Her mom sat perched behind the front desk, folding towels and watching for her. She stood up the minute Zoe stepped inside. They inched toward each other shyly, like a couple that's forgotten how to dance.
Zoe let herself be hugged but made a point of not hugging back. Her mother ignored the awkwardness.
"Oh my god, that coat," she said. "Is that X's?"
"Yeah," said Zoe. "It heals you. The minute you put it on, it starts, like, erasing your bruises and mending your bones."
"Seriously?" said her mother, her eyes wide.
"No, it's just a coat," said Zoe. "It's superwarm, though."
Her mom laughed and swatted her on the shoulder.
"Look, I need to apologize to you," she said. "Come fold some towels with me, and let me try?"
They sat with a basket from the dryer between them. Zoe remembered folding towels with Bert after he'd become senile. He'd been obsessed with how warm and fluffy they were, how clean they smelled. She had to stop him from shoving his face into them.
"So," her mother said now, "do you want the short, medium, or long apology?"
"Start with the short one," said Zoe.
"I love you, and I'm sorry," said her mother.
"Not feeling it," said Zoe. She smoothed a towel with her hand. It crackled with electricity. "Try the medium one."
"I love you, and I'm sorry-and I was wrong to tell the police to leave your dad's body in the cave," her mother said.
"Why did you?" said Zoe. "I don't get it."
Her mother sighed.
"I'm just going to blurt it out, like you would, okay?" she said. "I think maybe your dad killed himself, Zo."
Zoe said nothing.
"He was really unhappy toward the end," her mother continued. "He felt like a failure. He hated who he was. And he thought I'd stopped loving him, which … It kills me that he thought that." She paused. "I'm only telling you all this because you've asked me so many times, and I think you can handle it."
"I can," said Zoe. "Don't stop."
"Look, I don't know anything about caving, but it seems like he was too smart to die in some freak accident," her mother said. "So I thought maybe he killed himself, and I didn't … " She paused again, and pressed her hands against her eyes. "I didn't want the cops to go in there and prove I was right."
Zoe leaned forward. She hugged her mother for real this time.
"I know Dad wouldn't have done that," she said. "He just messed up. He stopped to take a picture-and he fell. When I was in the cave today, I could picture exactly what happened. I could feel it."
Her mother nodded.
"I'm sure you're right," she said. "I want you to be right."
"I am right," said Zoe. "So you'll tell the police to go get him now? I kicked ass today, but it was scary as shit-and Silver Teardrop is nothing compared to Dad's cave. I don't actually want to die doing this."
Before her mother could respond, an elderly, German-sounding couple came through the door. Zoe's mom took their money, and handed them flip-flops, towels, and locker-room keys. She and Zoe watched them shuffle down the stairs, arm in arm, and didn't speak until they'd descended out of sight.
"I'll talk to the police," she told Zoe. "I promise I will. And I'm sorry I didn't tell you all this sooner." She paused. "Being a grown-up is the worst," she said. "You'll be better at it than me. I can already tell."
Her mother's shift was supposed to end at six o'clock, but at 5:58 an employee she referred to as the Flaker called to say that he had weird spots on his tongue and was it cool if he bailed? Her mom was exhausted-she didn't even have the energy to brush her hair back when it fell in her eyes-and her shoulders sagged at the news. Zoe was still on a high from crushing Silver Teardrop. She offered to cover the shift herself. Her mother did the whole I-couldn't-ask-you-to-do-that thing, but Zoe said, "Shut up, I'm doing it. Shut up, I'm doing it"-and so on until her mother gave in.
Zoe's mom told her the pools were basically empty: there was the German couple, who were now making out in the big pool, and a single dad throwing a birthday party for his beastly six-year-old daughter in the smaller one. She reminded her that there was a lifeguard on duty at each pool, and that if she couldn't find Lance, the security guard, he was probably in the locker room doing Pilates. Her mom told her that she could close up early if the place emptied out-and, on a sort of creepy note, that she should watch the security monitors because they'd been having some sneak-ins.
"There's one other thing," she said. She opened her laptop, which lay on the desk in front of Zoe. "I was going to let this wait until morning because I wasn't sure you could handle it after the cave and everything. But you're going to want to see it."
Zoe's mother called up a news story. She swiveled the computer toward Zoe, and took a step back.
"It looks like X found Stan," she said.
Zoe's eyes raced over the article:
A man murdered in a hair salon in Wheelwright, Texas, earlier this week has been identified as Stan Manggold … Mr. Manggold, 47, was a native of Virginia … He was wanted by police … The coroner's report indicates that Mr. Manggold died of blunt-force trauma to the neck when his body was thrown headfirst into a mirror above one of the stylist's stations … Hairdressers described the assailant as an agitated, black-haired Caucasian between the ages of 18 and 21. He was said to be wearing dark boots, black pants, and a purple cowboy shirt. Police have released an artist's sketch, but have no leads at this time.
Purple cowboy shirt? thought Zoe.
She clicked on the link to the sketch.
The mouth was all wrong. The eyes didn't have enough depth. Still, there was something about the drawing-the long, wavy hair, the bruises on the cheekbones-that evoked X so powerfully that Zoe felt the blood rise in her cheeks.
She shut the computer and pushed it away.
"It's over now," her mother whispered. "The craziness is over. X, the cave-everything. We're going to be okay."
But Zoe didn't want the craziness to be over. She wanted X back. She couldn't help but hope that now that the lords had Stan in their clutches, they might let X out to hunt more souls.
Zoe's mom told Zoe she'd pick her up later, and left her sitting behind the desk idly eating yogurt pretzels and watching the bank of snowy, out-of-date security monitors. The single dad ushered the flock of six-year-olds into the night. The old German couple eventually wandered out, too, the wife's hand on the husband's butt. Nothing else happened for hours.
Zoe sent Val ten texts to pass the time. Three of them were about caving, five were about X, and two were about yogurt pretzels. Val must have been with Gloria-on the weekends, they often got in bed with a ton of food, hacked into Val's brother's Tinder account, and swiped right on all the girls they thought were hot-because she wrote Can't talk and (when Zoe wouldn't leave her alone), New phone who dis.
After that, it seemed as if even time itself had gotten itchy and bored, and decided to nap. Zoe padded down the damp hallway toward the pools, and told one of the lifeguards he could go home. That killed about ten minutes. She returned upstairs and stretched her legs, which ached from the cave. That killed about eight.
As Zoe dragged herself back to the front desk, she cast her eyes over the monitors. Everything was empty. The halls and stairways were newly mopped. The vending machines glowed silently. A ghostly cloud of vapor hung over the pools.
She was about to sit when her eye caught on something.
The upper left-hand monitor. The big pool.
Somebody had snuck in.
The man's back was to her. He was in the water, but wearing a knit hat pulled down low over his ears. The tiniest bit of scruffy hair spilled out from under it.
Zoe called Lance on the locker-room phone-he sounded out of breath from Pilates, as her mother had predicted-and told him to kick the guy out. She checked the monitor again. She saw Lance come into the frame and call out to the guy in the water. The guy didn't move. He ignored Lance entirely-which was not a thing Lance sat still for.
Lance was a preposterously big, broad dude. He lived for confrontations. His only complaint about being a security guard was that no one had the guts to stand up to him. More than once, Zoe had seen him swat at a fly and say, "Yeah, you better run."
She watched as Lance went to the edge of the water and knelt on one knee, like the former football player that he was. Zoe closed her eyes. She just wanted to go home. She didn't want to watch Lance administer a beatdown.
When she opened them again, she got a jolt-Lance was staring right at her in the security camera. His face filled the screen. He gestured for her to come down to the pool.
Zoe's stomach clenched. She slipped on X's coat, locked the front door, and walked to the stairs as slowly as she could.
By the time she made it outside, the stranger had swum to the far side of the pool. He was obscured by the darkness and the rising steam. He was just an outline, really-a head, shoulders, and hat glinting above the water.