Authors: Elle Cosimano
I froze in the doorway. Smoke curled from Mona’s lips under the harsh fluorescent light. Her elbows perched on the table, an ashtray spilling over between them.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I touched the soaked ends of my hair and resisted the urge to check them for blood. I’d stood under the security light in the pouring rain until the water stopped running pink, but I could still feel it.
Rainwater dripped steadily onto the carpet. Mona’s eyes drifted over the wrecked dress and rested on my bare feet as she sucked another drag. “Jim hired another new girl. He sent me home early.” She’d been coming home earlier, her tip jar lighter on Friday mornings than it used to be. The kitchen light deepened the lines around her eyes and her hands bore new creases like smoke rings. “You never stay out this late.”
“How would you know? You never wait up.” I listened for sirens, then shut the door and slid the dead bolt in place. I leaned back against the door and looked at her, wishing she weren’t here. I wanted to scrub away every drop of Kylie’s blood. I wanted to hide under a mountain of blankets with my father’s ring.
“Never had a reason to.” Mona crushed out the remains
of her cigarette, emptying the last ribbon of smoke from her lungs. Her chair scraped against the floor and she left the room.
I kicked the door with my bare foot. Had I expected anything more from her? She never waited up because she was never here.
A moment later, Mona returned, carrying a stack of clean towels and a hairbrush.
“Sit down.” She pulled out a chair and gestured with the brush, filling me with déjà vu. Gena had given me the same command a few hours ago. Now her ruined dress clung cold to my skin, and I’d lost her damn shoes. She was going to kill me. The thought was so absurd I choked on hysterical laughter. Gena wouldn’t have a chance to kill me. I’d be behind bars for the rest of my life.
I dropped wearily into the chair. My raw nerves jumped when a towel snapped next to my ear and wrapped around my bare shoulders, followed by the pull of a brush through my hair. She was careful not to touch me. Even so, I tensed, waiting for my mother to scream, to find a long bloody strand, for the towel to turn pink. But the brush kept up its rhythm. It was the same kind of brush she’d used when I was a girl and caught on the tangles with every stroke, but she expertly worked it through. It eased the blistering pain in my head. My heavy lids closed, fatigue consuming me.
Mona worked in silence to the crush of rain against the roof, to the soft pitter-patter of water dripping from my hem to the linoleum floor. The seconds ticked away. I wasn’t sure how many I had left.
“You said Dad had a record. I want to know what it was.”
She was quiet, the only sound the rustle of the brush. “Once you know something about a person, you can’t unknow it.”
“I already know about the fake IDs in his wallet. I know he had phony credit cards and used different names. But I want to know who he was. Not those other people he was pretending to be. I want to know why he left.”
The brush paused and I heard the snap of her lighter. The soft suck of air into her lungs. She tapped out her ash and set her cigarette in the tray, careful to push it away from me. “I don’t suppose if I tell you, it’ll be enough to keep you from making the same mistake I made.”
I wasn’t sure of the answer. Whose mistakes was I really making? Hers or his? “What was he like?” I asked.
She thought for a moment, and I thought I heard her smile. “We were sixteen when we met. He was sweep-youoff-your-feet handsome. And smooth. Charmed the pants right off me. I’d only known him a month when I followed him right out of my parents’ house.” She pulled at the memories with deep long strokes. “It was a nice house. Safe,” she said. “I don’t remember my parents ever locking the door.” She sounded younger, softer, the raspy edge almost gone. “Then why’d you leave?”
I felt her shake her head. Heard the distant, less critical voice of retrospect. Different from the sharp jabs she usually threw at his name. “Don’t know what it was about David, except that he could hold your hand and know exactly what you were feeling.”
I’d been listening before, but now I prickled under the brush.
“He was always holding me, back then . . . in the beginning. Before we grew up and things got hard.”
“What do you mean? How’d things get hard?”
She was quiet for a moment, as if she was giving me time to change my mind. Giving me one last chance not to know. I sat on the edge of my chair, hungry for her answer.
“Your father was charismatic,” she finally said. “He had a way with people. He always nailed the interviews, but could never hold a job. Floated from one to another, but he was always grifting. Finding ways to play off people’s emotions. It was like he could see right through them. They trusted him. Some days his ability to read people paid off big. Others, well . . . That’s what got him in trouble.” She brushed while she talked. I felt her shake her head. “I kept telling him he was in over his head, that it was only a matter of time before he took advantage of the wrong people, but he didn’t listen. He was hooked on the rush. Drunk on the money. He couldn’t see the lives he was destroying.
“One day, the police came to the door with a warrant. He was using some guy’s company as a front to launder money. The guy was loaded. Big house on the golf course in Belle Green. David met him at a poker game one night. Said as soon as they shook hands, he knew they’d get along.
“Before I know it, they’re thick as thieves . . . organized gambling rings, extortion, laundering. Until they got caught. That was the last time I saw your father. He left me a note, took the car across the state line into the city, and caught the first plane to who-the-hell-knows. Never came home.
“He loved you, though. Oh God, how he loved you,” she breathed. “He’d have grifted the moon for you. He used to set you in his lap and hold your little hands for hours, like touching you could fix anything.” Her nostalgia trailed off and the trailer was silent except for the rain. “Couldn’t get you to stop crying for weeks after he left.”
I wasn’t sure what to feel. My father had loved me, every bit as much as in my white-washed memories. And he was like me in ways Mona had never understood. But he was a thief. A con man. And he’d left us in a run-down trailer with nothing, just to save his own skin.
The brush moved easily now, but she didn’t stop.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She snorted. “When I was your age, if my mother had told me I would be anything like her, I never would have believed her. I would have laughed if she’d told me I’d be seventeen and pregnant, and that one day even my own daughter would hate me, and I would grow old alone like she did. I wanted to believe I could be different. That the direction of my life would be different.” She sighed. “No kid ever wants to believe they’ll be like their parents, Nearly. That’s something you have to come to accept on your own.”
She was worried I’d fall in love with someone like my father and give up my future like she did. But I
was
him. In over my head with the wrong people, too stupid to listen, too selfish to turn myself in before it was too late. So what if I went to jail? I should have gone straight to the police. Should have told them everything. If I had, maybe Kylie wouldn’t have bled out behind a Dumpster. Maybe Marcia, Posie, and Teddy would still be alive.
Mona stopped brushing and began working my hair into a tight bun, awakening the pain in my head.
“Nothing can change where we come from, Nearly. But you can change where you’re headed,” she said quietly. “That boy isn’t good enough for you. He’ll be gone before you know it.”
My chair screeched and crashed to the floor behind me. I ripped out the elastic band and threw it at my mother’s feet, unable to look her in the eyes. Unwilling to look in my own.
This wasn’t Reece’s fault.
It was mine.
• • • I leaned against my bedroom door. I had the mother of all psychic hangovers, and the smell of Kylie’s blood lingered in my throat.
A red light flashed on my bed.
Reece’s cell phone.
I shut my eyes, remembering the look on his face when I’d started to tell him . . . He hadn’t believed me.
I grabbed the phone and squelched down on my bed, Gena’s dress soaking through my sheets.
TXT ME WHEN U GET HOME—from REECE.
I sent a quick reply.
I’M HOME. I’M SORRY.
I’m sorry I broke my promise. I’m sorry four people are dead. I set the phone down on the bed, stripped off the cold dress, and put on my pajamas. I pulled Reece’s pendant over my head and held it. It didn’t seem right to wear it anymore. We had a deal and I blew it. And that’s all it had been . . . a deal.
I stuffed it into the pocket of my hoodie and hung it across the back of my chair. I reached under my mattress for the bag and dumped the contents on my bed. Pushing aside my father’s ring, I picked up the train ticket instead. I’d bought it using every penny I’d saved. Some days, when I thought I couldn’t stand it here one more day, I’d hold it and dream about running. Never coming back. But then I’d think of my mother. Her broken smile was a cuff around my heart and I couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving.
I stuffed everything back in the bag, then curled up under my comforter and switched off the lamp.
The phone vibrated and I sat up, squinting at the screen. Not Reece. A chill pulled up my spine, drawing the skin tight.
1 New Text from Unknown Number
.
MISSED U @ THE PARTY.
IT’S JUST A NUMBERS GAME.
STICK AROUND NEXT TIME AND I’LL SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU.
I’d left three phone messages and way too many texts for Reece. All went unanswered. The next morning, I flipped through the local white pages directory, determined to find him. There was only one listing for Whelan. I tore out the page and took a few dollars from Mona’s tip jar and walked to the bus stop at the end of the street. It was early and the air was already brutally hot and too sticky to breathe. When I emerged from the bus in a small neighborhood of run-down townhouses, the streets were empty.
I checked the numbers on the pale green siding, and found the one in the listing. It was missing a shutter and the shades were drawn shut. The tree in front was brown and barren, and looked like it had been left to rot. A security door with heavy black bars prevented me from knocking, so I tapped hard on the window beside it. A dog barked loudly in the unit next door.
I waited and knocked again. A woman peeled back the thin curtain and peered out at me. She cracked the door just enough to poke her face through. “What do you want?”
I forgot myself, taken aback by the woman’s features, how they were so like Reece’s. She started to shut the door.
“Wait!” I threw my hand in the opening. “I’m looking for Reece Whelan.”
Her features turned hard, the way Reece’s could turn when he was angry. “No one lives here by that name.” She looked pointedly at my fingers where they gripped the door frame.
“Please,” I said, hesitantly removing them. “I need to know where I can find your son.”
Her eyes glassed over. “My son is dead,” she said, and shut the door.
The dead bolt slid home.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and scrolled to the contact list. There was only one other number, and I called the only person who might know where to find him.
• • •
“You shouldn’t be here.” Reece stood half dressed, holding the door to barricade my way.
“I called. You didn’t pick up your phone.” I jammed the cell into his stomach, knocking enough wind out of him to make an opening for myself. “I got a text last night,” I said as I ducked under his arm.
I looked around his apartment. Sparse but tidy. The warm citrus and sandalwood cologne he wore last night lingered in the compact space.
He raked a hand through his unwashed hair and shut the door, looking weary. His jeans rode too low on his hips and I wondered when he’d last eaten. I looked away as he scrolled through the phone, face drawn and shadowed.
“Who else has the number?” He tossed me the phone.
“Just you.”
“Anyone else have access to your locker?”
Jeremy had my combination, but I wouldn’t let him get caught up in this. I bit my tongue and lied. “No.”
His jaw ticked as he studied my face. “How’d you find me?”
I didn’t want to tell him how I’d looked up his address and knocked on his mother’s door. Truthfully, I was afraid he might ask me what she’d said. And I could never look him in the eyes and tell him he was dead to her. Instead I looked around the room and skipped that part.
“I called Gena. I told her it was an emergency and then bugged the crap out of her until she gave me your address. What is it with you people and milk crates?” I changed the subject, nudging an overturned crate with my toe, remembering the ones in Gena’s apartment. His crooked smile, the one that used to come so easily, hadn’t made an appearance and I was surprised that I missed it. He fell into a lumpy sofa with squeaky springs, lacing his fingers behind his head.
“You people? Care to elaborate on that?”
I stood in the middle of the room and did a slow 360 so I wouldn’t have to see the suspicion on his face. “Nicholson’s people.”
He tipped a soda can to his lips and looked at me over a long pull. I could feel him puzzling through me, trying to figure out how I knew and how much I knew.
I glanced around the room, pausing in front of his bedroom door. A pair of faded jeans and boxer shorts were tossed on the floor beside the unmade bed and I wondered if anyone slept there with him. Or if he truly was alone.
“Do you have a roommate? Narcing must not pay you very much.”
“Enough for milk crates.” His eyes made a lazy pass over the tousled sheets. “And no, I don’t have a roommate.”
My face warmed and I turned away.
“What do you remember?” he grumbled.
“Everything, I think. I sobered up pretty quickly. The rain helped, but the headache is a killer.” The nagging tension lingered behind my eyes and made my glasses feel too heavy. I had to ask the question that had kept me up all night. “Was she . . . ?” I couldn’t make myself say the word, even though I’d known she was dead the second I saw the bloodless cuts in her arm.
He nodded.
I sank down onto the sofa beside him. “What happened after I left?”
“I cleared out before the cops came.”
“Are they coming for me?”
The pause felt too long. Reece looked down at his lap and picked at the tab of his soda can. “I don’t think so. Gena called me this morning and filled me in. The judge denied the cops’ request for a warrant.”
“Why?” Not that I wasn’t grateful and relieved, but I was surprised.
“They don’t have enough evidence to charge you with a crime. The most they can do is bring you in for questioning for a few hours with your mother and a lawyer. Gena and I were with you before the rave. Plenty of people saw you inside the warehouse, and an undercover cop claims he saw you before the time of Kylie’s murder. He verified that you were inebriated and unconscious, and therefore incapable of any involvement. And as of this morning, we have a statement from a very cooperative taxi driver who says he dropped you off, drunk and barely conscious, at your trailer before midnight.”
I raised a finger to interrupt. I’d gotten home at 1:30 a.m. and I was completely conscious.
Reece continued before I could correct him. “Forensics estimated Kylie’s time of death at twelve thirty a.m. and you were already at home, in bed, sleeping it off.” He leveled me with a hard stare, daring me to argue. “You were accounted for all night. This is a high-profile homicide case involving minors. One of the victim’s fathers sits on the town council. The judge isn’t going to let anyone screw this up by botching an arrest. She’s going to make the DA produce hard evidence beyond reasonable doubt.”
The breath I’d been holding rushed out. “So I’m okay? They can’t arrest me?”
He thought for a moment, then said softly, “For now.”
I massaged my temples. Reece disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a soda and a bottle of aspirin.
He shook his head. “I never would have put you in a situation like that if I’d known you’d get stupid.”
I spilled a few pills into my palm and tossed them back.
“Imagine how I feel.” I set the bottle down on a crate, my throat squeezing around the pills and forcing them down. “The first guy I ever kiss is a narc who’s trying to shut me up, and the first guy to feel me up is Vince DiMorello . . .” I shuddered.
Reece paled. “That was your first kiss? That day in the hall at school?”
I didn’t answer.
He dropped his head into his hands and let out a slow breath.
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I stood up, defensive. “I’ve kissed other people . . . like Jeremy.”
Reece stiffened. “Jeremy?”
“Yes, Jeremy.”
He stood up and pulled his hand through his hair, looking at me with a grave expression. “We need to talk. I should probably get dressed first.” He backed toward his bedroom. “Wait here. I’ll be back in five minutes. I’m serious this time. Five minutes. Don’t go anywhere,” and he disappeared into his room.
I guess I deserved that.
His muffled voice came through the bathroom door over the sound of running water.
“There’s leftover pizza in the kitchen. Help yourself.”
We need to talk.
So this was it, I told myself. I’d broken our agreement, and the deal was over. The official break-up of a non-existent relationship. I pulled his phone from my pocket, and set it on a small shelf where he kept his key ring and his wallet. Then took off his pendant and laid the thistle beside them, next to a framed photograph. I picked it up. The faded image under the glass was lightly torn around the edges. Two boys stood arm in arm, one a smaller version of the other. Matching grins and blue eyes, their unruly bangs falling into identical sets of dark lashes.
But Reece said he didn’t have a family.
There are a lot of things about Whelan you don’t know.
I set the frame down. The shower was still running in the next room. I reached for the worn brown leather trifold and opened it. His driver’s license was there, bearing his own name and his real photo. A few credit cards, a library card, and a gym membership. When I flipped open the third section, something fluttered out. I bent to pick it off the floor. It was black-and-white and grainy, and folded to fit inside the wallet’s crease. A photo of a girl. I held it closer to see her. She had long hair, high cheekbones, and pretty eyes. Her lips looked full and glossy, even without color. I recognized the dress before I recognized her face. It was me. At the rave. Reece must have cut it from a surveillance photo and saved it. But why? And was he disappointed to find out I wasn’t really like the girl in the picture at all?
I returned the photo to the wallet and set it on the shelf. Then sank into the couch where Reece had been sitting. It was still warm and made a strange crackling sound under me. I pressed and released my weight, feeling something give beneath the thin cushion. Reaching under it, I withdrew a clump of papers—the torn pages from Reece’s textbook.
I need you,
it said, the words opening a fresh wound inside me. I pushed the pages aside, letting the crinkled periodic table drift to the floor.
I glanced to the closed bathroom door, listening to make sure the water was still running. I stuffed my arm back under the cushion and my fingers closed on something heavy. They withdrew a thick file folder and I turned it sideways to read the tab.
Boswell, Nearly
. Bold red letters across the front said
Confidential
.
My profile was printed inside: name, date of birth, nickname, schools attended, no previous criminal record . . . I paused at my parents’ names. Mother, Ramona Stevens Boswell. Father, Donald D. Boswell—I knew David was his middle name from the real driver’s license I kept under my bed. A brief note about him followed and I devoured the details even though they made me sick. He had no less than a dozen aliases and was “wanted” for felony charges, missing for five years, and his only known associate, listed merely by case number, was apparently serving time for another three.
I flipped the page. My name, followed by the words
accomplice
and
possible suspect
jumped out everywhere, beginning with the notes from my first “interview” with Lieutenant Nicholson.
Then came pages of reports in Reece’s blocky print. I glanced through them, surprised by their brevity. Sparse of detail and sterile in content, several dates and conversations were missing. Nothing about my escape from school the night of the play. Nothing about our conversation under the bleachers. Nothing about my trip to the hospital to see Posie, or our conversation by the airport after we’d fled the museum.
I flipped past them, thumbing through toxicology and autopsy reports. A handwritten note, time-stamped early this morning, confirmed they’d found ketamine residue in Kylie’s body last night.
I flipped past the lab reports to a stack of photos. Dozens of them.
I was captured over and over again in grainy black-andwhite images. Me, walking to school. Me, at the Bui Mart buying my newspaper and laughing with Bao. Me, getting into Jeremy’s car. Me, holding Reece’s hand in a dark alley. Me, dancing with Vince DiMorello. Lonny Johnson whispering in my ear. Me again, barefoot and laughing, slung over the shoulder of a dark-haired boy with a close-shaved head. Oleksa. Oleksa had carried me to the alley?
. . . an undercover cop claims he saw you before the time of Kylie’s murder, and verified that you were inebriated and unconscious . . .
I dropped the file. The contents sprawled like wreckage across the floor. Bodies lay tangled among them. Naked arms with haunting markings . . . all of them numbers. And—a periodic table.
I stood quietly, the lumpy sofa squeaking with release.
It’s personal. I’ll put it all on the table for you.
That was the clue under the bleachers.
I reached for the periodic table. Reece had circled five elements in blue. The sides of the cube snapped together inside my brain.
Ten, the atomic weight of the element Neon. Abbreviation Ne.
Next had been Marcia Steckler. She’d been 18, Argon. Abbreviation, Ar.
I stopped when I reached Posie Washington, straining to make out the blistering mark in the photo, but I remembered it as clearly as I remembered the smell of her flesh burning. Element number 3. Lithium. Li.
I set Posie down, the photos like headstones laid out in a neat row.
Teddy was marked in stars, element number 5. Boron. B.
And now Kylie. I knew her number. And the fifth element had already been circled on the table. Number 76. Osmium. Abbreviation, Os.
Reece had solved the puzzle. It was so simple. I’d been reading into it too deeply, making it more complicated than it needed to be. Thinking only of the ink message on my chem lab table, and the carved one in physics. Assuming there was some complex hidden meaning in those messages I had missed. I’d never told Reece about the messages on my lab tables at school. When he saw the clue under the bleachers, his mind probably jumped to the only “table” he associated with me. The one we’d been studying together. The periodic table of elements.
Each victim’s number represented the atomic weight of an element on the periodic table. And together, in order, the pattern became clear.
Ne + Ar + Li + B + Os = me.
The killer was spelling my name with the bodies of my own students. And he wasn’t finished yet.
Are you clever enough to find me in time.
“Did you find the pizza?” I jumped at the sound of his voice. Reece rubbed a towel through his wet hair, his white T-shirt pink where it stuck to his skin. His eyes followed my guilty glance to the disassembled file on the floor. The towel stopped moving. “What are you doing with these?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” My voice was shaking. “This is a confidential police file. How did you get it?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t look at it. “I borrowed it.”
“Why?” I already knew the answer. It hung in the silence between us. “You said it yourself, you know it’s a set-up. You’re concealing evidence. Why?”
His brow pulled down.
“They’re going to arrest me, aren’t they?” I threw a pointed finger to the pile of loose photos and reports on the floor. Photos of a pretty girl with long legs and wavy hair and a gorgeous boyfriend. A girl who tangled with drug dealers at illegal parties and wore provocative clothes. A girl with too many secrets. And now everything was spelled out so clearly. “This—my name—is all the reasonable doubt they’ll need, isn’t it?” My knees felt watery and the room wavered.
I lunged for the door. Reece grabbed my hand, his emotions slamming into me. But my own were too jumbled and I couldn’t untangle the mess of feelings and scents in my head. He pulled me toward him, grabbing my face in his hands.
“Don’t touch me!”
Reece jumped back, palms held high. I braced against the wall, warning him off with my eyes.
“Give me a reason.” He eased forward, speaking in a low voice. “You’re always telling me not to touch you. What are you so afraid of ?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Bullshit.” He inched closer. “You said something in the alley. That you can find the killer because you can feel him. What did you mean?”