by Rachel Rust
“Arthur Kellen,” I said. “Mr. Kellen died?”
“Appears so,” my dad said.
Mr. Kellen, the government teacher who had paired Eddie and me up for our assignment two weeks ago, had never been my favorite teacher. In fact, he had probably been my least-favorite educator in all four years of high school. But my heart felt a severe twinge of pain at seeing his name and photo in the paper. He was dead. Gone. Just like that.
I scanned the obit. …Arthur Kellen, beloved husband and father, died in his home…
“Was he sick?” I asked.
My dad shrugged. “Not sure. Could be a heart attack or stroke. Something that happened quickly at home, before he could get to a hospital.”
He took the paper back from me, folded it up, and placed it on the desk. “You okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just weird is all.”
Weird indeed. The teacher who had paired Eddie and me up together for a school project suddenly died just two weeks after our study date from hell? I shook my head. People died every day. I mean, Mr. Kellen was old. It was probably a heart attack. The stress of teaching high school had finally gotten the better of him.
“How many people die of heart attacks and strokes each year?” I asked.
“Hundreds of thousands. Both are, unfortunately, very common.”
I nodded with relief. Very common. Nothing weird at all.
My dad and I exchanged “goodnights,” and I slipped out of the office before he could lecture me on the loss of life, or the benefits of sharing my feelings. I really didn’t need to ‘talk about’ my feelings of Mr. Kellen’s death.
As soon as I was in my room, I snatched the manila envelope from under my bed. I fell onto my mattress and brought Eddie’s name up on my phone again, wondering how many times in a row I could call him before it seemed too stalkerish. I considered calling again right that moment, but decided to wait one hour. It seemed like a reasonable time frame to prove I wasn’t too obsessive. Not totally, anyway.
I dropped the phone onto my mattress and rolled on my side, squishing my pillow up against my head. My eyes closed, and the day’s events flashed through my head. The photos. The boxes of clothes. Luke’s eye rolls as I messed up a credit card scan. Shawn’s face when I had asked for an escort to my car. Mr. Kellen’s grainy photo in the newspaper.
I thought about Brandon with the blue eyes. Who was he, and how did he fit into all of this? My conversation with him at the store ran through my head over and over again. His voice. His eyes. His model-like looks.
I crossed my arms over my face, wondering if I was going crazy. Maybe Brandon didn’t fit in at all and really had been shopping for his mom. Maybe in a state of hot-guy-induced dementia I had told Brandon my name and just didn’t remember doing so. Maybe Mr. Kellen had a bad heart and just didn’t wake up one morning.
Maybe my nerves were finding suspicions where there were none.
As the noise in my head faded and sleep crept in, my phone vibrated against my back. My eyes flew open and I sat straight up. Eddie’s name was on the phone screen.
Just breathe.
With a shaking hand, I answered.
Chapter Five
I placed the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Natalie, it’s Eddie.”
My heart raced as the rest of me melted. His voice was so familiar, and images of him flashed vividly in my mind. Dark-brown eyes fringed with black lashes, most likely from his father’s Mexican roots. His messy brown hair, which shouted to the world that he was too cool to care. A crooked smile that tugged on the outer corners of his eyes.
The very sound of him—the very idea that he was on the phone with me in that moment—made the stress of the day melt away. Two weeks ago, he had protected me from far worse things than two pictures in the mail. He could make these go away, too. He could make sense of the photos and make things better. Just like he had before.
“Hey Eddie,” I said with a casual voice, not wanting to seem too eager. “How are you?”
“Fine,” he said matter-of-factly. “What did you need?”
“Um… I received something in the mail that I thought you should know about. And then just tonight someone put an anonymous letter in my car with a square of aluminum foil that has some kind of drug residue on it.”
I read the handwritten note to him and there was a long pause.
“Okay. You said something else came in the mail. Who was that from?”
“There’s no return address.” I held the envelope with the open side down and the two photos slipped out onto the mattress. “They’re photos.”
“Photos of what?”
“Not of what, but of whom.” I paused for a reaction, for a question, for any hint that his curiosity had been piqued and that he was taking a great interest in this conversation. But he said nothing. “There are two photos,” I continued. “The first one is of me walking out of Little Bobby’s house.”
I paused again, hoping Eddie would have an intriguing thing to say about this. But the only sound from him was a sigh. A quick, annoyed sigh. Impatient even. As an FBI agent, he probably had more exciting things to discuss than pictures of me walking out of a drug house.
Except, he had been part of an FBI task force specifically created to take down The Barber and his associates, to put a dent in the massive drug, gun, and human-trafficking ring between Denver and Minneapolis. Surely, any information—even two glossy photos and a stupid note—would be pertinent to their mission.
“You said there were two photos. What’s the other one of?”
The image of him kissing me stared back from my mattress. It had happened right after we turned in our completed assignment at school—after Eddie had pretended to be Victor one last time in order to save my 4.0 grade point average, and my full academic scholarship to Columbia.
The lip lock had been a great moment. The best kiss I ever had. Not because he was twenty-three—an older, exciting man—but because I had known in that moment that he cared about me. He had respected me, and the things I had overcome that night—life-threatening obstacles, as well as saving my academic future. So much of my life had been spent proving to both my dad and myself that I was worthy of respect with my grades and hard work, or dealing with Josh’s daily jabs, or dealing with other guys’ immature taunting that they evidently mistook for flirting. But Eddie had been kind to me that day on the gravel road. He had appreciated me for who I was, flaws and all.
I picked up the photo of us. “The second picture is of both of us…”
Kissing.
The word stuck in my throat. Would he even remember that he had kissed me? So far during this phone conversation he hadn’t said much. He hadn’t even asked how I was doing or how my summer was going. My heart began racing again, but not out of excitement—out of the gut-aching realization that maybe I had played this whole thing up to be a bigger deal than it really was. I was about to remind Eddie of our kiss … a kiss he might not have even cared about.
“Us what?” he asked, his impatience coming through loud and clear.
“It’s a picture of you and me, out on the gravel road south of town … kissing.” I clenched my face, waiting for a response. Would he get angry? Would he soften up and finally speak to me with kindness like he had back on that day?
After a length of silence, he finally replied, “Bring everything to the Rapid City PD.”
I waited for more, but that was it. That was all he had to say.
“The police?” I asked, just to fill the awkward silence.
“Yes. They’ll take it from here.”
“Don’t you, like, need a copy or anything?”
“We’ll get one from them.”
His voice was rushed. Business-like. As if he were speaking to a girl he had never met before, and not one he had kissed. And it’s not like he could deny kissing me. There was photographic proof he had kissed me. Although that suddenly brought up a whole new crop of concerns.
“Y
ou’re not going to get fired or anything are you?” I asked.
“For what?”
My jaw went slack. For what? Was he serious? My cheeks flushed. For kissing me, you asshole! I took a deep breath. “For the kiss in the picture.”
“No,” he said with a slight huff of a laugh, the first indication that he hadn’t turned into a robot since I saw him last. “If agents got fired for occasionally kissing someone, there’d be a lot less agents.”
His flippant words jabbed into my belly like a knife …for occasionally kissing someone. Had I been one of these occasional kisses? Maybe kissing me had just been one last hurrah for him, after nabbing The Barber.
Get the bad guy. Kiss the girl. Job well done.
I hadn’t been anything to him after all. Just some dumb eighteen-year-old with a pretty face and a convenient set of lips. Thank God, we hadn’t spent any more time out on that gravel road. Who knows what other body parts I might have let him say good-bye to.
“I’m sorry I bothered you,” I said. My words came out more terse than planned, but I didn’t care. He didn’t seem to give a shit about what happened between us, so why should I?
“It wasn’t a bother,” he said. “But hand the photos over to the police. Ask for Detective Wilson.”
“Okay.” I wrote Det Wilson on the flap of the manila envelope.
“And, Natalie?”
Through my anger and anguish, my heart lifted, once again full of optimistic hope that Eddie from two weeks ago was still going to make an appearance. This was it. He was finally going to ask me how I was doing, or maybe tell me that he had been thinking about me.
“Yes?” I asked, heart fluttering.
“If you receive any more photos, just go ahead and give them to the detective.”
And like that, my optimism shattered onto the ground. The emptiness it left behind quickly filled with anger, resentment, and sorrow. He didn’t want me to call him again. I received his message loud and clear: Go straight to the police next time, and don’t bother the busy FBI agent who has more important matters to tend to.
“Okay,” I squeaked out, barely able to contain the sob of heartache that yearned to break free from my throat.
“Is there anything else?” Eddie asked.
“Um…” I scrambled for a topic—anything to keep him on the phone with me. “Did you hear about Mr. Kellen? He died a couple of days ago.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Do you think it’s weird? I mean, he paired us together for that assignment, and now he’s dead?”
There was a long pause. “People die, Natalie. Arthur Kellen was old.”
His coarse words grated on me. People die? That’s seriously his only response?
“Is there anything else?” he asked again.
I shook my head, but God, yes, there was so much more I needed to say. I wanted to yell at Eddie for being such a jackass, and for not saying that he missed me and wanted me the way I wanted him. For not spending even a few minutes asking me how things were going, how my graduation went, and if I was excited for New York.
But I didn’t say any of it. I only said, “No. That’s it.”
He grunted an, “okay,” and ended the call.
My phone fell to my bed as I struggled to hold back the tears that threatened to waterfall down my cheeks. Who had that been on the phone? He was not the same Eddie I thought I knew. Eddie from two weeks ago would have cared about the note. He would’ve been pissed that someone was messing with me. He would have been concerned about me and my academic future. But apparently that guy didn’t exist anymore.
With a numb mind, I walked to the bathroom, where I stripped myself of my clothing and got into a too-hot shower. As the water fell, so did my tears. I preferred crying in the shower. No one could hear me, and my sadness went down the drain where it needed to stay.
I had been an idiot for thinking Eddie had any interest in me. He was an actual adult, and I was still clawing my way into adulthood.
Right there, surrounded by water and steam, I decided that if Eddie didn’t want to talk to me, then I wasn’t going to talk to him either. I could find my own way around New York City in the fall. Screw him.
Chapter Six
I left early for work the next day, with a planned detour to the police station. The officer at the front desk was a woman about my height with blonde hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. “What can I help you with?”
I held up the manila envelope. “I’m supposed to drop these off for Detective Wilson.” I had never met or spoken to anyone at the station by the name of Wilson, so I watched with curiosity if the name rang a bell with the officer in front of me. She didn’t react one way or another. Police were weird people. Most seemed to have no emotions whatsoever.
She asked me to open the envelope. I did and showed her the two pictures, the note and the square of aluminum—hoping to hell I wasn’t about to get arrested for bringing drug paraphernalia into a cop shop.
“Okay,” is all she said, motioning for me to slip the envelope through the small slit in the bulletproof glass. She grabbed the envelope placed it inside a large, clear bag, and then stapled a yellow sheet to the corner. “Your name?”
“Natalie Mancini.”
She scribbled it on the yellow paper. “A phone number where you can be reached?”
I rattled off my number and she wrote it. Though I knew full-well the police station had all my contact information already. Maybe this officer didn’t know who I was, but plenty of other cops did. Natalie Mancini was probably known as “that girl,” the one who had survived The Barber and his straight razor.
Under my name and phone number, the officer wrote Det. Wilson. “Okay, I’ll be sure she gets it.”
“Thank you,” I said and turned to leave, eager to get back out into the fresh air and away from law enforcement.
I had never had any issues with cops. Aside from a speeding ticket when I was sixteen, my only interaction with police had been when Eddie and I had captured The Barber and his associates. That night had brought out a lot of police action. Everyone wanted my story … local cops, FBI, DEA. Some plain-clothed people who had some fancy badges of some kind or another. I wasn’t even entirely sure who I had all talked to.
It had been nearly a week since anyone had contacted me about that night. I was hopeful they had gathered all needed information by now, and they wouldn’t bother me anymore. Until the trials—at which time I would need to be brought back in, to prepare as a witness. But I had been told the trials were months away, maybe even a year or more. One of the police officers had told me to live my life as normal as possible and not stress about future events. I tried, and some days that advice stuck, others it didn’t.
My name hadn’t been printed in the media, kept confidential, given the high-status nature of the crime. But local people buzzed about me anyway. During the last two days of high school, some people had pieced together bits of information, though I waved their scarily-correct assumptions about that night as nothing more than rumor. As if straight-A, rule-abiding Natalie Mancini would have been running around all night with drug dealers. Yeah, right.
At work, I was only scheduled for a half day. I redressed the mannequins in the front window, which was more awkward and difficult than I had imagined. By the time I managed to weave the rigid arms of the second mannequin through the openings of a cobalt blue tank top, my short shift was up.
I grabbed my things, said good-bye to Angela, and ignored Luke’s side-eyed glare.
I considered asking Shawn for another escort to my car, but there was no sign of him in the hallways. But there was no Brandon with the blue eyes either, and it was the middle of the day—what could happen in broad daylight? So I walked myself through Macy’s and then into the glaring June sunlight.
The day had grown warm and muggy since I arrived that morning. I sloughed off my short-sleeved cardigan, leaving myself in only a black tank top with skinny jeans. The tank top was skimpy, ma
de from a thin material with only spaghetti straps supporting the top. It barely came down to the top of my jeans, and with each step, the bottom hem rode up, showing off a sliver of my stomach to anyone paying attention.
And there was someone paying attention.
Two cars up, a pair of blue eyes watched me walk their way. My feet lurched to a stop. Brandon leaned against the hood of a small black car. His lip curled when he realized I saw him. My car was parked in the same aisle, but about ten spaces farther down. I had to pass by him to get to my car. He was between me and my exit.
There was movement inside the car he leaned against—someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. The window rolled down, and a long, lean hand with red fingernails flicked a cigarette onto the asphalt. Before she rolled up the window, our eyes connected.
I knew her. Or at least I had seen her before and my stomach plummeted when I realized where I had met her.
She had been at the drug dealer’s house two weeks ago—the night the secretly-taken picture had captured me in the short black dress and red heels. The night I had been kidnapped and held at gun point. I didn’t know her name, but I knew she kept bad company.
I shuffled my feet backward and Brandon’s smile widened. He didn’t seem surprised by my movement away from him, which scared me even more. I grabbed my phone from my pocket. Brandon’s smile dropped and he shook his head slowly back and forth. He didn’t want me making any phone calls.
But screw him.
I contemplated calling 911, or even Detective Wilson. But what would I say about this situation? There wasn’t time to explain who the woman in the car was. I dialed someone else instead. Someone who would know exactly who the woman was and why I was fearful of her presence.
Eddie.
But Eddie didn’t pick up. By the time his phone rang five times, Brandon was walking my way. Eddie’s voicemail picked up and I whispered, “Eddie, it’s Natalie! I’m in the parking lot at the mall and there’s a man after me! He’s with one of the women from Little Bobby’s house and—”