“Thank you,” I told him. I said it again when he introduced me to Bruno and Lou.
“Don’t thank us, miss, we wouldn’t have stopped that little number if we’d seen her coming at you. Useless is what we would’ve been.”
“I’m still glad to know you were there.”
It was true. No one would have thought Langley would turn out to be psychotic. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have a hard time talking herself out of the maximum-security psychiatric facility her grandparents had installed her in before the police could question her. No one would believe she was guilty. No one except Pete. Pete was the one who had pieced it all together in time to warn Loretta not to use the syringe in the room to revive me.
“Why did you believe me? That I wasn’t crazy? No one else did,” I pointed out. I had his hand in mine and was tracing one of the lines of his palm with my finger.
“Joe did.”
“Okay. But why did you? I wasn’t even sure I was sane.”
There was no mockery, no irony, no sarcasm in his voice when he said, “Maybe I have more faith in you than you do.”
Gulp.
He nudged his nose against mine so our foreheads were touching. “Plus I thought I’d take my chances since no one else was bothering. The way I saw it, if you were right, then one of your friends was out to get you and all we had to do was figure out which one. And then it was easy.”
“Easy? How?”
He shrugged. “I just needed to figure out who was left handed.”
I pulled away to stare at him. “Okay, Nancy Drew.”
“It was what you kept saying about that ring. When we saw the picture in Elsa’s room where you weren’t wearing it, I realized that the killer had probably put it on you after you were hit. If you wore a ring and you were slipping an identical ring onto someone’s hand, which finger would you be most likely to put it on?”
“Whatever finger I wore it on normally.”
“Bingo.”
“So it ended up on my right hand—”
“—because that’s where the killer wore her ring. I just had to figure out who wore it on their right hand. I threw in the lefty part to make it sound more Sherlock Holmes.”
I was incredulous. “But Mr. Holmes, you never even met my friends. How did you know who was a lefty?”
“Remember that first day, you told me to watch the DVD Kate and Langley made you so I would see how popular you were?”
I groaned. “Yes.”
“I did.” He raised his eyebrows. “Twice.”
“I’m going to regret having told you to do that, aren’t I?”
He nodded somberly. “Oh yes.”
I laughed. “I can’t wait. But really, you figured it all out because of the ring?”
“Mm-hmmm.” He dragged the word out. “Okay, fine. That, and you gave me a pretty good hint when you had Ruben ask me about conversational hit men. Made me think you were trying to tell me that the first person in had just been a decoy to open the way for the real-kill shot.” He smirked, coming clean now. “Especially when the DVD helped me identify Ollie and Langley as the two people I’d seen making out in the stairwell that day. I figured they had a lot of secrets and might be working together for all kinds of nefarious purposes.”
“I guessed it was more complicated than a ring.”
“That DVD came in really handy. It helped me solve the crime and stop the killer.”
“Stop the—” That’s when I got it. The silver disc that had flown through the air and hit Langley just before I passed out. “That’s what you threw at her head!”
“I was on my way back from watching it in the lounge when I figured everything out, so it was the only thing I had in my hand. But it seems like perfect justice, doesn’t it? Popularity can be a real headache.”
“It certainly can.”
I looked toward the window of my room. There were no flowers or cards or presents there anymore. I hadn’t realized how much they’d been blocking the view.
In fact, I was aware that there was a lot I hadn’t been seeing, blinded by my own insecurities and guilt. But not anymore. Now I was going to have my eyes wide open.
Suddenly I remembered the medallion from the dream I’d just woken from—remembered I’d seen it the night of Bonnie’s death. It had been clutched in her hand. But it wasn’t hers. There was more to that night than I’d realized. And I owed it to Bonnie’s family to help them find the truth.
But right now, there were things right in front of me that deserved a long look.
My eyes went to Pete and he smiled, the one with the crinkles around his eyes and the lines next to his mouth. He looked like a happy little kid as he stretched out a hand to smooth my forehead.
“Stop fretting, beautiful.”
“I’m not fretting.” I reached out to toy with the pearl buttons on his shirt. “I just wish—I feel like I’ve been myopic. I should have figured this out before.”
“You knew the answer all along if you had just trusted your instincts.”
“Yeah. I need to work on that.” My eyes moved from the buttons to his lips, then his nose, finally resting on his eyes. “Do you think you could be my teacher?”
“Oh no. Absolutely not.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d expected. “Why?”
“I don’t want to teach. I’d rather do.”
“Do what?”
“This.”
This was not like anything I’d ever experienced before.
“Look, everyone, Jane is kissing Pete! That’s the third boy she’s kissed this week.”
“Is that true?” Pete said, pulling away to look at me.
“Purely medicinal,” I said solemnly.
“I think your sister just made a joke,” he told Annie.
“She should take lessons from Mom.”
I started walking again the next day.
Afterword
The image is a mess.
It’s the time of day just before sunset, when colors are at their richest. The sky is a deep mellow blue, the sea below it indigo. A red-and-white-striped tent stands on a greensward extending toward the ocean. Beneath it long tables covered in brightly colored floral cloths hold the skeleton of what had been a feast. There are beleaguered-looking flowers and crumpled napkins and plates covered in rainbow frosting everywhere. The remains of a cake list perilously to one side next to a huge silver urn with condensation running down its sides and an open bottle of Dom Pérignon poking out the top. On the left a little girl is showing a boy a snail she’s trapped in a peanut-butter jar. On the right four large men who have shed their jackets are playing poker and smoking cigars and drinking beer, although one of them has a bottle of Gatorade in front of him too. In the foreground Rosalind Freeman, in a blue sundress she would have sworn was too young for her but that her daughters made her buy, with her hair swept off her face, is gazing up at her new husband, Joe Garcetti, with an expression of wonder and joy.
Periodically the company is disturbed by a bubble of laughter erupting from under the apple tree. There’s a hammock there, old and so often mended that it looks like the hunting net of a powerful witch. In it, as though trapped in a spell, lie a boy and a girl. He’s wearing a button-down shirt with penguins embroidered on it and she has on a white eyelet dress that is probably last season. He’s devastatingly handsome. Her hair looks like it was styled with a machete and she will probably always have a faint scar on her forehead from where doctors stitched her back together, but she doesn’t care. They are facing each other, nose to nose, and grinning.
In its chaotic festivity it looks a lot like the photographs I’m taking these days, only it’s not one. It’s not a photo. It’s real life.
And I’m in it.
Michele Jaffe, Rosebush
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