Limetown Read online

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  At the end of the segment, the reporter approached the fence’s sole gate but was quickly escorted away by a security guard who looked like he worked nights at the local mall.

  “So no one else knows about it?” the girl said.

  “No one but us,” the other said. “Unless you count Brad.”

  The bell rang. The TV shut off.

  “That’s kind of creepy,” the girl said.

  The other girl took her hand. “I know.”

  * * *

  No one was home after school. Lia’s dad had returned to work; her mother was still at her purported conference. Out of curiosity Lia tried the cell phone her dad gave her mother for Christmas, but it was new to her and she’d always claimed to be a bit of a technophobe. Lia’s call went straight to voice mail. She didn’t leave a message.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed rehearsing tomorrow, her normal routine, which she liked because it gave her a sense of control. She told herself that tomorrow she would focus on the story she was assigned for Newspaper. Not her dead wannabe crush, not her missing mother—not any of the different mysteries that had become knotted in her mind. She would go to the memorial, get quotes from Brad’s teammates, and finish her piece on the basketball team’s upcoming season. Because it didn’t feel good, these growing mysteries, not for someone who only liked a good riddle if she was confident she could solve it.

  After she planned tomorrow, her mind involuntarily replayed today. She saw her dad crying in the parking garage, heard the pain in his voice when he said his brother’s name. Emile. Lia still knew nothing about him, but as she drifted off into sleep, her imagination, longing for answers, filled the void. She dreamed of her mother and Emile running off together. She saw him taking her for a midnight ride outside of town, swerving to avoid a deer, and running Brad off the road. Her mother standing over his body, saying, We have to do something. Emile grabbing her by the arm, pulling her away, the two of them escaping to Limetown, where they would start a new life.

  * * *

  Miss Scott gave Lia detention for never reporting back the day before. She laughed. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Lia Haddock, of all people.” She had Lia clean each desktop in her classroom, and when Lia was finished, she took her rag and spray bottle down each hall looking for gum. Lia had twenty minutes to kill, so she wandered slowly. She wiped the fingerprints off the wall of trophy cases surrounding the main auditorium, making her way to the small cabinet housing the plaques for nonathletic accomplishments, tucked in the corner of one hall. There were no fingerprints on its glass, only dust.

  Above the band room were portraits of every previous senior class, including the ones from way back when her dad had attended. Lia had glanced at these before, and once or twice she’d found him in his class photo, his dark and embarrassing feathered hair, his thick eyebrows that he’d passed on to Lia. But where was Emile? He would have gone here too. She scanned the years before and after her dad graduated. She went a decade in the past, flashed five years in the future. There was no Emile Haddock listed.

  As she made her way back to Miss Scott’s classroom, she wondered when Emile had turned bad, bad enough that her parents rarely spoke his name. Maybe, like Lia, he carried around the persistent feeling that he belonged elsewhere. Maybe he didn’t fit in in high school either. Maybe if he came back, he could help Lia. Maybe he could—

  “You have three minutes left of detention,” Miss Scott said, after Lia returned to her classroom. She didn’t bother lifting her head from the student essay she was tattooing red.

  “You knew my dad, right?” Lia said.

  “Your mother too. Good people.”

  “No. I mean, he went here. He was a student of yours.” Miss Scott had said something that first day of class. Called Lia a spitting image. The apple of his eye. “What about my uncle? Did you know him?”

  Miss Scott looked up. She took off her reading glasses. “What’s this about?”

  “I was looking at the class portraits. I didn’t see any Emiles listed.”

  “That’s because Emile was never a senior,” Miss Scott said. “He had a difficult time.”

  “So you did know him.”

  She stared at Lia for a while, studying her face, perhaps looking for a trace of her uncle, a landmark from the past. “Not as well as I would’ve liked,” Miss Scott said, “but I know your dad cared about him. He was very protective.”

  “Protective?”

  Miss Scott had taught Lia interview techniques the first week of the fall semester. She showed her different ways to elicit information from a subject who was less than forthcoming. First: Repeat their words. Make them feel insecure. Force them to elaborate.

  “For whatever reason,” Miss Scott said, “Emile got in fights. Quite a few, before he dropped out.”

  “Dropped out?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Doing?”

  Miss Scott laughed. She twirled her red pen around her thumb, until the pen’s point stopped, landing on Lia.

  “Why didn’t my dad get in trouble?”

  “He did. But after a while, he wised up.”

  “But Emile kept fighting.”

  Second: When repetition fails, finish their thoughts.

  “Well, from what I heard, he didn’t start many of the fights. He just had a way of finishing them.”

  The bell rang. Lia grabbed her book bag. Third: It’s okay not to ask every question. Press pause, walk away. Give the subject time to feel guilty for all the things they kept secret.

  Miss Scott walked Lia to the door. “You’re getting good,” she said. “But you need to be careful.”

  Careful? Lia thought. But she knew better than to push it.

  * * *

  The rest of the week passed without event, and without the return of Lia’s mother. Monday would mark two weeks that she’d been gone, and Lia’s dad had taken to avoiding Lia altogether. Notes in the kitchen said he was working late. Or he left messages on their archaic answering machine, having called when he knew Lia wouldn’t be home.

  He was gone Friday night too, the night of the vigil. The strangeness of her empty house pushed her out the door. The vigil was held at Lost 80, a remote park in the middle of the woods good for fighting, smoking, and sex. Lia had been there once, with a boy who was too nervous to make a move. She parked away from the gravel lot and picnic benches. The cops knew about Lost 80 too. Most of them had gone to Lia’s high school and never escaped after graduation.

  Everyone gathered on the far side of Potter Lake. It was really more of a large pond, but the town was short on scenery. The tallest hill was called a mountain. The two girls from English were there, huddled together, faces glowing above a shared candle. It was difficult to tell how many other people were present. Someone had built a small fire, the only light other than the candles and orange dots from joints and cigarettes. It would snow later that night, and the sky was overcast, the moon nowhere to be seen.

  “We should get started,” a girl said. Abby, one of Brad’s longest flings. She was a tiny girl with long dark hair, a button nose. She stood by the fire holding a sheet of paper. A poem, maybe. This whole thing was probably her idea. “Does anyone want to speak first?”

  The frosted grass crunched beneath shifting feet. They watched each other’s breath. Abby unfolded her paper. She looked down at her words and shook her head.

  “I wrote something,” Abby said, “in English class. But it’s not . . . I don’t think . . .” She folded the paper, put it in her coat pocket. “Brad was good to me. Though really, I wasn’t that good to him.” Some awkward laughter. “We dated for eleven months but I never liked him the way I should’ve liked him. Like he liked me.” Lia stepped closer to the fire. Abby frowned. “Anyway, what I wrote was stupid. It was a dumb poem about how no one is ever gone. Like, how I can hear his voice, even though my parents are atheists and I
know better.”

  Lia shivered. She heard her mother’s voice tell her a ghost was passing through.

  Abby took out the paper and dropped it into the fire. A few people closed in around her. The English girls, one of Brad’s best friends. They took her arms and formed a chain, and together they watched her words burn.

  * * *

  The fire died, was brought back to life, and threatened to die again. Girls passed around weed and wine coolers. Boys shotgunned beer. Lia was too afraid to drink or smoke, but she stayed because she knew nothing waited for her at home. She lingered by the fire and wondered how long it would go on like this. What would happen if her mom never returned home, if Lia had to watch her dad slowly disappear too?

  Abby put her hand on Lia’s shoulder. “ ‘No man is an island,’ ” she said. “What a joke.” It took Lia a moment to realize what she was talking about—the words carved into the tree a few yards behind her. “It isn’t fair,” Abby said. Her eyes were red from crying, or maybe it was the smoke. “Everybody liked Brad.”

  Abby took a swig from a wine cooler she’d tucked beneath her arm.

  “You liked him, didn’t you? Is that it?”

  “No,” Lia said. “I mean, yes, but—”

  “Yeah, you did. You little weirdo. Tell the truth.” Abby ruffled Lia’s hair like Lia was a small dog. Lia tried to step away but Abby pushed her, catching her off guard. Lia fell, feet away from the fire.

  A few girls laughed, a dumb boy meowed. Lia rolled away from the fire and into the darkness, shutting her eyes to make everyone disappear. What could she say? She thought she cared about Brad, but didn’t? That until the night of the party, the night that Brad died, she’d let herself believe that Brad was, if not the answer, then at least an answer to her loneliness?

  When she finally opened her eyes, Abby was gone. Lia sat up. Everyone was running. Into the woods, in all directions.

  A few seconds later police flashlights streamed through the trees. Lia stood and ran.

  * * *

  She hid in the woods for an hour, watching the cops’ half-hearted attempts to make arrests. They caught a few kids who were too slow or too high. One kid insisted to the cops that he didn’t do anything wrong. But the others, they cried. They begged for mercy. Don’t tell our parents, they said.

  While she waited for the cops to leave the woods, Lia practiced apologies to her dad. Sorry, I lost track of time. No, I wasn’t drinking. I would never smoke. No, I wasn’t at a friend’s. I was at a vigil. I lost someone.

  When she finally made it home, the kitchen light was on but dimmed. Lia started to apologize before she even saw who was sitting at the table, watching the news.

  “Mom?”

  Her mother didn’t turn to face her. She kept her eyes on the TV. A plane had crashed somewhere in the Pacific. There were over two hundred passengers. No survivors.

  “You’re grounded,” her mother said.

  “I’m sorry,” Lia said.

  “No, you’re not. That’s the one thing I’ve learned. People do what they want. Good luck trying to stop them.”

  “So how was the conference?”

  “Illuminating,” her mother said. “And nonexistent.”

  “Then where were you?”

  “Nowhere, as far as I can tell.”

  Lia sat opposite her mother, blocking the TV. Eliminate distractions, Miss Scott said. Confine your subject to the story.

  “Mom, I was worried. What’s going on?”

  “It’s nothing you need to worry about,” she said, though she still wouldn’t look at Lia.

  Don’t let them off easy. If you let them evade, you’ll never get the truth.

  “You disappeared for almost two weeks for a conference that you just told me didn’t happen.”

  She continued looking down. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. You deserve a better excuse. So does your dad.”

  “He didn’t know either?”

  Behind Lia a reporter narrated the crashed plane’s projected flight path. Where it took off from, where it should have landed. Lia turned and watched for a moment as the reporter drew a large circle on a map of the ocean, an estimate where the passengers likely died. But really, he said, they could be anywhere.

  When Lia turned back around, her mother was in tears.

  “Oh, Lia,” she said. “Something bad is going to happen there. I tried to warn him. I told him not to go back.”

  The news went to commercial. Lia’s mother fixed her dark eyes on Lia, as if willing her to understand.

  “Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s going to happen? Where?”

  Lia heard a creak on the stairs. Her mother looked around her, worried.

  “Mom, tell me what you mean.”

  The commercial ended abruptly. There was breaking news. They found the black box. And with it, the reporter said, hope for answers.

  “Limetown,” her mother said. “It will not end well. He needs to get out.”

  “Limetown? Who?”

  Her mother leaned in, just before Lia’s dad entered the kitchen.

  “Your uncle,” her mother whispered. “Emile.”

  Her dad stood in the doorway, recycling bag in hand. “So,” he said. “What are we talking about?”

  Lia’s mother glanced at her, then quickly looked away.

  “Nothing,” Lia said. “A plane crashed.”

  Her dad raised an eyebrow, but didn’t question Lia’s answer. He turned to the TV. “Oh, I saw that. All those people. What a tragedy.”

  * * *

  Lia was in Miss Scott’s room, working late on the piece about the basketball team when she heard the news about Limetown. Before that, Lia would later think, it could have been an ordinary day. If someone was reporting on her life, if they took a snapshot of her on her way to school, they wouldn’t know that she had taken her mother’s car—newer and nicer than her pre-owned—to school that morning because her mother canceled her classes that week, and would for the rest of the semester. If they interviewed her dad, they might shoot Lia a passing smile as she rushed through the kitchen, only pausing long enough to say she didn’t have time for breakfast. Until Lia got out the door and took off the mask, until she sat safely in her mother’s car, which she would rifle through later, looking for any clue as to where she had been, she could have been any other naive midwestern teen with no idea how good she had it.

  Miss Scott read the headline off the Internet, as if it were any other trivial story. “Entire Town Vanishes in White County, Tennessee. Huh. Look at that. Limetown.”

  As she read, Lia grew very hot. She felt nauseous. Over three hundred men, women, and children. Vanished. Every home and building abandoned. An entire town—gone. The next day there would be a full report on NewsNow and every other major media outlet. No cameras were allowed inside. NewsNow set up outside the fence, behind which billowed an enormous tower of smoke seemingly erupted from the trees. The reporter stood in front of the fence, desperate to know what had happened. But she had no answers. No one did. All she could do was direct the camera to the smoke and wonder.

  “Are you almost finished?” Miss Scott asked.

  Lia had been staring blankly at the computer screen, imagining all the ways someone could disappear.

  “Lia?”

  She didn’t answer. Her head buzzed with the possibilities, all the things she didn’t know, everything her parents were hiding.

  “Lia,” Miss Scott said. “Are you all right?”

  “My uncle was there. In Limetown.”

  Another teacher poked her head in. Miss Scott waved her away.

  Lia wiped her eyes, but they were dry. “I didn’t even know him.”

  Lia looked up at Miss Scott. She wanted to tell her about her mom. About her uncle, the way her dad sounded when he said his name at the police station. She wanted someone to help fill in the strange gaps that had crept into her life, to sort through the possibilities and tell her what was tr
ue.

  “There are too many questions,” she said, knowing what Miss Scott would say before she said it.

  She said, “You’re only as good as the questions you ask.”

  She stood Lia up for a hug. Lia squeezed her as hard as she could.

  “Something is wrong,” Lia said, trying to describe the growing heaviness in her chest.

  “That’s your intuition,” Miss Scott said. “A good journalist never ignores it.”

  Her intuition. Maybe that was what led her to Brad’s house, to the police station parking lot. Maybe that was what set off alarm bells when she saw the story about Limetown. But was any of it connected? If she closed her eyes again, and concentrated hard enough, could she weave the threads together?

  Lia lifted her head from Miss Scott’s shoulder. “I don’t know where to start,” she said.

  “Not yet,” Miss Scott said. “But someday you will.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Emile

  Twenty-five years before the Panic at Limetown, Emile sat down at his desk in the back of the American History classroom. His teacher, Mr. Church, was noticeably absent, late for the third time that week. Emile was not surprised. He knew Mr. Church hated teaching. Often, while his students took a quiz, Mr. Church made a mental list of all the ways his life had disappointed him: the dream jobs he’d never pursued (he’d wanted to be a travel writer, once upon a time); the women he found more interesting than his quiet wife. Was it too late, he wondered, to become someone else?

  He never said these things out loud, but Emile heard them just the same.

  Emile had dreams of his own. Lately, they revolved around finding his mother, a woman he hadn’t seen since he was six and only vaguely remembered. He’d always been curious about her, intrigued by the few bits of information gleaned from his brother, Jacob. But recently, that curiosity had morphed into something more. A compulsion he couldn’t explain, a riptide swirling in his head, ready at any moment to drag him out to sea.