by Bill Alive
He started to walk away, then remembered he had to open my stupid back door. As I ungracefully scooted out, he bent down to talk past me. “You don’t need me, Gwen. Your police network already knows everything, and it doesn’t have to get panic palpitations and gag on balloons greasing down some other guy’s esophagus.”
“This job’s no picnic for any of us,” Gwen said.
“I’m sure,” Mark said. “But at least your pain isn’t pointless.”
Gwen frowned, and her eyes crinkled, maybe with compassion. “Mark—” she said.
But he shut the door and left her.
The next morning, I woke up to Mark shouting at someone in the living room. It scared me, like hearing your parents argue when they think you’re asleep.
I stumbled out. He was pacing back and forth between the couch and the kitchen, clenching his jaw and then barking into the phone.
“What happened?” I said.
He spun toward me with a furious glare. “That kid Aidan. They found him this morning.”
“Dead?” I gasped. My stomach twisted with nausea. I’d only met him yesterday, but my mind flooded with his face. I will never get used to death. “Did that guy Luther kill him?” I said.
“Not like you’re thinking,” Mark said. “Aidan overdosed. His lungs shut down. They found him in his room with a little pile of balloons. A few still had heroin.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “So he was still using after all?”
“No,” Mark said. The phone yipped, and he scowled. “No, Gwen,” he said. “This was murder.”
PART 2
Chapter 17
Mark’s grip on his phone was turning his knuckles white. “Yes it is murder, Gwen! I swear that kid had quit!”
The phone crackled her reply, but I couldn’t make it out.
Mark groaned. “I don’t care whether the killer actually jammed in the needle, Gwen! All anyone would have to do is call in an order. You can’t hand a kid out of rehab a pile of heroin and not expect an overdose. Aidan wasn’t going to make the call, but if the stuff was right in his face and his parents were gone, and he was all alone… what?” His face flushed. “Fine! All right, then. Have a great day at work, dear.”
He hung up.
I gulped.
He eyed me. “Yes, Pete?”
I hate to admit it, but my first thought was… had they just fried their date?
But for once, I caught myself. Someone had freaking died.
Of course, with Mark, catching it before I said it didn’t matter. “Thanks, Pete,” he said. “Priorities.”
“I didn’t say it!” I said.
“Come on.” He strode for the door and snatched the car keys from their official nail in the wall.
“Oh, um,” I said. “I was going to maybe go to work?”
“Great. You can talk me out of it.”
“Out of what?”
But Mark didn’t start talking until we’d roared all the way up to Highline Drive.
I was nervous. It’s a bad sign when Mark needs to find an even higher mountain.
Plus, driving in silence gave me way too much mulling time for my own garbage. I kept looping Ceci’s glowy smile, her light laugh, and thinking I’d made a terrible mistake.
But then I’d think, dude, it’s not like you’re breaking up. That’s the whole point, you’re saving your friendship. The Incident could have wrecked it all.
Then I’d get some random memory surge from one of the way too many women I had crushed on, Rachel for instance, and be pretty sure I’d made the right call.
And then I’d loop some snippet of my mom’s call, her tired voice… and I’d feel sick.
I must have run this mental track three or four times before I realized something bizarre. Mark hadn’t made a single comment.
I slid him a sidelong glance. He was gripping the wheel, scowling, staring straight ahead. Was he actually so upset that he wasn’t even picking up my vibes?
Wow. This was serious.
And you know what? It was serious. That guy Aidan was dead. And right now only Mark seemed to know that it was murder. What if Mark got all discouraged and quit? A killer might get away with it… and maybe start hunting other addicts.
Compared to that, my stuff could wait. Which, honestly, was a relief.
Catching this killer was for real, and I was needed. I could help.
I hoped.
Although it was November and a weekday morning, Highline Drive had a few straggling tourists who hoped to sip the last dregs of fall colors in the valley. By now, the leaves had mostly fallen or drained to brown, but Back Mosby still sprawled in the valley, comfy as a cat stretching in the sun. No need to notice the surrounding winter creep.
Mark parked at an overlook, but he didn’t get out. He stared down at the town for so long that I thought he might not ever talk at all.
At last, he said, “So cozy, huh? You wouldn’t think you could call up a hit like a pizza.”
“So they’re sure it was local?” I said.
“That kid wasn’t driving to Baltimore with that knee.”
“Crap.”
“Indeed,” he said. “I’m finally ready to drop the superhero complex and just be glad I’m even alive, and boom, here comes the opiate apocalypse.”
“Dude, everything’s not all catastrophe,” I said. “Look at you and Gwen! Bowling! I mean, yes, bowling, but still, that is a solid start—”
“I doubt it,” Mark said. “I’m not sure how much extracurricular anything’s going to happen if I don’t dive into the fray and Fight the Good Fight Against Back Mosby Heroin.”
“Why would you not?”
“Because it fricking hurts,” he snapped. “I’m not saying Gwen’s got it easy, but my whole job is to writhe with other people’s pain. Hell, what if we walk in on some overdose and I start turning blue?”
“Yikes,” I said, trying and failing to avoid imagining this. “Can’t you shield?”
“I hope! But once I start shielding, that’s exactly when I might miss the crucial clues, right? Like last night with Rachel and Aidan, I took in as much of that tragedy as I could, but at a certain point…” He sighed. “It might sound selfish, but I was hoping I’d already burned through my Fair Share Lifetime Quotient of the world’s misery. By age ten.”
I winced. Mark doesn’t talk about his childhood much.
“It was different when I was obsessed with being some special snowflake,” he said. “When that agony of failure is chewing you to death, every single instant that you can’t numb it out… any pain anyone else can vibe at you makes a distant second.”
“Really? It was that bad?” I said. “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I shouldn’t say every single instant. The point is, thanks to Theodore, I’m feeling pretty much cured. Being alive is great. Amazing, even. And now that I’ve quit hating myself, I just want the chance to, I don’t know, breathe.”
“Cool,” I said. “So breathe.”
For the first time, he turned toward me. He arched an eyebrow.
“You’re an empath,” I said. “That’s a lot of possible feelings, not just pain. What if you tried to solve these cases without hurting so much?”
His lips twinged toward his trademark scoff, but he held it back. With restraint, he said, “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“You said it yourself. Breathe. Deep breathing.”
The repressed scoff flared. “I think I breathe pretty regularly.”
“Mark! Deep breathing is amazing! It feels so good! And feeling good doesn’t happen by accident. You have to act. Like, there was this study where they had people bite a pencil, and because it made their face move like a smile, they started to feel like they were smiling…”
Now Mark was just staring, like any possible snark would be unequal to the occasion.
“I’m serious!” I said. “They felt better! And there’s this book called The Happiness Project, this writer spent a wh
ole year trying different quirky happy hacks… I haven’t actually read it yet, but Vivian loves it—”
“I see,” Mark said.
“They worked!”
“Like what?”
“Like… um…” Of course I would forget the details. “Oh! She wore wool socks. At night. To bed.”
“Huh. And people waste thousands of dollars on therapy…”
“That’s just one thing, Mark! There’s a whole book!”
“There’s a whole industry,” Mark said. “And all that mountain of fiddling crap won’t make one tiny dent in the world’s real pain. That kid Aidan died, Pete… you want to talk about breathing, his lungs fricking filled with his own blood. What kind of sick bastard sends that shit to a kid who’s finally gotten sober?”
He fell quiet and looked back toward the town.
I remembered the first time he’d taken me up here, how he’d told me about his old ex-girlfriend Akina. She was a brilliant chemist and a haunting beauty, but like Mark, she’d had a “crazy Catholic alcoholic Dad who favored the belt.” Mark hadn’t said much about her childhood either, except that her father’s first beatings had been for crying in her crib.
For Mark, breaking up with Akina back in his twenties had nearly broken him. These days, he hadn’t heard from her in ten years. She’d been addicted to meth, and by now, she was probably dead.
Oh crap, I thought. Is all this drug stuff triggering that ache?
Without looking at me, Mark muttered, “Yes.”
I startled. Then I thought, screw this. I made my voice as hard as I could, and I said, “So don’t think about it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one going to Aidan’s funeral.”
“So don’t go.”
“What?” He frowned. “Gwen issued rather an ultimatum. As far as dear Gwen is concerned—”
“You take orders from Gwen now?”
Now he startled. I admit, beneath my bold tone, I was shaking a little at my own insubordination.
“Why can’t you do this your way?” I said. “So what if you don’t get every last clue? All that counts is when you catch the killer.”
Mark said, “Hmm.”
My heart leapt. “I mean, it’s your call,” I said, with a brilliant simulation of persuasive diffidence. “You can let this mystery criminal keep killing innocents… or you can admit that it takes work to feel good. Maybe it’s your job to avoid the worst parts, because you need that energy to catch the killers. Maybe there’s room for nuance here. Maybe you don’t have to freaking get crucified to save the world.”
“Sure,” Mark said. “And maybe all these killers are just getting in touch with their Jungian shadow side.”
“Can’t you at least try?” I said, opting not to share that I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, possibly because the one time I tried to read Carl Jung, I lasted about a half a sentence. It was a long sentence. “When have you actually tried to feel good?” I said. “The closest was buying that silly scenter thing. Is that really your best shot?”
Mark eyed me.
I held his gaze. Which practically burned.
Finally, he started Thunder. “You’d better text Vivian,” he muttered.
“Why? You want to return that scenter?” I said, with a rush of hope.
“Nope,” he said, swinging the car around to head down into town. “We’ve got suspects to vibe.”
“Sweet!” My chest flooded with the old excitement, the old flush of adventure and the hunt. I got one last look at Back Mosby, still basking in the bright sun amid the dying trees, sprinkled with tiny shops and churches and homes… and then my elation chilled, like a cloud smothering the sun.
Because one of those little houses held a killer.
Chapter 18
We decided to start with Rachel and Luther. The choice was fairly easy, given Luther had publicly shouted, “I’ll kill you!”
Plus, since we’d dropped Rachel off with Gwen last night, we already knew where she lived. Trust me, these little conveniences really add up.
It turned out that Rachel and Luther lived in the same cruddy apartment complex we’d seen back in Murder Feels Bad with Samantha. Samantha was this mid-forties single mom who’d lost her college-age daughter to this insane… never mind. Let’s just say it was a downer to be back.
Partly, the place itself was a downer. The four floors of crumbling brick were surrounded by brown bushy November grass; the place clearly wasn’t going to see a mower before next spring.
“You finding their apartment number?” I asked Mark, as we stomped up the stairs, which still smelled like cat urine.
Mark was checking his phone. “Yep, looks like they’ve hosted quite a few furry meets. Must have been a smaller group then.”
As we walked down the worn brown hallway carpet, the old surge of fear prickled in my chest. This was the part where we actually talked to possible murderers.
I tried to change my focus, but Fear Mind just shifted to another threat.
“Hold on,” I said, “what if Brett’s here?” Brett was this mid-thirties corporate type who was dating Samantha. Before, he’d been dating her daughter… you know what, forget it. “Running into those two would be super awkward,” I said.
Now that I think of it, why don’t these fake fiction small-town detectives ever seem to run into their former suspects?
Back Mosby is not a big place. I already can’t go to Wal-Mart without avoiding at least three customers I semi-know from the gift store. If we keep solving so many mysteries, this could really become a problem.
Mark shrugged. “We just saw Brett and Samantha at the wedding.”
“I guess,” I said. “But that was in a crowd. Here, we’d have to actually chit-chat.”
“Excruciating,” Mark said.
“What are we supposed to talk about?” I said. “Like, how’s the grieving process going? You think you’re at the anger stage yet, or are you still stuck in denial?”
Mark said, “You might be overthinking this.”
I wonder if that comment has ever helped anyone, ever.
Mark stopped walking, and he squinted at a scratched apartment door. “Hey. Check this out.”
An ornate business card was stuck below the peephole:
“FURRARI’S” FURSUITS
“Huh,” Mark said. “I didn’t peg Rachel for a punster.”
“Yeah, that’s not cool,” I said.
Mark shook his head. “Murder is one thing…”
He knocked, and the door opened, presenting Morning Rachel.
Unlike last night, Morning Rachel looked almost like a normal pregnant mom. She wore light gray pants, a bright T-shirt with swirls, and a tiny white open sweater that demurely framed her bulge. She’d washed away the party makeup, and replenished only enough bits to remind you that, suspect or not, she was still absurdly attractive. Also, she’d finally ditched the stupid cat ears.
On the negative side, as she saw us, her face twisted into a cold hard scowl, like we were two repo guys after a real Ferrari.
“What a surprise,” she said.
Mark squinted.
Was he going to vibe right there that she’d killed the father of her kid? Whatever meaningless flush I’d felt on seeing her again went cold.
Mark frowned. “Who told you?” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He sounded sad, like he meant it. Like he’d already vibed she was innocent.
Really? I thought. To me, she seemed awfully put together if she’d just now heard the news.
Rachel looked startled at Mark’s question, but she said, “So you guys are cops? Where’s the blonde one who hates furries?”
“She doesn’t hate furries, she hates drug dealers,” Mark said. “And she’s probably still processing the scene.”
At the word scene, Rachel’s ice face cracked with a flicker of pain. Maybe Mark was right. Maybe Rachel was just super good at locking it all in.
But the flicker passed. Which
made me think, wouldn’t a murderer have to block their feelings? Isn’t that a critical killer skill?
“Look,” she said. “I know you guys were there last night, but all I meant to do was get that check. That’s it. I’m sorry about Aidan, but there’s nothing I can tell you.”
Mark said, “We don’t want to bother you long.”
“Yeah, that sounds like all morning,” she said. “It might not look like it, but I’ve got a lot of work here I’m trying to finish before this baby comes.”
“I get that,” Mark said. “Can you talk while you work?”
Rachel frowned with surprise. Then she shrugged and swung the door open. “Whatever.”
And then, with no warning, she glared right at me. “Maybe Pete here can tell us more about that cat suit he wants.”
My cheeks flushed hot. I stammered something brilliant like, “Sorry,” but she had already turned and marched back into her place.
As I followed her in, I was scrambling for a way to defend myself for last night’s lies. I hadn’t actually said I was a furry, right? And detectives don’t really lie anyway, it’s called pretense…
…wait, why did I even care what she thought? Two seconds ago I’d been shivering that she might be a cold-blooded killer. Was I really just obsessing because she was hot? Gyah! What was wrong with me?
Then I totally forgot that whole mess.
Because Rachel’s place was nuts.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from a girl who made fursuits and put the business card on the door. An apartment, I guess?
This was a showroom… and a craft studio… and a phantasmagorical interactive exhibit…
Animal parts were EVERYWHERE.
Freestanding racks, like a thrift store would use for shirts, were instead hung with rows and rows of furry torsos, dangling arms, tails… The smell brought me back to my mom dragging me to fabric stores as a kid. She’d get deep into a project and get super excited, all lit up…
Rachel squeezed into a chair at a table workstation in the corner. She bent over a sewing machine, and when she tapped the pedal, the whum-whum-whum-whum of the needle also brought me back to Mom. The memory felt surprisingly cozy, just enough to offset the ache. Even though Rachel was sewing a disembodied cow leg.