Slain

by Harper, Livia

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have said any of that.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” I say. But the look on his face tells me it’s too late.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says, and the guys go.

  I fall asleep in homeroom. I fall asleep in British lit. When Mr. Stearns has to yell my name to ask me about a passage in Leviticus I startle awake and almost scream. Usually something like that would make us all crack up, but today the whole class just stares wide eyed at the mess I am.

  Paige whispers to me during quite study time.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just tired.”

  “Clearly. But you’re more than tired, Emma. You’re limping. What’s going on?”

  I don’t trust myself to just tell her about last night. If I open the bottle, it’s all going to spill out.

  “I took a walk last night and fell. Had to go to the hospital. Didn’t get much sleep.”

  “What did you say to Ben this morning? Do you know what people are saying?”

  “No talking, ladies,” Mr. Stearns says.

  Paige leans back in her desk but doesn’t stop staring at me. I excuse myself to the restroom and sleep in the handicapped stall until the final bell rings. When I wake up, my head feels a little clearer.

  I wait for the din in the halls to die down then venture out, sneaking through the back exit instead of going to my mom’s office. When I’m sure there’s no police following I walk a few blocks to catch a bus back home, and find the spare key to my car so I can drive to Jackson’s house. There are some things we need to talk about.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  EVEN THOUGH IT’S LESS than ten miles away from my house, Jackson lives in the kind of neighborhood most people at church would call “seedy.” Which is a totally stupid thing to say, especially after you spend any time here. I have, and I’ve never felt any sort of danger at all. I doubt the crime stats are any different than my neighborhood.

  But the people I’ve grown up with find things like gnomes on the lawn and motor homes in the driveway distasteful. I used to too, before I knew not to. Jackson laughed at me outright the first time we came here and I asked if there was gang activity in the area. I was such an asshole back then.

  His house is a ranch with blue siding and white trim and a miniature Dutch windmill in the flower bed up front. There are three bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen on the main level, but you could fit most of that in just our family room. He lives here with his parents and two brothers. One of the brothers goes to community college and hogs most of the basement.

  I see Jackson’s lime green 1972 Gran Torino in the driveway. His grandfather gave it to him a couple years ago, and he’s been working on restoring it ever since. It’s his baby. There’s no way he’d be anywhere without it.

  I park on the sidewalk and walk up to the door. There’s a television blaring inside, or maybe a video game. There are lots of explosions. I’m hoping his parents aren’t home. I’ve never met them, and I’m not sure I want to, at least not now. I definitely don’t want today to be the first time. Besides, Jackson says there won’t be much to miss family-wise when we go. I’ve never asked him to explain.

  I ring the doorbell, and the noise stops. Jackson opens the door. He’s wearing jeans and an old orange T-shirt. It’s the kind of clothes that make me wish I was a boy sometimes: anti-heel, anti-tights, anti-spanks.

  When he sees it’s me, he breaks into a grin. “Em! What are you doing here?” He snatches me into his arms and lifts me right off the doorstep. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  I pull away from his grasp. He looks confused. It’s so hard not to kiss him.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Last night?” The look on his face says he has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “You texted me. I snuck out to meet you.”

  “I didn’t text you, Em, I couldn’t have,” he says. “My phone got stolen yesterday.”

  “You didn’t text me? You swear?”

  “I swear. I was working after school yesterday. You know how they don’t want us having phones on, so I left it in my trunk with my backpack. Somebody broke into my car and took everything.”

  He shuffles off to find something. “Look. Here’s a copy of the police report.”

  “Oh my god,” I say.

  I read it over, and it’s written down exactly like he said. The realization of what really happened last night sinks in.

  “Em, what the hell happened to you?” he looks irritated, not mad at me exactly, but mad. “I wasn’t gonna say anything, but you look like you got the shit beat out of you.”

  “Can I have a glass of water, please?”

  We go inside. I limp into his kitchen where I sit down and he hands me a cup. He toes at a loose corner of linoleum on his floor while he watches me drink it down. I had no idea how thirsty I was.

  “Can you please tell me what’s going on now?”

  I do. I tell him the whole story. The texts I got from him, the midnight meeting, how I was attacked.

  “Seriously?” he says.

  “Seriously.”

  “I didn’t text you, Em. And there’s no way I would have been cool with you walking around in the middle of the night by yourself like that. You know that, right?”

  “I know.” I say, even though I wasn’t so certain last night. I lean into his chest, pull him toward me. He crushes me against him, and I wince.

  He pulls away immediately. “Oh god, sorry.”

  “Don’t stop. It’s okay. I’m fine.” I can trust him. That’s all I need right now. Everything else will heal.

  And then I think of something else. “You know what? That text said to meet you at the park. Not our spot. The park. We never call it that.”

  He shakes his head. We both know what this means.

  “Somebody texted me with your phone,” I say. “Somebody’s been following us enough to know we meet at City Park. Which means they know a lot about me. And a lot about you too,” I say.

  “It also means they went pretty far to try to hurt you last night. Stealing my phone, getting you alone? That’s seriously fucked up.”

  “I know.”

  He grabs his keys from the counter, and then my hand. “Fuck it. I’m not doing this anymore. We’re going to the police.”

  I call my parents before we leave. We take his car. I sleep on the way there. When I wake up we are in the parking lot of the police station, and the sun is shining through the window and Jackson is stroking my hair. I look into his eyes, and I imagine us in Central Park. I imagine us on the Brooklyn Bridge. I imagine us in a tiny, shitty apartment making pancakes on a Sunday morning. My dreams seemed so small once, so easy.

  Now? I might be kissing every single one of them goodbye.

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?” I ask.

  He pulls his hand away from my hair, takes his keys out of the ignition. “I’m not cool with this anymore, Em,” he says. “I’m not gonna just sit around all day wondering if someone’s trying to hurt you. Come on. We’re going inside.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “I’M SORRY I LIED,” I say. “I shouldn’t have done that. But now you know everything.”

  My dad’s face has turned to stone. My mom’s propping her head up with her hand. They put Jackson in another room with some other detectives before we even started.

  I’ve told Detective Boyer exactly what happened the night June was killed, and everything that’s happened since. Well, everything except the gun. Even I’m not stupid enough to tell them about that.

  “So you were cutting a demo tape of the two of you? In the recording studio at your church?”

  The look on Boyer’s face says it all. Why on earth would she believe me?

  “Yes,” I say. It’s not the only thing we were doing, but it’s why Jackson was there in the first place. I fish something out of
my purse. Luckily Jackson was smart enough to think of bringing it.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a CD with the audio files that we recorded that night.”

  “You got any record it was that night, and not some other night?”

  “No. Jackson wiped the files off the computer, so no one would know we used it.”

  Detective Boyer taps the CD against her hand, then pops it into a laptop that’s sitting in the room.

  “We don’t need to listen to it,” I say.

  “What? Why? You’ve got such a pretty voice. I’m sure we’d all like to hear you sing.”

  “It’s private.”

  She double-taps her index finger on the laptop. “I thought you wanted to be famous, Emma?” She presses play. My voice comes out of the tiny speakers. My voice and Jackson’s guitar. It’s faint at first, then stronger as Detective Boyer turns up the volume. I lower my eyes, stare at the table, stare at anything but my parents.

  Sunlight on your back, in my eyes.

  Feeling the weight

  Of your heart over mine.

  The feel of your hands.

  The feel of you.

  My love. My love. My love.

  I look up to see my mom trying to press the tears back with a Kleenex. My dad is staring at the wall across from him, his face hard. It’s not exactly how I imagined someone hearing it for the first time. I imagined smoke-filled bars and heads nodding along in the darkness. Not this.

  Finally, Boyer turns it off. “Now isn’t that sweet?” Boyer says. “We’ve got ourselves a couple of lovebirds here, don’t we?” She leans forward in her seat, “Did you write that yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty impressive. A little sappy for my taste, but not bad, as far as those kinda songs go.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “You know what I don’t get, though? If you were really just recording a CD, well, that seems like a pretty stupid lie to tell, don’t you think?”

  “My parents didn’t know about Jackson. They wouldn’t have approved.”

  “No kidding we wouldn’t have approved,” my dad says.

  “Frank. Calm down,” my mom says.

  “But still, keeping a secret like this when you know we’re looking into you?” Boyer says. “Why would you do that?”

  I pull out the final card in my hand. “Ask Mike. He knows. He saw us…kissing.” He saw a lot more than that.

  “Michael Kent? That’s not what he told us.”

  “Ask him again. He’ll tell you. I’m surprised he hasn’t called you already.”

  “Here’s the thing. I believe you.” The tone in her voice makes me think there’s a catch coming.

  “You do?” I ask.

  She pops out the CD from the laptop, puts it back in its case. “Well, this? I don’t know about this. This you could have made any time. But I believe you were with Jackson that night. That much I believe. Kid has quite a record.”

  She takes a deep breath and blows it out slowly.

  “Do you remember what I told you about lying, Emma? About how I don’t like it?”

  “I remember.”

  “Good, good. I’m gonna ask you a few questions now. And this time, I want the truth.”

  We go through the whole story again and again and again. I’m so tired. She must see it, but she doesn’t let up. It’s the same questions over and over, stated differently, but all the same. She’s trying to catch me in a lie. But it’s so much easier to avoid the trap when I stick to the truth, and that’s all I’m telling anymore.

  My head sinks down to the table. I’m drifting away again when she asks:

  “Are you familiar with the name Trixie Burnette?”

  This question is new. She threw it in hoping to catch me off guard. It works.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “How do you know Mrs. Burnette?”

  “She goes to our church. She’s kind of like a grandma to everybody. We call her Aunt Trixie,” I say. “Why do you ask? Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. A little head cold at the moment, but she’ll be okay. Have you visited Mrs. Burnette lately?”

  “No. I’ve never visited her,” I say.

  “Yes, you have,” my dad says. “We dropped off some soup for her.”

  “Frank,” my mom says. Her tone is a warning. She’s telling him to stop talking.

  “No. We’re telling the truth. Come what may, we’re telling the truth.”

  “So you’ve been to her house, Emma?” Boyer asks.

  “I guess so. I totally forgot about it, though. We weren’t there long. I didn’t even go inside. We just handed it to her at the door and left.”

  “When was this?”

  My dad speaks up. “A year ago? Maybe more? She was going through chemo at the time. Why? What does Mrs. Burnette have to do with any of this?”

  “Do you know what kind of car Mrs. Burnette drives?” Boyer asks.

  “No,” I say.

  Detective Boyer opens a file. I realize it has been sitting there the entire time we’ve been in here. She’s been building up to this moment for over an hour. I get nervous. Anything this important to her can’t be good for me.

  She pulls out a photograph. It’s a maroon sedan. A Cadillac I think, with four doors.

  “Does this car look familiar to you?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, surprised. I picture it in the dark. I picture it with the tail lights lit up. I picture it bearing down on me, its wheels squealing. “I think that was the car from last night.”

  “You think or you know?” Detective Boyer asks.

  I take a second look. The license plate reads 8MK-42A.

  “That was the car,” I say. “But there’s no way Aunt Trixie could have been driving it. She’s tiny. I think the driver was taller. It’s hard to tell when somebody’s sitting down.”

  “You know what? I think you’re right,” she says. “Here’s the funny thing about this car. Mrs. Burnette reported it stolen yesterday, right out of her garage. Turned up abandoned in a tow-away zone this morning.”

  “Do you know who was driving it?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer, just leans back in her chair, satisfied. “You know the other funny thing about this car? That’s not the right license plate. We were a little stumped last night. Turns out those three digits are pretty unique. Only car that had them was a Nissan Pathfinder. But that’s an SUV, not a sedan.”

  “So the driver switched the plates?”

  “That’s right, Miss Grant. That’s right. You wanna know the last funny thing about this whole thing? That Nissan Pathfinder? Turns out it belonged to your boyfriend’s next-door neighbor.”

  “Somebody is trying to frame me,” I say. “Do you think if we’d actually done it we would have used a plate from Jackson’s neighbor?”

  “You ever heard of Occam’s Razor?” she asks. “Basically says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one. You think that sounds like the simplest explanation?”

  “It does to me, because I know I didn’t do it. So the simplest explanation is that someone wants you to think I did.”

  “Uh huh,” she says. She pulls out another piece of paper from the folder. She slides it toward me. “What does ‘come clean’ mean?”

  I look at the paper. It’s a transcript of the texts yesterday afternoon.

  Jackson’s phone to me:

  Going crazy. Need 2 see u.

  I think we should come clean.

  Can u meet me?

  Me to Jackson’s phone:

  ?????????

  Lots to tell u, but grounded, can’t meet.

  Hang tight. Will call 2nite.

  Love you.

  Jackson’s phone to me:

  Please. I need u.

  The park? After bed?

  Please.

  Me to Jackson’s phone:

  Ok. midnight. See u there.

  Love u. B strong.

  The fact that they have this, so
soon after we came in, maybe even before, makes me wonder if they knew about Jackson all along.

  “What does ‘come clean’ mean, Emma?” she asks again.

  “Just look up the police report he filed. Jackson didn’t write that.” I lift up the paper. “So this? It means someone is being very deliberate about trying to frame me.”

  “You think no one’s ever filed a false report before? We get them for insurance all the time.”

  I sink back into my chair.

  “Why don’t we go through your story again?” Boyer says.

  It’s nearly nine when I finally get out of the room, and it’s only after I ask if I can go. It was going nowhere. They don’t believe me. I’m the boy who cried wolf, and soon I may be eaten by one. I should have been honest with the police from the start.

  I go through the hallway into the lobby alone. My parents sent me out so they could have a private talk with Boyer before we go.

  I’m guessing Jackson’s been waiting for me for a while, but he’s not in the lobby. I scan the parking lot and see his car is there. He must still be talking to the police. I ask at the front desk.

  “Has Jackson Thomas finished up yet?”

  “I have no idea, Miss,” the guy says. He has that eye-rolly tone in his voice that’s supposed to make me think I’m wasting his time.

  “They’re still back there,” a woman’s voice answers. I hadn’t noticed her before, but it only takes a glance for me to have a pretty good guess about who she is. She’s sitting in a chair in the corner and looks as exhausted as I feel. She’s thin and tall with split-end prickled hair that looks on the verge of giving up. She clutches a raincoat to her chest. Her long, boney fingers look like they belong on a woman much older than her forty-ish years. The thing that makes me know, though, is her eyes: dark fields that shift like wheat on a moonlit night. They’re exactly like Jackson’s.

  “He was doing really well, getting his life back together,” she says.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. We’ve never met, his mother and I. It’s not exactly a good first impression.

  “It was a girl last time too, you know. He did all that stuff for a girl.” Her words bite. Whatever trouble she believes her son is in, it’s my fault. I’m mute because she’s right. Jackson wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for me.