Frozen Beauty Read online

  Dedication

  To my two sisters, and my brother, too,

  who has, after all, had to put up with all three of us

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Now

  Part One

  Chapter One: Before

  Chapter Two: Now

  Chapter Three: Before

  Chapter Four: Now

  Chapter Five: Before

  Chapter Six: Before

  Chapter Seven: Now

  Chapter Eight: Before

  Chapter Nine: Before

  Chapter Ten: Now

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven: Now

  Chapter Twelve: Before

  Chapter Thirteen: Now

  Chapter Fourteen: Before

  Chapter Fifteen: Before

  Chapter Sixteen: Now

  Chapter Seventeen: Before

  Chapter Eighteen: Now

  Chapter Nineteen: Before

  Chapter Twenty: Now

  Chapter Twenty-One: Before

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Now

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Before

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Now

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Now

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Before

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Now

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Now

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Before

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty: Now

  Chapter Thirty-One: Before

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Now

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Now

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Before

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Now

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Now

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Lexa Hillyer

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Now

  FEBRUARY 4

  SECRETS, SECRETS. EVERYONE HAD THEM. Everyone kept them from Lilly, kept her out.

  This is what comes of curiosity, the wind whispered hard and cold in her ear, swishing up into her skull. She shuddered. Snow soaked her boots.

  As the youngest of three, this was the story of her life: this winter coldness, this left-out-ness, this butt-out-and-don’t-complain-or-you’ll-sound-like-a-whiny-baby-ness.

  But here they were now: two glowing yellow headlights through the swirl of falling snow, through the blur of fading streetlights, through the dark of Route 28. Twin golden keys to the fucking treasure.

  And she had to have it, she thought, her hands shaking—had to know the secret. Between Kit and Tessa, Lilly was always excluded from the things that really mattered. But this time, she would know, would force her way in. The warmth of the golden orbs called to her with some kind of dark, irrepressible magic, and there was so little magic in this world. Lilly only wanted her share.

  It was a Saturday night. Lilly and Mel had been having their customary Saturday night sleepover at Mel’s house, which sat just on the edge of Devil’s Lake, the weeds and trees in her backyard giving way to the protected woods. Lilly had started to believe that their friendship was back on track. But when she’d awakened after midnight to find Mel gone, and the bedroom window cracked open, letting in a tiny but steady stream of frigid air, she’d had to assume the obvious: Mel had snuck out.

  And if she had snuck out, it could only be for one reason: to meet up with Dusty, her on-again-off-again something. After all, Mel had been texting furiously all night, even during the rom-com sex scenes.

  In a mix of disappointment and curiosity, Lilly had pushed open the bedroom door and crept down the quiet hall, past the den where all of Mel’s dad’s hunting rifles hung proudly in a row, polished and gleaming black even in the dark. Mel wasn’t in the house.

  So, naturally, Lilly had slithered through the front door, into the slowly filling pocket of snow by the side of the house, then went in search of her friend—and answers. Maybe Dusty’s car would be parked around the corner of the cul-de-sac.

  But what she’d found was a whole other kind of secret. Not more than the length of a football field down the main road sat a truck, its engine still going. Only yards from the edge of Mel’s property, if you cut through the woods.

  And it wasn’t just any truck. The red truck. Boyd’s red truck. It was parked at the side of the road near the preserve, a hulking metal animal heaving its breath into the cold . . . and of course, her curiosity had snagged like a loose-knit sweater on a chain-link fence.

  She felt that pull, that need to understand.

  She reasoned: what if Boyd needed help, needed her?

  A flash of doubt flooded Lilly’s brain for a minute. What if Mel had gotten back already and wondered where Lilly had gone?

  No—Mel was with Dusty, she was sure of that much. Mel had chosen her loyalties.

  Now: a male voice drifting out over the wind. The sound of a car door slamming. She was almost there, and the heat of discovery drove her on.

  But it was so cold. So cold and so dark. The sparse streetlights did little to help, spinning patches of air into gold-hued snow blurs. She had to hurry.

  Lilly scrunched her winter hat down lower. Still squinting, she made out a figure—no, two figures—floating from the shoulder of the road, toward the looming darkness of the woods that backed up to Devil’s Lake from Route 28.

  Mel and Dusty?

  Mel and Boyd?

  Voices took clearer shape in the air as she got closer, though the words themselves wove and dodged and blew away. Holding her breath, hidden by the hounding snowfall and the heavy dark, she came all the way up to the driver’s side—the side facing the road—without the figures noticing. She peered through the window. The keys were still in the ignition, a faint silver clump dangling in shadow.

  Shivering, she rounded the back of the truck, careful to stay hidden from view behind the glow of the taillights.

  A guy and a girl, arguing.

  Her heart hammered. She had to strain to see them in the bad light and the fierce snowfall, but she recognized Boyd by his height and his hunting hat. And the girl with him wasn’t Mel at all. . . .

  She was unmistakable. She wore no hat, and her golden hair shone even in the darkness.

  It was Kit.

  Lilly took a step back. Was she being crazy right now? You didn’t just traipse along the road late at night by yourself, in the middle of a storm. She should head back. What was she thinking?

  But then again, she could almost hear Tessa’s voice in her head: weren’t Boyd and Kit—the ever-trusted boy next door and the older sister everyone in school worshipped—up to something crazy, too? Tessa was always talking about likelihoods and hypotheses. Lilly wasn’t exactly a star at science, but you didn’t have to be a neurosurgeon to solve this equation: if you were those two and you were driving around in Boyd’s truck together on a Saturday night, in secret—you didn’t pull over in a storm, either. Not unless something was wrong. Not unless something was going on.

  Secrets. Secrets.

  Lilly watched from behind the truck as Boyd put his hand on Kit’s arm, and she shook, possibly crying.

  Was he grabbing her now? Had she let him?

  Slowly he pulled open her coat.

  Lilly shuddered hard. Kit said something, but Lilly caught only snatches of her words: please and you’re making a mistake and I don’t believe you.

  The racing of Lilly’s heart became a loud ringing through her ears and head. What was happening? Kit’s voice, dancing on the wind, seemed to ebb and peak and break.

  Lilly trusted Boyd; of course, she did. Hell, she loved Boyd. But she also knew how angry he got sometimes. Once he’d shoved Tessa so hard she’d fallen int
o the gravel on the playground and torn open her shin. Then again, that had been right after Tessa kneed him in the balls. They were ten then, and nothing like that had happened since.

  But still. Lilly remembered. Lilly always remembered.

  She stood on the verge of calling to them when Kit got quiet, moving closer to Boyd. Then she was touching his face. And he was leaning down, and they were kissing—mist rising from where their faces met.

  Hot breath in the cold night.

  Oh.

  So they weren’t fighting.

  A flash of mortification.

  Everyone was coupling off, hooking up, lying to Lilly about it.

  Secrets, secrets.

  She backed up toward the road, the thrill of voyeurism bursting suddenly into hot shame. A car rushed past her and honked.

  She gasped, startled, realizing how easy it would have been to get hit.

  Sweat tickled the back of her neck even in the freezing cold. Had the honk drawn Kit’s attention? The last thing she wanted was for Kit to think she’d been spying—which was, of course, exactly the truth. The last thing she needed was to give anyone more ammo for treating her like a fucking kid, one more reason to say butt out or I told you so.

  Quickly, without looking back, she raced through the trees, taking the shortcut into Mel’s backyard. She couldn’t have been gone very long, but still. A person could die out here, on a night like this.

  Icy pellets of snow blew into her eyes and Lilly could hardly see at all now—but that didn’t stop her from replaying the moment she had just witnessed over and over again: Boyd’s plaid hunting hat as he leaned down toward Kit’s face, and their lips met, and they kissed.

  And above them, in the winter air all around them, the echo of Kit’s voice, saying please.

  Later, long after she’d curled back onto her side of the trundle bed in Mel’s room—after she’d awakened the next morning to her friend lying beside her, softly snoring—Lilly would recall that word, please, and know for certain that it had been Kit’s final plea for her life. That if only she had stayed, or shouted, or called for help, maybe things would have gone differently.

  Maybe her sister would still be alive.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Before

  AN OLD SAYING: ALL GOOD things come in threes.

  Or was it that all bad things came in threes?

  Pushing his too-long hair out of his face, Boyd drove the lawn mower across his dad’s quarter-acre of grass. The early September sun cut jagged lines of shadow through the scattered cottonwoods.

  Some of the places he’d seen over by Detroit, where distant cousins lived, boasted that cookie-cutter perfection you dreamed of when you thought of a small town, all even squares and matching houses in a row like straight little teeth—one big suburban grinning mouth—but out here in Devil’s Lake, the yards ran amok, mangy and undefined, lapping over one another and swarming in constant land disputes and neighborly grudges. Always a roamer buck hunting or firing pellets at squirrels on someone else’s property.

  That’s why he’d convinced his dad to go in on a used John Deere—the kind of mower you got up on and rode like a tractor—and now he actually enjoyed this chore, this chance to work outside and hover above things for a little while, carving out a space that belonged to him.

  Evening was coming on, though, and the sunlight left its weight on his shoulders somehow, like it felt tired and had to rest from a long summer of burning itself up. He could smell fall’s approach, too: the early hint of decay, of mud hardening, preparing itself.

  Boyd probably should’ve prepared, too, he thought. It was junior year, starting tomorrow. The year of all the tests that supposedly determined your future, slapped a number on you and sorted you like cattle. Some ended up in college. Some ended up working seasonal land jobs. Some ended up leaving town with no good plan at all except to get away.

  He should’ve been thinking about graduating, about what would come next—about whether what came next would take him far, far away from Devil’s Lake.

  Or at least about final papers. Maybe he’d write one up on Chizhevsky, something that would make Tessa smile when she read it. She read nearly all his homework, either her or Kit, to catch all the spelling nicks. Never Lilly; her schoolwork was a mess, like his.

  As usual, Boyd couldn’t stay concentrated too long on school, though. All he could think about right now—on this warm almost-evening that had his skin prickling with a pleasant layer of sweat—were the three girls next door. They’d lived there most of his life—moved into the area with their mom after their dad died in combat off in some location Boyd only learned about later and still couldn’t pronounce.

  He’d been about six at the time. He’d never seen anything like this tribe of women.

  All good things come in threes.

  His mom had once taught him about the constellations—or at any rate he had a memory that she had told him about the stars, even though he probably shouldn’t trust that memory, because she died when he was two and who remembers anything from then? Anyway, he liked to imagine the Malloy sisters that way: three bright points in his sky, their bedroom lights coming on every night, then flickering out a little while later, and with each, he felt connected, rooted to something.

  Everything else might be completely fucked—an unending string of garbage news on the television, angry politics, countless hours of half-inspired homework and his dad getting uptight all the time, about jobs going sparse and bank accounts shriveling into shells and bottles running out too soon, or their aging dachshund, Jimmy, shitting on the living-room carpet again.

  But the Malloys shimmered through it all—livelier than stars, really. More like lightning bugs you caught in a jar—the three of them living in the house next door, so close to his, moving about in the routine of their lives, crying out to one another like fighting cats in the night, cursing under their breath or, sometimes, singing, loud and off-key. Whispering. Scheming and assessing, the way sisters do. Building a world in which your part was only ever passing by, on the periphery.

  He had been close to the inside most of his life—over the years they’d made him their pirate overlord and beast prince, their evil doctor, their pony, their priest. They’d teased him and tagged him and angled to have him take their side over the others, though he never could for long. He had even brushed and braided their hair. This was long ago, and at the time, that fine silkiness in his hands had given him an otherworldly shiver—Kit’s golden, Tessa’s pale, and Lilly’s firelike. It made him kind of mortified to think about it now.

  Mortified, but still proud. Because they were his, after all, even if he couldn’t explain how or why. They were Narnia, or Terabithia, straight out of one of those old magical books they loved to read out loud: living dream, accessible through some trapdoor in the universe that just happened to be right here where he could reach it—a door that opened into a constantly unknown and yet intimately familiar landscape of balding dolls and hairballs, catfights and tears and egg-salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off and only-green grapes, the kind whose skins were always splitting, overfull of juice. A world of rules and vows and secrets and allegiances and competitions and handshakes and the intoxicating scent of—

  “Hey!”

  Boyd yanked his headphones off his ears to catch his father calling him in. Probably needed him to run an errand. Boyd could guess what kind. He’d been to the bottom of more than one bottle since dawn. Sometimes there were just bad days.

  The sun was drooping now, darker red at the center, then bleeding out like a shot animal.

  He leaned forward to shut off the engine and got jolted forward as the machine let out a whining grunt. Probably ran over a stray rock or an old shoe. Weird shit ended up out here, who knew how—dragged by wild animals, coyotes maybe, or local kids from his school with nothing better to do (not always a huge difference between the two). Definitely not by Jimmy, though—the dog was too old to drag his
own tail most days.

  Boyd hopped down off the mower and examined what had gotten jammed in its teeth. In the failing light, he squinted at the shiny piece of crushed plastic for a second, finally identifying the stuck object as an old Barbie, its hair chopped at a crude diagonal, its too-big eyes squished onto either side of a flattened head, one arm bent backward and the other snapped off entirely.

  Odd. He used to see these things over at the Malloy house all the time, but they’d outgrown Barbies long ago. The doll had super-shiny golden hair, reminding him of Kit.

  A big smudge of dirt darkened its squashed face, and out of some deranged instinct, Boyd thought to swipe it clean with his thumb. This broken detritus of girlhood. This piece-of-shit bit of plastic once shaped to look aspirational and sleek, with its red satiny outfit, all torn up. It seemed, now that he thought about it, kind of slutty and cheap. Kind of sad.

  He shoved it into his pocket, kept it like a piece of crucial evidence, this birthing of the backyard muck, a relic, a reminder of the Malloy sisters’ unchanging ever-presence. It would make an okay chew toy for Jimmy, at any rate, he thought as he headed inside to see what his dad wanted now, trying not to wonder too much about how it had ended up out here, on his lawn, in the first place.

  It was a mystery, or an omen, and Boyd disliked both, about as much as he disliked bloody hangnails and all of Devil’s Lake. He’d never been particularly good at guessing the truth, or what terrible thing was coming next.

  WAITING

  BY KATHERINE MALLOY

  Devil’s Lake is only half what its name indicates—

  more like a pond, more mossy than sheer,

  hidden in the preserve past Route 28,

  covered in slick green slime all year . . .

  except when it freezes over in winter.

  But it isn’t frozen yet, not when my story starts,

  the tale of my own thawing: ribs like the tinder

  of an unseen fire, burning not just in our hearts

  but without and around—consuming the forest,

  coating the trees with smoke black as ink,