Frenzy

by V. J. Chambers

  Jill let out a laugh, but it was high-pitched and nervous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cori was my friend. I would never hurt her.”

  “You admitted that you were angry with her,” I said. “Hell, you sat here right in this room and said that you felt like it was your fault that she was dead. Because it was. And when you couldn’t cry that day. Gee, I wonder why that was.”

  “You’re losing it. Seriously.” Jill crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t believe you would say something like this.”

  “She was sleeping with your boyfriend,” I said. “You’ve said over and over again that she was a difficult person to like.”

  “I didn’t kill Cori,” said Jill, pressing her lips into a firm line. “You’re way off base, Molly. And, frankly, I think you’re going a little crazy. You’re way too obsessed with Cori—”

  “Explain to me how else her stuff got there.”

  “How should I know?” said Jill. “Maybe she took my keycard, like you just did.”

  “I thought of that,” I said. “But why would she do that? And how did she get the keycard back? And why would she put her stuff where she couldn’t get to it unless she had your keycard?”

  “You think I moved all that stuff? She had a refrigerator. What, you think I carried it all the way to the art building?”

  I hadn’t really thought about that part. “It was over winter break. There was no one in the dorms to see you. Maybe you loaded it into a car out front and drove it up the art building.”

  “I don’t have a car,” she said. “And you think I dumped Cori in the river? You think I’m strong enough to lug her body down there and throw her in?”

  It was the argument I’d made to Levi earlier. “Well, you wouldn’t have been lugging her body. She could have walked down there. She drowned to death. Maybe you knocked her over the head with something and then tied her up—”

  “Listen to yourself,” said Jill. “I couldn’t have done something like that. Not me. You’re crazy.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m not staying here with you. I don’t trust you.”

  * * *

  I banged on the door of Wyatt’s house. It was probably two in the morning now, and I wasn’t sure if I was waking him up. I didn’t know where else to go.

  The door swung open. Wyatt stood there, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and he looked relatively alert. He held a can of beer in one hand. “Molly? What the fuck?”

  “Hey,” I said. “I know this is going to sound weird, but can I crash on your couch? You’re literally the only person I can go to.”

  He hesitated.

  “I know that things are weird between us, and I know this is a fucked-up thing to do to you. But, please, if you don’t let me stay here, I’m going to have to sleep in my car. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s like ten degrees out here.”

  He opened the door wider. “Come in.”

  “Thank you.” I stepped in out of the cold.

  He shut the door after me. He jammed his hands into his pockets. “Hey, um, I’m sorry if I was kind of an ass to you before.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have to do that. I just need to get a few hours of sleep, and I’ll figure out what to do in the morning.”

  He scratched the back of his head. “I really am sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I moved further into the room. I sat down on the couch. This was fine. I could curl up here. It was probably easily as comfortable as the beds in the dorms.

  “You, uh, you want to, like, sleep in my bed?”

  I gave him a startled look. “What?”

  “Well, I mean, you’re here, and I guess I thought maybe this is some kind of weird way to try to… you know, hook up with me again? If so, it might be—”

  “No,” I said. “I really want to sleep on the couch, Wyatt.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  I nodded. “Definitely.”

  “I’ll get you some blankets.”

  * * *

  The lights were on in the kitchen in Wyatt’s house, spilling warm, soft light into the living room where I lay. Wyatt had given me two blankets, made sure I was comfortable, and then disappeared into the house somewhere. I could hear someone moving around on the floor above me, but I didn’t know if it was Wyatt or one of his roommates.

  I was exhausted, so I thought I would go straight to sleep, but instead I lay there, my eyes open, my mind racing with the events of the night.

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  Everything was a mess, and I didn’t know how I was going to fix it yet. I couldn’t sleep on Wyatt’s couch forever, that was for sure. But I couldn’t go back to my room with Jill there, either.

  I probably shouldn’t have told her about Cori’s stuff. What if she went and moved all of it in the middle of the night? That was my only piece of evidence, and I knew that it wasn’t a very good piece.

  What if I was all wrong about it, anyway? What if Jill had nothing to do with Cori’s death?

  Ugh.

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  I wanted to sleep.

  I focused on a chair in the kitchen. There was a t-shirt flung over the back of it, and I could read what it said on the front. It said, You’re just jealous that the little voices talk to me.

  Heidi had a shirt like that. In fact, she’d been wearing it that night.

  God damn it.

  That was the last thing I needed to think about right now. Heidi’s limp body. All that blood. The sound of the gun going off.

  I pushed aside the covers and got off the couch. I went over to the chair and picked up the shirt. I turned it over so that I couldn’t see the letters anymore.

  But when I touched the shirt, I… remembered something.

  Everything about that night was fuzzy. What I’d told Levi was true. I remembered the sound of the gun going off. I remembered the sight of Heidi’s bloody body. I remembered looking down and seeing the gun in my hand.

  But I couldn’t remember how we’d got into the room with the guns the second time. I didn’t know why Heidi and I were in there together.

  As I held the shirt, I remembered pushing open the door to my dad’s office. Heidi was with me. She was laughing.

  “You just want to be a badass with that gun,” she said.

  “You know it,” I said. “You’re going to take super sexy pictures of me, and then Duncan is going to lose it.”

  “Eew,” she said. “Can you stop talking about my brother like that?”

  I pushed the door open the rest of the way.

  There was someone in the room.

  What? There wasn’t anyone in the room. It had been me and Heidi. Just the two of us.

  I sank down in the chair, still clutching the shirt.

  And it washed over me, everything that I’d forgotten.

  I was having trouble standing up, and I grabbed onto the door to keep myself upright, still laughing. In a mock-serious voice, I slurred, “No one should be in my father’s study. This room is off-limits.”

  I faced the person inside. My vision was a little blurry, like everything was spinning past me at warp speed. It took me a second to recognize who it was. “Zach?”

  “Get out of here, Molly,” said Zach.

  Wait. There was someone else there, too. A guy I didn’t recognize. I squinted at the both of them. “Zach, what are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Zach countered. “Your dad said the house would be empty this weekend. I’m trying to conduct some business.”

  The guy with Zach looked around nervously. “Hey, dude, who are those girls? What’d they hear?”

  I turned back to Heidi. It was hard to move my body. It felt too heavy and everything else seemed to be moving at warp speed while I was stuck in slow motion. “Don’t worry, Heidi. It’s just my cousin selling drugs.”

  “What?” said the other guy. “What did she say?”

  �
�Molly, Jesus,” said Zach. He turned to the other guy. “Hey, dude, be cool. It’s my cousin throwing a party. It’s not a big deal.”

  The guy picked up the gun on my father’s desk. The antique one, the one I’d been playing with earlier. The one I wanted to use to take sexy pictures. He pointed it at us. “Either of you says a word—”

  “It’s not loaded, idiot,” I said, giggling.

  “It’s not?” The guy pulled the trigger.

  The gun went off.

  I ran over to him and wrested it out of his grasp. “What the hell?” I looked down at the gun in my hands.

  And then I looked over at Heidi, who was lying in a pool of her own blood, her brains spattered against the wall of my father’s study.

  I dropped the shirt like it had burned me. My mouth was dry. That wasn’t what happened. Was it?

  I tore across the room to find my phone.

  * * *

  “It’s the middle of the night, Molly.” Zach’s voice was thick from sleep.

  “I didn’t shoot her,” I said. “I didn’t shoot Heidi.”

  “Aw, shit,” he muttered. “You remembered that, huh?” He sounded more awake now.

  “What the fuck, Zach?”

  “Look, Molls, it was easier that way. It was your father’s idea. He knew that if he tried to cover up a spat of violence that was connected to the business, it would go badly. But if it was you, with your lack of record, and your good grades, there’d be judges he could pay off, people who’d be unwilling to ruin a young girl’s life.”

  “My father’s idea?”

  “You didn’t remember what happened anyway,” he said. “You were black-out drunk. You passed out almost right afterward. You had the gun in your hand. It just made everything smoother, you know.”

  “But… I didn’t shoot her.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “But I thought that I did. I’ve spent months of my life thinking that I had…”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. But no matter how you look at it, it was an accident.”

  “I felt responsible. I thought I killed my best friend.”

  “Hey,” said Zach. “I know it’s been tough on you. I told your dad you could probably handle the truth, and that if we asked you to take the fall, you would. After all, we all know that being part of this family requires sacrifices. But he wouldn’t have it. He said he didn’t want you to know anything. He was trying to protect you.”

  “Protect me? By making me think I shot Heidi?”

  “His heart was in the right place.”

  “No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Look, I really am sorry. I wish it had gone down a different way.”

  “I…” I was at a loss for words. I hung up the phone. I stared down at it, too horrified to cry. To scream. To rage.

  I lay back on the couch and pulled the covers tight around me.

  I gazed at the ceiling.

  No.

  No, it couldn’t be true.

  I whispered that over and over, my lips barely moving.

  And somewhere in the middle of my repeated litany, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  I woke up early, cold under my blankets. No one else was awake in Wyatt’s house. I tried to burrow, to curl up and get more heat, but it wasn’t working, so I just got up.

  It was Saturday. I didn’t have any classes that day.

  I paced in the living room, thinking about my father.

  I felt betrayed.

  And it ate into me like a cancer.

  When I was a kid, before my father was arrested, I had no idea what he did for a living. It wasn’t something that I thought about much.

  After the police came and took him away, I found out.

  I knew that I loved my father, so it was pretty obvious to me as a kid that if the cops had taken him away from me, they were the enemy.

  But now…

  Things seemed muddled. Thinking that I had killed Heidi had practically destroyed me. I’d hardly been able to breathe, to exist. Everything had hurt so badly. It had cost me my relationship with Duncan. It had sent me off to this college. It had started the schism between me and my family.

  Now that I knew that my father had concocted the story to protect his precious business, I was pretty sure that the schism was complete.

  I hated him for what he’d put me through.

  Everything was confusing now. All the things that I’d believed, all the things that I’d valued were called into question. I didn’t know how I was going to sort through it all.

  I felt like I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore.

  And I didn’t want to think about it.

  Instead, I turned my thoughts to my conversation with Jill last night.

  She’d made some good points, and they bothered me. If Jill had killed Cori, then how had she transported the body?

  How had she transported all of Cori’s stuff?

  Was she strong enough for all of that?

  It didn’t quite seem to line up.

  I tried to think about the way she’d acted. When she’d found out about Cori’s death, she hadn’t been able to cry. I remembered the way I’d found out. She and Parker had been in the room when I’d come home. They’d been smoking pot. Parker had been angry. I remembered the way he’d slammed his fist…

  Parker.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I shook Parker’s inert form. He was lying on his bed in his dorm room. “Wake up, Parker.”

  Parker stirred, turning over and squinting at me. “Molly? How did you get in here?”

  “The building?” I said. “I waited until someone came out, and I held the door. And your roommate let me into the room. I told him to clear out. You and I have some things to talk about.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “This have something to do with the fact that Jill was blowing up my phone last night?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Jill was calling you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I didn’t listen to any of her messages. I don’t really like her.”

  “Huh,” I said. I’d been going back and forth between two scenarios. Now, I was pretty sure that I knew what had happened. “Sit up, Parker.”

  He complied. He wasn’t wearing a shirt—only a pair of flannel pajama pants.

  “Put something on,” I said, fishing a shirt off his floor and throwing it at him.

  He caught it. “What’s going on, Molly?”

  I wrapped my arms around myself and studied the floor. “At first, I thought maybe it was all you. Because Jill pointed out that it would have been hard for her to move the body or to move the stuff. I thought that you got angry with Cori, because she cheated on you, and you killed her. And then you dumped her body in the river. Then you got Jill’s keycard and took all of Cori’s stuff to the art building.”

  “Wait,” said Parker. “That’s not what happened. Really, I swear, I didn’t mean for it to go the way it did.”

  I raised my gaze to meet his. “I know that. No, I remember that the day you found out, you were angry. You said that she was thrown in the river alive. And I know that you didn’t know that before. You were surprised. I don’t think you could have faked it. So, I’m thinking that Jill killed Cori, and you helped her get rid of the body. But what neither of you knew was that it wasn’t a body. Cori wasn’t dead.”

  Parker’s face twisted. “Jill called me. I was stuck on campus because I couldn’t get a flight until the next day, and she said that there had been an accident.”

  I chewed on my lip. “It was the knick knack, wasn’t it? The one that Jill had in her dresser. You put that up there for her to see. Because that was the murder weapon.”

  He nodded. His voice was haggard. “Yeah. I guess they were arguing, and Jill threw it at Cori. It hit her in the head or something.”

  “So, Jill said it was an accident.”

  “I believed her. That night I believed her. But then…” He rubbed his forehead. “Well, I kept thinking abo
ut it after I knew that Cori wasn’t dead when we dumped her. And that glass mushroom thing that Jill had? When I got there, it was covered in blood and little bits of hair. And I think… I think Jill hit Cori on the head with it over and over again. Because I don’t think it would have been covered like that if Jill had only thrown it at Cori. If it had only hit Cori once on the head, like Jill said? It wouldn’t have looked like that. So, I think she was lying to me.”

  “I see,” I said. “So, your girlfriend calls you and tells you that she’s accidentally killed your ex-girlfriend.”

  “No, Jill and I weren’t together yet.” Parker looked out the window. “I had just broken up with Cori. I was angry with her, but I didn’t want to hurt her. I definitely didn’t want to kill her. But I went when Jill called, because she was my friend, and because I was worried about Cori.”

  “And even though it was an accident, Jill wanted you to help her cover it up.”

  He nodded, still avoiding my gaze.

  “Was it her idea or your idea to dump her in the river?”

  “Jill’s.” His voice sounded tight. “She said that if the body was in the water for long enough, it would make it tough to know when she died and that it would get rid of a lot of the evidence. I don’t know how she knew stuff like that. Anyway, she seemed like she knew what to do.”

  “And you didn’t argue with her? You didn’t try to convince her to call the police or something?”

  “I…” He thrust his hands into his hair. “I was upset. Cori was… she was like my first real girlfriend, and she was lying there, and she was all… she was bleeding, and she… And Jill was crying, and telling me that she never meant it to happen, and that she’d get in trouble, and that her life would be ruined, and she was begging me to help her, and I… I don’t know. It was hard to think.”

  “So you and Jill dragged the body to the river? Did you use your car?”