Authors: Nick Lake
It wasn’t him, not really. It was me. You know that now.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I was crying again; I felt like there was a heat behind my eyes that I had to get out.
You were half in the truck, one leg inside it, the other out. Something about your stance softened then. “Listen, Cass. If you didn’t do anything with that guy, not really … You could tell me. If your dad is … I don’t know. If he’s hurting you, or threatening you or something … I could help you. We could face it
together
. But you have to be honest with me.”
I was wrong.
That
was the moment when my heart broke.
“My dad isn’t threatening me,” I said. Which was true. Kind of. “He has never hurt me. Not once.”
“Then what?” you said. “What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of you. I just cheated on you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I shrugged. “I’ve known him longer than you. Sometimes we hook up. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just sex.”
I used the word deliberately. I wanted its hardness.
You stared at me, like I was someone you didn’t know anymore. The sun caught on the hood of the Ford and flashed white, blinding me for a second. I couldn’t see your face. I couldn’t see you at all. It was like the light was washing you out of existence, washing you out of my life.
“Also,” I said, every word feeling like a heavy stone that I was having to lift out of my mouth, with my tongue, so heavy, so hard to say. “Also he kisses better than you. Is that good enough for you?”
I turned around and walked away. I didn’t look back. A moment later I heard the engine of the truck start again. And you drove out of my life.
Please come back?
I mean, I
want
you back.
I was stupid. I know that now.
But I didn’t do the thing they said I did.
I swear.
I changed to the 7 bus.
I mean, what else was I going to do?
I rode for fifteen minutes. Something like that. Finally I got off, which was a relief because there was a creepy mustachioed guy in a shiny plastic jacket who was checking me out the whole time, thinking he was being subtle. I was like four blocks away. I walked and turned, following the little map I had drawn, after looking up the place on Google Maps on Dad’s computer in his study.
The same computer I’m sitting at right now. With the insects around me. Appropriate, I guess. Being surrounded by lowly little insects.
Am I overdoing it with the self-flagellation? I think maybe yes. I’ll stop now. I mean, either you’re going to forgive me or not.
It was weird, walking the north side of town. The buildings got dirtier, and more run-down, as you walked. Once past the piers, the poverty and dilapidation set in and everything seemed to slump. Like a time-lapse movie of the aftertimes—once nuclear war has come or a virus or whatever—the whole town slowly rotting, falling into the sand and the marsh, once all the people are dead and no longer caring for it.
That was the kind of very cheerful thought I was having.
Anyway.
For a while, I walked on the beach, listening to the gulls, breathing in the ocean air. Then I turned up, past the tufted dunes, to the streets. This was Bayview, the part where Paris had gone missing. I was walking the street closest to the beach; there were swirls of sand on the cracked concrete, abstract shapes, as if the wind was trying to write something, to pass on some message that no one could understand.
I kept walking. I was on the block now, maybe a hundred yards from the house—I glanced at my hand-drawn map again. Yes. Nearly there.
And …
And just then a black Jeep came driving toward me, down the perpendicular street to the one I was on, slowing as it reached the junction with the beach road.
A Jeep SRT8. Like the one Julie had seen turning in front of her.
I shrank back, spinning the other way, as if I had just been curious about which way this street went, and now I was returning to the beach—north, away from town. I walked quickly, until I was a little sheltered behind a row of crappy cars, Civics and Daewoos mostly, and some rusted old American sedans—Chevys and Fords. The crappy cars of Bayview. Rusted by the ocean. Local cars.
The SRT8 was not rusted, that was clear. Even from the brief glimpse I had gotten, I had seen that it was shiny. Gleaming like something built for evil. Some black tank from some private army.
I leaned against a car and took out my phone as if it had just rung; I don’t really know what I thought I was doing. Trying to act inconspicuous, I guess, since my pulse was an engine, two stroke, rattling in my veins. I held the phone to my ear and kind of half turned around, and that was when I saw the car turn, leaving the stop sign where it had been pulled up. Onto the beach road. The road where Paris had gone missing.
KRS1-GH7 said the license plate.
I felt the breath catch in my throat.
Why?
What did that mean to me?
“The song,” said the voice. “The song that Julie had stuck in her head.”
“What?”
“The
song
,” said the voice.
“What song? When?”
“When you went to the apartment the day after … you know. When Julie was telling Horowitz what happened.”
I thought back to the conversation with Julie. What was the song she’d had in her head? An earworm—that was what people called it, wasn’t it? It had been triggered by seeing Brian’s cop car turning up …
That was it. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police …”
It was a stupidly catchy song. And now it was going around in my head, again and again. Impossible to make it stop, once you thought of it. I was only half-aware of it though; it was playing in the background of my thoughts.
Oh
, I thought.
Oh, ****.
I should have gotten it quicker. I mean, old-school hip-hop was my thing. Before the voice anyway, it was my thing. Because of Travis and the other kids who used to hang out at the restaurant.
“KRS1,” I said, to the voice. “That’s what Julie saw. That license plate. That’s what put the song in her head.”
“Yes,” said the voice.
Julie had been pissed with herself; guilty about the earworm, I remembered. She thought it was bad that when Paris was being … whatever happened to her … that she had this old rap song going around in her mind. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” She had thought it was random, had been angry with her own distracted mind, the disrespect of it.
But it hadn’t been random. When I asked her about the license plate, what was it she said? That there was something “on the tip of her tongue.” Something bothering her. But she didn’t know what it was. Except that her subconscious knew. Her subconscious knew what she had seen, what the link was.
KRS-One, the rapper from the nineties. Whose biggest hit was a song called … yes … “The Sound of da Police.”
****, it was so clear now. Julie had seen the Jeep driving away, and on some level, she had registered the license plate.
KRS1-GH7.
And seeing that—that coincidental conjunction of numbers and letters—followed by the sound of an
actual
police siren, had got KRS-One’s most famous song playing on her mental stereo.
Holy ****. This was the car Julie had seen. This was the actual car.
Without any moment in between, any transition, at least that I was aware of, I was running, following the car.
“It’s turning,” said the voice.
“I see that,” I said.
Sure enough, the black car was pulling into the driveway of a house just in front of me. My scribbled map was in my inner eye, like a pilot’s heads-up display, superimposed on the real street, and I realized that this house, this place where the black Jeep was parking, was maybe two or three houses south of the one Paris had gone into.
And so already I was thinking … I was thinking,
It’s just a neighbor …
But it was like that thought was a thorn I wanted to pull out, something I wanted gone; I still moved, I was still running, the main control for my mind had been wrested from me, the copilot had taken over, and wanted to see who was in that Jeep.
I mean, I’d told Dwight about the SRT8. And he would have passed on the information, and the police would be looking into it. Horowitz probably, and his team. But they were looking in the wrong place, weren’t they? Checking out the demolition company, probably running the backgrounds of every employee, when they weren’t investigating Paris’s dad.
“It’s just a neighbor,” said the voice. “Julie saw the car turn because they were leaving the house. That’s all.”
“Shut up,” I said.
I got to the driveway as a woman got out of the driver’s seat of the car.
“A woman,” said the voice.
“I can see that,” I said. I stopped, out of breath. I wasn’t used to exercise.
The woman was staring at me. I’m not good at judging the age of adults. I guess she was in her thirties? No makeup, hair pulled back. Tight yoga leggings and a zipped-up body warmer. I assumed she had been at the gym. She looked hard. Wiry. Like she spent too much time there.
“You think this is the killer?” said the voice. “Really?”
I scanned from her to the car. There was no one else in it.
“Uh … can I help you?” she said. Blond eyebrows tight together. Concerned.
“I …”
“Yes?”
I breathed deep. I suddenly felt like this was a big mistake. A feeling that was familiar to me.
“Is your husband home?” I said. I had seen the ring on her finger.
“No, I’m afraid not. Do you … I mean … what do you want him for?” Worry in her voice now.
Is this girl having an affair with my husband?
I bet that’s what she was thinking.
Come on, Cassie, come on
.
“I, uh, my dad owns Donato’s. The pizza place? Your husband left his business card in our prize drawing? Raffle, you know? It’s a big prize. A vacation to Italy. I … My dad sent me to tell him.”
“Oh.” Still suspicious. But curious too. “Italy, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s a vacation for two.”
“Well, he’s working in Dubai. He’s in construction project management.”
I nodded. “We called his phone. I figure that’s why it wouldn’t go through.”
The woman examined me. “You’re shivering.”
I glanced down. There were goose bumps on my bare arms.
“You should get inside,” said the woman. “Storm’s coming.” She wasn’t inviting me into her house. That much was obvious. It was clapboard, but from what I’d seen on Street View, better maintained than the one Paris had gone into. Clean paintwork, no peeling—a new mailbox bolted to a post. Little round trees by the door.
I looked up. The sky was a bruise now, thin sickly bars of light showing through clouds that were almost black. Pressing down. The air was frigid on my skin. How had I not noticed? I’d been running, I guessed. But also I was in my head, thinking of Paris. Always thinking of Paris.
And how all hope was gone now.
Almost
all hope.
“How long has he been in Dubai?” I said. “I mean, I’m trying to figure when he put his card in the jar.”
“Four months,” said the woman.
Nope.
That was it.
All
hope gone.
“He wasn’t here when Paris … disappeared,” said the voice.
“I know that, genius,” I said.
“What?” said the woman.
“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry. I’m sorry I came. I’ll go now.” I started to walk away, down the street, toward the house, the one where … the one where … I could feel it pulling me, could feel its painful gravity.
“What about the vacation?” she said to my departing back.
“Can only give it to him,” I said. “Call us when he gets back.”
I kept walking.
“Wait,” said the woman. “Wait. His business card would have his work address. How did you find us?”
I ignored her. I ignored her and kept walking. I heard her go into the house. Maybe she was going to call the cops. Maybe she didn’t believe my story.
I didn’t care.
The license plate was a dead end, and that just left the Houdini Killer and Paris’s dad and there was nothing a seventeen-year-old girl from Jersey could do about either of those.
I didn’t care about anything anymore.
We’re coming to the part when I died, now.
I know, spoiler alert.
But I’m writing this, aren’t I?
So maybe that’s spoiler number two.
The woman was gone now, forgotten.
The wind was up, whipping from the ocean, leaving a thin layer of freezing water on my skin, but it was okay, I deserved it.
I took maybe ten more steps, and I was right outside the house. Wooden numbers, one of them with screws missing and tilted on its side, were screwed to the wall.
3151.
The number I had written down.
3151 Seafront Drive.
I would like to say the house loomed or crouched there, or something that might make it seem evil. But it was just a one-story clapboard house, on a seen-better-days street near the ocean. But where the neighbors had gentrified, here the neglect was obvious. Everything was dirty or worn or peeling or all three. The front yard was overgrown with weeds. There was a little driveway, and the house had windows and a door and all the stuff you would expect. There was a satellite dish on the roof.
Even now, there was a police tape across the door. But I could see that it was standing open. “Ajar”—the word popped into my head. There was a discordant ringing in my head too, a sickly resonance. Spray painted on the front of the house were the words SICK ****.
Kids, I realized. Kids had tagged the place, and broken in. Probably they went in there at night, with a Ouija board. Got stoned, drank 40s. I don’t know. Dared one another, maybe. It was the kind of thing kids did.
I stood there, looking at the open door. I took a step forward, and stopped.
See, I had imagined her death so many times. I had played scenes in my head, little snippets of film, of video. I had run it through, over and over, different permutations, different scenarios.