Time Will Tell Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Barry Lyga

  Cover art © 2021 by Chris Koehler. Cover design by Jenny Kimura.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at LBYR.com

  First Edition: September 2021

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  “My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1984 Bruce Springsteen (Global Music Rights). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  “Death To My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 2012 Bruce Springsteen (Global Music Rights). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  Image of hourglass copyright © by sinoptic/Shutterstock.com; bed emoji copyright © by Valentina Vectors/Shutterstock.com; cursing emoji copyright © by stas11/Shutterstock.com; exploding head emoji copyright © Chaim Devine/Shutterstock.com; all other emojis copyright © Cosmic_Design/Shutterstock.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lyga, Barry, author.

  Title: Time will tell / by Barry Lyga.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2021. | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Summary: Relates the efforts of teens Elayah, Liam, Jorja, and Marcie to solve a 1986 murder, and the actions of their then-teenaged parents leading up to the crime.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020048675 | ISBN 9780316537780 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316537803 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316537841 (ebook other)

  Subjects: CYAC: Criminal investigation—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Bigotry—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.L97967 Tim 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048675

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-53778-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-53780-3 (ebook), 978-0-316-39411-6 (international)

  E3-20210825-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 The Present: Elayah

  2 The Present: Liam

  3 1986: Dean

  4 The Present: Elayah

  5 1986: Marcus

  Jay

  6 1986: Marcus

  Dean

  7 1986: Marcus

  8 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  Liam

  9 1986: Jay

  10 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  11 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  12 1986: Dean

  13 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  14 The Present: Elayah

  15 The Present: Liam

  16 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  17 1986: Kim

  18 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  19 1986: Dean

  20 The Present: Liam

  21 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  Liam

  22 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  23 1986: Jay

  24 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  25 1986: Dean

  26 1986: Kim

  Dean

  Kim

  27 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  28 1986: Marcus

  29 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  30 The Present: Elayah

  31 1986: Kim

  32 1986: Kim

  33 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  34 1986: Kim

  35 The Present: Elayah

  36 1986: Dean

  37 The Present: Liam

  38 1986: Dean

  39 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  40 1986: Jay

  41 1986: Marcus

  42 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  43 1986: Dean

  44 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  Liam

  Elayah

  45 1986: Dean

  46 The Present: Elayah

  47 1986: Dean

  Brian

  48 The Present: Elayah

  49 1986: Dean

  50 The Present: Elayah

  51 1986: Marcus

  52 The Present: Liam

  Elayah

  53 The Present: Liam

  54 The Present: Elayah

  Liam

  55 1986: Dean

  56 The Present: Liam

  57 1986: Dean

  58 The Present: Elayah

  59 1986: Dean

  60 The Present: Liam

  61 1986: Kim

  62 The Present: Dean

  63 The Present: Liam

  64 The Present: Elayah

  65 The Present: Liam

  66 The Present: Elayah

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  For J, J, S, R & D

  We did the things and we can’t take them back.

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town

  He’d tousle my hair and say, “Son, take a good look around

  “This is your hometown”

  —Bruce Springsteen, “My Hometown” (1984)

  I awoke from a quiet night, I never heard a sound

  The marauders raided in the dark

  And brought death to my hometown

  —Bruce Springsteen, “Death to My Hometown” (2012)

  I’m sorry

  THE PRESENT: ELAYAH

  Bearing shovels and a pickax, they made their way up the hill that morning. Liam started whining about the climb halfway up, pleading exhaustion already, to the annoyance of the others. Elayah rolled her eyes.

  Marcie did more than roll her eyes—she turned to Liam and held out her shovel, stopping him in his tracks.

  “Are you in or are you out?”

  “I only had a grande this morning,” Liam said with a wretched pout.

  “Grow up,” Marcie told him, tossing her hair back. “Stop being a pussy.”

  “Microaggression!” Liam cried. “Hashtag me too!”

  The last of their foursome, Jorja, snorted. She had the pickax, which somehow imbued her with additional gravitas. Everyone turned to look at her.

  “Girls are allowed to say pussy,” she informed Liam. “We’re reclaiming it from the patriarchy.”

  “Sucks to be you,” Marcie added with a healthy dose of sn
ark.

  “Wait, wait!” Liam made an almost mechanical sound deep in his chest. “I think… I think I know what the problem is.” He gagged up a wad of something thick and yellowish, then spat it into the grass at his feet.

  Elayah was the only one to react. “Gross!” she exclaimed.

  Liam chuckled under his breath. Tall and dirty blond and crinkly-grinned, he was pretty much every aftershave and men’s deodorant commercial come to life. He had a face made for YouTube and a body made for making girls swoon. Straight girls, at least. Elayah had done her fair share of swooning, and even knowing that he was playing her for the reaction to his phlegmy, male raunch, she was still frozen by those blue eyes and that saucy quirk of his lips.

  “You’re disgusting,” she said just a moment too late. Liam laughed. He took a bizarre pleasure in tricking her, then pulling back the curtain. Always had.

  “It’s up there.” Jorja pointed to a spot just atop the hill.

  “The lady hath spoken!” Liam shouldered his shovel and—grande or not—dashed up the hill at a pace that made Elayah feel like a slug. “First one up is ruler of the world!”

  Jorja reacted instantly, her long legs carrying her up the hill only a foot or two behind Liam. “No fair!” she screamed, racing.

  Just then, Liam crested the hill. He spun around and lofted his shovel like a medieval knight’s sword, striking a legs-akimbo pose. “I have conquered the mountain!” he bellowed.

  “Not a mountain!” Jorja yelled back, just a few feet from him.

  Marcie sighed and shook her head, adjusting her glasses. She raised an eyebrow at Elayah. “Are we going to race like those idiots?”

  “Please, no.”

  Marcie laughed. “I’m glad.”

  Together they made a steady but unhurried trek up the hill. The incline rolled over into a broad, wide expanse of grass and trees. It would have been a mesa if it had been higher and drier. And in the Southwest. From here, they could see the dinky “sprawl” of town to the north, the Wantzler factory—still chugging along, barely—to the west, and the high school to the south, down the slope. Elayah allowed herself a moment to enjoy the view, then hustled over to where the others had gathered.

  “I think it’s this tree,” Liam said, now all serious. “It is, right?”

  Everyone glanced over at Elayah, who had already dug into her pocket for her phone. She consulted a document, pinching it wider. It was a scan of the yellowing sheet of paper she’d found in one of the old yearbooks in the school library. There was a map of sorts there, with a scraggle of lines to indicate the copse of trees they faced right now, then a hasty circle to indicate the sun. Some ruled lines formed a right triangle between the sun, one tree in particular, and a spot on the ground.

  The tree on the map had a callout to it, showing a capital B. The tree Liam had indicated had a rough, scraggly B carved into its bark, nearly overgrown but still distinct enough to identify.

  “Looks right,” Elayah said. It had been more than thirty years since the makeshift map was drawn. They were damn lucky the tree was still there. Hell, they were lucky the hill was still there.

  When she’d told her dad about the “treasure hunt,” he’d laughed and said, “Honey, are you sure there’s even a place to look anymore?”

  Fortunately, there was. The hill and the trees were older, slightly eroded, more than a little weary-looking, but still in the same places they’d occupied in 1986.

  “Time to measure,” she told them.

  The lines forming the right angle had foot demarcations on them, meaning that figuring out the location of the spot on the ground should have been as simple as facing the right direction, watching the shadow of the tree, and judiciously applying old man Pythagoras’s theorem about a2 and b2 equaling c2. But the tree had grown over the past few decades, so they had to fake it, using the measurement on the old paper to calculate where the shadow would have fallen back in 1986 and then going from there.

  Elayah had aced trig, so she got to do the math while Liam and Marcie used their shovels to measure off the appropriate distances.

  “Why didn’t they just write down the longitude and latitude?” Liam grumbled.

  “Because no one had GPS back then,” Jorja told him gently. Physically, Liam was almost always a step ahead of the three women; mentally, he was almost always a step behind.

  It was simple enough to find the spot. Now they just had to hope that, for example, the tree hadn’t shifted because of erosion or ground movement in the preceding thirty-plus years. Or that the slope of the ground hadn’t changed too much. Or any of a million other little things that could throw them off.

  She kept those fears to herself. No point stressing anyone out. This was supposed to be fun. A lark, Jorja had called it when Elayah first suggested they dig the damn thing up.

  “How far down do you think they buried it?” Marcie asked as the four of them clustered around the spot.

  Elayah shrugged. “I don’t know. They didn’t write that down.”

  “Six feet?” Liam said with a mix of confidence and inquisitiveness.

  “That’s dead bodies,” Jorja informed him.

  “Just how many dead bodies have you dug up?” Liam asked.

  “Only the three,” Jorja deadpanned, then shoved Liam lightly. He nudged her back with his shoulder.

  They could have been brother and sister. Both of them tall, both of them blondish—though it was tough to tell with Jorja, ever since she’d started buzzing her hair. Their easy repartee infuriated Elayah, which she never let show; she didn’t want Liam to know she cared.

  But… damn, sometimes she wished she were Jorja instead of herself. To be so relaxed and at ease around Liam…

  “So, six feet, right?” Liam said, jostling Elayah from a world in which she, not Jorja, lived next door to Liam and got to joke around with him and even touch him on occasion.

  “Not technically,” she said, going on autopilot. “That used to be the law for graves, but that was hundreds of years ago, in Europe, when they had to bury victims of the plague deep enough that the bodies couldn’t contaminate the living. In the US, the only relevant law is that there has to be eighteen inches of dirt between the body and the open air.”

  There was a moment of silence during which they all regarded her. Jorja seemed to be absorbing this information, filing it away in her personal data vault. Marcie just grinned.

  “Geek Girl rides again!” Liam sang out. Elayah pursed her lips in mock anger. It was the easiest way to keep herself from blushing. Why did she crave his attention, even when it was negative?

  Oh, right, because she was madly—

  “For definitions of geek meaning anyone smarter than you,” Marcie snapped at him.

  “So… everyone, then,” Jorja chimed in brightly, ignoring Liam’s look of feigned outrage. “Let’s get started.”

  Liam was a bit taller and stronger, but Jorja had an almost poetic sense of movement. She briefly struck a Rosie the Riveter “We can do it!” pose before applying the pickax to the ground, breaking up the turf so that the shovels could find easier purchase.

  She leaned back, slid the pickax’s handle through her threaded fingers almost to its end, and then skip-stepped forward, bringing the ax up and around and then down in a perfect arc, biting the earth with its steel tooth.

  Ch-chm!

  A devotee of a brutally exhausting form of yoga and a regular in the school’s weight lifting room, Jorja had the lithe shape of a dancer, wedded to a swimmer’s muscles. She seemed to enjoy attacking the innocent turf.

  She and Liam swapped pickax duty until there was a wide, ragged oval of broken earth. Then the foursome took turns with the shovels, one of them digging the hole, one keeping its edges from collapsing, while the other two rested. It was deeper than eighteen inches, but fortunately nothing like six feet—an hour later Liam’s shovel sang a sour, metallic note and shivered so strongly in his hands that he nearly dropped it.

  “Rock?�
� he said, arming sweat off his forehead.

  “Didn’t sound like it,” Jorja replied, and crouched to peer into the hole. She’d stripped off her overshirt, and sweat soaked through her ribbed white sleeveless tee. “Looks shiny. Step back.”

  For once, Liam obeyed, scrambling out of the hole. Sunlight glimmered off something that was most definitely not made of stone.

  “Hells yeah,” Liam whispered. “Time capsule, baby.”