Authors: Aric Davis
SEVEN
I walk into the park feeling like I own the place. I may as well—no one else does. Riverside is as much of a home as the place where I lay my head. I feel alive there. Maybe it’s the plants, or maybe it’s knowing where the bodies were planted. Hell, maybe it’s just Eyepatch. Riverside is his, too, ours in a way that only people who truly love a place can possess it. Four summers ago he was trading bullets while I ran with a scared and wounded little girl. I caught lead (that’s how these things can work), but so did the bad guys.
I think about those days like they’re some faded flag, my personal mark of glory. I’ve done good things since then, but nothing like that, and all too often my hands come back bloody. I can deal with that, as long as I know that’s how it’s supposed to be, but at night when I’m alone, it can be tough to think about. Seriously, roll it over on your tongue:
I’ve killed people.
You’d think it would be easy, like it is on TV, but it’s not. Even killing bad people like Gary or Spider leaves a scar. Why do you think so many soldiers wind up jacked up? It’s not all black and white or singing songs around the old oak tree when there are bodies in your wake.
The park is mostly empty. Kids are playing, and moms are on their phones ignoring them, the whole world aglow in the light of computers that can slip into a pocket. Hey, I’m not immune. I keep a phone, too, but I’m not married to it. I think we’re supposed to use them like tools, but instead they function more like a leash. When was the last time you saw someone leave a cell phone home on purpose and not make a big deal out of it? I know what I see when I watch a person with their nose in a phone while they drive a car or walk down the road: I see someone I can take advantage of. Not a civilian, but a pigeon, and usually a fat one that’s just waiting to be plucked.
Today I’m meeting the woman I met on Twitter a few days back. I still have some reservations, but beggars can’t be choosers. All I want is a neck above water and a head below the radar. Fat chance of either one of those things happening, with the fire at the farm all over the news, and I’m just waiting to see cruisers pacing me on my bike.
I see her as I cross in front of the playground equipment. She sounded older on the phone, and she looks rough, but I couldn’t care less. All I really care about is that she followed instructions, and unless there are two forty-year-old women walking Riverside Park wearing boots, a skirt, and a sweatshirt, it looks like she has.
“How are you?” I ask as I walk up behind her, and she jumps. I honestly don’t make an effort to sneak up on people. It’s just that civilians are so oblivious. They think they’re safe no matter where they are, and then they wonder why bad things happen all the time. Watch your six, stay worried, and get ready to run. That’s how you stay safe. Leave the pistol work for the cowboys and the dudes in blue.
“I’m fine, are you—”
“Yeah, we talked on the phone. You’re Claire?” She nods, still looking a little shell-shocked over getting caught off guard, and I give her a little grin to help break the ice before we start the heavy lifting. “So what’s the trouble? I know you don’t want to talk to the law or we wouldn’t be here, so spill.”
“I don’t want to talk to
anyone
about this,” says Claire, looking like she’s scared someone else is going to jump out at her on her blind side. It’s my fault. I got her blood pressure up, but still: she needs to learn to trust me if she wants me to work a job. After all, if there were someone coming, I’d be the first person to tell her to hit the deck.
“I get that,” I say. “I hear it all the time, in fact. But telling me is like telling a priest or a doctor. My lips are sealed, and unlike a man of God, I get results.”
“I’m worried about my daughter.”
“Why?”
“We . . . Our family has some skeletons in our closet, bad ones, and I’m terrified she’s going to get a look at them.”
I nod, smile, and then lock eyes with her. “I need more than that.”
She took a deep breath, then said, “There was a girl killed a few years ago,” the words coming out of her slower than cold toothpaste. “I don’t want my daughter to know anything about her.”
“What was her name?”
“Mandy.”
“Mandy Reasoner?” I ask, already shaking my head, and Claire nods in agreement, her words all spent for the moment.
“Look, I’d love to help, Claire, but there’s a problem. I don’t know how Mandy Reasoner could have anything to do with your daughter, but no matter what, you’re asking me to handle something that already got handled, something in the past, and that’s not the way this world works. You don’t have the money to make me shut up everyone who might know about that case. There’s just no sense in trying to make the truth disappear.”
“I know you can’t make what happened go away. I just don’t want her caught up in it.” Her eyes are glistening, and that soft part in my chest that I keep next to what’s left of my heart starts playing a little song.
“Lady, I can do a lot, but I can’t put the paint back in the can. There’s always going to be a stain.” I shake my head. “I have to ask you, though. Why does it matter? What are you so worried she’s going to find out about Mandy Reasoner?”
“They’re trying to get the man that killed her released, and I want my daughter to be safe.”
“From the man who killed Mandy?”
“From everybody.”
None of it is making much sense, but we’ve at least drifted into an area where I can operate. “I can watch your daughter if you want,” I tell her. “Make sure she avoids trouble for the most part, but it’s going to be tricky. Duke might get released, and he might not, but even if he did, how would he even find her? And why would he even want to?”
“Can you keep her safe, or not?”
If people could just come out and tell me stuff, my job would be a lot easier. “I’m going to need to know what it is you think is going on, lady.”
She closes her eyes for a few seconds, like I’m causing her physical pain, and then she opens them. “You’ve heard of her, so you must have heard about the people trying to set Duke free, right?”
“Yeah, I know about that.”
“What if they’re right? What if he really didn’t do it?”
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even possible for this woman to make sense. “Well, what if he didn’t? What’s that got to do with your daughter?” But before she can answer, something else occurs to me. “Claire, you need to be straight with me,” I say, leaning in close. “Do you know who killed Mandy?”
“No. I’ve always assumed the court got it right, but now there are so many people saying he could still be out there—”
I put up a hand, cutting her off. I need to just simplify this loopy job. “How many hours a day are we talking?”
“My daughter is still in school, so not many,” says Claire. “Just enough to make sure she’s keeping her nose clean and stays safe. Whatever you can do to steer her away from this whole business, that’d be great. But it’s even more important to me that she stays safe.”
I nod, try to look like I’m just considering taking the job, but I know the score even if she doesn’t. I need this job, I need the money, and I need to keep myself busy. Being lonely hurts, and most of the people I care about are never coming back.
“I’ll do it,” I say, and she nods. She’s already opening her mouth, but then I tell her the terms and she stops nodding, starts frowning, but agrees to pay me. I’m getting a tenth of what I would have been paid even just a couple of years ago—I never would have guessed the economy would have crippled even a crook like me, but here we are—but she’s looking at me like I’m stealing from the church bowl. “I’ll need her name.”
“Her name is June Derricks, and Mandy is her aunt,” says Claire and she hands over a picture of her daughter. All of a sudden, everything begins to make sense.
“You know there’s no way you’ll be able to keep her from knowing about this forever, right?”
“I just want her to be safe,” says Claire, and I nod.
Secrets won’t stay buried forever, no matter how deep you make the hole. But safe? That’s something I can help with.
EIGHT
Betty spent her night buried behind a wall of studying and wondering. The paper was coming along swimmingly, but she couldn’t help but wonder what June’s mom would have to say about the show. Most likely just that June was allowed to go and little else.
Betty wanted to ask Andrea about a possible reprieve when she got home, but the look on her mother’s face told her that Andrea was in no mood for hearing about a grounding violation, nor did she look like she wanted to discuss a punk rock show, even a really important one. Still, Betty did her best to maintain the goodwill that Ophelia had shown her, so she was talkative throughout the meal, ate her salad with gusto, and then cleared the table and did the dishes without being asked.
Drying her hands with a kitchen towel as she returned to the dining room, Betty had been expecting some small amount of gratitude for the completion of the unrequested chores, but found the moms entirely focused on each other. Clearly they’d been talking,
really
talking. Instead of sticking around to hear if they were discussing her or one of the bleak tales that Andrea carried home from work, Betty scurried off to the safety of her room.
Betty was buried deep in her homework when her phone rang around eight o’clock, the time of day where she tended to feel the most bruised by her school workload. Betty grabbed the iPhone and saw that it said “June Bug” across the caller ID.
“What’s up?” Betty asked in the way of teenagers that don’t really care what’s up at all, but June’s voice surprised her. Unless Betty was mistaken, her friend was crying. “Hey, are you all right?” she asked, but hated the words as they came out of her mouth. If June was all right, she wouldn’t be crying, so why was she asking her best friend such a stupid question?
“My mom is fucking crazy,” spat June. “I’m serious, Betty. Claire has officially flipped her shit.”
“Calm down,” said Betty, “and try and talk more quietly. If Claire hears you calling her crazy, she’s going to go fucking nuts.”
“No worries there,” said June. “Mother is at the bar, guaranteed. I showed her that flyer when I came home. At first she looked like she was going to pass out, and then she tore it up before I could even say anything.” June sniffled. “Thank God I didn’t show her the tickets. I mean, I get that my mom hates punk rock or whatever, but she’s always been cooler than this.”
“Did you try and call your dad?”
“Fuck him,” said June in response. “All he’d do is tell me that he was really busy, and that I should listen to my mother. My dad doesn’t care about me, Betty, he just cares about whatever piece of ass he’s chasing. That’s just how he is, and being mad about it is like getting angry at a dog for running after a car.” Another sniff. “It’s possible I stole that part from Claire.”
“That’s OK,” said Betty, smiling at the small joke. She was jealous that June could be so tough, with all the bullshit she had to deal with, and blushed at the memory of her recent wish for some sort of struggle to deal with. She had it easy compared to June, really easy, and she was pretty sure being unable to appreciate it was making her a terrible person.
“It’s not OK,” said June. “None of this is. I mean, no offense, Betty, but Ophelia saying no wasn’t even a surprise. I’m not in trouble—as far as Claire knows, I’ve been a little angel lately—so I just don’t get why this would make her freak out so badly. I mean, good lineup or not, it’s still just a dumb little punk show.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a little show,” said Betty, “but you’re right. Your mom flipping is really weird. She’s usually pretty cool about stuff like this. Like when she let you get your septum pierced. My moms would never go for that.”
“You already have your nose pierced, septum isn’t any different,” said June. “Not like any of that even matters right now. Listen, Betty: I’m going to this show no matter what. Seriously. Senior year is less than six months away, I’ll be eighteen in less than a year, and the Pyramid Scheme isn’t even in a bad part of town. There’s no reason that I can’t go to this stupid show, except for the fact that my mom is a crazy bitch.”
“Maybe Claire just had a bad day at work,” Betty suggested. “Andrea looked like she got hit by a truck when she came home today. Sometimes with parents the timing is the problem, not the question.”
“Seriously, Betty?” June asked, the sneer audible through the iPhone’s speaker. “I’m not a complete idiot, remember? Mom was in a fine mood until she saw that flyer, and—”
“Wait. Remember what Ophy said? She was staring at that flyer like there was something wrong with it, but she wasn’t looking at the bands or the venue. She was looking at the name on it, remember? It said Duke something-or-other. Maybe there’s some weird shit with that guy that we just don’t know about.”
“Maybe,” said June, “but it’s probably just my mom wanting me to be as miserable as she is.”
“I don’t know. Ophy was superweird, remember? She knew something was up, guaranteed. If it had been Andrea, we’d already know—she’s not nearly the secret keeper Ophelia is.”
“I think we just need to let this go,” said June. “I have to get back to my homework. No sense in getting grounded before I get in trouble for sneaking out.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Betty. “Hey, I had a question: Do you really think my situation with Jake makes me a bitch?”
“Betty—”
“I’m serious. I know you were joking around in gym, but I’m not talking about that. I’m asking for real. Am I a bitch for dating him when I know it’s going to turn out badly?”
“Pretty much,” said June. “But listen, Jake is one of the cutest and dumbest boys in school. Someone was going to break his heart this year, and it may as well be Betty.”
“I’m not sure that makes me feel any better,” said Betty with a frown. “I’m not doing it to be mean, it’s just—”
“Betty, the problem is that most of the girls at Northview would kill for Jake Norton just to look at them once the way that he stares at you. The boy is seriously in love, and you know it, and you knew exactly what was going to happen if you dated him. It’s part of the Betty Martinez experience, if the past couple years have been any indication.”
“Fuck you,” said Betty with no malice in her voice.
“Fuck you back,” said June. “I need to get to work on my homework, all right? We can talk more in school, maybe come up with a plan.”
“All right. I hope your night gets better.”
“It won’t,” said June, and then she was gone.
Betty laid her phone down on the desk in front of her, then stared down the blinking cursor on her open Word document. The flashing line was mocking her inability to go to shows, treat boys decently, or write about the women’s suffrage movement. With a sigh, Betty popped her headphones back on, fired up the same playlist from earlier in the afternoon, and then clicked on the browser tab at the bottom of the window. After a moment of thought, Betty punched “duke barnes grand rapids” into the search box and then waited as the results loaded.
The results came flying in, and Betty clicked on the first of them, a website with the URL www.freedukebarnes.com. The click led her to a page with a black background and a picture of a hard-looking young man. The guy in the picture—presumably Duke—had spiked hair and a dog collar with a bondage ring hanging off the center of it. Seeing no other links on the page, Betty hovered her mouse arrow over the picture and double-clicked the image.
The screen flashed and then loaded a menu with four options: The Crime, The Trial, The Aftermath, and How You Can Help. Betty figured the start was as good a place as any, and clicked “The Crime.” The screen flashed again, then loaded a text-heavy page with a few pictures of Duke along the side. The background was black with a red spatter effect, the grim imagery removing any doubt that what she was about to read wasn’t going to end well. Betty shut the playlist off, removed her headphones, and began to read.
On January 27, 2000, Duke Barnes was at the end of a tough period in his life. He had largely dropped out of the alternative music community that he had invested a great deal of energy in, and he was struggling with addiction issues. His friends were worried about both Duke and his girlfriend, Mandy Reasoner, and their worst fears came to fruition on that wintry day. Duke and Mandy had both spent a significant amount of time under the radar of modern society, at first by intent, and later through their crippling addictions to street narcotics.
At 7:45 a.m. Duke was returning home to the squat he shared with Mandy and several other transients on the south side of Grand Rapids. He had spent the morning earning money through prostitution, and according to several witnesses, Mandy was also engaged in acts of solicitation. Upon arriving at the squat Duke saw a man running from the building, and fearing the worst, Duke entered to find Mandy lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Despite Duke’s best efforts to revive Mandy, her wounds were too grievous, and eventually Duke left her to call 911. Upon police arrival Duke was detained and then released, but was later brought back to the Grand Rapids Police Department in order to straighten out the exact window of his arrival to the home. At some point this line of questioning turned into an interrogation, and even though Duke did not have legal counsel present, he was questioned for over seventy-two hours. When the detectives in charge of the investigation were finished, they had a confession on the table and a suspect in custody.
This confession came despite the fact that Duke was given next to no food during the interrogation, was suffering badly from opioid withdrawal, and was still grieving Mandy. Duke was recorded on both video and audio for the duration of the interrogation, and the detectives in charge of this case broke several Michigan statutes regarding the length of time that a suspect may be questioned without counsel present. Despite these issues, Duke was formally charged, arraigned, and brought to trial later that year.
Seeing the tops of more pictures, Betty scrolled to the bottom of the page, and then gasped. There were three more pictures of Duke—one of him on stage holding a guitar, a shot of him smoking a cigarette and smiling under falling snow, and one of him holding his fists up in a mock fighting pose—but Betty ignored all of those because there was another picture, a moment captured in time of a skinny and scared-looking girl with bright orange hair.
Mandy Reasoner.
Mandy had a ring in her nose and was wearing a Queers
T-shirt and black jeans. She had what looked like track marks on her arms and a bright bruise on her neck.
All of those things were insignificant to Betty, however, because the girl in the picture was a dead ringer for June.
Betty found it nearly impossible to take her eyes from the shot of Mandy, June’s impossible doppelg
ä
nger. The similarities were so striking—the shape of their noses, the corners of their mouths, their hairlines. Betty back-clicked and then began to pore over the rest of the website, ignoring the words now, entirely focused on the pictures.
There were lots of shots of Duke and Mandy on the page about the trial. In some they were together, but most of the time they were separate and alone, and it was easy for Betty to imagine that whichever was missing from the frame was likely the one holding the camera. The last of these shots, an awful image taken by a police photographer of a half-naked Mandy covered in stab wounds, was bad enough to make Betty tear up, but the words at the end of the paragraph chilled her to the bone. “I hope he rots in hell” was the quote from the victim’s sister—and the name next to it snapped the final piece of the puzzle into place.
Claire Derricks.
“Mandy was June’s aunt,” said Betty to no one at all, and then her hands dropped off the keyboard and mouse as though they could burn her.
June’s aunt was killed
.
The thought kept repeating until it began making some sort of impossible sense to her, and then she moved on to the next.
How could we not have known about this?
Andrea had worked a great deal with the police department over many years. Surely she had to have known all about this. Betty supposed there was no reason for Andrea to share these sordid details with her daughter, but the issue had to have come up between the moms once the dead girl’s niece became Betty’s best friend. Even so, Betty guessed it wasn’t surprising that they’d never broached the subject with her, particularly since June herself didn’t seem to know anything about it.
That was the amazing part, now that she thought about it: How had June never heard of it? Even if her mom and dad chose to keep it from her, wasn’t it pretty incredible that no one in the community at large had brought it up with her? Maybe not, though. A random junkie girl’s death had probably never been front-page news. Still, especially with the grown-up June walking around town as the murdered Mandy’s all-but-identical twin, it was remarkable that it had never come up.
June had never said much about her family, which as far as Betty knew was practically nonexistent. Betty knew that June’s parents were split up and that June didn’t have any living grandparents, but that was about it.
How can we be such good friends if I know so little about her?
Betty felt almost sick at this thought, and then remembered the murky waters of her own past—her missing father, her nonhyphenated last name, the moms themselves. Especially when it got complicated, maybe it was just easier to keep family stuff to yourself. It just
was
, after all, and not talking about it didn’t mean they loved each other any less.
Done thinking for a while—it was wearing her out—Betty folded the laptop closed with a satisfying snap, grabbed the bottle of water from her desk, and ventured out of her room and back to the kitchen.
She found Ophelia and Andrea sitting at the table there. “Hi,” she said.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” said Andrea.
Betty nodded, realizing as she sat that they’d been waiting for her. That they’d probably heard her phone ring and knew who’d likely called, and at least some of what they’d talked about, and where her curiosity would probably take her after she’d hung up.