You Can Never Tell

by Sarah Warburton

  Half an hour later, Dad came back with a cooler and a wheeled suitcase. “Where should I put this?”

  “Let Kacy and Grace have Molly’s room. We’ll sleep on the futon.”

  “Mom, I’m up and down a lot in the night. Why don’t you and Dad take the bedroom?”

  “We’ll be fine out here for a few nights. Not another word.” My mother put her hand over mine, either to comfort me or to make me stop messing with the crocheted blanket.

  And that was the end of the discussion. I felt simultaneously irritated and adored.

  * * *

  As I huddled alone under the covers in a bed that sagged too much in the center, Grace’s rhythmic wheezing put me to sleep, but my dreams were fractured scenes of running through empty rooms in terror.

  I woke with a start, disoriented. Apparently, my sleep problems weren’t something I could leave behind in Texas. The slight scent of patchouli and dust pervaded the room. Molly had been on tour for almost a month, and little things—a spider web in the corner of the bathroom, a whiff of mold by the refrigerator—made me feel her absence even more. She was probably crashing on the sofa of a friend of the band or sharing a dingy motel room with three other people. And Michael must be alone in some spartan bed with nothing to distract him but his own fears. Even my parents were sleeping on a crappy futon instead of their own four-poster with its pillow-top mattress. No one was snug in their own home.

  Grace was stirring, making little sounds. If I nursed her now, she would probably drift off without waking my parents. She ate quickly, without opening her eyes, and before half an hour had passed, I was placing her back in the crib.

  But I was brutally awake.

  The television was in the other room. I hadn’t brought any earbuds, and the sound on my phone might wake Grace up. My fingers itched for movement, something to tear and fold, something to do. And Molly hadn’t left so much as a spare scrap of paper where I could find it.

  So I pulled up a game, swiping colored squares on my phone with the sound off, hoping the repetition would put me back to sleep. But whether it was the light from the screen or the mild competitive thrill I got from winning, the endorphin rush of doing it over and over again, I was getting further and further from sleep.

  An old impulse pulled at me, born from the dark, the phone in my hand, the feeling that what I did here in this strange space didn’t matter. I opened up Aimee’s social media accounts. Her Twitter hadn’t been updated for a couple of days and included just a cryptic quote designed to make her sound deep: Life is the Medium; Living is the Art. Her Instagram featured an artfully arranged photo of a coffee shop I knew well, one right around the corner from the museum. The filter was set to blur everything except the close-up of a mug of coffee—which I knew was black with cinnamon—and a folded arts page of the paper over the caption Old School Monday Morning. Almost a week out of date.

  Then on Facebook, I struck gold. A story was still up, something she had to have posted within the last twenty-four hours. Aimee at a club, leaning against the bar, cocktail in hand, between two people with their backs to the camera. Her angled bob was a little shorter, her lipstick a little darker, and her pose was a little overly theatrical. There was the time stamp. Four hours ago.

  I waited for the bitter taste of envy or anger, but that poison seemed to have drained away. Even those postcards were almost quaint, relics of a bygone relationship, designed to hurt me with paper darts in a world where real bullets had grazed my head.

  But I still kept flipping back to the story over and over, until finally I just took a screenshot and enlarged the picture. Was that also a club I’d been to? Was Aimee still living the same life she’d been before—same breakfast, same museum, same lover, same cocktail in the same nightclub? Despite myself, even though I didn’t want her friendship anymore, I did feel another lingering pang for those glittering nights when it seemed like we might live forever. This picture was full of purple, pink, gold, all the vibrant colors of a fairy carnival, and the people in the photo … I squinted, my pulse quickening.

  On one side of Aimee was a young, dark-haired guy in a white shirt leaning over the bar to place an order. On the other side, a woman, also in a white shirt, also with dark hair, also with her back to the camera, was looking off the side, so that she and the man made a perfect frame for Aimee in her sapphire sheath. But something was sparking my memory, something about the edge of that woman’s face, her hair—the wrong color but the right texture—a certain out-of-placeness to her.

  I was paranoid, seeing Lena everywhere.

  I dismissed the picture and switched back to my game, but no matter how I tried to focus my attention on the flashing shapes, I lost over and over. It was four o’clock in the morning after a day of travel with a newborn. I just wanted this to be over, and that was why I’d thought I’d seen Lena. I’d conjured her out of my head.

  I couldn’t stand it. I opened the picture again just to be sure. Aimee kept smiling, confident and polished, next to maybe-Lena. Maybe just another anonymous city girl, slightly awkward in her pressed white shirt. Maybe a cocktail waitress at the bar or an off-work hostess.

  If I’d still had my old phone with all my old contacts, would I have texted Aimee and warned her? Maybe she had other pictures from the bar, ones she’d rejected before she posted this one, ones that would dispel the illusion, revealing a more narrow nose, a heart-shaped face, a woman younger or older or just other than Lena.

  I needed a second opinion, from someone who wouldn’t judge me. Michael had enough to worry about. I had to keep any additional burdens away from him. Like I’d said to him in the voice mail message, Grace and I were good, we were hidden away, and my parents were looking after us. Safe and snug, that’s what we were. Not post-stalking one ex-friend and hallucinating another.

  I was caught in a state of suspension, torn between what I thought I’d seen and what I knew. My whole body was buzzing.

  Nobody I knew would be awake now, but sending a text would be okay. Anybody worried about being woken up would have their phone on silent.

  Holding my breath, I sent the picture separately to Elizabeth, Alondra, and to Rahmia.

  No explanation. No commentary about who Aimee was or how I’d found this or even a Didn’t want to bother you, but … I didn’t want to cloud their judgment or color their response. I just sent the picture and the words What do you think about the woman on the right? A puzzle I couldn’t solve alone.

  In only a couple hours, Grace would be awake again. My eyes were dry and tired from staring so hard at the screen in the dark. Hitting send seemed to have sent my worry out into the ether. It would be waiting for me in the morning.

  C2C TRANSCRIPT

  12

  Helen: Investigators are looking for Lena in Texas. They’ve reinterviewed the aunt—

  Julia: The one she was supposedly visiting.

  Helen: And they’re not buying her “my niece wasn’t supposed to visit, I never saw her, this is all a total shock” story. They start pulling footage from traffic cams, and lo and behold, there’s Lena’s car on the interstate the night before everything blows up with Brady and the neighbor.

  Julia: So he didn’t kill her.

  Helen: Nope. And all he would have had to do was not kill anyone else or at least not invite anyone else into a crime scene until she got back. But he screwed that up.

  Julia: If he wasn’t in jail, she’d probably have killed him. I might have.

  Helen: Seriously. So the cameras also show her driving back towards Sugar Land, presumably to abandon her car by the Brazos. But after that, there’s no trace of her. She’s got cash, access to properties under construction all over Houston, and nobody knows what she plans to do next. She could just disappear, start a new life as someone else.

  Julia: Kill more people.

  Helen: Maybe. When you look back at her life, there were a number of deaths even when she was young. A local kid drowned in a creek, a great-uncle fell down
the stairs.

  Julia: If you look far enough back in anyone’s life, there are some deaths.

  Helen: The most suspicious one is a neighbor from the year before she met Brady, a young woman found dead in her apartment below Lena’s.

  Julia: Dead in her apartment like Lena and Brady’s neighbor was found dead in his house?

  Helen: What?

  Julia: Both living alone, both found dead from a slip and fall, and both living next door to Lena.

  Helen: Damn, I think you could be right. But without a confession, I don’t see how they’d ever prove this. But it all adds up. You have to wonder if those neighbors saw something or knew something—

  Julia: So they were “business” kills, while the ones she and Brady did and recorded were for fun?

  Helen: If you add up the victims we think Lena killed on her own and the victims she and Brady killed together, the number jumps to serious double digits.

  Julia: We might never know how many she really killed, because she didn’t hack them up, like, “Look over here, y’all. These are some murder victims!” She was sneaky.

  Helen: And the victims she and Brady chose were so random, so dissimilar from each other, that it seems deliberate.

  Julia: No way Lena would let Brady accidentally kill two white teenage runaways instead of just one.

  Helen: So she was hard to predict. Her early crimes, if they were crimes, were opportunistic ways to get rid of people she knew, while the later ones were highly planned, but the victims were random. Only the timing—six months apart—was regular.

  Julia: So now that the pattern was disrupted, would she keep killing solo? Would she feel compelled to keep killing someone at the six-month mark? Or would she go back to sneaky kills whenever she felt like it? Had Brady messed up the whole system? Would she blame Michael and come after him? How many people would Lena kill?

  Helen: Take a breath, honey. We’ll get to everything.

  CHAPTER

  23

  WHEN I WOKE, Grace wasn’t in her crib and sunlight was streaming into the basement windows around the edges of the woven bamboo blinds. I sat up, calling out, “Mom?”

  I could hear my parents’ voices in the other room, and then my father crooning in his talking-to-a-baby voice. They had Grace. Everything was okay.

  Swiping the sleep from my eyes, my head still heavy, I glanced around the room. No clock. I picked up my phone to check the time, and texts were waiting, even though it was an hour earlier in Texas. I had a reply from Elizabeth and another from Alondra. Nothing from Rahmia, but it was a weekend, and she probably hadn’t gotten up with Emir yet.

  Alondra’s read What am I looking at?

  I answered: The woman with her back to the camera. Lena?

  Her reply took just seconds: Don’t see it. Will forward to police. Stay put.

  Then I opened Elizabeth’s: Is that Lena? Where are you?

  Not my picture. Saw online.

  Did you send it to the police?

  Alondra’s on it.

  Do you know the other woman, the one next to her?

  Yes, from a long time ago.

  You should warn her.

  If I warned Aimee, would she even believe me? Then I thought about the postcard Lena had sent. Working on another surprise for you.

  A year ago, I might have jumped at the chance for Aimee to be beholden to me. She’d be in danger, I’d save her life, and then she’d confess everything and clear my name. But now I hesitated. I could pretend I was wrong about the picture, that the postcard meant nothing. But I wanted Elizabeth to think I was a good person. No, more than that, I wanted to be a good person.

  I will. I’d warn Aimee, I would. But even as I typed my answer into the phone, my skin prickled. What if I was too late?

  In the gritty light of morning, I went back to Aimee’s page. She hadn’t posted anything new, but the story was still there, time-stamped seven hours ago. Lena could have done a lot in seven hours.

  I enlarged my copy of the photo again. The woman with her face turned away from the camera looked like Lena. But was she really? Even though nearly two years had gone by, Aimee was definitively herself. No question, positive identification, that was the bitch who’d wrecked my life. But the woman next to her was like a police artist’s sketch. My head was comparing her height, her hair, her build and not coming up with a conclusive answer. Yet my body tensed with certainty. Wherever the police thought Lena was, I believed she was here.

  I slid out of bed, dropped the phone on my pillow, and started throwing on clothes. None of the victims I’d heard about on the news had a personal connection to Lena or to Brady. Maybe that had made me feel strangely safer, as though our relationship would keep me alive, but that was stupid. Killing random people instead of neighbors was just another way of not getting caught. It was calculated, not compassionate.

  And I couldn’t shake TXSally808’s suspicion. If Lena and Brady had killed the man who’d previously owned our home, there was something different about it. Not just that it was personal, petty, a violent reaction to a few HOA complaints. The other crimes, the ones getting publicity, were splashy, obvious murders. This other one had been stealthy, carefully orchestrated to look like an accident. So sad. Could have happened to anyone. Just like …

  My stomach clenched, bile rising.

  Just like Sandy.

  No. But even as I tried to reject the idea, my mind kept whispering. Lena was working on her house. Lena hated her. Lena was so much taller and stronger than Sandy. Sandy was threatening not to pay Lena, was going to badmouth her business.

  A second death in our neighborhood, another older person living alone dead from an apparent slip and fall. A person who just happened to have had a run-in with Lena.

  I’d still been hoping, somewhere deep inside, that Lena had been an accomplice, afraid or cowed or under Brady’s spell. Because I could see her standing at the doorway with a pitcher of margaritas, still feel the freedom when she hurled a glass in solidarity, still somehow credited her with lifting the depression I’d been under. And she wasn’t dead, but now I didn’t know if that was better or worse. Because she was absolutely a killer. She knew my maiden name, so I couldn’t let my parents go back to their house again. She knew I’d been fired from the Martina V. Umana. And she knew how badly Aimee had hurt me.

  My phone vibrated with another incoming text. I scooped it up. This one was from Rahmia, with a link to a local news story.

  I clicked on it, and a rushing sound filled my ears.

  The story, titled “Army Veteran’s Struggles End in Tragedy,” was an in-depth profile of one of the victims, Marcus Fontenot, an older man in a military jacket. The pullout quote from one of the man’s daughters read, “We never stopped looking for him, trying to bring him home for good.”

  I knew that man. In the photo, he was standing against a pale-blue background in a professional photographer’s studio. But I could still see him half in shadow, no medals on his distressed green jacket, a jacket that was too warm for the Houston humidity, even in the shade of the underpass.

  And then I shuddered with a cold that radiated outward from my bones. I’d seen him with Lena. Not with Brady, just with Lena. She’d noticed his army jacket. I’d given him my tacos. His eyes had looked so much like my father’s.

  He’d been slaughtered.

  I read the words dismembered and decapitated and disposed, horror blurring the screen of my phone. This man, the man I’d seen with Lena, had been carved into pieces and discarded in the bayou. He was dead, worse than dead. Had I drawn Lena’s attention to him? Maybe I was the reason she’d plucked him from the street.

  My phone vibrated again with another text from Rahmia: Be safe. She’s dangerous.

  Shaking, my stomach roiling, I sat down on the edge of the bed. Lena was dangerous, I knew that; some part of me had always known that. Wasn’t that why I’d wanted her on my side? Wasn’t that the feeling she’d given me, that I was powerful, could be danger
ous too? I’d been so scared—of Aimee, what she’d said, what people would think, what people might post. Now all that seemed like playground gossip.

  And my friendship with Lena left me feeling like an accomplice.

  Working on another surprise for you.

  What surprise? My baby shower hadn’t been a surprise. Maybe the baby monitor she’d given me? But that was naïve. I turned the phone over and over in my hands. Another surprise. Was Sandy the first surprise? She was the only person in Texas I’d had any trouble with, but I’d never wished her dead. Had Lena seen something in me that made her think I longed for violence? No amount of bitchiness meant Sandy deserved to die naked and alone in a pool of her own blood.

  A sob built in my throat, but I tried to choke it down. I didn’t want my parents to hear.

  If Lena thought Sandy deserved death, her next surprise must be Aimee.

  Lena might have sliced Aimee up and murdered her on a whim. For a hot second, I almost burned with something like joy. All that agony over, my tormentor dead. But the feeling was gone in a flash, leaving me sick to my stomach. Revenge was one thing, wanting vindication or restitution, but death was something else, something vile and permanent, a stain on the new life I was building, an affront to the joy I had in Grace. If I really was brave, if I really was strong, I couldn’t just cower in this basement and let bad things happen to someone else.

  Even someone I thought I hated.

  Alondra was notifying the police. Nobody here would be convinced by an almost-out-of-frame profile on a screenshot from a social media story. And Aimee wouldn’t be convinced by a simple message from me. If I just knew she was alive, maybe that would be enough.