by Lily Sparks
We wake up curled into each other like a figure eight, fingers entwined, him over the duvet and me under. He’s already awake, staring at me.
“Morning,” he says, voice gravelly from sleep.
I kiss him gently on the lips. (Carefully, because what if I have morning breath?)
“Thank you for telling me last night,” I tell him honestly. “I’m sorry it hurt so much.”
“Don’t feel bad, gorgeous.” He smiles, and it’s a relief to see that smile again. “You know, I haven’t slept that deeply in a long time. Maybe telling you is part of that.” He tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Or maybe it’s just sleeping beside you.” He leans to kiss me, just as the shrill bedside alarm goes off. We groan and force ourselves up and out to the car.
* * *
Stomach aching, hands clammy, mouth dry, I stare out at Ojai Valley as we crest the final hill before town and check my phone for the thousandth time.
Nothing from Dennis. No asterisks.
We pull into the Oak View Motel. Our room, for once, is inviting and smells delightful. I check my phone. It’s half past one. No asterisks.
Javier’s phone chimes. “Ray’s on his way now. I might take a shower real quick before I meet him, unless you want in the bathroom?—”
“Javier?”
“Yeah?”
I walk over to him and throw my arms around his shoulders and he pulls me in even closer, his hands holding tight to strands of my hair, like I’m a balloon that might fly away. “It’ll be okay, Signal. We’re going to get you out of there safe tonight. I promise.”
I lean back and scan his face: his large, gentle dark eyes; his sensitive, serious mouth.
“I’m not worried about tonight.” It’s the next ten minutes that really scare me. “I’m going to drive down the street to the store, okay?”
“Okay …” He can tell something is wrong. But so many things are wrong, that’s perfectly normal, I guess. I float over to the door, looking over my shoulder one last time. He’s about to disappear into the bathroom when something squeezes it out of me:
“Javier?!”
“Yeah?” He ducks his head past the door.
“Being your girlfriend is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I tell him. And without giving him time to respond, I shut the door and hurry to the car.
I left my phone in my backpack, along with my credit card. I just have the keys and my knife sheathed in the small of my back. Our route perimeter is limited to a mile around the motel, and a mile around the road to the Owl’s Nest compound.
So if I drive over a mile down the road away from Ojai, I’ll know if Dennis succeeded or not. Which presumably he has, since there’s no asterisk. Of course, he could’ve not sent an asterisk because his mission went wrong. Or his phone isn’t charged. Or he just plain forgot.
Or they figured out he was trying to hack into the kill switches and set his off first.
Stop being such a weakling. Do you want to free all your friends and get justice for Rose, or go into a cult compound tonight and watch Javier murder someone so you don’t have to?
I pull out of the parking lot, gaining speed as I merge onto the rural, oak-lined street. I stay in the outside lane, so if I have to, I can veer off the road with my last conscious twitch and not endanger other drivers.
Stop it. Be brave.
When the balloon breaks, the helium escapes, and joins the air.
I cross the half-mile point and wonder what my mother is doing. Is she at her job, gray-faced and smiling, trying not to picture me in the cell where she thinks I am, forever?
I think of kissing Javier last night, the sweetness of it.
I picture Nobody in the desert with Dennis, dozing in the driver’s seat of their parked van, head tilted to catch the sun on her perfect face. I picture Dennis in the back, watching a beeping point of light that represents my kill switch flying off course. Three quarters of a mile.
Kurt is off somewhere in sports gear, his heart still broken. And Jada and Erik in Portland. Just thinking his name hurts. Why didn’t I say goodbye to Erik? Why didn’t I do whatever it took? And this regret is what pierces through, a high note of pain above the low roar of despair, and knocks the tears out of me at last.
A sign looms up ahead, “Welcome to Meiners Oaks,” and the last good feelings dissolve. All I have is the sound of my breath and the steering wheel in my hands. Did you do it, Dennis? Did it work? I step on the accelerator and my chest floods with fear.
Rose, if this is it, please come get me.
The sign shoots by, my heart throbs, and I am 1.1 miles off my route. I shout at the top of my lungs and punch the car’s ceiling, and then shout again as I fly down the back road, crying and laughing like a maniac, pounding my steering wheel and yelling at the top of my lungs as I pull off onto the shoulder of the road.
“YEAH! HELL YEAH!!”
I get out of the car, shaking wildly as adrenaline cascades through my nervous system. I jump up and down, bang my fists on the hood and actually turn a cartwheel, enjoying the sharp pain as the gravel at the side of the road digs into my palms. Pain is a gift, just as much as my racing breath and the warmth of the sunlight; I am here for all of it. I catch the stunned expression on a driver of a passing pickup truck—he probably thinks I’m crazy. What’s really crazy is that we aren’t all dancing with joy every minute we’re alive.
* * *
Oxnard is full of low bungalows and tall palm trees leaning in the breeze that rolls off the ocean. I find Jaw’s duplex on a street of candy-colored houses, bleached pastel by relentless sun.
I knock three times on the door. Hard.
A seagull cries overhead as I wait, watching the palms sway like they’re underwater. No answer. Two little girls cruise past on bikes, ringing their bells before turning the block’s corner.
Go time.
I walk to the side of the duplex, slipping between two scraggly cypress trees and following a rough wood fence. Up on the second story of the duplex, past a white iron balcony rail, is a sliding door. Time to see if it’s unlocked.
I grab the top of the wood fence, tuck the toe of my sneaker into a knothole and bounce upward, pulling myself to standing five feet off the ground, then throw myself toward the lip of the overhanging balcony. Thanks to the obstacle course, my practiced fingers hook and dig. I gain the railing, pull myself up and swing my leg over the rail like a cowboy mounting his horse.
The balcony door opens noiselessly under my hand and I step into the air-conditioning. There’s a gentle clatter of vertical blinds as I step through, closing the door behind me, my senses on high alert as I listen for voices.
This must be Jaw’s mom’s room: there’s a vanity covered with cosmetics and lingering perfume mixes with notes of new paint. As I move out into the hall I bump the bedroom door.
SKREEEEEEEE …
The hinges let loose a high-pitched, comically prolonged shriek that rings through the house. I freeze in place and listen.
Complete silence. Well then. The house is definitely empty.
With a sigh of relief, I spot a padlock on a door down the hallway. That’s got to be Jaw’s room. Thanks to a few hairpins from his mom’s hairdresser, I get it open fairly quickly.
The smell hits me first, intimate and grimy like the bottom of a laundry pile. Though the hallway is bright and airy, Jaw’s room is completely dark. Snapping on the lights reveals industrial-strength blackout curtains nailed around the windows. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with posters of black metal bands, turning the room into a dour patchwork of black, red, and purple.
I move quickly past Jaw’s unmade bed to the rickety desk in the corner. It’s dominated by an enormous gaming console next to a charging e-vape. I’ve tried three different passwords when the e-vape blinks on. I look down and freeze when I see the swirling image on its LED screen: a blinking purple pentagram.
The vertical blinds clatter across the hall, and my skin crawls.
I must have left the sliding door open. It’s probably just the wind. But I could have sworn I closed it?
SKREEEE …
Someone else is in the house.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Missing Piece
I press myself behind the door and take my knife from its sheath. I’m still listening for steps when a tall dark figure slips through the door, and I leap out with a cry, blade flashing.
“There she is!” He grins. “Nice knife!”
“Erik?!” And before I can stop myself, I’m hugging him as tight as I can. When I step back, he holds onto my arms and takes me in from head to toe as if to make sure I’m still in one piece. He looks pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept in a while.
“You don’t know how glad I am see you,” I splutter. “How are you here right now?”
He blinks at me, then quickly turns his head away, scanning the room over my shoulder.
“We finished our target early. I was going to try and meet up with you and Jav after checking this place out.” He turns back, eyes sharp and clear. “How are you here? How many miles are we from Ojai?”
“It’s surprisingly close,” I lie, not wanting to tell him about my kill switch yet, until I know if Dennis has freed us all. “You … finished … early?”
Erik shrugs, running a hand through his mop of stringy, dark gold hair. He looks like he hasn’t had a shower in a while.
“Yeah. Our girl ran this dive bar in Portland that hosts all these bands. We went to a show and stayed until everybody else left. The weird thing is … she didn’t like … fight us? We cornered her in this little backstage area, when she was unplugging all the tech. And then she pulled a gun on us. I thought that would be it. But then she just …” Erik puts two fingers in his mouth and lets his head fall back.
“What?”
“Yeah.” He bites quickly at his nails, then shoves his hand in his pocket. “The shot was so loud we were sure someone heard, so we cleared out. Drove as far as our switches would let us, called ‘MomandDad’ and told them we needed to get further away. So they disarmed our switches for a few days.”
A chill goes up my spine.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Erik. “That must have been really disturbing.”
“How are things going here?” he says quickly.
“I was only here for about five minutes before I heard the vertical blinds.”
“Vertical blinds!” He shakes his head. “My Achilles’ heel. And then that squeaky door!”
“We should start carrying WD-40 when we break and enter,” I say seriously, and Erik lets out a little laugh, then scans the walls with a palpable shudder. He nods to the computer.
“Password protected?”
“Yeah. I have one more guess before it locks me out.”
“Have you tried ‘Sailor Moon’?” The side of his mouth twitches. “It doesn’t matter, because he didn’t do it.” Erik taps the corner of one of the posters. “No one who puts Scotch tape on fresh paint has the foresight to stage a murder scene.”
“Yes, he did,” I insist. “Jaw got Rose into occultism. He has pentagrams on everything—” I hold up the e-vape triumphantly, then, in a flash of inspiration I try “pentagram” as the password. The error message comes up and I bang the keyboard. “It’s locked me out!”
“Forget the computer. Are you looking at this room?” Erik sounds frustrated. “There’s no …” he clutches at the air around him. “No drive. Nice Guys are driven to kill. It’s a drive strong enough to split them into two different people. What drive do you see in Jaw? Besides maybe one day managing a head shop?” He kicks at some marijuana leaf pajama pants. “Also, I looked up that altar thing from Armchair.org on the way down. It was a Wiccan altar, and Wicca is basically Recycling the Religion. It doesn’t require human sacrifice.” Disapprovingly, he watches me rifle through Jaw’s bedside table. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“Anything that links him to Rose.” I pull open the bedside table drawer: glass pipes, a razor blade with black tar on the edge, a silver skull ring. Erik picks it up and frowns.
“Aside from dressing like the President of Halloween, Jaw seems like a pretty chill guy. He’s fine with Rose dating Mike, he worships the Lord and the Lady, and keeps himself pretty sedated. What motive does he have to kill his hot secret girlfriend?”
“Who knows?” I take the ring and throw it back into the drawer. “Couples are weird that way. No one can really tell what goes on in a relationship except the two people in it.”
“As a single person, I’d say everyone can tell what’s going on in a relationship except the two people in it,” he says meaningfully. “Different perspectives.”
“Yeah. Well.” I refuse to take the bait. “I remembered Jaw being inside the shed.” I rummage through a low dresser, “And why Rose wanted me to meet him.”
Erik’s eyes are suddenly bright again. He looks so much like himself, I have to turn around and rifle through a bookcase to hide my relief.
“Well?” he presses.
“She wanted a picture of me and Jaw doing something. For the My Life thing.”
“When did you remember this?!”
“At camp. When I had that nightmare.” I run my hand along the tops of the stacked graphic novels, netting a few sticks of incense and a quarter.
“The nightmare that made you wake up screaming?” Erik’s tone demands I turn and face him. “A picture of you and Jaw doing what exactly?”
“Kissing.” I blush. But that’s not the right word. “Well, I mean, I don’t know how much kissing I was doing, I was mostly passed out.”
“So Jaw assaulted you. Oh, okay.” Erik tears his hand through his hair with a quick, suppressive gesture, then turns and kicks in an expensive-looking speaker near the door.
“Erik!”
“Whoops.” He shrugs as the cone clatters off. “You were saying?”
“Rose asked him to,” I say, and he starts excitedly biting his nails.
“It fits. It fits.” Erik’s voice comes out half-strangled with excitement. “Signal, it’s so obvious. Jaw was Mr. Moody. But Mr. Moody never killed Rose.”
“Not that again.” I heave the rat’s nest of dirty clothes from beside the bed and lower myself to the carpet. I push myself as far as I can under the low wood bed frame, Erik’s voice chasing after me.
“So what, you think Jaw met her at the shed, took her somewhere else, then brought her body back? The same Mr. Moody who won’t even call Rose is crisscrossing the woods with a corpse in the middle of a kegger?”
“Maybe he didn’t know about the party.”
“Your high school’s drug dealer didn’t know about a big party in the woods? You’re being purposefully obtuse, Signal.”
Below the bed is a clear plastic bin, disappointingly full of shoes. I wrestle open a long cardboard box crammed beside a set of turntables, scraping my knuckles viciously in the process. Inside is an old skate deck, empty aquarium, and rock tumbler. I tear open a trash bag to find a worn sleeping bag that stinks of weed.
“She was killed in the shed,” Erik insists. “They’re drunk and high and doing an occult ritual. They’re not going anywhere. But there’s no evidence of a third party. So what does that tell you, Signal?”
The back of my head cracks against the wood frame, hard, as I back out from under the bed. I swallow a string of expletives before staggering over to Jaw’s thin closet doors and throwing them open, Erik’s voice right behind me.
“If you know Mr. Moody was in the shed too, then what does that tell you, Signal?”
Craning my neck, I scan the boxes on the shelves above Jaw’s rack of dark clothes, the back of my head throbbing. There’s a black cardboard box with a pentagram sticker on it.
“The only way to see the truth here is to strip away what you want to be true and face the facts, unpleasant though they may be,” Erik continues. “But you won’t. You can’t. You keep turning away from the s
ame key fact because it scares the hell out of you.”
I reach for the black box, straining my arms as far as I can, teeth clenched against the pain in my head. My fingertips just brush the sides with me standing on tiptoe. Erik reaches over me, his chest brushing against my back, and lifts it easily from the shelf, setting it down on the floor. I fall to my knees and pull off the lid: it’s just a bunch of old vinyl records.
“Signal. Look at me.” Erik sits on the corner of the bed, right across from me. A prickle creeps up the back of my neck.
“You’re seriously trying that again?” I glare at him. “Trying to get into my head by ‘proving’ I killed Rose?”
He’s about to retort something but swallows instead, hangs his head, then looks up at me with a wounded expression, eyes glistening like fresh scrapes. “Okay. Let’s just play into your paranoid fantasies about me for a minute. Let’s say I am trying to get into your head by proving you killed Rose. If you know you didn’t kill her there’s no way for that to work. I can’t prove what isn’t true.” His face has never been more intent or more beautiful. “Don’t you want the truth?”
Or am I afraid of it?
If everyone was somehow right, and I did kill Rose in some disassociated state, that guilt would destroy me. But walking around every day, half-believing it’s true, that will destroy me too. If there is some buried memory of that night, don’t I want him to find it?
“Yes,” I tell him. “I do.”
When he leans toward me, the corner of his mouth twisting, I flinch back a little. But it’s the last twitch of prey in the shadow of its predator. Then I meet his eyes and all the noise in the world narrows down to Erik’s deep voice.
“Signal, it’s time to face some facts. Rose never left the shed. She died in front of you.”
I start to object, but Erik goes on firmly:
“You remembered her drugging you. You remembered Jaw in the shed. You remembered her taking a picture of the two of you. If we had longer, you would remember her dying, too.”