Slain (13 page)

I wrap my hands around my middle and try to make the tears stop, but my body is shaking and I can’t move away. I know I’m taking too long. I can feel their eyes on me, the cameras fixed on the sobbing girl who said she was June’s friend but didn’t mean it. The girl who should have been with her instead of shoving her away. The girl who should have stayed with her all night.
 

I want to go, but my feet are locked up and I can’t. I just can’t. Maybe if I stay here I can save her for real this time.

“Come on, sweetie,” Paige says, and my feet start to move again.

After June’s burial, everyone comes back to the church for the reception. The sound of people munching on sandwiches and slopping cold casserole onto their plates feels so wrong. It seems like we should be able to think of something better to honor a life than: A girl died—here’s some Jell-O salad.

I make my excuses and go home.

Paige calls as I’m throwing on clothes to go for a run.

“Hey,” I say, before I hear her crying. “What’s the matter?”

“Come over,” she says. “I found something.”

P
AIGE
MEETS
ME
AT
the door. Her house is a sprawling ranch with six bedrooms for four people in a gated community down the road from my own. I want to ask her if Mike’s there, but I can’t. She’s so upset, swiping at her eyes with her sleeves. She’s the toughest person I know, and it makes her look like a little girl.
 

“Look at this,” she says, holding her phone out to me. “I didn’t get it back until today when we were at church. And I totally forgot I took it.”

The phone is paused on a video, the image too blurry to make out. There’s a shuffling, and I look up to see Mike standing in the hall outside the living room, skulking in the dust-moted mid-afternoon shadows.

“Hey,” he says as he walks toward me and kisses me on the cheek. I try not to flinch. “What are you doing here?”

“Paige called,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, disappointed. He must have thought I was here to see him.

“Yeah,” she says. “And I have dibs on her right now, so back off.”

“Fine. Geez,” he says, rolling his eyes.

Paige yanks me by the elbow toward her room, calling over her shoulder, “Geez is short for Jesus, you know. It’s disrespectful.”

Mike shakes his head and saunters off.

Paige shuts the door. “Sorry, but I don’t want him seeing this until I figure out what to do about it. He can get all vigilante sometimes.”

“It’s fine.” I don’t tell her I’m relieved.

We sit down on her bed, which is covered in a pink eyelet bedspread. For being such a killer athlete, she’s super girlie.

She presses play. There’s laughter and shouting. The image is temporarily blocked by the back of people’s heads, but Paige, the one holding the phone, seems to elbow her way through the crowd as the camera twists and blurs. I think I can make out the red-on-wood stripe of the church gym floor.

Then Paige gets to the front and steadies the shot, and I see that the camera is pointed at me. I’m sitting in a chair blindfolded, with four other kids sitting next to me in a line, also blindfolded. It’s the night of the lock-in, maybe around nine thirty. We’re all in the gym, separated into groups of ten or so, going around the room in a circuit of games. I think we were split into teams? I can’t remember.

Miss Hope sets a small box on my lap. Then she gives similar boxes to the other kids. You can’t quite see it in the video, but it’s an old Kleenex box, wrapped in black paper, with a sign that says:
BATTERIES
. The other kids’ boxes say:
SPAGHETTI, GUM DROPS, COTTON BALLS
.

“Okay, everybody quiet down. No hints. No talking.” Miss Hope says to the crowd. Then she turns to us. “On your mark, get set, GO!”
 

We dive our hands into the boxes, feeling around. Chuck's hand shoots up into the air in an instant, and he screams “Noodles!”

“Gummy Bears!” Ruth screams.

“Almost, guys,” Miss Hope says, jovial. “Almost!”

The look on my face is confused. I wasn’t even close. I’m terrible at this game, and I wasn’t exactly concentrating. I was thinking about Jackson, wondering when I could check my phone next to see if he had texted, to see if he was still coming.

“Um, um, spaghetti!” Chuck shouts.

“We have a winner!” Miss Hope says. I remember being glad Chuck won. It saved me from the embarrassment of having to guess. I had no idea.

There’s a swoosh of the camera down toward the floor, and the video ends. I turn toward Paige, confused.

“Didn’t you see it?” she asks.

“See what?”

Paige presses play and the video starts up again. She scrubs forward to where Chuck shoots his hand up. “There.” She points to the corner of the image.

Against the wall, to the side of all the action, June is standing with Nicolas. She has her arms wrapped around her body, the way she sometimes did. They were thin and long like a ballerina’s, and she could wrap them around her stomach so far that her fingers nearly met behind her back. The only time I ever saw her like that was when she seemed to be upset about something.

Nicolas reaches toward her, but she twists away. Then she runs out, leaving him standing there alone. Then Paige’s grip on the camera shifts slightly, and I can’t see Nicolas in the frame anymore.

I look over to Paige. She looks away, chews on the inside of her cheek, then looks back at me. “Can I tell you something?”
 

I nod yes.
 

“It’s probably nothing, but then I saw this. And now…I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“What?”

“June did talk to me a little bit more that night, before she disappeared. I think she was looking for you, but she found me instead, and…well, remember how she wanted to talk to us about him?”

“Yeah?”

“Well…she said she was going to break up with him.”

“Seriously? When she talked to us it seemed like they were having problems, but I thought June loved him. Like,
loved
him, loved him.”

“I know. But that’s what she said.”

“Did she say why?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“No, I…they didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to make him look any guiltier, you know? I mean, he’s already her boyfriend, right? So the police have to be looking at him. And he was all over the place that night, so he looks even worse. I really don’t think he did it, Emmy, I really don’t. But if the police keep asking questions like that, I’m gonna have to say something.”

I can’t believe he would do it either, but this business about them breaking up is weird. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have told you they’d be married by next summer.
 

And then there’s the gun in my room. Nicolas and I used to date. He’s been in my house before. Could he have done it? But why? And why try to blame me even if he did?

“No, you’re right. There’s no way he did it. Let’s just keep it to ourselves for a while, okay?”

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, I show up at Nicolas’s house without calling. When he comes to the door, his eyes are red-rimmed, his hair sweat-smashed on one side of his head. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

“I need to talk to you,” I say.

He sinks into the couch. “Okay. Talk.” He seems angry, irritated I’m here. We didn’t work out as a couple, but I thought we were at least friends. I sit on the opposite end of the couch.

“Why don’t the police know you guys broke up?” I ask.
 

His head snaps up, surprised. “What? We didn’t—“

“She said she was going to.”

“It was just…it wasn’t for real. She got in these moods sometimes, but it never lasted. We would have been back together by morning.”

“What kind of moods?”

“Like, I don’t know, dark, opposite of what she usually was. She’d get to thinking that she was dragging me down, that I should be with someone better. It was always after things were really good for a while. Like she didn’t know what to do when things were good.”

“And then she’d break up with you?”

“Sometimes. For a little while. But I could always cheer her up, you know? Convince her that we were supposed to be together, and then everything would be okay again.”
 

“And that’s what happened the night of the lock-in?”

“Basically. She got this idea in her head that she shouldn’t be dating anyone, that she needed to purify herself. That she was spoiled, because of, you know, her past. She wanted to get baptized. I told her, sure, that’s great. I mean, they do it, like, every three months. But she didn’t want to wait that long. She was trying to convince someone to do it sooner.”

“Who?” I’ve never seen anyone baptize people but my dad. It’s one of his favorite things about being a pastor.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. All she said is that she didn’t think we could be together until it was done.”

Something the police said catches in my mind. The swimsuit. You get baptized in your clothes, but women always wear a bathing suit underneath for decency. What if June wanted to get baptized the night of the lock-in? It would explain why she was up in the sanctuary.
 

You wouldn’t notice it by looking, but behind the choir loft, under a platform, there’s a baptistery big enough for my dad to stand in waist deep. The mechanized front panel slides back to expose a reinforced glass wall, so the whole audience can watch people get dunked, like it’s a whale exhibit at Sea World or something. When the cover is over it, it just looks like part of the stage. Would the police know to look for it?

But if the murderer was trying to baptize June, why not just drown her? Why the gun? And why at the church? It seems like one of the worst places you could choose to do something like that. Unless, of course, you’re trying to frame someone who was there at the same time.

Or maybe it wasn’t the murderer trying to baptize her at all. Maybe someone else is the reason she was up there that night, and they’re not saying so for fear of becoming a suspect.

Nicolas’s words pull me out of my thoughts. “She didn’t think she was good enough for me.”

“She said that?”

“Yeah, I know, that’s what I mean. It was crazy. I told her that it didn’t matter what had happened to her before, that I didn’t care, but she wouldn’t listen.” His voice gets all chokey. “It was kind of frustrating actually. It got to feeling like, I don’t know, a test. A test I kept having to pass over and over and over again. I thought maybe she’d…I thought she could use some time to calm down. So I told her to think about it. I told her I’d leave her alone to think about it for a little bit, then we’d talk about it again. But then I couldn’t find her.”

His anger isn’t toward me at all. The number one villain to Nicolas is Nicolas.

“I had one thing to do as her boyfriend, and I failed. I didn’t protect her. Why’d I leave her? Why’d I have to do that?”

“Oh, Nicky.” I grab his hand. “What would you have done against a gun?”

“I don’t know. Something. Not let her die like that. All alone.”

We sit in silence for a moment, then I ask, “Do you have any ideas about who could have done it?”

“Yeah, but the police won’t listen.”
 

“Tell me.”

“You want to know the first thing I thought, when I found out she didn’t do it to herself? I thought it was her dad.”

“Her dad?” I know nothing about June’s dad.

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“He’s, like, not a good guy. In and out of prison her whole life. Armed assault, bank robbery, drug possession. The sick bastard has killed people before. Sorry.” He’s apologizing because of the language. It’s automatic. “And when he
was
around? Let’s just say it was better for her when he wasn’t. I know what the Bible says, but there’s got to be an exception for men like that. He should be the one dead, not her.”

“What do you mean it was better for her when he wasn’t around?”

He looks away, says quietly, “He did things to her. Things that shouldn’t happen between a father and a daughter.”

“I had no idea.” I really didn’t. She alluded to things sometimes, gave testimony about a dark past, but everyone talks like that. The worse your past, the better your testimony. I never imagined anything like this. What did I really know about her? It feels like nothing at all.

“She even went to see him a couple weeks ago. She’s been working through some of this stuff, trying to move on. She wanted to confront him, forgive him. I don’t think it went well. She barely talked to me afterward.”
 

“Have you told the police?”

“Oh yeah. But they think someone in our church did it.”
 

Me.
 

“I thought maybe it was because they had some evidence that they weren’t telling me about. But I haven’t heard anything. Do you know anything? Like, from your dad?”

“No,” I say.
 

“I mean a guy like that? You think he couldn’t break in?”

“Of course he could.”

June’s dad is a criminal. It’s a good feeling, like seeing a clean spot on a dirty window. I shouldn’t be glad of anything having to do with such a terrible person. But I am; I’m relieved. There’s at least one person who might have had a reason to murder June.
 

I go home right away to tell Mom. She’s sitting on the back deck, wrapped in a blanket even though it’s nearly eighty degrees out, a warm Colorado spring day soon to be chased away by a cold Colorado spring night. I think I can smell cigarette smoke, but I’m not positive. Something about her has been different since June’s murder. She seems quieter, more introspective.

After I tell her, she gets on the phone to the police, and they ask us to come in. We’re so excited we forget to call Mr. Graham, the lawyer.

I tell the police everything Nicolas told me.

“Okay. Anything else?” Boyer asks. She seems annoyed. I’m confused.