Stop.
“We want to find him as much as you do,” the young cop said. “Trust us.”
He had an ugly smile.
“I’m tired,” I told them, though that wasn’t the right word. There was no word. “I want to go home.”
“Just a few more questions.”
I stood up. “You can’t keep me here if I want to go home.” I had no idea whether it was true.
“You say these were your friends,” the younger one said.
“I don’t ‘say’ it. It’s true.”
“Then I know you want to help us help them.”
The older cop cleared his throat, shot the younger one a Look. “Just one more,” he said. “Then you can go.”
I sat down.
“Adriane Ames. Does she use drugs?”
“Of course not!”
It didn’t seem like a good time to mention the stash of pot she kept hidden—“for emergency situations only”—in a Wizard of Oz DVD case.
They exchanged another Look.
“What?” I asked.
“Tox screen turned up drugs in her system. A psychogenic toxin.”
“Psychogenic … like LSD, or something?”
“Or something, yeah.” The older cop put on his kindly mask again. I steeled myself. “The drug affects the frontal lobe; you know what that is?”
“Something in your brain.”
“It’s the part of the brain that controls personality, mood, and memory,” the younger cop said, like he was reading off an index card and inordinately proud of himself for being able to do so.
“I took bio, too,” I told him, but it wasn’t the textbook diagram of the brain I was thinking of. It was black-and-white horror movies with electroshock and straitjackets, it was that absent look in Adriane’s eyes, it was the word lobe, too close to the word lobotomy.
“Doctors think she took something—”
“She wouldn’t.”
“—or got dosed with something that would affect her memories. Maybe she knew something she shouldn’t have. Saw something.”
Something other than her boyfriend getting stabbed six times in the gut and his throat slashed for good measure?
“So that’s why she’s … like that? Because of a drug?” Not because she was weak, or hiding.
I hated myself.
“Is she going to be okay?”
He shrugged. “They don’t know. But she got lucky.”
I wanted to claw out his eyes. “Exactly which part of this qualifies as lucky?”
“Doctors say with this kind of drug, the effects are unpredictable. Say it could have caused a stroke.” He watched me carefully.
“You said what happened to Professor Hoffpauer was an accident.” I squeezed my hands together so he wouldn’t see they were shaking. “You said not to worry.” I was on my feet again. I was shouting.
“It now seems we may have been wrong.”
I laughed.
My legs felt like stilts. Like they didn’t belong to me and might shatter if I put my weight on them. But they held me up. “I’m leaving.”
“What would you say if I told you we have evidence that your friend Max was in the professor’s office at the time of the incident?”
The door was locked. “Let me the hell out of here.”
“That doesn’t make you think?”
“You said one more question. I answered it. Let. Me. Out.”
“You know what’s strange?” he said, too casually. “The forensics indicate the victim was stabbed in the entryway of the house, but then dragged himself to the family safe. It was found open, with nothing missing—according to his parents, that is. So I think we can assume he opened the safe once his assailant had fled. Why do you think he would do that, Nora?” Again, he asked so offhandedly, as if the answer couldn’t matter less to him, as if he were wondering aloud whether his kid’s softball game would be rained out. “Now, I’m lying there, bleeding to death, I go for the phone, or the door. But your friend, he goes for the safe. You got any idea what he thought was in there? Something he would have wasted the last few seconds of his life trying to get?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything as they unlocked the door and handed me off to my parents, and I didn’t say anything to them, either, when they loaded me into the car and deposited me at home.
I didn’t tell them, or anyone, about the stained letter I had found crumpled in Adriane’s hand, the letter whose value had so impressed Chris that, careful and responsible as he was, he could well have locked it up for safekeeping until he decided how to fix my mistake. The letter I’d slipped out of the pocket of my bloody jeans before the cops took them away, and that, as soon as I was safely behind my locked bedroom door, I returned to its hiding spot in the crawl space beneath my desk, like nothing had ever happened and it had never left.
Like Chris hadn’t died for it. Hadn’t died because of me.
I told myself anything could have been in that safe, and I got into bed, fully dressed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, phone open on the pillow. I lay there, and I listened to Max’s phone ring and ring, and I waited for morning.
7
Some simple, logical proofs.
One. Max loved me. Max loved Chris. Max claimed to “find the overabundance of violence in modern American cinema to be bordering on grotesque” but did so only because it was easier than admitting the sight of blood, even on-screen, made him want to puke. Max was Max. Therefore he did not do it.
Two. Max loved me. Max would never leave me alone to face Chris’s body and Adriane’s eyes and the cops and the cameras unless he had no other choice, and not no other choice as in he preferred to stay out of jail and feared sticking around would have the opposite effect, but no other choice as in he needed to stay away to save his own life, or mine. Therefore Max was in trouble.
Or Max was dead.
Three. Max knew I was coming to Chris’s house. If Max wanted Chris dead—which he did not—but wanted me alive, he would have chosen a different moment, a different night, one when he and Chris were alone, as they were almost every night, in their dorm room. If Max wanted Chris dead and me dead—which he did not—he would not have murdered Chris and run away. He knew I was coming; he would have waited. Therefore Max did not murder Chris.
Of course Max did not murder Chris.
Four. Max did not murder Chris. Someone else did. The police were looking for Max. Therefore no one was looking for someone.
8
A tenable hypothesis.
Someone was looking for me.
9
I didn’t go back to school for a week. Most nights I went to bed swearing this would be my last day in hiding, that nothing, not even school, could be worse than those first couple days trapped in the house pretending not to watch my parents pretending not to watch me, and certainly no worse than the long, empty days that followed, when my mother went back to work, my father went back to his office, and I was left alone, feeling each minute of each interminable hour, trying not to see ghosts. I went to bed with the best of halfhearted intentions—and then lay there, wide awake. Running through the now-familiar inventory of items in my room that could be used as weapons—Andy’s old bat, the hair dryer with its comfortingly gun-shaped silhouette, the lighter, a bottle of eye-burning wasp repellent, and of course the highcarbon, stainless steel, infomercial-guaranteed slicing-and-dicing knife hidden under my mattress.
At night I was too wired to sleep; by morning, I was too tired to move. School was out of the question. So I stayed in bed, watching the ceiling, my brain fogged, playing dead until I heard the telltale slam of the front door, and then the creak of my father’s office door easing shut, confirming that I was, once again, alone.
After the first day, I forced myself to stay away from the TV. I couldn’t risk flipping through channels and seeing the shaky cell-hone footage of Chris’s body being wheeled out of the house that his real-estate-agent neighbor had been kind enough to shoot and
, despite the easily foreseeable effect on property values, sell to the highest bidder. And the pictures they showed … The most popular was one of the four of us that we posed for on the college green after Chris charmed a bed-and-breakfaster into taking our photo. Chris, in a photogenic display of strength and all-American-boyness, lifts a squealing Adriane aloft in a cradle hold, the camera catching her at the tipping point between annoyance and glee. Max stands behind me, his arms around my shoulders and his lips to my ear, ostensibly whispering sweet nothings but in fact complaining that Adriane had just kicked him in the lower back. I am in the process of deciding whether to pick a fight in defense of my friend or let Max bribe me away from her in ways only Max could devise, but you can’t tell from my smile. You can never tell from my smile.
There were other pictures on Chris’s hard drive, pictures of Adriane’s drunk face, raccoon tracks smeared around her hugely dilated pupils; pictures of Chris posing bashfully with his Han Solo action figure and meticulously assembled to-scale Millennium Falcon that no one but me knew he still had; pictures of Max in profile, curled over a book, eyebrows knit together, preemptively angry about some future interruption. There were the pictures I could only assume Chris had erased from his hard drive, since they had yet to surface on CNN, the “artistic” shots Adriane had ensorcelled him into taking one sunny afternoon, the two of them locked in his bedroom with the blinds shut tight and the camera on a carefully positioned tripod, as they—in Adriane’s words, after the fact, swearing me to secrecy—“made good use of the time.” Adriane, who was now making use of her time staring at the walls of a glorified mental institution, who was unresponsive and unable, who was brushed and bathed and changed like an invalid, like a corpse. Adriane, whom I hadn’t been able to force myself to visit, because I couldn’t face holding her hand and looking in her eyes and knowing she was no longer there.
I got it. The cable-news morons had a job to do: Score ratings. Spin a cautionary fairy tale. And that picture made for a good one. Two photogenic victims. One assumed killer, and his devilish girlfriend, evil by association. All of them appearing so innocent, so wholesome, so delightfully, painfully normal. I had a copy of the photo tacked to the wall by my bed, and I had to leave it there, because it was a piece of him. That’s what death did—it turned trash into talismans. A CD he’d burned, a notebook he’d doodled in, a sweatshirt he’d worn: holy relics. I knew how it worked; hadn’t I spent the last six years living in a sacred shrine to a dead brother? So I left the picture where it was, but I couldn’t look at it anymore. It had been claimed by them; it was, somehow, no longer us.
Every day was too long, and every day was the same, until one day, for no particular reason, I got out of bed, showered, dressed up in convincing imitation of a normal, well-adjusted member of society, the blameless good girl the cops had officially deemed me to be, and went back to school.
10
I’d prefer not to talk about that.
11
Here’s the secret: You don’t feel it.
You don’t pretend not to feel. You don’t raise your hand, choke down cafeteria food, ignore the stares just as intently as you ignore the empty locker next to yours that you know has Chris’s goofy senior picture taped to the inner door, nestled inside an equally goofy lipstick heart; you don’t smile weakly and then sneak off to the nearest bathroom stall to cry every time you overhear someone whispering about your boyfriend, the psycho killer.
You turn it off.
You let yourself go cold and numb, and it’s easy, like rolling downhill, like falling out a window, because numbness is all your body really wants, and, given leave, gravity will take its course.
The thing is, no one noticed. I was simultaneously infamous and invisible. Chris and Adriane were the hometown heroes, the golden couple, repository of innumerable yearbook superlatives and hallway-PDA citations. Whereas I, after all this time, was still the new girl, imported under shady circumstances. It had never bothered me. The four of us had been a self-contained unit, with our own stories, our own bad habits—practically, when you considered all the inside jokes and references and things that didn’t need to be said, our own language. That was supposed to be enough.
I did my homework. I ate in the library. I flinched at loud noises and sudden movements and kept away from the dark. I shamelessly abused my independent-study privileges, even though there was no study left to be done, given that the files had disappeared and the Hoff had been shipped down to a rehab facility in Texas, and as often as possible, I got the hell out. Some days I went to the movies, letting the flicker of color and light carry me into someone else’s story, but there was only one theater in town and only so many times I could sit through Crap Blows Up: The Sequel. Mostly I went to campus.
There was a small, round plaza on the western edge of the college green that I’d walked through for years, never paying much attention to the names and dates engraved on the pavement stones. That’s where I sat, on one of the stone benches rimming the circle. It emptied during class periods, which guaranteed me regular forty-seven-minute increments of isolation.
The names were students, the years carved next to them either the dates they’d graduated or the dates they’d died—there was no explanatory plaque to make things clear, but the general situation was clear enough from the thick letters engraved at the center of the circle: PRO PATRIA. You learned that one in Latin I, partly because it was remedial, partly because the ancient Romans were so high on dying that way. Pro patria, for country. If that hadn’t clued me in, the names engraved on the benches would have done the trick. Not people, but battlefields, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Rhine Crossing, Bastogne, Ardennes—apparently whatever wealthy alumni endowed the memorial thought it only fitting that Chapman’s brave dead children be stuck in battle for all eternity. Sic transit gloria.
The green was green in name only. Where it wasn’t a dull, bare brown spotted with a few sad patches of gray snow that had forgotten to melt, it was a sickly yellow, the color of hair sprayed with cheap Sun-In, then doused with chlorine. In summertime, the grove of trees bordering the western edge passed for an overgrown wilderness separating the classroom buildings from the barren athletic fields, but three months of snow and frost had denuded the branches. March wasn’t a good look for this corner of New England. Chapman was passable in the dead of winter, as much a snowy wonderland as any of the other carefully picturesque towns dotting the highway, but March was a dead zone of desiccated grass, sagging trees, and melting snowmen. Even the sky gave up for a few weeks, forgoing color for a thick miasma of gray.
It was quiet, quiet enough that I could hear the crunch of leaves beneath a shoe, just behind me. I flinched at the sound of it, imminent invaders of my sanctuary—and the crunching stopped, abruptly. Not, then, the noise of a student who’d overslept, clomping toward class, but of someone who crept, silently and carefully, freezing in place with his noisy misstep, hoping not to be noticed. Someone there to watch.
I told myself that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, if I pretended I hadn’t heard, if I didn’t provoke, then nothing would happen. I’d been the kind of kid who liked to map out contingency plans in case of burglars and kidnappers, who lay in bed practicing fake sleep, under the theory that if I looked harmless enough, the troupe of rampaging killers I imagined climbing into children’s windows up and down the East Coast would understand that I was no threat and would, after dumping our nonexistent family silver into their burlap sacks, leave me alone. But I was all grown up now, enough to know that looking harmless only made you easier prey. I turned around.
The tree was too narrow to hide him completely. He peeked out from behind the bark, his face cloaked in shadow.
Max? I swallowed the word, along with the hope. Stood up. Squinted into the woods, looking for the telltale glint of glasses—or a knife. Waited for him, whoever he was, to decide, to move toward me or run away. Fight or flight.
He held his ground, watching me watch him.
r /> “What?” I said sharply. This prey would show no fear.
He knelt, never taking his eyes off me, never moving his face out of the shadow, and played his hand across a patch of gray snow.
Then he ran away.
“Wait!”
But I didn’t run after him, because if it had been Max, he would have come to me, and if it wasn’t Max …
You didn’t run after a killer.
Not even if you wanted, more than you’d ever wanted anything, to watch him die.
He’d left something for me, in a smooth patch of mud-streaked snow. It was the size of a hand with its fingers spread. And where the center of the palm would be, he had scraped an eye speared by a lightning bolt. A message for me.
He was watching.
12
I wasn’t invited to the funeral. That was in Baltimore, and it was for family. I didn’t qualify. Not until Chris’s mother emailed me, asking me to go to the campus memorial service on the Moores’ behalf and then, afterward, to Chris’s dorm room to help the dean pack up his belongings. I was family enough for that.
The chapel was full of kids from the college and Chapman Prep who didn’t know Chris any better than the egalitarian minister who prattled on about Chris’s achievements—read haltingly off bullet-pointed index cards—and God’s plan. “We can’t be angry at God,” the minister said. God was everywhere in the service, shepherding Chris through a “short but meaningful life,” shielding his grieving loved ones in “the bosom of His love,” leading Chris to a “lasting peace where someday we will once again be together.” His God, under this theory, had planned it all, from start to finish, might as well have wielded the knife. And because of this, because he was in control, because he was watching, we were supposed to be grateful for his interest, no matter its form. We were supposed to say thank you.
“No one knows why Chris was taken from us,” the minister said, and I carefully steered my thoughts away from the bloody letter, from the fear that I knew why, that the why was me.