by Jesse Grey
In the days that came with his arrest, Bridge had been subjected to multiple sessions with Dagger, submitted lines of questioning that he had already answered, with the same conclusions that he had given the detective during his initial crusade upon their culpability. It was a constant state of badgering that Bridge was thriving inside of, a battle that he was destined to lose at the feet of Dagger’s persistence. He wasn’t letting up, and while Bridge knew he was innocent, that he hadn’t killed Blanche the night of Homecoming because he was with Ben, he couldn’t tell Dagger that. He was in enough trouble without dragging Ben and his self-inflicted issues into the interrogation room with someone as savage as Detective Alston Dagger.
He wasn’t the only one feeling the white hot wrath of their less than favorite law enforcement figure. The rest of his friends were being questioned just as hard in the coming days. Ever since Blanche’s funeral, Dagger had not only himself, but also the town believing that they were the ones behind Blanche’s murder, and therefore, the ones who were really hiding Sumner, waiting for the right moment to attack the entire population. And when countered with the fact that Sumner had tried to kill them, he simply waved it away as an act, one they had kept up for over six months. He was a man possessed with finding the truth. Except he was so blinded by pursuing it that he didn’t see that his view was obstructed.
And now, Bridge was having another meeting with his lawyer, Maxima Simon, annoyed with the fact that he was being told to plead guilty so he could have a reduced sentence for murder in the first degree.
“I’m not taking it, Maxima.” Bridge shook his head. “Why would I want Blanche dead? She was the only person who knew what Sumner was really about, why he was doing everything that caused the mess that I’ve called life for the past eight months.” He scoffed, seeing that Maxima really did mean well, that she was just doing her job, which was to advise her client on their best choice for survival. “I want this to be over. I’ve been treated like a murderer for only five days and I already want out. But I’m not going to say that I’m a killer in order to do so.”
“I know this is crazy, Bridge.” Maxima breathed between her slightly chapped lips, edges of frayed skin crying for attention and making home on the crevices of her face. It somehow warmed the cold exterior her features shone to the world, which helped Bridge feel the need to trust her despite his lack of choices in the matter. “I don’t want you to think that I believe Dagger, because I don’t. But the evidence against you...while it’s concrete, I don’t think it got there because you were the one to end Blanche Baxxen’s life.”
“Then why tell me to take the plea?”
“Because someone wants you to go down for this.” she nodded. “Someone wants you to pay for her death with the rest of your life.”
“It’s her. I’ve been telling you it’s her.” Bridge licked at his own lips as he continued to focus on his lawyer’s, also a sign that he was beginning to get restless. “Paige is the one who’s framing me.”
“Bridge, if I tell Dagger—”
“I know, I know.” He sighed. Bridge was at a junction of juxtapo-sition, one that didn’t seem to have a clear destination as to what he would get when he found the end of either path. If he kept it to him-self that Paige and their stalker shared the same stationary, he’d stay in jail. He’d go to trial. He’d be labeled a murderer for the rest of his life. And if he told Dagger, the detective would know not only about the stalker, but he’d ultimately have to ask about what it is that the mysterious blackmailer was hanging over them. And no one, not even Bridge scared out of his mind for his life in prison, wanted to condemn the lives of his friends from something that he felt he alone had committed that night at Armor Falls Cemetery.
“You have choices, Bridge.” Maxima said, steering him back to-wards the current conversation they were still having and away from his darkening thoughts. “You can either tell Dagger what you told me, about the stalker and Paige and the stationary, everything. Sure, you’ll have to tell me, and him, why this person is doing this, what it is you’re willing to go to jail over. Or, you could let Ben be your ali-bi—”
“I can’t.” He stopped her, shaking his head vigorously. “Ben doesn’t want anything to do with me. He’s...no. I can’t do that. It doesn’t really prove anything anyway. I was with Ben after Blanche’s apparent time of death, so they’ll still think I could have killed her once I left my friends and went searching for him or something stu-pid like that, right?”
“That’s definitely a possibility as to how it could look.”
Bridge rustled in his chair, his awful orange jumpsuit chiming its fabric together like a wounded cricket in the night. He felt like he was on Orange Is the New Black, only with less antics and more murder. “There has to be another way.”
“There is.” Maxima leaned closer to Bridge, grabbing his hand tenderly. “Tell Dagger about the stalker. At the very least, they can bring Paige in for questioning and you’ll know once and for all if she’s the one behind this.”
“My hair was found at the crime scene. I lived in her house. I’m telling you, it’s her.” Bridge nodded. “She’s the one that’s been plagu-ing me and my friends’ lives.”
“Then you already know what to do.”
He didn’t want to. Only because he’d truly have to face the fact that he was a murderer, just not the one that had killed Blanche. He was a killer, albeit an accidental one caused by the placement of Sumner Shadows. But he had still taken a life. And it was time, final-ly, after a long almost eight months, for him to face the shiny mirror that was the truth. The only thing that caused hesitation to thrust in his veins was what would happen to his friends.
“The only way I can do this is with them. My friends have to be here, with me and Dagger. This affects them to. Can you make that happen?”
It only took about an hour to get everyone assembled. Bridge was beginning to learn that not only was Maxima a true woman of her word but also the type of person who made things happen, unable to waste any time. So when Bridge sat before his friends, which Dagger was less than pleased about but had ultimately agreed to, along with his lawyer and the short-tempered detective, all he could think to do was take a chaste chasm of a breath before opening his mouth.
“I’m going down for this,” He was addressing his friends, pre-tending that the adults were as far from this room as they could pos-sibly be. This was about them too, and he didn’t know exactly how they were going to take the next set of events that he was about to put into motion. “And the only way to save myself is to tell them.”
The flash of a lightbulb breaking was easily read in all the eyes of his friends, a subtle hiss from the broken skull of glass ringing in Bridge’s ears. None of his friends opened their mouths, each of them fearing the confession that simmered painfully on the cusp of their lips.
“Tell us what?” Dagger asked impatiently, eyeing every one of the friends gingerly.
“Bridge.” This was from Mercer, but the arrestee abstained from facing the pleading he knew would be reflected in the dark splotches along his best friend’s eyes.
“I’m out of options right now.” he scoffed. “I’m sorry that it has to happen like this.”
Collecting himself, Bridge turned away from his friends and stared into the shadowy pits Detective Dagger claimed were his eyes.
“Someone’s stalking us.”
“Bridge!”
He ignored Abram’s protest, trampling over his cry with the stampede of his further discourse. “It’s been going on for a while, since just after you first brought us in for questioning about Sumner, right after Kirby snapped that picture of him.”
“Why?” Dagger said, leaning off the wall and standing tall over them, a rage swelling massive waves of flames that were ready to capsize and devour them all. “Why wait until now to say some-thing?”
“That’s not important right now,” Bridge shook his head. “What is, is that the one framing me for Blanche’s murder, the on
e you need to be arresting, is Paige Honeycombe.”
Dagger’s stare was sharp and felt like a blade across his neck, the detective’s namesake threatening to cut his carotid. But the aston-ished outputs on his friends’ faces felt like burns on his unsuspecting skin.
“Paige?” Alex cried.
“What are you talking about?” Mercer and Abram said together.
“Detective Dagger, Paige has been harassing us for months. And I can prove it.”
While he looked to Maxima, Dagger took the time to call an of-ficer to put out a search for Paige Honeycombe at her house.
“Bridge, why haven’t you told us about this?” Abram stated, eye-ing his friend with an eye of proposition.
“Because Blanche was murdered. Because everything was hap-pening.” he declared. “Maxima?”
His lawyer retrieved two pieces of paper, one that Bridge had held onto and one that he had gotten from Abram weeks before they had arrived at the police station for this little get together. The first page, the one that Abram had previously found stuck inside his locker at school, just needed to be unfolded once. The second one was viciously crumpled into a paper ball that Bridge had to take several moments to smooth out.
Finished calling in the order to arrive on Paige’s doorstep, Dag-ger realigned his priority on the pieces of paper gracing the table as Bridge set them side by side for optimal viewing.
“What is this, Mathison?”
His eyebrows arched as he answered Dagger’s grunt of an in-quiry. Bridge pointed to the first piece of synthesized vellum.
“This is one the stalker sent us. Notice the design of the station-ary in the bottom corner. This one,” his hand wavered to the next page. “is a rough draft that Paige made of her wedding invitations.” His finger flitted to the design that the page shared with the one pre-ceding it. “Same design.”
“You’ve known this, suspected this, since Homecoming?”
“Are you listening?” Bridge was elevating his voice as he spoke to Abram, unaware of his friends’ reaction to his restlessness, his en-compassing feeling of loss for himself. “This isn’t about you right now, about any of you. Do you think this is easy, that any of this is easy? Everyone in this town thinks I killed Blanche and I find out that Paige is the one that’s been making our lives a conscious version of hell. That’s not easy for me. Especially dealing with all of this so...so soon after Ben.”
“Who’s Ben?”
“Ben Magnus.” Mercer nodded, seeing the sparkling tear in Bridge’s eye when he looked away from the detective. “He’s a psych major at Heartmyth.”
“I was dating Paige’s fiancé, detective. That’s why it’s her. She’s putting this on me as revenge for giving Ben the best sex of his life.”
“Okay, I’m going to pretend to ignore the underage sex part for the time being,” Dagger shook his head, violently wishing that he wasn’t having to deal with these kids and their seemingly sordid teenage love lives. “Assuming this is even the slightest bit true, that Paige has been stalking you, that doesn’t answer the question of why. What is it that she’s holding against the four of you to be haunting you over the course of two months?”
There was no way to accurately reply to Dagger’s question with-out confessing to the accidental murder in the woods just outside of the cemetery all those months ago. They’d kept the secret for so long that it felt cheap to just blurt it out, like they were robbing the per-son they had taken before their time of the grandeur they were de-served. A terrible thing happened, and they didn’t even know who it was that they had buried in the ground that night. There was a lin-gering assumption that it might be Emmy Walker, but the truth was they didn’t know for sure. It was a terrible thing that had happened to them that they had been hiding from the rest of the world for so long, it seemed second nature to bury it from the forefront of their thoughts. How were they supposed to shatter such a heavy secret and, once more, deface the life that they had taken?
Bridge’s mouth trembled with a response, some type of answer to calm the intense shaking of Dagger’s eyes. But the door slammed open with visceral necessity as a stumbling officer made his debut in the room.
“Detective,” the officer said between his strained breathing, eye-ing the tall man systematically.
“What is it, officer? We’re busy.”
“We just received a call from Officer North. It’s Paige Honey-combe, Sir.”
His stance went from eager to agitated and alert, a warning visi-ble in the vein on his forehead. “What about her?”
“Her place, it’s been ransacked, Sir. The officers on the scene be-lieve it’s in disarray because she’s fled town.”
Dagger blasted off from the room like a disoriented rocket with sloppy aim, a startled eagle in the wild. Bridge stared at his friends, a lopsided laugh falling out of his mouth at the idea of Paige’s disap-pearance being the catalyst for him being released from his charge of first degree murder.
Being called in for questioning the next day wasn’t shocking to Ben Magnus. He’d been waiting for the call once the news broke that the police were looking for Paige in regards to the murder of Blanche Baxxen.
And Dagger was brutal. He kept implying that he and Paige were working together in torturing Sumner’s friends. Ben was still in awe that Paige had been keeping such a hideous secret, a truth so devas-tating, he was finding it hard to answer Dagger’s constant shouts in the forms of loop-ended questions.
“Detective, I don’t know anything.” Ben concluded for him, in-terposing another question that Dagger had ushered.
“Mr. Magnus, you have to know something.”
“But I don’t.” Ben scoffed, trying not to roll his eyes and at least keep some decorum about him given the situation. “I don’t know where she’s gone to, I don’t know why she did this to Bridge instead of me, and I have no idea what caused her to try and destroy Bridge and his friends.”
“Let’s talk some more about Bridge.” Dagger said sternly. “He said he was with you minutes prior to Ms. Baxxen’s body being discov-ered.”
“He was.”
“So how do I know you didn’t kill her together?”
“Seriously? I didn’t even know Blanche.”
“You’re hiding something.” The smell of car maintenance that usually hung off of Dagger like a lost soul attacked Ben’s nostrils as the detective got in his face. “I can see it in your eyes. It’s all over your face.”
“I’m hiding my sexuality, maybe, but I’m not some psychopath.” After a heavy huff, Ben went on. “I love Paige, I do. But there’s al-ways been a part of me that I kept hidden, even from myself, and when I met Bridge,” He had to pause his rise in conversation, letting out a soft, velvet laugh, a light breeze on an airy summer day. “He somehow broke through that security I had subconsciously con-structed, and I feel like I’m finally on my way to being my true self. I’m gay, detective. And I just might be in love with Bridge Mathison. But I’m not a psychopath.”
Exasperated, Dagger flung his wrists towards Ben. “Get out of here. Before I decide to follow through on filing some statutory charges.”
“I’m free to go?”
“Goodbye, Magnus.”
Ben rose from his chair, abandoning the interrogation room, knowing better than to give Detective Dagger any amount of time to alter his decree. When he ambled out of the police station ten minutes later, after really understanding that he wasn’t a viable sus-pect anymore, he watched two officers escorting a casually dressed Bridge out of the police station after him.
“They’re releasing you?” Ben’s voice was wet with disbelief, but also unbridled joy, which brought a relaxed half-halo smile to Bridge’s face.
“Just now.” Bridge inclined. “With Paige fleeing town, I guess Dagger figured that she probably planted the evidence against me. Plus, I’m guessing whatever you said carried me the rest of the way out of there.”
A simper graced Ben’s darker features then, the first genuine gr
in he had felt ever since Homecoming. Since before Paige had been re-vealed to be stalking Bridge and his friends, before he’d admitted to himself that he wasn’t perfectly heterosexual anymore.
“Why didn’t you tell them about us right away?”
Bridge suspired, taking in a huge gulp of air, saying, “I didn’t want to—”
“I’m gay.”
Speech stalled, the younger man stared at him intently, waves of trauma sending spastic twitches to his face. “What?”
“I’m gay.” He took a step towards Bridge, slicing through the space currently keeping them apart. “I’m gay and I love you.”
“Ben, stop.”
“I know a lot has happened, I know I was engaged to the woman trying to destroy you and your friends, I know everything is crazy. But I’m crazy about you, Bridge Mathison.”
He sighed again, stepping ever closer to the equal-heighted man standing next to him. Ben saw a glaze lift from Bridge’s eyes, color livening up his face in an acrobatic tumble of clarity.
“Ben, you’re great—”
“But?” he sighed, knowing the word was popping up on Bridge’s vocabulary next.
“But you’re right, everything is crazy. I was just arrested for first degree murder. My friends just found out the woman who let me live with her is the same person that’s been trying to put us on trial for reasons of unknown origin.” Bridge shook his head, a stiff beam on his face as he examined Ben. “I can’t. I haven’t even had a chance to process everything. I need to focus on myself, without the distrac-tion of a relationship or a casual friends-with-benefits. It’s a Bridge-a-thon.” He grinned again. “That’s all I can really handle right now.”
Ben would have been lying to himself if the word disappoint-ment wasn’t floating around his mind like a lazy river of diction. He wasn’t as upset as he would have expected. Bridge had just been through hell and back and Ben himself had, for the very first time, stepped out of the shadows of the closet. As much as it sucked to admit it, Ben didn’t need to jump into another committed relationship at the moment either.