Follow Me Down

by Sherri Smith

  In the last several hours while I was waiting, I’d decided that even more than finding Lucas’s body, I wanted him to be absolved of killing Joanna. I wanted it to be known that Kathy ordered her son to kill his sister. I wanted it to be known that Lucas’s murder wasn’t some vigilante reaping but cold-blooded. I wanted Lucas to be restored to his golden-boy status. I wanted everyone in Wayoata to feel terrible that they’d ever doubted it.

  Garrett reached over and squeezed my hand. He looked stricken. His eyes, shiny and bloodshot, fixed on mine. His voice went heavy. “I am sorry, Mia. Really sorry I didn’t do better by you in this investigation.”

  “Just promise me that when you go back in there, you won’t come out until you get some answers.”

  Garrett nodded. “I’m going to use everything you told me before this lawyer Kathy called gets here. I’ll keep you updated. I can text you every hour if that’s what you want, but you need to get some rest. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  * * *

  I left the station, my eyes gluey and dry. Stepped into the bright, stunning morning that made the grief barbing around inside my body so intensely piercing that for a second I thought I might not make it to my car. I could just fall and die there, on the spot.

  Lucas was gone. I was twinless.

  26

  DAY 12

  SUNDAY

  I entered Lucas’s apartment, weak-kneed and in desperate need of something. I needed that ashy feel of a bitter pill between my molars, the taste of something dissolving on my tongue and the anticipation of looming oblivion. I popped three of Alice’s Percocets, and while I waited for them to do their magic, I poured myself a king-sized portion of vodka.

  The sunlight (I couldn’t escape it) coming in between the blinds’ slats slashed light across the coffee table. Across Bailey’s forgotten plate littered with jagged grinning pizza crusts. Balled-up napkins dotted with tomato sauce. Her half-finished can of Coke, backwash coated and grease printed. I flicked open the box of pizza; there was one slice left. That girl had an appetite. The cheese had congealed into a white fleshy skin.

  The smell of it was making me sick. I wanted to clear it all away, but I couldn’t move. I reclined on the couch, my spine creaking out of its curled seated posture, and rolled onto my side. The Coca-Cola’s squiggly “C” hooking into the “L” like a tongue, like a fishhook. My head was going fuzzy.

  Eyes closed, I kept seeing Lucas. An agonizing fusion of nightmare and memory. Lucas submerged in water, his hair a floating wreath around his head, screaming so hard it looked as if the water was boiling in his open mouth. Lucas at seven years old, treading water, his scrawny arms in water wings that buoyed up beside his ears. Lucas in a burial plot, lighting a match over and over that kept going out. Lucas and me riding our jingly bikes. Lucas and me in Mimi’s LeSabre, smoking cigarettes.

  Finally the booze and the pills arrived, arm in arm like shiny partygoers. I slept. Sweet sleep.

  But not for long.

  The sound of knocking, a persistent knuckled drumroll, pierced the heartbeat sound pumping in my ears. Then I heard her. “Mia? Mia, are you in there? Helloooo? You there?”

  Knock, knock.

  Fucking Bailey. I couldn’t lose her.

  I had no plans to open the door. None. Go away.

  “Mia?” The knocking was getting more insistent, harder.

  Go away. I wanted to scream it, but then she’d know I was home and keep knocking.

  Finally silence. I hoped she’d gone away, and I started to drop off again. But then the jangle of keys. I sat upright. The door was opening, the light from the hall spilling into my dim cocoon.

  “What the hell, Bailey? You can’t just come in here. You have no right to do that.” I stood, stumbled off the couch, still in a heavy stupor.

  “You’re home.” She looked startled, standing half inside the apartment.

  “I was sleeping.”

  “Oh.” No apology. She wasn’t leaving.

  “It’s not a good time.”

  “It’s just … I lost my bracelet. Is it here? I think it’s here.”

  “I’ll look for it later.”

  “I can look,” she blurted. Then, baby-voiced, “It’s just really important to me, and with everything going on with my dad…” She trailed off, because she assumed it was enough of an excuse to break in. She took another step inside.

  “Fine, I’ll take a look.”

  “No, really. I can.”

  I ignored her; she needed to be ignored. The bracelet was next to the couch. I picked it up and was about to toss it at her, fling it hard and tell her to leave, but the way it felt in my palm—the silky texture and the color of the threading. Something was wrong with it. I’d felt this before. This silky texture.

  I rolled it between my finger and thumb, back and forth, and some of the threading came loose, and I knew what it was. Hair. Ginger-shaded hair braided up with the embroidery thread. It was the hair coming loose, going fuzzy around the thread. Now that I saw it, I knew.

  I turned around, but Bailey was right on me. I bumped into her. Her face looked suddenly older, nostrils flared, her lower lip bent into a hard, stippled shell. Something was in her hand, and for a two-second beat, I thought she was trying to return Lucas’s electric razor.

  And then something bit into me, a sizzling pulsation. It went on forever. All of my muscles went hard and then slack. I had no control over my body and fell to the ground. I twitched all over, and my heart firebombed against my chest. My vision turned sparkly and sun-red, and I turned inside out.

  I faded in and out. Felt myself being moved.

  * * *

  I was on a dance floor. The one I passed out on when I’d just turned twenty-one and had had too little to eat and too many of whatever I was taking. There I was, flat on my back. No one had stopped dancing. No one tried to wake me up, or even pulled me off to the side. They had just made a little circle around me and kept dancing, and when I woke up, I stayed there for a little while, under those laser lights spinning like spokes, watching everyone lurching and gyrating, all legs and wrists and chins. Fixated by the bizarre angle.

  My eyes fluttered open, not to that dance floor but a food-stained linoleum. My hands were zip-tied tight; another zip tie had been looped through to leash me to the handle of an oven door. My arms felt drained of blood. Duct tape was pinching my mouth. The apartment was like Lucas’s but smaller, a bachelor suite, and I was in the alcove kitchen. On the fridge was the Christmas picture of Lucas, Mimi, and me. Someone had carved X’s into my eyes.

  I looked out into the dim main room. There wasn’t much furniture, just a pullout couch, two lawn chairs, and two substantial speakers throbbing out bass like thunder coursing up the walls, along the floor. I noticed the tinfoil window, and knew I was in the basement of the Terrace.

  Something on the bed moved. Mr. Hideaway flashed in my mind. I tried to stand up and partially managed to get into some kind of half crouch and then I saw him. Lucas. He was turned the other way, facing the silvery window. He was wearing only boxer shorts and a bright blue tie that was tossed over his shoulder. Under the tie was something like a dog’s pinch collar, with a metal chain, leashing him to the metal frame of the pullout. Even from the back, I could see his hair had been freshly gelled into some tousled style. The smell of cologne was overwhelming, badly masking rank body odor and the smell of urine. A bedpan was on the floor nearby.

  Lucas, Lucas, Lucas. Luucaaas. I screamed his name behind the tape.

  I couldn’t tell if he was alive or not. His back was bed-marked red—it wouldn’t be red if he was dead—and then I saw him move. I did. I tried to break away from the stove.

  Lucas.

  The oven door opened, and I slipped, my bare feet skittered against the linoleum. I tried to pull the stove out with me, toggling it side to side. Lucas rolled over and faced me. His mouth was duct-taped too, but drawn in marker on the duct tape was a set of oversized, ruby-red lips. Very worn,
ruby-red lips. Attempts had been made to shave him, because his cheeks were a patchy combination of curly beard and bare skin. His hands were zip-tied behind his back; his feet too. His wrists and ankles were a pulpy mess.

  He shook his head no. His eyes were bloodshot and terror-stricken.

  A door opened somewhere in the apartment. From where I figured the bathroom would be.

  “Oh, fucking great, Bailey, she’s awake. I was hoping she’d just have a stroke or something with her stockpile of pills,” Madison growled, and marched into the middle of the room, hand on hip. She was wearing a sleeveless black blouse like a micro-dress, her tiny waist cinched with a thin plastic belt. A heavy-looking, bauble necklace hung loose around her neck.

  She was not wearing shorts and I caught glimpses of her silky underwear. She finished off her outfit with very spiky red heels that she skittered around on. She looked like a little girl who had raided her mother’s closet (or some other tenant at the Terrace).

  “I really don’t know what you were thinking. You shouldn’t have brought her here. You fucked everything up. Everything was fine. I just wanted time alone with my boyfriend.” She bared her teeth. “If you would just answer your fucking phone. Why did I even bother buying you a phone if you don’t answer it when I call? What a waste of money. I would’ve told you, you had bigger things to worry about than your shitty bracelet. This is all on you. Not me. You!”

  Bailey was in the room now too, sitting in one of the lawn chairs. Her head drooping, her hair now curtained around her face. Her hair, which had been dark but was now blond. Dark, just like the lunch lady’s. She was the lunch lady, this pear-shaped girl who needed to be looked at carefully to see that she was fourteen and not pushing forty. It wasn’t Ben in drag or Kathy. “Well, how do you want me to do it?”

  “Well, how do you want me to do it?” Madison mimicked her. “I don’t fucking care, just do it. And this music, Bailey—we really need something else. Seriously. I am getting, like, an aneurysm from it.” She jumped onto the bed; the mattress heaved. She curled herself up against Lucas. In a flirty voice, she said, “This is all your fault too, y’know?” She flicked his tie like it was a little whip. “You’ve got too many women in your life, babe.”

  The sight of this girl climbing on my brother like he was an amusement park ride was sickening. My feet kicked at the floor as I tried to break myself out of the zip ties, but the oven just creaked open, closed, like some jabbering mouth.

  I pressed my knees onto the door, put all of my weight on it, and it started to sink. A vision of breaking off the door and then swinging it around like some medieval knight’s shield flickered clear in my mind. Then Madison was standing there, her high heels kicked off, bouncing back and forth like a boxer, and in a quick, jerky movement, she darted over me and turned the oven on high. I kicked at her, both legs thrashing. She let out a little giggle as she avoided me and said, “Feel the heat, bitch,” and then skipped away and flopped back down again next to Lucas. The bedsprings squeaked harder. Madison kissed Lucas’s neck, glanced up at me, half smirked, then leaned down and kissed him again. Where the tie encircled his neck I could see tiny bite marks, and down his chest, his skin had been rabidly sucked on, leaving a trail of fat hickeys.

  Lucas shuddered squeamishly, turned his face away from her and tried to buck her off.

  “Stop looking at us!” Madison hissed. “Oh, I get it. You want to watch. Sick. My aunt likes to watch me fuck my uncle. Lukey here told me all about it, Auntie Mia. It’s definitely a bit of a mood killer, but you know what? It’s not like Lukey here doesn’t like doing his nieces. Isn’t that right? Keep it in the family.” She thrust herself closer to Lucas, licked at his ear. “Bailey, why are you just sitting there? Kill this bitch already.”

  Bailey got up, all slope-shouldered, and went around the corner.

  I started again to pull at the stove, dragging it out from the wall. The veins near my wrists felt like they were popping. Madison rolled her eyes. Stood up again, lit some of the stubby candles on the floor that surrounded the bed, pulled at the sheets that had been bunched and tangled around Lucas’s feet, gave up and left them there. Turned the music up. Got back into bed with Lucas, her head now on his stomach, dipping up and down on the ebb and flow of his breathing. Her finger circled his nipple.

  On the wall over the pullout couch, written in loopy, clumsy cursive, was the word “destiny,” like those sticky wall appliqués that were just as terrible as LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE coffee mugs. Hovering over it like it was a marriage bed. A teenage girl’s sex crime was to want Lucas to love her back, for them to play house this way. To domesticate him, to make him her prince, the boy band member she could have all to herself. Some of his clothes were folded into tidy piles on the kitchen counter. Each had a distinct style theme. Lucas casual, Lucas formal, sporty Lucas. A human Ken doll they dressed up and undressed and made over. The Christmas picture was what? To make him feel more at home?

  Bailey was back, with a serrated hunting knife. I started screaming, the sound raging through my throat. I tried to drag the stove farther out, but it was caught on a broken tile.

  “Where should I stab her?” Bailey blinked, turned around to Madison.

  Lucas thrashed around. “Settle down, babe.” Madison put a hand on his shoulder, then yelled back at Bailey, “I don’t fucking care.”

  Bailey raised the knife, and I tried to avoid it, practically tried to crawl inside the oven, the elements red-hot and licking at my face and arms.

  “Well, don’t do it here! God, Bailey, what the fuck?” Madison’s arms were folded tight. “This is getting exhausting already.” She grabbed her bag, pulled out her own stun gun, and zapped Lucas against his chest. He let out a deep growl, and his body arched up and went stiff, then sagged back into the mattress. “I said settle the fuck down. Goddammit, Bailey. Deal with this.” Madison flicked her hand.

  Bailey nodded, sighed. With the knife, she cut the zip tie that had hitched my bound hands to the oven door. I lunged at her, but Bailey was ready and struck me in the head with her hulky knee. Something crunched in my jaw.

  “Get up.” She hauled me up. This girl was strong, like carpenter strong, like handled-a-drunk-dad-for-years strong. She was stronger than me. She pushed me toward the door, the knife piercing the back of my neck. I hoped someone would be out in the hall, poking around their storage space. There was no one.

  Ahead of Bailey, I saw my opportunity. I made a run for it, ripped off the duct tape, screamed for help. I made it to the main stairwell door, but it was chained shut. I shook the door, hard. Hoped someone would hear it rattle and wouldn’t write it off as the pipes.

  “Stupid bitch.” Bailey had me by the shoulder again, but I twisted around, fast, and hammered her with fastened fists. Like I was dropping a mallet, as hard as I could, somewhere in the face. She stuck her knife out and up, and it speared into my wrist down to my bone, but also cut the zip tie. My hands popped apart. I shoved past her and ran down the hallway. I stumbled up four steps to the other door, the one that led out to the side of the building. It was locked, not with a chain but a dead bolt. My hands, slick with blood, shook as I clumsily twisted the thumb turn, took a step out. It was dark. There were two lonely cars on this side of the parking lot, and an abandoned shopping cart. The lot was practically empty. I screamed for help anyway, and then I felt it, the knife sliding into me from behind, just over my hip.

  Bailey’s arm wrapped tight around my neck in a choke hold. She half dragged me back inside, down the hall, to the mechanical room. A trail of blood ran thick along the carpet. Inside the mechanical room, with her free hand, the hand with the knife, she flicked on the greenish fluorescent light and pushed me hard to the ground. My shirt was hot with blood.

  I crab-crawled back on the concrete floor, away from her, tried to press myself between a giant old boiler and a hot-water tank. Bailey walked toward me, slow, not at all worried.

  “Bailey stop, just stop. You don’t have to do
this.”

  “Shut up!” She sniffed, tugged some hair out of her face.

  “I just don’t understand why you’re doing this. I thought we were friends.”

  This gave her pause. She tapped the knife against her thigh. “Bullshit. You couldn’t stand me. People think I don’t notice, but I do. I was being friendly, and you were trying to get rid of me.”

  “What are you talking about? I was upset about my brother. That’s all. Otherwise I would have been more talkative. We’re friends, Bailey. You don’t need to do this. You just need to let me go, and we can still be friends.” The room was going wavy, the mold growing behind the water heater was catching in my throat, a pipe was dripping somewhere.

  Bailey shook her head. “Madison would never let me do that, and I know you’d tell.”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t tell anyone. You don’t need Madison. You really don’t.” My hip was burning. “I had a crush too at Westfield, on the guidance counselor.”

  “Mr. Lowe? Ew, he’s so old.”

  “I did, though, and you know what? It passed. I just forgot about him. You need to go and tell Madison that, OK? That she’ll get over it, she’ll hardly even remember Mr. Haas. To just let him go. And if you have feelings for Madison, you need to know that one day—”

  “Oh my God, just shut up already.”

  “Bailey—”

  “I said shut up! She’s my best friend. She really is.” She jutted her chin out, in a dare-you-to-contradict-me expression.

  “I know she is. But she isn’t being a good friend to you right now. She’s getting you into trouble. What will happen to your dad’s job here when the agency finds out his daughter kidnapped her teacher and kept him in an empty basement apartment?”

  Bailey, shaking her head, let out an airy snort. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to worry about him anymore or this shithole place. I’m going to live with Madison.”