Better Left Unsaid

Prologue

Sitting in one of the old, somewhat rusted metal chairs in the Statford Towne Police Department was certainly not difficult, if not the slightest bit familiar.  The air in the lobby of the STPD was cold, and clammy, like a mixture between the air in a meat freezer and the swamps in January.  It was uncomfortable and stale, completely not the air Janey Nicholson wanted to be soaking in during the middle of July, when all the other rising seniors attending Foster High were most-likely relaxing at the cove, or having lunch at Bobby Cole's.  Though at the moment, in the busy-for-a-Tuesday police department, nobody was caring about what Janey wanted to do, not even Janey herself.  Everything, from wanting to be home watching reruns of the Big Bang Theory to the scratchiness in her throat seemed to have slipped her mind.

Instead, her mind was in a whirlwind of commotion, a neverending blur of the same facts circling around again and again in a useless array that left her staring morosely at the safety-poster-covered wall, in all its blue-wallpaper-ed glory.  Salty lines streaked down her face, the only evidence of tear-filled nights, before she'd stopped feeling and had become numb, like a comatose patient in a hospital.  Her eyes were red-rimmed, showing how little sleep she'd truly gotten over the past two days.

Those were the same eyes which had seen countless things, only some of which had imprinted their images into her mind, like slides to a neverending slideshow, one that was missing huge chunks in the storyline.  She saw those images now in that dismal, rusted chair--her mother stirring a bowl of Janey's favorite chocolate-chip cookie dough, throwing her head back with a laugh as Janey's father wrapped his arms around her skinny waist, planting kisses along the outline of her skinny, pale neck.  Janey saw her mother pulling the covers over the both of them, whispering ghost stories as she shined a flashlight up at her face, highlighting the slightly upturned, freckled nose that both of them shared.  Janey saw her father laughing and throwing her off of their lakehouse dock, into the cold murky water, before her pink floaties dragged her up to the surface again.  Janey saw a clean-shaven man clad in white shaking his head slowly, and then the wilted peonies dropping from her sleep-deprived father's hand and landing on the floor, seeming too silent to mean anything at all.

The images stuttered and then skipped forward a few years, and then she saw a slight blue-eyed girl gripping a squirming mud-colored toad between her pudgy fingers, laughing as she chased all the other little girls around the mulch until they ran for the safety of the third-grade teacher, Ms. Oakley.  She saw the hopeful face of the blue-eyed girl as Janey joined her for lunch on that first, nerve-wracking day of sixth grade, when none of the other girls would. 

Then, almost as if in flash-forward mode on her DVD player at home, she saw that blue-eyed, black-haired girl grow up before her eyes, pretty face filled with laughter and shared secrets and talk of boys and school.  The girl grew, stop-motion pictures continuing, full of promises for sequels and reruns, until in the end they stopped, freezing at one final picture of the blue-eyed girl.  She had haunted eyes, looking as if they were deprived of a good amount of sleep, and thin pink lips, moving slowly and out of sync with the four words they were speaking:

"I've got a secret."

And then the images stopped, leaving Janey staring at the peeling blue wallpaper of the police department, the posters.  Stranger Danger: What to Do, a picture of a frog detective instructing a small boy with a lollipop and a red polo.

Leila was gone.

A big part of Janey wished her secret was too.