The Space Between Trees

The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams Page B

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Authors: Katie Williams
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up—no vomit, no bile. I try for a while longer, and then the feeling passes and my breathing slows. I sit back, pressing my cheek against the cold side of the stall. The inside of my mouth tastes metallic, like I’ve been hiding pennies under my tongue. I wipe my lips over with toilet paper, rubbing away the last smudges of my lip gloss. Once I’m sure I can, I stand up. In the mirror, I look gray and ghost-like, but I feel better. I swish water in my mouth and go back out.
    The hallway I’ve come down is lined with doors. I glance into each room as I pass it. There’s a Sunday school room, painted yellow.There’s an office. There’s a room with a chipped and dinged piano. There’s a room with nothing in it but rows of folding chairs and, in one chair, a man.
    I stop. He’s sitting in the first row, and even though his head is bowed, for some reason it doesn’t look like he’s praying. It’s his hands, I realize. They aren’t clasped in his lap, but instead are curled around his chair, gripping the seat. He’s in a dark suit. I wonder if he’s here for Zabet’s funeral, which must have already started by now.
    I step into the room. “Hello?”
    He takes a minute to look around, as if I’ve woken him up, and I think that maybe he was praying after all. His face is the sort that looks beaten up even though it isn’t: low-slung jaw, watery eyes—a bulldog face. There’s something familiar to it.
    “Are you here for the funeral?” I say. “Because I think it’s probably started already.”
    He nods. “It started a minute ago. And you?”
    “Me? I was . . .”
Sick
, I was going to say, but then I realize that I wasn’t. “Yes. I’m here for it.”
    He releases the bottom of the chair and plays with his shirt cuff. “You should go back in, then.”
    “Did you want to . . . ? You could . . .” I indicate the hall.
    He studies me for a second, long enough for me to get self-conscious and drop my arm. He shakes his head. “I don’t want to disrupt the service.”
    “Me neither,” I say and take a chair in the back row. It’s an impulsive decision, to sit down, and he watches me as I do it.
    “I’m Ray,” he says.
    “I’m Evie.”

    “Evie.” He inclines his head.
    As soon as I give him my name, a thought crosses my mind: This man could be Zabet’s killer. In the movies, they say that killers like to return to the crime scene to watch events unfold. I think that I would be one of those kind of killers, too, coming back to watch people react to what I’d done. Otherwise, what would be the point? But I’m not a killer. This man might be, though, here alone, at the funeral but not at the funeral. I look around. The room is nearly bare except for the chairs, with their feet sinking into the carpeting. A copy of the Ten Commandments curls on one wall, its tape gone dry. There are three rows of chairs between the man and me. The door to the hallway is just behind me. I could run if I needed to.
    The man looks up at me then. “How did you know Elizabeth?” And so he knows her name. Would he know her name if he’d killed her? I decide that he might. It’s been in all of the papers and on the programs at the door. And besides, maybe she told it to him before he killed her.
    “She was my friend,” I say. “My best friend.” I don’t even think about the lie before I tell it, so does that make it a lie?
    “Are you Hadley?” he says.
    “No. Evie.”
    “That’s right. You told me that.” He nods. “I’m afraid that I didn’t get to meet too many of Elizabeth’s friends.”
    This stops me, when he says this, and all of a sudden I know why he seems familiar. “Are you her—”
    “Her dad.” He wipes a hand over his forehead. “Did I not say that?”
    “You’re Mr. McCabe.” I can see him now, in the photo on the sideboard in the McCabe dining room in a suit with a green tie. Inall those afternoons there at Zabet’s house, I’d never met him; he had always stayed late at

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