“Do you think he could really hunt down who killed her?” I asked Harry. Before he answered, I thought, if anyone could solve a cold case, it would be Graham.
Harry returned a record to its sleeve. “Identifying the bad people in the world isn’t the same as busting them. Graham finds out who this guy is, then what? You heard him—we’re going after bad guys and we’d have the worst one.”
I sunk lower against the bed. Knowing would be dangerous. I ached to know, nonetheless.
24
We gathered at Graham’s that evening. He met Harry and me at the front door, took the pizza box from my hands, and smiled easily. But his gray eyes were as elusive as shadows. Viv was already there, lying on the sofa, her boots hooked over the sofa back, her hair tapering to the carpet.
“It’s about time,” she grumbled, hoisting herself up, teetering with a red face to take the pizza from Graham.
She led the way into the attic, the box ajar, a piece hanging from between her teeth.
Graham’s mother had a collection of artifacts that would have made a museum drool. In addition to her own acquisitions, Stepdads Two, Three, and Four were academics, and because their marriages with Graham’s mom had dissolved as spontaneously as they germinated, had left trunks and crates in the Averbach house.
I haven’t said much about Graham’s mother. This is mostly because she’s a puzzle to me. She was as majestically beautiful as the crowned crane on its dusty mount in her attic. She was the kind of college professor who taught students rarely and traveled on research sabbatical often. From the invitations sent by foreign governments, I had the impression that she was a big deal in her field of nearly extinct civilizations.
In her absence, Graham was curator of the attic museum, with special collections like wood carvings from Papua New Guinea, rare butterflies of the Amazon, and rudimentary agrarian tools from the Jordan River Basin. We weren’t searching the clutter for anything as humdrum as pinned insects.
Stepdad Number Three was a professor of evolutionary biology. Graham was sure he’d left one of his skeletons behind. It was ideal—untraceable to us. I remembered the skeleton as being kept in Graham’s study during Stepdad Number Three’s reign. I had dared Graham to stick his fingers in the eye sockets. He had dared me to kiss it.
Viv drew a smiley face in the snowy layer on a nearby wooden crate. “It’s romantic up here. All the old things.”
“I’m not going to kiss you again, Vivian, no matter how much you hit on me,” Graham said with an impish wink.
Viv pursed her lips at him. “If I want another kiss, I’ll take it. Open the window. It smells like cheese and dust.” Graham took a circuitous route around boxes toward the lone windowpane leaking sunset into the rafters. Its bronze chain allowed a few-inch gap to siphon fresh air inside. Graham whipped a white sheet off of a shrouded table like a magician snatching away a cloth.
“Massage table?” Viv called.
“Hospital gurney,” I guessed.
Graham hopped up on its center and swung his legs. “A Civil War–era autopsy table.”
Viv dropped the leather chest she was holding and yelped as it thudded to her feet, popped open, and freed a rush of jingling coins. Harry fumbled on the floor, trying to stop their rattling and ricocheting with Viv.
Graham leaped off the table. Rather than help he took a lock of my hair between his fingers and tugged. From the floor, I shoved his kneecaps. He was angry, immature, annoying. I wanted to get him alone. To tell him. It was dangerous for Graham to hunt for Goldilocks’s killer, but in the hours since he stormed from Harry’s bedroom, I’d come up with a solution.
Rather than hunt for Goldilocks’s killer, we would force her killer to reveal himself.
Amid the upheaval of boxes and crates, we finished segmenting the rebellions for our initiates.
“I found him—errrr—her?” Harry called from a dark corner of the attic. He lifted the skull from the box.
“Don’t touch it,” Viv said.
“We’ve got to wipe it free of prints anyway,” Graham said.
Viv muttered, “Because it’s gross.”
The skeleton had wires protruding from its bones, but his or her pieces were loose, an anatomical puzzle.
The outside light had dimmed by then and a single, dangling bulb from a rafter illuminated the macabre discovery. Viv nudged the skull with a finger. A minute later she was cradling it in her hand and peering into its eye sockets. “Do you think there’s another skull up here?” she asked. “Because this would be the greatest prop for my Hamlet audition next semester.”
“Ophelia didn’t have a scene with a skull,” Graham told her.
She raised her chin, preparing to be challenged. “I want to audition for Hamlet. A girl Hamlet.”
“That’s brilliant, Vivy,” Harry said.
Graham nodded approvingly. “We’ll find you another skull before then.”
We turned back to appraise the bones in the box.
“What if the initiates—if Amanda—open their first rite and say screw this?” Viv whispered. “They tell everyone everything and we spend the next eight months as pariahs. Doing community service to atone for vandalism.”
“We were outcasts up until a week ago,” I reminded her.
“Ouch,” Harry said teasingly, hands pressed over his heart.
“Kings and queens without a court,” Graham said.
Harry chuckled. “Worry about what’s more probable. Someone smuggled in their cell last night and we’re two minutes away from a video of Graham with the dead bird in his bloody hands going viral.”
He was met with horrified stares. “I’m joking.”
“It’s worth the risk,” I said. “For Goldilocks.”
“For revenge,” Viv murmured.
Graham unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket. Harry read its title over his arm. “ ‘Standards of Data Selection from Human Skeletal Remains: Estimating Sex from the Human Skull.’ ”
“It’s a work sheet I found on an archaeology blog,” Graham said. “See, they break the steps down. You pick which characteristics of the skull match which in these diagrams. Each has a point value and you total the four diagram point values up, and whichever range the sum falls into tells you if the skull’s biologically male or female.” His finger traced the back of the skull and then he referenced the paper. Three more times he studied features of the skull and consulted the work sheet. His lips moved as he tallied up the values in his head.
“She’s a girl,” he proclaimed.
A girl. Like me. Like Goldilocks. Exactly what we needed.
All our rebellions with the initiates would be displays Seven Hills couldn’t look away from. Nightmare-inducing. Perhaps that Goldilocks had been tucked away on our rock, high on its altar so that even the neighbors who stood in the orchard couldn’t see, made her easy to ignore.
Several minutes later in the living room, Graham paced, hair on end, worked up by his fingers. “All six initiates take part in each of our rebellions.”
“What if the initiates won’t follow through?” Viv said.
“They will,” Graham said.
“They just stabbed a dove in the heart,” I reminded them.
“How can we be sure, though?” Viv pressed.
Graham took a deep, considering breath. “One: peer pressure—Amanda and Conner are in. Two: We’ve explained that rebellion and subversion is the mission of the Order. And three: We’ve promised them they’ll benefit from playing along, because they’ll graduate from initiate to member and be able to use the Order’s mischief against whoever they want. Only one out of three of these incentives needs to stick for them to go carry out the rebellions.”
“People do way worse for less,” Harry said quietly on the sofa, a socked foot balanced on his knee, wireless headphones around his neck putting out a wisp of music.
I recognized the incentives Graham described from a book he’d read and shared the year before about how ordinary,
usually kind people were convinced to do crazy things or radicalized to belong to murderous cults. I didn’t comment, not about to draw parallels.
Harry’s finger brushed occasionally, accidentally, against the side of my leg.
Viv dropped the cold pizza crust she’d been gnawing on and said, “Oh my god, brilliant idea. We could get them to do anything. I could make Amanda do embarrassing stuff. Like, why not toss in a few rites that are funny? Stuff the initiates can do at school.” Her shoulders bounced, but her mouth pinching told me it wasn’t as spontaneous as she was pretending.
I wondered, Was this the revenge Viv wanted on Amanda?
Harry’s finger grazed my leg. On purpose. “What do you think?” I asked, turning slightly to him. Brown eyes stirring with thoughts. Bowing pink lips. His finger traveling down my outer thigh. The song playing faintly was familiar. I listened, my shoulder pressing his. My perfect song.
“I’m good with funny or embarrassing rites.” He looked to Viv. “But no going overboard. We have to agree to send only a couple to any given person.” He meant Amanda. “And they can’t distract her or him from the important rites. No unnecessary risks.”
“I am the king of necessary risk,” Graham said from the corner of his mouth.
“We should pick initiates to send them to so they won’t get embarrassing rites on the same day from more than one of us,” I suggested.
I watched Viv casually pick lint from her skirt, lips pursed at the alpaca throw that had shed on her. With an unconcerned smile she said, “Sure. I call Amanda. Oh, I have a good idea for a way to start them off. Can I have Campbell for the first one at least?”
“You guys care who you get?” I asked the boys.
Graham said, “Harry’s earned the right to embarrass Conner. I’ll take Rachel. You want Jess or Trent, Iz?”
“Trent, if I’m picking the person I want to embarrass. I can do Jess too, though.”
I wanted to define the rules more. The when and how. But Viv was chewing on the inside of her cheek, lost in thought. If this was what Viv wanted, how she planned to get her revenge on Amanda, I didn’t want to tie her hands up with rules. I trusted Viv’s judgment; she wouldn’t endanger the Order, but she could be ruthlessly calculating. And so I clapped and said, “That’s that.”
• • •
• • •
It was a few past ten when Harry and I reached my front door.
My key in the deadbolt, hand on the knob, I stopped and turned to him. “I had fun today. With the music. With you.”
He laid his hand over mine. “The beach,” Harry said. “Let’s go.”
I smiled. “Right now?”
He tipped his head and laughed softly. “After school this week. Just us.”
My hand stretched under his, enjoying the cover of his warm fingers. “Definitely.”
I waved at Harry when he turned one last time, a few houses up the street, before he jogged the rest of the way home. Then I stole into the shadows between lampposts.
Graham was framed by the front window under a reading lamp, a book propped on his chest, close to his face. No spectacles or contacts.
He squinted at me as he opened the door. “Forget your cell?”
My finger jumped involuntarily to my lips. “Shhhh.” Paranoid, I looked to the sidewalk. Why? Harry and Viv would be home. No one else would think me at Graham’s suspicious.
I spun him around, gently pushed him inside, and shut the door with nary a click at my back. “Close the drapes. You can see in from the street,” I whispered.
An eyebrow shot up as he asked, “What are we doing that you don’t want people to see? May I make a suggestion?”
“No,” I snapped. I shook my head, frustrated, and went to pull the drapes closed myself.
“You’re weirding me out,” he said with too much amusement for it to be true.
“What if Viv or Harry really did leave a cell and they see me in here when they come back for it?”
“What if?”
“No, Graham. It has to be a secret. I mean, I guess there are a million possible reasons why I’m here and not necessarily the reason I’m really here for.” I paused. “The reason I’m really here for . . . ,” I repeated to myself; shook my head to clear it.
He smiled crookedly. “You seem nervous, Izzie.”
“I don’t think you made eye contact with me the whole night. Not once.” I leveled a finger at him. “And I know I shouldn’t have called you stupid, but you don’t believe I think you’re stupid. Not for a second. Never would you doubt the giant brain sloshing around in your skull. So just stop being a jerk to me already. Don’t ignore me again.”
Hands shoved into his pockets, he shrugged. “Okay.”
He was all eyes now. The knob was cold at my back and I’d started to replay Viv saying, It’s okay to like both of them. It wasn’t. I didn’t. I’d never. “Jesus. Blink or something.”
His face reddened and he kept his voice low, though it warbled, “Stop bossing me around and tell me what you want me to keep secret.”
“Harry and I went to homecoming together and then you walked in on what was our second date today. We were about to kiss and you ruined it. I just want to make sure you know because I haven’t said it aloud to you.” I barely had breath left to squeeze the important part out. “I like Harry.”
His expression was unreadable. “You’re babbling.”
“I like Harry,” I said more emphatically.
His jaw tensed. “Not twenty seconds ago you referenced the enormous brain sloshing around in my skull. You said I wasn’t stupid. You plus Harry. I’ve gleaned it already.”
“Giant. I called it a giant brain. Enormous—that’s just cocky.”
“I am sorry that I interrupted you guys when you were about to hook up.”
“Kiss,” I said, “and don’t apologize.”
His fisted hands rubbed at his eyes. “What is the secret, Izzie?”
The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked five times. I felt each down to my bones.
“Want to find a killer with me?”
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Isadora Anne Pendletona
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Mon., Oct. 21, 12:05 a.m.
Video start.
I. Pendleton sits in her mostly dark bedroom. “It finally happened,” she whispers. “I got home from Graham’s about an hour ago. I thought my parents would be sleeping because they go to bed superearly. Wrong. I was going to the kitchen for water when I saw my dad at the dining room table. In the dark. Just sitting.”
She pauses.
“He said he was sorry for startling me and I asked if everything was okay, even though I knew it must not be. Then he started to cry. I froze at the other end of the table. Waiting. I got all antsy, like I wanted to scream at him to just say it already. He goes, ‘We don’t want you to be worried. Your grandma needed your mom to stay with her a while is all. Nothing specifically wrong with her health. Mom’ll just be gone for the week.’ And I’m like, ‘In Denver?’ He nods and I go, ‘Did you bring her to the airport?’
“He says, ‘No, she took a taxi. You just missed her.’ ” She exhales loudly. “We’ve flown to see Grandma a billion times, and there are so few flights out of Santa Barbara and they’re always during the day. By the time Mom gets to the airport, it’ll be one a.m. It’s a teeny-tiny airport. They don’t have red-eyes. No. If something else wasn’t wrong she would have slept here and left early in the morning. She must have found out about Dad. I can’t think how. Maybe he finally told?”
Her expression wavers between a frown and a smile. “She knows about Dad and Ina and she left. I don’t mean she left me—technically, yeah, but she’ll be back. Obviously. I just mean she didn’t hang around to argue. To let him weasel his way out of trouble. She ran. I guess I’m kind of surprised and proud of her.
“When I got up to my room a little while ago, I call
ed Viv to tell her what I thought had happened. She said her parents were asleep in their room together. She’d gone in and said good night to them when she got home and they were totally normal. She doesn’t think my mom found out about Dad and Ina, because if Mom knew, wouldn’t Viv’s dad have heard too? Wouldn’t he be angry and have left? I don’t know what to think. I guess I’m just relieved it’s not up to us to tell or not tell anymore.”
Video stop.
25
The dark hours of Monday morning saw the delivery of the initiates’ first rites. I kept low as I stole up Trent’s driveway. I was in luck; he’d left his car window cracked open, and I slipped the envelope through the gap. Trent would find both an embarrassing rite and the rite all of the initiates would receive, which added up to our larger rebellion.
I delivered Jess’s rite to her locker at school, my footsteps the only sound echoing through the campus. It fell to Viv, Harry, and Graham to deliver the rest of the instructions clandestinely.
I considered giving Jess two rites, like I gave Trent. But the night to come, revenge for Goldilocks, Mom gone, the embarrassment I planned for Trent, and mine and Graham’s emerging plan took up too much space in my head. And honestly, the more I’d gotten to know Jess, the less I wanted to embarrass her. She was quick-witted, world-weary, and interesting.
There was a vague nagging that deadlines for college applications were coming. Later, I told myself. After, I promised. Once Mom got back I’d write my personal statement and ask her to read it.
The crowd in Cup of Jo was thin; it was early. Chai latte in hand, I went to sit across the street in the gazebo at the center of the knoll. I gave a finger to the founder’s plaque affixed to the right of the short staircase. From the gazebo’s axis all of the town square stores were visible; likewise, all of the stores had a clear shot to the gazebo. I spat a mouthful of chai on the ground. It smelled normal but there was a mysterious bitter taste on my tongue. Bullshit. The nasty taste came from the recording I’d left in our shared folder the night before. Chances were, it was the roses I had delivered to Ina’s clinic from my dad that got them caught. The flowers arrived on a day Ina didn’t work; a curious nurse or doctor must have flipped open the card, and they told someone in a gossipy whisper. It took over a week to reach my mom.
First We Were IV Page 22