember anything?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well, I hate to distract you from your moping, but you’re in full sight of the bridge. Anyone driving by could see you.” She was right. The bridge, huge and elegant, hung in the shimmering summer air like a spiderweb. “And we have to meet Mom and Dad at the police station in like…” She checked her phone. “Forty-eight minutes. And we’re trespassing. And you’re actually trespassing again if you count—”
“I know.” Kane let irritation color his voice. “You didn’t have to come. You know that, right?”
“Well excuse me for trying to help my brother in his time of crisis.”
“I’m not in crisis. I’m just…”
“Confused?”
Kane winced. Confused. When he first woke up in the hospital after the accident, when he first realized he was in trouble, it seemed like a good idea to hide behind that word until he could figure out what was going on. The police were asking questions, and the few memories he had from the accident barely made sense. He was confused. But now the word felt like a friend he couldn’t unmake, always popping up to embarrass him. Discredit him.
“I’m not confused,” Kane said. “I’m just trying to clear my name.”
Sophia rubbed a smudge of sap on her palm. “Well, you’re doing a shitty job.”
She was right. He had been acting pretty terrible since the accident. Avoidant. Gloomy. Brittle. But these were things Kane had always been. It was just that now people were looking to him for explanations. They wanted answers, or at least to see a brave survivor of something terrible. Instead they saw Kane: avoidant, gloomy, brittle. No one liked it.
“I heard Mom say that Detective Thistler is doing a psych evaluation with you today,” said Sophia. “They’re going to ask you a lot of questions, Kane.”
“They’ve already asked me a lot of questions, Sophia.”
“You might consider attempting a few answers this time. For instance: Why?”
“Why what?”
Sophia glared at him. “Why did you drive a car into a historical site?”
Staring across the lot at the charred remains of the old mill, Kane’s mind went blank. He’d spent every minute since waking up wondering the same thing.
Sophia went on. “Mom said the police won’t press charges while you’re being evaluated, but I heard that the county might prosecute.”
The whole county? Everyone, all at once? Kane imagined the entire population of East Amity, Connecticut, piled into a jury box. It made him smile.
Another pine cone struck his shoulder. He trudged back to the bank, letting his feet dry on the baking pavement as Sophia took pictures of the bridge. Then his feet were dry, and he couldn’t stall any longer.
“All right, let’s make this quick,” he said as pulled on his boots. “I just need to poke around the crash site. Keep taking pictures, okay?”
“Are you sure it’s safe to go in there?”
They stared at the mill.
Kane shrugged. It definitely wasn’t safe.
Half imploded, the mill sat quarantined behind a web of caution tape. Behind it, rising through the young birch forest, stood the rest of the old industrial complex: a maze of abandoned factories and warehouses that represented the height of East Amity’s manufacturing era. They went on for miles, proud and forever, slowly decaying beneath neglect as the forest grew up under them. This place was called the Cobalt Complex. This building before them—the old mill that looked onto the river—was the crash site. The crime scene. The cherished bit of Connecticut history Kane had rammed a Volvo into, which then exploded, one week ago.
He didn’t even think cars really exploded on impact. That was movie stuff. Yet the mill, and everything within fifty feet of it, was scorched.
Kane laced up his brown leather boots. The old mill was a symbol of East Amity, appearing in the watercolor postcards sold all around town. Kane imagined the watercolor version of his crash. The dotted glass on the pavement. The inferno rendered in pale, tasteful shades of apricot. Greasy smoke eddying upward in violent, lovely twists against the restrained lavender of sunrise. Very pretty. Very New England.
“Come on, Kane, focus,” said Sophia as she dragged him under the tape.
No new memories came to him in the chilled shade of the mill. Instead came an itch, the sort that simmers through your veins. An instinct. It had been crawling beneath Kane’s skin since they got here. It said: You should not have come back.
Kane stood his ground. He needed answers, and he needed them now.
“Remember anything?”
“No.”
Sophia sighed. She prodded a blackened beam.
“Try harder,” she suggested. “Use your imagination.”
Kane willed himself calm. He tested his weight on the sloping staircase. The fifth step let out a groan, but it held. “I think that using my imagination is the opposite of what I should be doing.”