Dead Girls Don't Lie (15 page)

“I don’t think—” My heart is still pounding. A hundred thousand reasons why I shouldn’t leave with Skyler right now run through my head, not the least of which is my promise to Dad, which I guess I’ve already broken.

He leans over and touches my cheek, tracing the path the tears made. “Rachel doesn’t want you to stop living. She doesn’t want you to be sad.” He twists a piece of my hair around his finger. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

I shake my head to clear it. “I can’t just forget.” He doesn’t understand. What Rachel wanted, what she asked me to do, I don’t know how to do. That’s the problem. I’m not even sure where to start. Then I remember what Skyler has. “Did you copy that chip for me?”

He lets me go and leans back. “I pulled it up, but there was only one file on it.”

“Was it her journal? Do you have it with you?” My voice comes out breathless, almost panicked.

“Hold on.” Skyler looks uncomfortable, like he doesn’t want to tell me something.

I’m losing patience. “Don’t tell me to hold on. I need to see that file.”

He pulls at his tie. “It’s not her journal. I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to look at the file, but I thought it was important. I mean, Rachel was murdered, and the guy who did it might still be out there. He might even be one of those guys who was following you, but—”

“But what? What was on the chip?”

“It was just a school assignment. A bunch of pictures stuck together. Something she made for digital arts.”

“A school assignment?” I’m so stunned that it comes out as a whisper.

“I’m sorry.” He looks defeated, like he failed me.

I lean back in the seat, trying to process what he’s saying. “What were the pictures of? Why would she put a school paper in …” But I haven’t told Skyler about Eduardo or the necklace or Rachel’s message.

Skyler puts his arm around me again. “There were a lot of pictures of you and her. Maybe she wanted you to remember the good things.”

I’m shaking my head. It has to be more than that. “I need to see it. Can we go to your house? There’s still a little church left, and Dad always stays late.”

“Okay … sure.” He hesitates, but I’m already opening the door and pulling him out after me.

I cringe at the noise his truck makes when he starts it and look back at the church, thinking again about the promise I made Dad about not going to Skyler’s house, but this is more important.

I watch the trees beside the cemetery as we drive the opposite direction. For a second I think I see Eduardo standing there, watching me drive away with Skyler, but when I look again, he’s gone.

Except for the party at the beginning of the summer, I think I’ve only been to the Cross house once before, for Skyler’s sixth or seventh birthday party, when his mom was still around. She left the family when he was like eight. The only
thing I remember about her was that she was very thin, very pretty, and she always acted nervous.

The house looks different than I remember it, but it was dark the night of the party, and I was pretty freaked out about being here. It has a wide circle driveway with a big barn in the back and a truck on one side. The swather Skyler was driving is parked out front.

He leaves my crutches in his truck and loops his arm around my waist. “My computer is out back. C’mon, I’ll show you.” Dad’s warning goes through my head again, but I shake it off and let him take me behind the house, across the backyard, and to a building that looks like some kind of garden shed. It’s painted white with little shutters, and there’s a window box, overgrown with weeds.

He gets a key out of the window box, unlocks the door, and steps inside. The room is really dark. I look around and realize all the windows are blacked out. He turns on the light. It comes up a pale yellow/red color, then he hits a different switch and the regular light comes on.

There’s a sink in one corner and a long table, like a potting bench. It holds flat basins and some kind of projector. Strung across the room is a clothesline with clothespins. There’s a piece of canvas, like a photographer’s backdrop, on one wall and another wall is covered in framed black-and-white pictures. “What is this place? Why does it have that weird light?”

“It’s a safelight, and this is a darkroom. My mom was a photographer. This is where she developed her pictures.”

“Developed? You mean like with film?”

“Yeah.” He walks over to a computer set up on a desk in the corner and turns it on. “Mom taught us all how to do pictures when we were pretty young. Eric still does the crime scene photos in town when they need him to. Evan got into taking sports pictures after he broke his ankle in middle school and got stuck on the bench. He wasn’t very good at it though.”

“They still have the stuff for that?” While we wait for the computer, I wander around the room and look into one of the basins; the sides have something grainy stuck to it and it smells like sulfur.

“It’s a little harder to find, but yeah, I can get all the chemicals I need online.”

It seems like a lot of work for one picture. “Why? If you have a digital camera you can take as many as you want and print them off from your computer.”

“I don’t like digital pictures.” He almost sounds offended.

“Why not?”

“It’s too easy to fake stuff if you go digital, like all those models you see in magazines with impossibly perfect bodies and flawless skin. When you take a picture with film it has to be real.”

“I never thought of that before.” I walk over to the pictures on the wall and examine them. “These pictures are great. Did you take them?”

“No. My mom did.” He keeps his eyes on the computer.

“This is you!” I point to one, obviously him as a little boy, blowing on dandelion fluff, a halo of light around his head.

“Yeah.”

“You look so sweet.” At the bottom of the photo are the words “my angel” written in a fancy loopy print.

“Thanks. Mom was a great photographer.” His voice sounds sad. “What does your mom do?”

“She puts bad guys in jail.” It comes out with a bitter edge that I don’t expect. Skyler gives me a funny look, so I explain. “That’s what my dad used to tell me, probably to make her look like some kind of superhero.” I turn and run my hand along the clothesline. “My mom is a federal lawyer. She lives in the other Washington.”

“Do you ever talk to her?”

I clip and unclip an empty clothespin so I don’t have to meet his eye. “She called right after Rachel’s funeral, but she just talked to Dad. I don’t think she wanted to deal with an emotional teenager.” I look up to see if I’m dumping too much on Skyler, but he looks like he gets it. I smile and try to sound more positive. “She’s okay. I just don’t think having a kid was part of her master plan. What about you, you ever talk to your mom?”

“No, she’s dead.” It comes out in a voice that’s so cold I have to look to see if it’s really Skyler talking.

“I thought—”

“She died a couple of years after she left us. But I didn’t find out about it until the end of eighth grade. I was doing a research paper at school, and I decided to see if I could find her. I found an obituary.” His voice is so emotionally removed that he could be reading a cereal box. “When I asked Dad about it,
if he knew, he said she was dead to us the minute she walked out the door.”

“Oh.” I’m not sure what to say. I want to ask him what happened to her, but he looks so distant that I’m afraid to. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.” He sits down at the computer and clicks the mouse. “The file’s up.”

He stands up from the computer and looks at me expectantly. I was so eager to see what Rachel left for me, but now I’m afraid. What if it is just a school assignment, or just pictures of us? Maybe she didn’t get the chance to do what she wanted to. Maybe she died too soon.

I take a breath and cross the room. When I sit down, Skyler puts his hands on my shoulders, like he’s helping me brace myself. I stare at the page in front of me, a jumble of pictures with the words “Journey Map” at the top. There are a lot of pictures of me and Rachel together, but most are just her. I can trace her transformation through the pictures, from my friend who always had something to laugh about to the sullen, hardened girl who never smiled.

“What’s this?” I touch a picture stuck in the middle of the others, almost like it was added as an afterthought. I make the picture bigger and realize it’s a football jersey. More specifically, it’s Evan’s football jersey and the number eighteen. Below it are written the words, “Making the cut,” but it doesn’t look like Rachel’s handwriting.

“Looks like a football jersey,” Skyler says casually, but I’m sure he knows who wore number eighteen.

I can’t tell Skyler that I know whose number it is, and I can’t tell him that I’m worried that his brother might have had something to do with Rachel’s murder, so I pretend it’s no big deal. “Rachel always had a thing for football players.”

“Most girls do,” Skyler says, and I catch the bitterness in his voice.

“Could you print this for me so I don’t have to try to get into Dad’s computer again?”

“Sure.” Skyler takes my place at the computer and prints off the picture. I reach to get it, but he stands up, blocking my way. “Can I show you something?”

I’m distracted, wondering if there’s any way I can make sense of the mass of pictures Rachel left for me, but I say, “Okay.”

He moves the backdrop mounted on the wall, revealing a cupboard underneath. He pulls out a stack of pictures and shuffles through them before he sets the rest back inside the cupboard. “I want you to look at something, but I’m afraid … I mean, I know it’ll be hard for you.”

Now he has my attention. “What is it?” He hands me the picture, like he’s not sure he should show it to me. I gasp when I see what it is—a picture taken from Rachel’s front porch, through her shattered bedroom window. There’s a dark spot on her carpet. I cover my mouth and look away, even in black and white I know what it is.

“I’m sorry.” Skyler takes the picture from me.

Everything inside me is churning like it’s going to go in reverse. I have to swallow a couple of times to make sure
everything stays down. “When did you … how … why?” I lean against the counter to steady myself. I can’t believe Skyler took that picture.

He puts his hand on my arm. “I don’t want you to think I’m a creep or anything like that. Eric lets me go with him on calls sometimes, because he knows I want to be a forensic photographer.” He looks at me like he’s begging me to understand. “I want my pictures to help people, catch bad guys, like what your mom does. I only showed you this because I wanted to see if there was something the police missed, something you might catch because you knew her so well.”

“What else did you see? Did you see her after—” I swallow back another wave of nausea.

Skyler shakes his head. “No. This was after they took her away. I don’t usually go with Eric when there’s a body involved anyway.” He looks at me sideways, like he shouldn’t have said it that way. “He thought it was a drive-by with no victim when he said I could come.”

I take a breath and look at the picture again, avoiding the dark spot at the bottom. The mirror over Rachel’s dresser is shattered, and the wall behind it is marked with bullet holes. Then something catches my attention on the far side of the room, at the edge of the photo, there’s a picture hanging at an odd angle. “That picture is crooked.”

Skyler looks too, but he shakes his head. “It could have been like that for a while.”

“No. Things like that really bugged Rachel. She wouldn’t have left it that way.”

“Maybe it got knocked sideways when the bullets came through?” But Skyler doesn’t sound sure of that.

I look at it closer. “Maybe, but there aren’t any holes in the wall by it.”

Skyler takes the picture from me and studies it too. “Might be important. I could mention it to Eric.”

“No. It’s probably nothing.” I say it too quick. Skyler is giving me a strange look, but I keep thinking about what Rachel said about not trusting the police. “Do you have any more?”

“No. I only got one shot off before Eric told me I had to leave because it was a murder investigation.” He gives me a guilty glance. “He doesn’t know I took that one.”

“Can I keep it?” Now I sound like the creepy one, but there might be more to the picture. “If I have more time to look I might see something else.”

He hesitates. “I have the negative. I can make you another copy.” He goes to the closet again and gets out a shoe box full of negatives, strips of developed film. He sorts through them, pulls one out, and puts the box back in the closet. Then he slides the strip into a black machine and turns it on.

Another picture is projected on the table below. It’s a picture of me from Evan’s party. “What’s that?”

Skyler looks embarrassed as he moves the negative so the picture from Rachel’s room is showing instead. “I was just messing around.” He turns a knob on the projector and the picture gets bigger. “We can blow it up so you get a closer look at the wall.”

“That would be great.” I lean forward and study the image on the table.

“You’re right, I don’t see any—” Skyler freezes and I hear it too, someone yelling his name. He swears under his breath and goes to the door, opening it just a crack. His face goes pale.

“What’s wrong?” I walk across the room to him.

He shuts the door. “My dad’s home.”

“Oh.” I wonder if Skyler is going to be in trouble because I’m here. It doesn’t seem likely, considering what Evan told me about their dad being “cool” with parties at their house. Whatever it is, Skyler looks scared.

“Skyler! Skyler!” His dad’s voice is getting closer. “Where the hell are you?”

He reaches over and turns off the projector. “Stay here. I’ll come get you when it’s safe to come out.” The way Skyler says it, combined with the tone in his dad’s voice makes me afraid, so I nod. He slips out the door.

I sit on the desk chair, waiting, listening to muffled yelling outside the shed. It sounds like Skyler’s in deep trouble. I’m worried about him, but I also wonder if I’m going to make it home before Dad gets there and what he’ll do if I don’t. I stand up and pace the room, wondering what I could say to my dad or to Skyler’s dad if I get caught.