The Darkest Corners Read Online Free Page B

when I can’t tell her, she’ll give me one of those looks that level me.
    Callie was always the one people listened to.
Eight going on eighteen,
Maggie would say. Even now that we
are
both eighteen, I feel like a stupid child around her.
    “Things are different now,” I mumble.
    “What are you talking about?” Callie springs up from the couch. Closes the family room door. “Do
not
tell me all those lunatics from Cyber Sleuths got into your head and now you want to take back your testimony.”
    So she did get my message.
    “Of course not,” I say. “But it’s been ten years. If they retest the evidence, who knows what they’ll find.”
    Callie folds her arms across her chest. “Tessa. He stalked Lori and he killed her. You were there when he threatened her at the pool. Don’t you remember?”
    Of course I remember. I’ve remembered it every day for the past ten years. The three of us were headed to where Lori’s car was parked. Wyatt Stokes was leaning against the chain-link fence, smoking a joint. The day before, Joslin had let him borrow her lighter. I don’t know what Stokes said to Lori, but she got uncomfortable and ignored him.
    He sucked on his joint and said, “What’s red, white, and blue and floats?”
    Lori pressed her hands to our backs and pushed us toward the car as he called out, “A dead bitch,” and laughed to himself all the way into the woods.
    I realize I haven’t responded to Callie when her eyes flash. “I
saw him,
” she says, but I hear what she really means: Wyatt Stokes is the man who killed her cousin. Even to consider the possibility that it isn’t true is treason.
    I lift my chin so that I can meet her eyes. Callie was always taller than me. She towers over me now, though, her low-slung jeans showing off a sliver of her toned stomach.
    “How can you remember what you saw?” My voice quakes. “It was dark. We were only eight.”
    Callie lets out an exasperated laugh and grabs the doorknob. “I’m done talking about this.”
    She whirls around to face me, and I flinch. Her face softens—or maybe I only imagined it, because now she’s glaring at me again. “Just remember that you said you saw him too. You can’t say I lied without accusing yourself of the
same thing.
”
    Callie slams the door behind her. The sound may as well be the period at the end of the sentence
Wyatt Stokes is guilty.
    Two more days in Fayette.
    It might as well be two years.
    •••
    We begged Lori to let us sleep in the Greenwoods’ sunroom that night. Maggie had said absolutely no to our setting up Rick’s tent in the backyard. She’d promised we could camp out there some other time, when she and Rick would be home and someone could stay in the tent with us.
    The sunroom was the next best thing. It made Lori nervous that a screen was the only thing separating us from the outside, but Callie insisted that nothing bad ever happened in our neighborhood. Lori relented, and we dug through the camping gear in the crawl space beneath the stairs to the basement to find me an old sleeping bag. We vowed to stay up all night and watch for bears, but by ten, we were fading, cloaked in a sun-and-chlorine-soaked bliss.
    I woke up to Callie shaking me, her Cinderella sleeping bag bunched up to her shoulders.
    “Tessa. There’s someone out there.”
    I don’t remember being scared. I thought it was probably an animal, until we heard another twig snap. Footsteps. Callie dug her nails into my forearm. “What if it’s the man from the pool?”
    I shushed her, and we peered out the screen together. Callie cried out as a dark figure skulked around the side of the yard. I yanked her through the sunroom door and into the living room, where Lori was on the couch, the television muted, a book facedown in her lap.
    “There’s someone outside,” Callie said.
    Lori grabbed a flashlight. Callie started to cry.
    “It’s probably a raccoon,” Lori told her. “Just wait in your room.”
    We huddled on