Influenced

by Eva Robinson

  Not a single person Michael had spoken to knew of anyone who’d want to harm Peter. He’d broken up with a boyfriend months ago, but the boyfriend was now overseas.

  Two dead academics within the span of a few weeks, both with missing laptops. Cambridge had a few murders per year, but this was deeply unusual. Michael had a sinking feeling that if they didn’t figure out what was happening—fast—they could soon be stumbling over another academic’s corpse.

  But what had really crushed Michael that week was having to tell Peter’s mom that her son had been found dead. The look on her face was now seared into his brain—her stillness as some part of her mind took it in, but the rest refused to believe it. Her expression had made Michael feel desperate to find out exactly what had happened to her son, who had dumped his body in a pond.

  Michael pulled out a pan and doused it with a bit of olive oil. As he started slicing up an onion, he thought of what he’d once read long ago—that soldiers called for their mothers when they died—and wondered if he’d think of his mum when his time came.

  But in most of his memories it was the other way around, wasn’t it? She called him for help.

  Sixteen slices of onion, no more, no less. They were a bit bigger than he’d like, but they’d have to do.

  Whenever he started to think of his mum, a storm of emotions clouded his mind—sadness and regret so murky that it was hard to think straight.

  While the onions sizzled in the pan, he grabbed a head of garlic and started peeling the cloves. Four cloves, cut into fours, crushed in with the onions. As it fried, a delicious scent filled his apartment. He opened a can of tomatoes, steam from the heating water curling into the air.

  He let the sauce simmer and sat at his table to pull out his laptop.

  It was unfortunate that not everyone conveniently catalogued every moment of their lives like Rowan did.

  Peter Sylvestro… The name kept niggling at him. He was sure he’d seen it recently.

  Did he have something to do with Rowan?

  He opened her Instagram feed, where he found an artful sunset photo of her standing on a plot of land, shot from behind. The text beneath it was all about the Cambridge Teen Center, how they’d gotten the funding they needed, how it would help educational outcomes… It all sounded much more professional and academic than what Rowan normally wrote. It didn’t quite seem like Rowan at all, in fact.

  Michael scrolled to her bio, then clicked the link to the teen center page. And that was where he’d seen the name. There was Peter, smiling behind his glasses.

  Michael would be paying Rowan another visit.

  And where was the real Rowan? Because this golden image of Rowan saving the world wasn’t it, nor was the text about the fundraising.

  The real dirt was on the blog discussion sites.

  When he opened TOI.com, he found that no one there seemed particularly interested in the teen center. He switched the view, so that the “hot” posts shifted to the top. One was an ongoing discussion about whether or not she’d murdered Arabella, filled with complete conjecture about a jealousy motive.

  The other two were deleted photos that Rowan had apparently posted a few nights ago. They’d been up only a few hours before she took them down, but of course they’d already been catalogued.

  The first image was a dark, glimmering pool of water. The location tagged it as Fresh Pond. The text read, I havejt snaped..; Im perfecly san;e. I didn’t kill any one.

  His pulse started to race, and he scrubbed a hand over his mouth, staring. Holy shit.

  He pulled out his phone, calling Ciara.

  When she answered, she sounded breathless. “Michael? You’re not at work. Where are you?”

  “No, because it’s nine thirty on a Friday, and I haven’t eaten. What’s up?”

  “Oh. I forgot dinner. Anyway, I found something.”

  “Want to come by? I can add extra pasta.”

  “Uh, yeah, sure.” She hung up without another word.

  Michael rose, pulling a chili pepper out of the fridge. With Ciara coming, he’d make it as hot as he could stand, until he burned away the lining on the inside of his mouth.

  His mind whirled. Now both cases were clearly connected to Rowan. But she wasn’t the only one in that social circle. He needed to find out exactly where she’d been that night, and who else was there.

  Sixteen pieces of chili pepper went into the sauce, along with a little salt. He washed his hand to get the chili juices off, then dumped a box of spaghetti into the boiling pot.

  When he sat down at his laptop again, he scrolled through TOI.com. One more photo from that night had been deleted from her feed—a selfie with her eyes half-lidded, unfocused, her hair stuck to her forehead. The flash hadn’t gone off, so the light was coming from a bright moon and a few lanterns hanging from the trees.

  She’d written some inane comment underneath it, but his attention was on the people in the background. One of them—a man—looked like he might’ve been Peter, but he was in shadow. The other person looked like she was creeping up behind Rowan, the lantern beaming on her. Hannah? It was the friend who’d replaced Arabella in the photos.

  He saved the image to his laptop, then blew it up, trying to adjust the contrast and the lighting. The other woman almost looked like a double of Rowan—her hair styled the same, the kind of dress she would wear—but tidier, without Rowan’s train-wreck situation.

  As he read through the thread, he found one comment after another celebrating Rowan’s “breakdown.” It was a pure feast of schadenfreude. This was the end game for them, wasn’t it?

  When his buzzer rang, he rose and crossed through his living room. Ciara announced herself on the intercom, and he buzzed her up then unlatched his door. While he waited for her to come up the stairs, he cast a look around the room—a science magazine lay on his dark grey sofa, and he snatched it up, tucking it into the walnut magazine stand where it belonged. Other than that, everything was in order.

  The door creaked as Ciara pushed it open. “It smells freaking amazing in here.” She slid off her shoes, glancing around the room. “Do you live here?”

  “You know I live here.”

  “There’s no stuff in it. It looks like… like a catalog.”

  Bookshelves lined two of the pewter walls, and apart from that, a sofa stood against a wall of exposed brick. “Okay.”

  She slid off her laptop bag. The rain had dampened her curls and her button-down shirt. “That was a compliment.”

  “Thanks.” He led her into the kitchen. “Hungry?”

  “Starving. I’m digesting my organs again.” She sat down at the small, square table in his kitchen. “And I also have leads. I spent all day looking over security footage for the education department. Guess who I found the day Peter’s laptop was stolen?”

  “The Red Sox woman?”

  “Yep. The one with the skull sweater. It’s the same person.”

  He uncorked the wine and poured her a glass. “Rowan ties them both together. She was working with Peter on a fundraiser. I found a photo she deleted, and I think she might have been with her the night she died. She was at a party at Fresh Pond.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  He sat at the table next to her; it was small enough that their knees were nearly touching. Turning his laptop to face her, he said, “Rowan was at Fresh Pond four nights ago. Drunk out of her mind, writing nonsense posts on Instagram that she deleted a few hours later. But everything is catalogued on TOI.com. Her post showed her location. I think Peter might be in the background, with her friend Hannah lurking behind her like a creep.”

  Ciara leaned in closer over his shoulder, invading his personal space again. But she smelled faintly of rain and coconut shampoo, and he didn’t mind. “Okay. Do you know where Hannah lives?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because I used Find My Mac again. I found Peter’s password in his office. Someone turned the computer on near Cambridge this time, but near
Fresh Pond. Not at a home—at a pizza shop across the street from the pond.”

  Michael typed, Hannah Moreno, Cambridge, into his search engine, and her image came up right away. School psychologist, Woodhurst Charter Schools. Perfect. “Hang on. I can figure this out right now.”

  He pulled out his phone and called his friend Katie—a chemistry teacher at Woodhurst High School. It rang twice before she picked up.

  “Michael? Who calls on a phone these days? Such a cop.”

  “Well, it’s something I don’t want to text.”

  “Mysterious. Am I a suspect in a crime? Do you need to search me? Will there be handcuffs involved?”

  He and Katie were just friends, but she flirted like the devil himself. He shot a nervous glance at Ciara, wondering if she could hear. Her arched eyebrow suggested she could.

  Of course. Americans were so loud.

  With the phone against his ear, he rose to drain the pasta. “Do you work with someone named Hannah?”

  “Hannah?”

  “School psychologist.”

  “Oh! I did. She had some kind of nervous breakdown and quit.”

  The steam heated his face. “What do you mean, ‘some kind of nervous breakdown’?”

  “She just walked out in the middle of the workday and left the rest of the department to run her meetings. It was a whole thing. Very dramatic. I think she kind of ruined her career.”

  “Any idea what happened?”

  “She started seeming increasingly frazzled at meetings. Writing her reports last minute. The reports kept getting shorter. Everyone was complaining. She showed up late to a few meetings. Honestly? I feel like the school psychologists flip out all the time. They last, like, one year at a time. It might be that their jobs are hard, but who doesn’t have a hard job? At least they’re not in classrooms in front of twenty-five kids. I don’t know. I think a lot of the people interested in mental health stuff are a little, you know, mental.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “Oh, right. Well, you changed fields.”

  The sauce had now simmered almost to perfection, and he added a few basil leaves. “Isn’t there some kind of database of teacher information?”

  “Aspen, yeah. Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s not interesting anyway,” he lied. “I’m just wondering about an address.”

  “Is this shady? Don’t you have, like, DMV records or something you can get through normal police ways?”

  “Yes, but it takes too long, and I wanted to hear your voice.”

  “So charming! How could I resist. Okay, Hannah Moreno, twenty-seven years old, lives on 37 Porter Street in Somerville. Apartment 12 A.”

  Somerville. “Brilliant. Oh, Katie? You won’t mention this to anyone, will you?”

  “Hmm. What would you do if I did? Would you handcuff me and spank me?”

  “Absolutely not, because it seems like that would be an incentive.” He shot a nervous look at Ciara and cleared his throat. “I have to go, Katie. I have a friend over.”

  “Tell her I’m jealous,” she shouted into the phone.

  Michael hung up. “Somerville; 37 Porter Street.”

  “That’s it.” Ciara gestured with her hand, spilling her wine. “That’s the same block where Arabella’s laptop was turned on.”

  Thirty-Two

  Rowan sat in her dark apartment, peering outside her window, just a crack. Were there people watching from outside? Did they all know what she’d done?

  Music floated through the room—horns and drums.

  A tear spilled down her cheek, and she wiped it away. She was sure she was rotting from the inside out. She took a swig from her bottle of scotch.

  They’d found Peter, and now she was wondering what the hell she’d been thinking when she agreed with the plan. And why had she thought deleting the photos from her feed would do anything? Those Reddit psychos online tracked everything she did. Everything. They were convinced she’d murdered Arabella, and soon they’d find out she was there when Peter died.

  She drank deeply from her bottle, then crossed back to her sofa. She flopped down flat on it, trying to untangle the reasoning that had made sense to her at the time. In the fog of drunkenness, it had seemed clear—the grant money being in Peter’s name, needing him to be alive for it to go through. The money was now sitting in the teen center bank account, just waiting to help underprivileged youth graduate from high school.

  But couldn’t they have found another way to get the grant money? Now they looked sketchy.

  Was it really about the grant money for her, though? Yes, she’d wanted the funding, but it had been more of a blind panic that had driven her to grip Peter’s limp legs. She’d been tried online, and people already thought she was a killer. Not just one, but two dead friends now. She’d sort of hoped Peter might sink to the bottom of the pond, never to be found, and no one would connect his vanishing to her. That maybe she could escape that scandal and repair her image.

  Now she could see how dumb that was. That wasn’t how anything worked, because Peter, of course, hadn’t stayed at the bottom of the pond. And their cover story—that he’d walked home, and that was all they knew—didn’t sound quite as convincing now that she wasn’t completely hammered.

  Lying flat on her sofa, she opened TOI.com. She took a deep breath as she read through the latest theories about why she’d killed Arabella. It was all over Arabella’s husband, because Rowan was desperate for all the male adulation she could get. No, it was because she couldn’t handle anyone else around her being genuinely talented when she was such a vapid, alcoholic mess. Her rage and jealousy came through in all her posts. Anyone could see it.

  The vines slithered in her mind. Look at her, lying there. Drinking again. Alone. She’s killed two people now—two people who had more to offer the world than she ever could, and she couldn’t handle it. You can see her rotting, can’t you? So corrupted. The evil is ravaging her face. She looks worse than Peter at the bottom of the pond.

  The pressure in her mind was getting to be too much. The voices built louder.

  No one could ever love her.

  Her heart was beating so loud that she could hear it, and she thought it might explode. She needed Marc more than ever. It had been ages since she’d spoken to him, but she needed to hear his voice. She picked up her phone and clicked on his name. Her blood pounded hard as she listened to it ring.

  No answer.

  She called again and again, listening to the phone ring, increasingly desperate, until at last—

  “Hello?”

  “Marc?”

  He sighed. “Rowan. Is this an emergency?”

  “Um, I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Are you joking, Rowan? It’s three in the morning here. Please, please try to think about other people for once.”

  She winced. The line went dead, and her heart twisted.

  As soon as he hung up, the voices started up again in her mind.

  At some point, everyone realizes how vile she really is.

  Her lungs were constricting, and she rolled over, curling up in a ball. She needed to think clearly.

  One thing at a time.

  What would Marc say if she could talk to him?

  She’d tell him how the secrets were crushing her, smothering the life out of her. All of them. She’d tell him that people found out the truth sooner or later.

  And he would tell her she should get to it first, and tell the story in her own words.

  Rowan pulled herself off the bed and crossed to her wardrobe. She opened the doors and took in the silky negligees on the bottom of the wardrobe. She pulled out a black one with the smallest hint of ruffles at the neckline. She pulled off her clothes, then slid it on.

  As she carefully applied her makeup in the bathroom, she hummed along to the music. Black eyeliner, highlighter on her cheeks. Ruby-red lips.

  She crossed back to her chaise longue and set up the ring ligh
t. She snapped her phone onto the selfie stick. Always, when she took a photo here, she was thinking of Marc, imagining him with her.

  The photo she took was so perfect that she didn’t need to adjust it at all. She just added a hint of grain so it looked like an old film still.

  In the caption, she wrote:

  I have something to confess to you all. You want to know my secrets? You’ll get them. You want to know about people getting ahead in this world who don’t deserve it? Because I’ve got stories to tell. Stay tuned.

  She let out a long, slow sigh. When she posted it, she already felt like a weight was lifting off her chest.

  As soon as she posted, her phone buzzed. It was Heather. Brilliant shot. Love the caption.

  At least she was finally making her agent happy.

  But the next text that came through made her blood run cold. It was from an anonymous number, and it read:

  If you tell everyone what’s happening, you’ll end up like Arabella and Peter. Go to the police, and you’ll be the next one to stop breathing.

  I’m watching you.

  Thirty-Three

  Ciara watched Michael as he drove—at a remarkably confident speed, considering he couldn’t park a car to save his life. They were on their way to Stella’s house, with a long list of questions about the night Peter went missing.

  “Murder is bad luck,” Ciara mused aloud.

  “Particularly for the person killed,” said Michael.

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean… Look, there’s a lot about the world we don’t understand, right? And it seems like sometimes, horror has a way of lingering on a place. Take the Salem witch judge, John Hathorne. He scourged Quakers nearly to death. He hanged innocent people, drove them mad in prisons, made them turn on their own families. He pressed Giles Corey to death with rocks. And long after Hathorne died, the site of his home turned into one of the most brutal insane asylums in the country. It had to be shut down. Look at Waco, Texas. Site of an unspeakably sadistic lynching, then later all these people burned in the siege.”

  Michael cleared his throat. “Or maybe Americans just do so many insane and violent things that they run out of space to come up with unique locations.”