by Tara Kelly
Amber’s name was at the top of the message window, as the sender. My heart thudded in my ears.
“Tell me I’m hallucinating. Tell me that’s not…” Zach’s eyes squeezed shut.
The artificial light hitting her skin and the grainy background told me the picture was taken at night, probably in complete darkness. The color of her irises was too washed out to define, but the whites of her eyes glowed against the black paint on her lids.
I recognized that stare. It was like looking into the eyes of a doll. You couldn’t fake that kind of emptiness.
I took a deep breath, trying to slow my heart, stop the buzzing in my extremities.
“I put my phone on silent last night. People wouldn’t stop texting,” Zach said, running his fingers back and forth through his hair. “Why the hell did I do that? I shouldn’t have done that.”
I put my hand over his—it was even colder than mine. “Go to the cops and show this to them,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Now.”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were wide and staring, like he was seeing me…but not.
I pressed the mail button on his phone and forwarded the picture to myself. There was still a chance this wasn’t what it looked like. Blowing it up on a bigger screen would at least give me a better idea.
Then I remembered those sirens when I woke up. Those sirens that seemed to go on forever… What were the odds?
“She’s dead. She’s really dead,” Zach muttered.
Dread tightened my throat. “What time did you get that threat last night?”
“I don’t know.” He stood up, scanning the room like he expected something to jump out at him. “I don’t know,” he repeated under his breath.
I pressed his mail button on the toolbar and scrolled through the dozen emails he’d gotten in the last twelve hours. The sixth message down was from “I.M. Nobody” with the subject line “Hey Coward.” I opened it up to see WATCH YOUR BACK written all in caps.
“I have to go. I have to get out of here.” Zach dug into his pockets, pulling out his keys. He ripped his phone from my grip. “What are you doing?” His voice was sharp, accusing.
I stood slowly, keeping my eyes on his. “I’m trying to help.”
He stared back at me like a cornered animal, clutching his phone so tight his knuckles were white. His nose wrinkled. “You’d defend him no matter what, wouldn’t you…”
“Alex didn’t do this.”
“You’re as fucked up as he is,” he said through clenched teeth. He turned and bolted then, slamming the door behind him.
I didn’t know how long I stood there, in the middle of the living room, just breathing. My mind kept telling me this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
The phone rang, loud and shrill, making the lump in my throat ache even more. I ran toward the kitchen.
“Hello?” I answered. My hand shook so much I nearly dropped the receiver.
“Nova.” There was an anxious edge to my mom’s voice. “They found a body at Winchester Beach this morning,” she continued. “People are saying it’s that girl—Amber.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, not hearing the rest of what she said. Winchester Beach. The place I was hours before. The place where my best friend assaulted someone. The cops would be gunning for anyone and everyone who was there last night.
“I don’t want you going out alone, okay? Even walking to the diner,” Mom said. “Not until they’ve figured out what’s going on.”
“Oh, stop, Angela!” Gramps yelled in the background. “You can’t keep her locked up in her room.”
“Dad…” Mom said.
“She’s not much safer at home,” he continued, his voice getting closer. “Especially with those crap locks you have.”
I was hearing their words, but I couldn’t process them. This was really happening. Amber was murdered. Murdered.
“Put Gramps on the phone,” I said. “I need to talk to him.”
“Oh, hon, don’t let him scare you—”
“Mom, put him on.” If I told her what I saw on Zach’s phone, she’d go into a full panic. Right now I couldn’t even calm myself down.
There was a rustling noise as Mom passed the phone to Gramps.
“What’s going on?” he answered.
“Have you been listening to your scanner? What are they saying?” The words tumbled out. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow.
“Far as I can tell, it’s a homicide. Sounds like the body might’ve been staged, but people are saying a lot of things right now.”
I kept seeing her eyes. Eyes as dead as the January sky. “I saw it.”
“What do you mean you saw it?”
“Zach got a picture.” My breaths were coming out shallow and fast. “On his phone. He was here, and we were talking and—”
“Hold on. Why was he there?”
I told him everything I could about Zach’s visit—except the part about what happened last night. I didn’t want anyone to know about last night.
“Gramps, he’s talking crazy. He seriously thinks Alex is behind this.”
Gramps blew out a dismissive breath. “Well, I wish him luck with that. He’s the guy in Amber’s life—yeah? They’re going to be a lot more interested in him.”
“You should’ve seen the look on his face. He was terrified.”
“I don’t care what he looks like, Nova. I care that his girlfriend just turned up dead. Stay away from him.”
I used to think I was damn good at reading people, even people I’d never met. One time I went through my mom’s yearbook and accurately described 99 percent of the students just by their picture. The look in their eyes. Their smile. The way they held their head. Every detail gave them away.
Yet the two guys I’d let closest to me, the two people I trusted the most outside my family, managed to betray me. And I never saw it coming.
“I’ve gotta get back,” Gramps said. “Are you going to be okay until your mom gets home?”
I still had the shakes, and the lingering smell of Mom’s coffee was making me sick. But it was Sunday morning. There was no way my mom or Gramps could leave the diner without causing mass chaos. “I…yeah.”
Alex. I needed to warn him about Zach. But I didn’t want Gramps to go. My fingers gripped the phone tighter.
Mom’s voice rang in the background, loud and anxious. “I’ll give you a call a little later and check in,” he said before hanging up.
I dialed Alex’s number, my fingers going faster than my brain. I actually had to think about the last four digits—I couldn’t remember if it was 3756 or 5637.
“Nova?” he answered, as if he were waiting for me.
“Amber’s dead.” It came out just like that. I didn’t know how else to say it. “Someone killed her.”
He didn’t respond for a few seconds. Long enough for me to wonder if he was still there.
“They sent the picture of her body to Zach, from her phone.” I swallowed, closing my eyes. “And they sent him an email, telling him to watch his back.”
“How do you know that?”
“He came by here this morning…”
There was more silence on Alex’s end.
I ran my fingers back and forth over my scalp. I had to say it. Get the words out. “He thinks you did it.”
“What? Why?” Finally there was some emotion in his voice—something that told me he was still in there.
“Because he’s crazy? I don’t know! We need to get our story straight,” I said, my words coming out fast. “If Christian talks…”
“He’s not going to talk.” Alex sounded so sure of himself, as if he had Christian under lock and key.
“His friend was murdered. Everything is different now.” My heart was starting to pound again. I stood and paced around the kitchen.
“Nothing matters to that guy more than his ego.”
“That’s not exactly convincing me, Alex.”
“Look…” His voice softened to a whispe
r. “I’m not going to let this land on you. If last night comes out, tell the cops I made you go with us. Threatened you if you didn’t stay quiet. I’ll back you up.”
“And help Zach convince them you’re a psychopath? There’s no way I’m saying that!”
“They need some kind of evidence, Nova. I didn’t send him any email. And I sure as hell didn’t kill her. So there isn’t any. I dropped you off, I went home, I went to bed. Megan was up—she saw me.”
I slumped against the fridge, letting it hold me up. “I don’t know what to do…”
“Just take a breath,” he said, his voice calm. How could he sound so calm? “We don’t know what they’re going to find. They might not even need to question us.”
“We’ll tell them we just drove around. It’s half true.”
“You don’t have to lie for me. I lost it last night, okay? That’s on me.”
My eyes burned, but I held my breath, fighting the urge to cry. “Megan needs you. Your grandma needs you. You just got that job…”
There was no response on his end, not even a breath. I waited a few seconds. And then a few more. The ticking in my head kept getting closer, louder.
“You should talk to Megan,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “She misses you.”
“I can’t. Not now.” She’d sent me four emails since I found out about Jenika, asking if I was okay, if I wanted to talk. I hadn’t answered one of them. I didn’t know how to answer them.
“Do you want me to come over?” he asked.
I kept my eyes shut. “No.”
There was another long pause before he said, “You know where to find me.”
Something resembling “yeah” came out of my mouth before I hung up.
I sat down at the kitchen table, rocking and counting the scratches and chips in the wood. Gramps swore by saying the alphabet backward in his head. He said it made him think instead of feel.
I couldn’t even get past “T”.
I stared at my in-box for at least a half hour, wondering if I’d ever have the guts to open that picture. I’d seen pictures of dead bodies before, plastered to the pages of a homicide investigation textbook I’d bought at a library sale. They were strangers who lived and died long before I was born, their eyes crossed out with black bars. It was easy to look at their bodies clinically, how they were killed, the evidence left behind, even the position they were found in. How all of it led to their killer.
This was Amber, a girl who spent her last day acting ugly, like she had a lifetime to make up for it. A girl I hated with every inch of me. I kept hearing her sneering voice, calling me Diner Skank.
It would be easier if I thought of her like that. An evil villain in my life. Not a real person. But she was a real person.
I double-clicked on the attached image in my email, my breath stuck in my throat. Her chipped, chrome nail polish caught my eye first. I remembered how her nails looked that last day I saw her at the diner, all shiny and meticulous.
Now those leftover specks of silver gnawed at my gut. Maybe because they were remnants of who she was, always so self-conscious, so put together. She’d never be put together again.
Her skin didn’t even look real, moonlight pale and as smooth as a mask. Her drawn-on mouth was different up close, more of a brassy red, like ketchup. One corner went up higher than the other, forming a crooked smile. All of the lines painted on her face were broken and hasty, like they were created by a five-year-old.
Her lips were slightly parted, but the space between them wasn’t completely dark. I zoomed in close, my heartbeat thumping in my ears. There was something partially blocking her front teeth, a sliver of purple.
I’d bet my hands it was a foxglove.
Cold raced underneath my skin until it consumed every inch, until my toes and fingers went numb. I wanted to be wrong about that deer being the beginning of something. God, did I want to be wrong.
I could already hear what the locals would say. They’d blame it on a drifter, some outsider who deserved to be hunted down and taken out like a rabid coyote. Hell, if it had to be someone, I wanted it to be an anonymous psycho, too.
But this didn’t feel anonymous. It felt close and suffocating, like a warm, unwelcome whisper in my ear.
Most of us were warned about foxgloves as kids, the elegant, vibrant flowers that grew along the beaches and in the woods. Look…but don’t touch. We all heard the tale about the young girls who used them to make “fairy stew,” hoping it would give them magical powers.
Instead, they never woke up.
Monday, June 30
You don’t know it yet, but I’m taking everything away from you. One day soon you’re going to wake up and your life, your whole big bright future, will be gone. I will never forgive you.
Chapter Twelve
All day at the diner, people said her name in whispers and hushed voices. As if it were disrespectful to say it out loud. As if she’d come back from the dead and haunt them.
A couple photographers on their honeymoon found her. They were probably taking pictures of the morning sun hitting the waves or kissing like fools. Now they had to live with that image for the rest of their lives. Just like I did.
Local stations were spinning a different headline every news hour. Missing Teen Found Dead on Oregon Coast. Medical Examiner Confirms Amber Connelly Strangled.
They think she was killed sometime early Sunday morning. The thought made me crazy—where was she for the last week?
They called her a bright girl who wanted to be a Broadway singer. Her friends said she was known for her big voice, but she had an even bigger heart. The latest update online quoted her friend Holly Chapman. “She was my rock. She was my best friend.”
Only “good” girls were murdered, if you believed the TV—which most people did. In a day’s time, Amber had become a saint, like every other pretty white girl who turned up dead. Maybe some of them were saints. But Amber wasn’t. She was the one who laughed the loudest at every insult. The one who earned Alex’s trust and lured him to the beach that night.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel, but I couldn’t forgive her just because she was dead. Maybe that made me a bad person.
She sure as hell didn’t deserve this, her last moment captured and shown to the world, her face drawn on like she passed out drunk at a party. That sloppy red smile was there every time I closed my eyes.
Gramps, Mom, Gavin, and I were huddled around our dinky kitchen table, everyone but Gavin picking at our undercooked pizza crust. Vista served two kinds of pizza—doughy or burned. Tonight was our family night, one of the few nights none of us worked at the diner…or ate food from the diner. Sometimes we’d play poker. Sometimes we’d watch a cheesy movie just to make fun of it. An obnoxious amount of laughter was guaranteed.
Not tonight.
The six o’clock news was on, and they were talking about Amber again. They hadn’t really ever stopped.
An image of Steve De Luca filled the screen. The Inn at Emerald Cove sign towered behind him, the cursive green lettering demanding attention. He was dressed in a suit, his salt-and-pepper hair slicked back. A lot of women in town gushed over his blue eyes, but I found them cold. Predatory.
He probably did everything he could to set this interview up. A few tourists were already packing up and leaving, running back to cities where murders were a weekly or daily event. But as Gramps said, the rules were different in someone else’s backyard.
“We’re a small community,” Steve said. “A lot of us knew Amber. She was a friend of my daughter’s.”
She hated your daughter, I wanted to scream as he went on to express his condolences to Amber’s family.
“Emerald Cove has always been a very safe place,” he continued. “We watch out for each other here. I know this tragedy will make us stronger and more vigilant. In turn, Emerald Cove will be safer than ever, for residents and visitors.”
Translation: Stay put and keep spending your mo
ney, tourists. We’ll do our best to make sure you don’t get murdered.
They cut to a Neahkahnie County Sheriff spokesperson, a younger guy who looked a little awkward in front of the mic. He squinted in the sunlight, as if he’d been locked in a dark room all day.
“Can you tell us if this is a random act?” a reporter asked.
“We’re exploring different options. That’s all I can say right now.”
What kind of answer was that? You explored college options. Job options. Not murder options. Clearly they had nothing.
“Is this connected to the recent animal mutilations in the area?”
“That’s a possibility we’re looking into.” No, it was a certainty.
“I wish you’d turn that crap off,” Gramps said, looking in the direction of our TV in the living room.
“I wanted to see if the news had any updates,” Mom said, as the tip line flashed on the screen.
“News? That’s not news.” His bushy brows furrowed. “That’s a goddamn made-for-TV movie.”
Gramps had been anti media for as long as I could remember. “Sensationalism keeps us neutered and spending,” he always said.
Mom shut her eyes. “Dad…”
“Hey, Grandpa?” Gavin asked. He was practicing the dovetail shuffle with a deck of cards.
“Don’t dad me. If you want to know what’s really going on, go outside!” Gramps spread his arms wide. “Take a walk. Look around. Listen.”
Mom let her fork fall against her plate. “With a psycho out there? Great idea.”
“Grandpa,” Gavin said louder. “Watch.”
“It’s broad daylight right now,” Gramps said. “You think someone’s gonna chase you down the street with a chain saw? You watch too much news.”
A small part of me wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t. It didn’t seem so ridiculous now. Not after everything I’d seen lately. I was starting to question everyone’s sanity. Even my own.
“I’m glad you can shrug this off,” Mom said, her eyes meeting mine.
I knew what she was thinking. It could’ve been me. She kept asking questions about Zach, if he had a temper, if he’d ever made me feel uncomfortable.