Authors: Chelsea Cain
“Do you smell that?” Susan said, wrinkling her nose. She sniffed the air and grinned. “Dr. Bronner’s.”
“I smell peppermint,” Archie said.
Susan shook her head. “It’s Dr. Bronner’s peppermint all-in-one liquid soap,” she said. “We used it for everything when I was kid. Shampoo. Toilet cleaner . . . This guy was a clean freak.” She started walking toward the TV hutch.
“You’re moving,” Archie said. “I said no moving.”
She didn’t even slow down.
“Check it out,” she said. She reached the hutch and ran her finger along one of the wooden incense trays that lined the shelf above the television.
“That would be touching,” Archie said.
Susan lifted her finger and showed it to Archie. It was clean. “Who wipes down their incense trays?”
There was a photograph on the shelf, too. Archie couldn’t make out the image from where he was standing, just the bamboo frame. But when Susan saw it she inhaled sharply.
Archie was at her side in four steps.
“It’s him,” Susan said, indicating the picture. “That’s the guy I found in the house.” She ran her hands over the goose bumps that had appeared on her arms. “He did live here.”
The photograph showed three young men, outdoors in the woods, squinting into the sun. They were teenagers, seventeen, eighteen, their bodies not quite formed, T-shirts and cargo shorts exposing skinny legs and soft, sunburned arms. They had posed for the shot, but they weren’t smiling. The middle kid’s T-shirt had an Outward Bound logo on it. The kid on the left wore the bill of his red baseball cap low enough that Archie couldn’t make out his face. But the kid on the right, shaggy-haired and slight with tattoos decorating one arm, Archie recognized. He looked over at Susan to see if she’d seen the flicker of surprise on his face. She hadn’t. Her attention was still fixed on the photo.
“Which one?” Archie said.
“The one in the middle,” Susan said.
“Good,” Archie said.
“Good?” Susan said.
“It’s good that we’ve identified him.”
She turned to look at him. “No ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ ” she asked.
Archie humored her. “Are you sure it’s him?” he said.
“He was older,” Susan said. “Early twenties, maybe. But it’s the same face.” She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t seem that surprised.”
“It makes sense,” Archie said. “We were supposed to find out who he was. That was the idea.”
“Why not just leave a wallet in his pocket?” Susan muttered.
“There’s a story,” Archie said. He looked around the apartment again. The smell of peppermint was strong and recent.
That kind of cleaning took effort. It was obsessive. But he didn’t find time to make his bed? So why go to all the trouble in here? The blinds had even been dusted. The electric heaters gleamed. No coffee-cup rings on the kitchen counters; no crumbs on the coffee table. The TV screen, on the other hand, looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years.
Archie stepped to the side so he could get the right angle and then he saw it—letters where a finger had drawn in the dust. PLAY.
“People need to tell stories,” he said. He peered behind the TV and saw the tiny DV camera tucked in the corner of the hutch, a black cord snaking up to the TV’s video input. “It makes their lives seem important.”
The DV remote was on the coffee table, next to the TV remote. Archie took the pen out of his pocket and used it to turn the remote to on and then depress the play button on the DV remote.
A cockeyed image of the room they were in appeared on the TV. A chair had been dragged in front of the collage wall. Suddenly a young man appeared on camera. He was older, his brown hair longer, his body filled out a bit, but Susan was right, he was the middle kid from the photograph.
The man fiddled with the camera for a minute, until it was level and then backed up and sat down in the chair. Gray T-shirt. Jeans.Barefoot.Beads around his neck.
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said. She dug her notebook out of her purse, opened it, sat down on the couch, and stared at the screen. Archie thought about telling her to get up, lecturing her about all the trace evidence she was getting on her pants, but he didn’t really have the energy.
The dead man looked at someone off camera. “Is it recording?” he asked. The person must have nodded, because the dead man smiled shyly at the camera. “Okay,” he said. He crossed his legs at the knees, gripped the top knee with threaded fingers, and leaned forward. “If you’re seeing this, well, things went wrong.” He took a breath, ballooned out his cheeks, and then exhaled with a sigh. “So, I guess I should explain,” he said. “When I was eight my brother got mono. He was twelve at the time. We didn’t know he had mono. He’d been complaining about a sore throat for a month, but my parents thought he had a cold. The thing about mono is that it can cause your spleen to enlarge. This is why they tell you not to engage in strenuous activities for six weeks. My brother was in a PE class when some kid ran into him. It was one of those freak things.”
Archie sat down on the couch next to Susan.
“You can live without your spleen,” the dead man said.
“That’s what they do when your spleen ruptures. They just take it out. A splenectomy.
“He was in the hospital for a week. Everyone in his class made him a card.
“That’s when I started thinking about it.”
One corner of the dead man’s mouth lifted. “God, that sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Can you pause it?” Susan asked, scrawling notes.
“No,” Archie said.
“I used to play hospital. Pretend I’d had a splenectomy, too. I wore a bandage and everything.
“Eventually, it stopped being a game. I wanted it out of me. It felt dirty. Like this foreign thing that was stuck inside of me, like a tumor. I just got really sort of obsessed with it. Listen, I know how it sounds. I’ve had all kinds of therapy.”
The dead man lowered a hand to his rib cage and held it over his spleen, and Archie realized that he was in the same pose, his own hand finding the scar Gretchen had left on him. Archie put his hand between his thighs and held it there.
“I found a doctor in Tijuana who said he’d do the operation,” continued the dead man. “And after he bailed at the last minute, I got really depressed. Then a friend hooked me up with this Web site, and they said they could help me. I’m sorry, Mom, Dad, everyone. I know I could die.” He licked his lips. “But if I can just get it out of me, I’ll feel better.”
The video ended and the screen went blue.
Susan was still scribbling. Archie could see the pulse throbbing rapidly in her throat.
“It wasn’t Gretchen,” Archie said. “She didn’t kill him.”
“They’re fans,” Susan said, not looking up. “Wannabes.” She stopped writing, set the pen on her notebook and turned to Archie. Her face was pale. “They’re auditioning.”
Archie shook his head. “And you think I’m crazy.”
C H A P T E R 31
The tendons in Henry’s neck bulged and his ears were pencil-eraser pink. Susan tried not to cringe as he towered over her and Archie, still sitting on the couch. “Have you two lost your minds?” Henry said. Behind him, the dead guy sat frozen on the TV screen. They’d watched the video twice more since Henry had shown up. It didn’t get any less weird.
Henry turned his square head toward Archie, and held his hands palms up. “Breaking and entering?”