Secrets so deep, p.31
Secrets So Deep, page 31
If I could become anything, that’s what I would choose for myself.
“Someone painted the memorial back,” Cole whispers. “The one on the back wall of the scene shop.”
My mother’s name. And those blood-red words. What the sea wants, the sea will have.
“Why?” I ask. “I don’t—”
“They think it was the curse. What happened to Glory. The whispering. Another tragedy at Whisper Cove.”
“It wasn’t,” I tell him. “Nobody called Glory into the sea. That isn’t—”
“No.” He reaches for my hand. Squeezes it tight. “I know. The only one who cursed Glory was Glory.”
He leans down to kiss the top of my head, and I have this sudden flash of terror. Almost like a vision. Or a premonition.
Something terrible is going to happen tonight. To me.
Or to Cole.
But I don’t have time to think about any of that, because the lights are going down and I’m moving into my spot.
I sit on the bench center stage and shed my Avril skin, the way you slip off a robe before you step into the shower. I let the Eden thoughts replace the Avril thoughts, and I embrace all the places where they overlap. I let the edges melt together.
I’m sitting on the bench. Waiting for Cole to find me.
Because he will. He always does.
That’s the only thought I keep. I let the others drift away like ashes rising into the wind.
I’m waiting for Cole.
I’m always waiting for Cole Culver to find me.
Always.
Then the lights come up. And we’re off.
The show is going so well. The audience is eating out of our hands. And it feels so good. Because every single minute, scene by scene, I’m falling so in love with Cole over and over again. That dark wavy hair. And those gray eyes. By the time we get to the dance scene, where Eden admits she’s in love, I don’t know which one of us is more head over heels. Me. Or her. But I know when Eden tells Orion, that’s me telling Cole, too.
I feel so open. Like every part of me is exposed. And it’s the most amazing feeling. To be standing in the spotlight like that. No secrets. No hiding in the shadows.
But doing the show is also strange. Because each time I hear that song—Eden’s melody—it pulls a little harder on my mind. It’s like my memories are threads, and instead of plucking guitar strings, Cole is tugging on those threads each time he starts to play. He’s undoing me, bit by bit. Through all of act one, the longing for my mother builds and builds with each chord of that song. I feel the truth floating up, closer and closer to the surface. I can almost lean down and grab it.
Almost.
But then it sinks just out of reach again.
I can’t focus on remembering, though. Can’t focus on me. Not now. I have to focus on Eden. All I can do is let my mind work in the background.
And maybe that’s why it finally comes to me. Because I’m just living inside the notes of that song. Experiencing it. Not trying to remember. Not trying to force it.
It’s in the middle of the drowning scene that it hits me. The music is so loud in that moment, because Cole isn’t playing it on the guitar. It’s being pumped through the speakers, straight into my head.
I’m dancing on the edge of the river when it slams into me. Like a rogue wave.
And I stop dead in my tracks. I’m frozen.
My mother is tucking me in at night. The bed is warm and cozy. She lies down beside me to rub my back. And she’s humming that song. Eden’s melody.
Eden.
My mother’s favorite name.
Suddenly I remember a hundred nights. The memories slam into me like waves. One after the other. A hundred hugs and kisses. My mother’s hand on my back. That song against my ear.
Over and over. A thousand variations of the same tune.
I’m moving again now. Spinning and dancing, twirling. And the sound of the rushing water is getting louder in my ears.
Memories flood my brain.
My mother lifting me overhead and spinning me around.
My mother sweeping the kitchen floor.
My mother washing my hair.
And humming. And humming. And humming.
Always that same tiny bit of the same haunting melody.
I remember something Glory said to me. About what an ear my mother had for music. The way she was always singing. How she used to compose original melodies in her head and walk around humming them to herself under her breath. “Never whole songs,” Glory told me. “Just the most beautiful little snippets.”
The memories keep coming.
And coming and coming and coming.
The water gets higher.
And the music gets louder.
Until the dam breaks and I’m swept away.
And the world goes dark.
I stumble offstage and into Cole’s arms. He’s waiting for me in the tiny backstage area, and he wraps me up tight. I’m gasping for air. Drowning. Choking. On water. And on memories. “Breathe,” he tells me. “I won’t let go. I promise. Just breathe.”
But I untangle myself and pull away. Because I only have that one scene. The one at the funeral. Between Orion and Anya. Cole and Val. And then I have to be back onstage.
I push my way through the kids that are waiting to go on. The funeral crowd. One of the girls has a script in her hands. She’s looking over her lines. But I pluck it out of her hands. “Hey!” she hisses, but I’m already moving toward the prop table. I hold the script up to the light and flip to the very first page, where the production information is.
And fuck. There it is. Right there.
I was carrying the key around in my fucking backpack with me the whole goddamn time. Almost my whole goddamn life.
Midnight Music was first produced at Whisper Cove Theatre under its original title, Before the Chaos.
B. C.
Before the Chaos.
My mother wasn’t trying to figure out how to end an affair.
She was trying to figure out how to end a play.
“Av?” Lex is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. “You okay?” he whispers. But I can’t move. Or speak. “Av?” he says again.
“Willa Culver didn’t write this play,” I tell him. I’m thinking of that picture of my mother. Hunched over that laptop. Eyes on fire. And all the other B. C. notes in that blue notebook.
Love isn’t enough.
No promises.
Lonely. Secretive. Passionate.
And all the others.
They’re character notes. Plot notes.
Not love notes.
“What?” Lex whispers. “What are you talking about?” He clearly thinks I’ve lost my mind.
“My mother did.”
I push past Lex. I’m heading for the side exit.
As soon as I step away from the brightness of the stage, I’m aware of the fog rolling in to suffocate me. But I don’t care. I’m already moving through the dark toward the farmhouse. The fog is so thick now, but somehow I find the little path that leads into the woods, toward the Culver house. And when I look back at Whisper Cove, the lights of the amphitheater have vanished. All I see are empty houses. Dark and deserted. Dead. No smoke curls from the chimneys. No candles flicker in the windows.
Laundry flaps on the lines.
Vegetables rot in the gardens.
And then I’m climbing through the woods. Racing toward the kitchen door. Willa is at the amphitheater, I know. And Brody, too. Cole. All of them. But I only have a few minutes before they all discover that I’m missing and Midnight Music comes to a screeching halt.
The kitchen door isn’t locked. I knew it wouldn’t be. I push it open and hurry toward that little painting. The one of the muses. The girl with all the cracks.
The one who reminds me so much of myself.
I lift it from the wall and turn it over in my hands. And there’s an inscription on the back.
To Willa,
Thanks for encouraging me to write. You’ll always be my best friend and my greatest inspiration. Love you forever and ever!
Nicole
The painting clatters to the floor. And I’m already moving toward the living room. I scan the shelves for other clues. But something tells me to look upstairs. In Willa’s bedroom. If she’s hidden any other proof, I bet it will be there.
I climb the stairs and stand in the hallway. I don’t know which rooms are which. I don’t even know which one is Cole’s. I look down at the wood floor, and there’s a worn path in the middle. It runs from one end of the hallway to the other. Like someone has spent years and years pacing back and forth.
“She walks at night.”
I spin around, and Cole is standing at the top of the landing. He looks down at the worn path on the floor. “I hear her out here all the time. Walking back and forth.” He lifts his eyes to look at me. “I don’t— We don’t sleep.”
I remember that strange night in the library. Willa sleepwalking. Pulling books off shelves. Looking for something. Searching.
I wonder if she’d been looking for my mother’s notebooks, maybe. She had to have known they existed. That they were full of clues.
The idea of them being out there somewhere must have haunted her.
I look past Cole to the big picture window at the end of the hall. The perfect view over the tall fence and out to the cliff beyond.
“Did you know?” I ask him. “Did you know she stole Midnight Music from my mother?”
“No.” Cole looks like I slapped him. “I swear. I had no idea. Not until Lex grabbed me and told me what you said tonight. Before you took off.” I’m trying to decide if I believe him. I want to believe him. But everyone at Whisper Cove is so slippery. They all move through my fingers like the damn fog. I can’t seem to pin anyone here down. They shift and change before my eyes. “It all makes sense now, though. The way she wrote it so fast. And we didn’t know—nobody knew—that she’d even been working on a play. The way she’s never written another thing. Not one fucking thing. In all these years.”
A thought suddenly knocks the air out of me. “Did she kill my mother? So she could steal her play?” I have to lean against the wall to stay on my feet.
Did Willa Culver drown me?
Is that what Glory wanted me to figure out? Is that why she gave me so many clues?
“I don’t know,” Cole admits. And it’s not the answer I wanted. I wanted him to say that stealing a play doesn’t make his mother a murder. Because I love Willa. I love her so much. But he just repeats those three words again. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there that night.”
“You were there,” I tell him. My voice is rising. I’m frantic now. Desperate for an answer. Something that will finally put an end to all this. “You did that magic trick for me. The one with the sea glass and the flashlight, and—”
“No. That’s one thing I know for certain, Avril. I wasn’t there when your mother died. When you—”
“Cole. You told me to look at the stars.”
“No.” He sounds so certain. “I wasn’t there. And I’ve never seen that part of it. The shadow of it. Or the memory. So I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.” He reaches for me, but I back away.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “Cole.” Because now that I’ve said it, I know it must be true. What would Willa Culver have done for a chance to become extraordinary? What would she have taken? Who would she have thrown away to get it? Or to keep it?
Cole freezes. He puts a finger to his lips. “Do you smell that?” he whispers. And it feels like déjà vu. But this isn’t the smell of horses. Or pigs.
It isn’t the smell of the past that’s filling up our noses.
This is the smell of gasoline. Here. In the present.
“We need to get out of here,” I whisper. “Now.”
Just then I hear voices below us. Laughing. A boy and a girl. Cole takes my hand in his, and we creep back down the stairs.
A video is playing on the TV. Little Cole and little April are giggling at the edge of the cliff. Dusk is falling. It’s almost dark. “Careful.” It’s Glory’s voice from behind the camera. She’s always nervous. Always cautious. “Don’t get too close,” she warns. “It’s dangerous.” She grabs Cole by the hand when he strays too far from her side. Then she pans over to the right, and Willa stands at the edge of the cliff. Her long, dark hair is blowing wildly in the wind. She holds a flashlight in one hand, and I stand in her living room, transfixed, as she pulls a handful of sea glass from her pocket. She tosses it into the darkness and hits it with the flashlight beam.
“Look at the stars!” she tells us, and we squeal with joy.
Me. Cole. Glory. Because Willa is pure magic.
The smell of gas burns my nose.
“Your mother taught you that trick,” I whisper. And Cole nods. “It was her that was there that night. Not you. Not your father. Not George. Not Glory.”
It was Willa.
“Cole!”
We both whirl around, and Willa glares at us from the kitchen doorway.
Cole takes a step in her direction but I reach out to grab his arm and stop him. Because I see the matches in her hand.
And the room is drenched in gasoline.
“She won’t hurt you,” Cole says. But I don’t know if he’s talking to me. Or to his mother.
If he’s talking to me, I know he’s wrong. Because Willa Culver murdered me once before. And there’s nothing to stop her from doing it again.
“Get out, Cole,” Willa says. But Cole doesn’t move.
“Mom.”
“I said get out!” Willa hisses.
“I’m not leaving.” Two sets of slate-gray eyes, each locked on the other.
“Everything about you is a lie.” I spit the words out like poison. “There’s nothing extraordinary about you. You stole it all from my mother.” It surprises me how much it hurts to say those words. Because I wanted so much for Willa Culver to be exactly who she said she was. I was so willing to love her for who she pretended she was. And I was so hungry for her to love me back.
“You can’t steal from a dead woman,” Willa tells me. Her eyes are so cold. How could I ever have thought they looked like Cole’s eyes? “That play wouldn’t have done your mother any good.”
“How could you kill your best friend?” My jaw is clenched so tight that I’m not sure how the words can find a way out. “She fucking loved you!” There are hot, angry tears on my cheeks. Because Willa Culver took so much from me. She took my whole world.
Willa looks genuinely surprised. “I didn’t kill your mother, April. All I did was accept a bargain.” She smiles at me. “I can’t let you accuse me of murder in front of my son.”
“It was Glory, wasn’t it. We had that part right.” Cole’s voice is so quiet. He sounds so distant. I grab his hand to make sure he’s still there. That he hasn’t slipped away from me.
“They had a fight that night,” Willa says. “A big one.” She’s playing with the matches while she talks. Holding one delicately between her fingers. Rubbing the head just so lightly across the side of the box. Reminding us that she could strike a flame at any moment. If she chose to. Because she’s Willa Culver. And she’s extraordinary.
“Nicole told Glory that she was leaving,” she goes on. “That it was over. All of it was over. Nicole came straight here when she left Glory’s place. Brody and I were going to set her up with a little apartment in the city. Just something tiny. A fresh start.”
The scratching sound of the match against the striking strip. A barely audible warning. A reminder to us that we’re not in charge here. That Willa is telling this story because she chooses to. Because there’s nothing Willa Culver loves more than an audience.
“But Glory followed her here. I heard them fighting down at the edge of the cliff, so I stepped out on the porch to see what was going on.” Willa finally strikes the match and Cole and I both suck in our breaths. “And that’s when I saw Glory push her over the edge. I don’t think she meant to do it. She just did it.” Willa shrugs. “But there are moments of no return. Some things you can’t take back.”
“Glory offered you a deal, didn’t she?” Cole says. “She knew Nicole was working on a play. She knew it was good. That it would be something big. And she traded it to you for your silence.”
“She bought you,” I whisper. The match in Willa’s hand goes out. But she immediately has another one between her fingers.
“She offered me an opportunity. A chance to become someone completely different.”
“But you became a monster,” I say. “You could have become anything. And you chose to become a thief and a liar.”
“How did Avril end up in the water?” There is so much ice in Cole’s voice that for a moment he sounds exactly like Willa. “Was that Glory, too? Or was that you?”
“I didn’t know she was there. Not until Glory left.” Willa is looking at me now. And just for a moment there’s something soft in her eyes. Something genuine and sad. “I didn’t know Nicole had even brought you with her that night. That’s the truth. But then you popped up out of the grass. And I knew you’d seen. That you knew. So I did what I had to do.”
“Jesus. She was a little girl.” Cole sounds sick. Like he’s going to throw up. “Was the fucking Tony worth it?”
Willa tightens her jaw. “I did what I had to do. Just like I did what I had to do last night.”
“You tried to kill Glory.” The realization of it comes to me so suddenly. “She was going to tell me, wasn’t she? She couldn’t live with it anymore.”
Willa shrugs. “I did what I had to do.” She strikes another match.
“And what are you going to do now that it looks like Glory’s going to live?” It’s Cole and the pain in his voice is almost the worst thing about this whole unfathomable night. “Are you going to try again? How many times are you willing to kill someone?”
