by Jesse Grey
“Kirby?” Mercer stood up, just unsettled by her abrupt arrival af-ter his father, heading over to her as his dad handed her a glass of the perfected strawberry lemonade. “Everything alright?”
She ignored Mercer, giving his dad a teethy beam of apprecia-tion. “Thanks for the lemonade, Mr. Meadows.”
“Just yell if any of you need anything else.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Mercer smiled.
As he departed from the room, Kirby shut the glass door to the sunroom, granting them total seclusion.
“Kirby.”
She took his hand and joined the group, taking a seat in the me-ticulously chosen wicker furniture with the rest of them.
“I should have texted.” Kirby stated, eyeing Bridge. “What’s the theme for your party?”
Bridge puffed out his chest in pride, boasting loudly, “Día de los Muertos.”
“I love that. I’ll YouTube an amazing tutorial for my makeup.”
“Kirby, we love you, but we can tell you didn’t come over here to talk about Bridge’s birthday.” Alex saw her face alter into the truth he had presented. “What is it?”
“Last night,” Kirby started, gripping Mercer’s hand to ground herself and keep her tone even as she went on. “I followed some in-formation and ended up breaking into Dagger’s office at the station.”
“I’m sorry, you did what?” She was surprised to hear this from Abram and not Mercer, or even Alex, who had obligation to the force through his mother.
“He had a file, one that Blanche recommended we find to piece everything together.”
“When did you start speaking to the dead?” Bridge scoffed.
“Just following your Día de los Muertos motif.”
Alex huffed. “How do you know this exactly?”
“I can’t say,” When she answered his question with such a closed analysis, all of them scrutinized her. “I have my ride or die, too, al-right? The file was of a young girl, barely sixteen, that was admitted to Arclan Asylum.”
“So what is so special about this girl’s file?” Mercer asked.
“Because Frankie Ellery, the girl that stayed in Arclan with Blanche, was admitted the morning of August 2nd.”
“As in—”
“The morning after Sumner showed up at Heartmyth to plead help out of Straton.” Kirby confirmed. “I’ve been thinking it over, where the connection lies, and what if the reason Sumner was cov-ered in blood the night Hugo and Straton saw him is because he did what Frankie was convicted of and murdered her family?”
“For what reason?” Abram brushed it off, unmoved by this proc-lamation that had as many loose ends as everything else that fol-lowed anything about what they thought they had known about what Sumner did. “What sensible link could she have to Sumner?”
“First Emmy Walker, now we have this Frankie Ellery.” Bridge’s temper flared in the abstract form of rolling his ankle, cracking its double joint irately. “All we keep getting is dead ends and harder questions to answer.”
“It doesn’t get much better.” Kirby was beginning to ruin Bridge’s previously natural high. “I looked into it and Frankie is closed off from any type of access. She’s in isolation, ever since Blanche’s es-cape. They think she might have been involved, along with two oth-er unidentified patients.”
“So we have to wait.” Alex growled, restless over their diminish-ing options, lifting from his chair. “Waiting to find out more about Emmy, waiting for the police to find Paige, all we do is wait!”
“Alex,” Abram persuaded him to sit back down, after placing a strategic kiss in between a set of his knuckles. “So we take some time off from investigating. We could use more of that.”
“We should tell Dagger.” Alex huffed. “About Emmy, Reyna, Re-phaim, this Frankie girl, all of it.”
“No.” Kirby was adamant, having no intention of betraying her mother’s prerogative in such a cheap way. “We can’t.”
“Why, Kirby? We probably should!”
“We just can’t, Bridge!” She was yelling, but she couldn’t help it. There was no stopping the rush of vocabulary spewing from her mouth. “You guys said you couldn’t say more about the stalker. You claim that you can’t divulge in details. This is that.”
Kirby was filled with relief as the crescendo of cognizance lit their faces up like a banquet of fluorescents. Alex and Abram held on tight to each other, Bridge and Mercer swapping their silent bro bond through their eyes.
“Alright.” Mercer’s hand drifted toward her, understanding form-ing a sheen of familiarity on her wrist where his fingers teased the skin he was caressing. “So we won’t tell Dagger.”
Bridge stood then, his chair flying backward from the inertia of his ascension. “My birthday is in a week. We’re not getting anywhere with Emmy Walker and we can’t question this girl. They’re still looking for Paige, so can we relax and just celebrate the momentous miracle that is my birth?”
“Momentous miracle?” Mercer smirked pointedly, when he saw a response twitching Bridge’s mouth open. “I know, I know, ‘fuck off, Meadows’, right?”
A similar leer on his face, Bridge agreed wholeheartedly. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“How about this,” Alex decided, an auditory inclination of his es-crow of reluctance hanging off of every syllable he uttered. “If after the party they still haven’t found Paige or anything, we at least anon-ymously let Dagger know everything we do, so at least we aren’t stumbling through this without some hired guidance.”
The terms were enough for an agreement among the attendees, accepting for some semblance of normalcy. If only fate could hold off on meddling for a week, they’d, maybe, be okay and able to cope.
20
FOUND
Grabbing coffee with Salem after not seeing him for a whole year felt good. More than good, it felt great. Kirby knew it was long overdue, and it felt great because it was right. Salem had been pretty much her only friend back in Manhattan. He had always calmed the noise of her life. Only now, her life was noisier than anything she'd ever known, the idea of silence out of the question.
It was the following Wednesday morning, before school, since she had entrusted the disclosure about Frankie Ellery to her friends. She agreed that until the police found Paige and Frankie was released from solitary, there wasn’t anything more that they could be doing.
Salem and Kirby were walking around town together after stop-ping to grab coffee. They kept walking until they were leaving the confines of the city, strolling alongside aged oaks and withering pines on the outskirts of Armor Falls. The weather was breezy and warm, perfect for their jaunt of reminiscence.
“So, Mercer, huh?” Salem stated, sipping on his caramel latte, thankful for its warmth on the chilly day currently enveloping eve-rywhere their heads swiveled.
Curiosity itching along her senses, Kirby laughed at the vague variation in conversation. “What about Mercer?”
“Nothing.” Salem gazed, meeting her interested look. “He seems like a great guy.”
“He is.” A swallow of her white mocha dark roast followed the incline of her head. “Mercer is amazing.”
“And he knows…”
“About the baby, yes.”
“And that I’m…”
Kirby chuckled, making sure to step over a flattened styrofoam cup from one of the local fast food joints in town. “Salem, you’re just fine in the eyes of my boyfriend.”
“His best friend’s cute.”
“Bridge?”
The flush of red lit Salem’s cheeks like rose lights implanted un-der his skin. He avoided contact with her eyes, resolving to drink his latte in lieu of a riposte. An uproar of delirium echoed upon Kirby’s throat, swatting Salem’s leather glossed arm with her own leather lathered limb. It was funny that time had separated them so, yet their mutual love of leather jackets remained as true as ever.
“Shut up.” he sighed.
“You have a thing for Bridge.” It was a
statement rather than a question, a fact that she happened to know held all verity.
His face contorted as he grimaced. “I sort of already had a thing with Bridge actually…”
“You what?”
“Right before that dinner you guys had about the fate of the asy-lum. We may or may not have hooked up in the bathroom of a nearby bar.”
“Salem!”
“What? He needed a rebound, I had just gotten to town. He’s hot, I’m hot. We made heat together. Explosions, actually. Volcanic explosions.”
“Lord, Salem.” she chuckled, feigning the act of being over-whelmingly grossed out. “So what are you both doing now then? Does Mercer know?”
“We’re not doing anything. We called it off. More accurately, he called things off, which is cool. I’m not, like, into him or anything. My point is, is that no one knows. Except you.”
“Right.” She drew out the word, disbelief of his coolness of the situation evident by the slow-mo delivery. “Good luck with that. You haven’t told me, by the way.”
“I thought I just did.” His neck snagged at a slant as he thought on it. “Oh, the tattoos.”
“Not about Bridge or the tattoos, but I’d love to hear more about both.” She smirked. “I was talking about why you’re here in Armor Falls.”
Their amicable stroll slowed, a weightful exhale lowering from his lips. Kirby felt the vibrating hesitation drying out his flesh as they kept walking in the grass by the vacant road connecting the town with the drive out towards the scenic countryside. Salem peered at his former best friend turned ex-girlfriend with misty eyes and a mouth full of lead.
“It’s not a good story.”
“Trust me, my stories aren’t cotton candy and gumdrops.”
He readied himself, needing a second to strengthen his mind in order to let Kirby inside, a blockage at the door to his past.
“My dad died.”
Kirby dropped her coffee instantly, the latte splattering all over her worn Manolo Blahniks. “No! When!?”
“A few months ago, back in April.”
A slight weight repositioned inside him, the deafening sound of crumbling cinderblock filling his senses, one side of his walls coming crashing down at an alarming, but needed rate. Salem dared a sharp gaze to gage her reception to such a deep misery. Her eyes were al-ready twitching at the arrival of tears, her skin blue in mourning, her lips wrestling against each other to silence the scream itching to break free. Wordlessly, her hand found his, Kirby’s grip hard next to his shaking fist.
“How?”
“Heart attack.”
“Oh my God.” Her free hand swiped at a tear, evicting it from her face. “Salem, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.” No other words seemed to appropriately portray the dis-mal damage from losing his father, but Kirby didn’t seem to mind.
“How did Sahalia take it?”
“She got pregnant.”
Salem’s big sister being with child was way too wild a concept to wrap her head around. She had just let go of her friend’s rough hand, fully prepared to badger every detail out of him when a car popped up at the end of the road they were walking toward. The driver was swerving dangerously across the pavement, closing in on their loca-tion.
“Look at this asshole.”
His blasé comment bore no comfort to her flourishing anxiety as the vehicle neared them evermore. But then it was clear that the per-son operating the car was either losing control over the metallic monstrosity or was intentionally throwing away every fear over their well-being, looming trees elongating their branches to lure the driver to meet their end against their potentially brutal bark.
“Salem—”
And then metal clashed off-key on wood, the tan sedan careen-ing into a nearby redwood. Salem leapt into hero mode, scrambling to make the light trek over to the freshly cultured crash site. Slower than her counterpart, Kirby found a path to the mangled, dark face of the halted Honda with her cell phone dialed and pressed firmly at her ear.
A random officer picked up the phone and said, “Armor Falls Police Department.”
A full rendition of the event in front of her had been queued up on her tongue, keen and ardent. Salem threw open the driver’s door and her prepared words dissipated off her earnest taste buds.
“Oh my...God.”
“I’m sorry, what seems to be the matter, miss?”
She ignored the cop. “Get me Dagger.”
“Kirby, what is it?” Salem’s regard momentarily killed any viable heroism.
“Don’t you recognize her from every news report every five minutes?”
A clicking was heard on the other end of the phone call, indicat-ing that her call had been successfully transferred. Then a familiar booming voice clearly spoke into the phone. “Detective Dagger.”
Altering her priorities, Kirby declared distinctly into her phone’s receiver. “Alston, it’s Kirby. I’m just off of Wheats Valley Road. You’re going to need to get here. Fast.”
“What? Why?”
A scoff of incredulity involuntarily fell from her mouth, a leaf of information in an updraft of discovery. “Because we’ve just found Paige Honeycombe.”
Waking up felt awful. Once her unconscious was ailed, everything hurt. Her nerves rebelled against her with significant force, every movement a cataclysm of molten affliction. Paige’s eyes stuttered, flapping aimlessly like window shutters in the throes of a terrific tor-nado. A flutter of facts presented themselves while she struggled to open her eyes.
The first was Ben. How much she loved him, how badly she wanted him, how she craved for their life together. But something snagged at the sentiment, telling her that she was forgetting an im-portant detail. Then she thought of Bridge. She felt unfathomable rage for him, though she was clueless as to why the emotion con-sumed every atom within her.
Paige saw light bending and darkness fading, her eyes finally fin-ishing the act of breaching confinement and allowing her green irises to breathe for what felt like the first time.
“Hey.” Ben’s smile both sent her shocks of anguish as well as pangs of bliss. “How are you feeling?”
“What-what happened?”
He moaned in discontent, a crater of a pant leaving him with earnest. “You were in a car crash.”
In her head she heard scraps of metal and the shrill wail of an ambulance, yet nothing even close to a fragmented memory was tangible by her mind’s grasp.
“A car crash?”
“Don’t you remember?” Ben, skirting closer to her from his seat next to the hospital bed she resided in with inverted eyebrows, felt hope at her loss memory to save his own mistakes taken out on their relationship. “Don’t you remember...anything?”
A massive swirl of nothing came to her, a blank slate of missing memories. A wrinkle concaved in the space between her eyebrows.
“I remember chaperoning Homecoming.” Paige coughed a few times, her throat suddenly raw from either the apparent crash or her compulsory slumber. “After that…” Paige knew a big calamity hap-pened at Homecoming, but her head was hazy, full of fuzzy forget-fulness. Her brain was a maze filled with thorny turns and blinding sunshine. “How long was I out?”
“About twelve hours.” Ben admitted. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything?”
Then, something did hit her recollect, a whisper of remembrance floating between her ears. “Blanche Baxxen.” Paige shuddered, the truth cold along her cerebral cortex. “Blanche Baxxen is dead.”
“Yeah.” Ben curled up next to her, leaving his chair and crawling into the hospital bed and cradling her. “Yeah, she is. But you’re not, and that’s what you should be concentrating on.”
As Ben kissed her forehead, telling her it would all be okay, Paige wasn’t able to shake the feeling that everything was very, very wrong.
“What do you mean, ‘Paige is at the hospital’?”
Dagger let Bridge’s question linger in the room. He had pulled them from class just a
half hour prior. He was just telling them that Paige Honeycombe had woken up less than thirty-six hours ago. He had waited to tell them after Dagger himself had a chance to meet with Paige, with failed advance. And the four teenagers that claimed Paige as their stalker weren’t taking the news of finding her, and not arresting her right away, so well.
“Why isn’t she in jail?” Abram exclaimed, screeching his chair across the concrete of the secluded interrogation room.
“Bridge gave you evidence. She tried to flee town and then she ended up in a car crash!” Mercer yelled.
“You had no problem locking Bridge up!”
“Enough!” Dagger said, ending Alex’s spew of incompetence. “Paige hasn’t been arrested because she doesn’t remember.”
“But—”
“But we can’t question her if she has no memories.” Dagger eluci-dated, toes tapping the surface of the floor. “The doctors are corroborating her condition, and they won’t release her until tomorrow.”
“So what are we supposed to do then?” Alex asked.
“Until they release her tomorrow night, we can’t bring her in for questioning. I only brought you in to inform you of the circum-stances.” Dagger sighed, waving to the single officer in the room with them. “I’ll have Officer North drive you back to Westbrooke.”
By the time they were back at school, they had decided to skip the rest of first period, since it was almost over anyway, and gathered at their spot in between the cafeteria and the science building.
“All of this is bullshit.” Bridge breathed with boisterous irritation. “Paige just conveniently acquired amnesia the mere second she was found? I don’t buy it.”
“Doctors have signed off on her status, Bridge.” Mercer heaved, berated sorrow clashing in his voice. “There’s nothing we can do right now.”
“There is one thing we can do right now.”
“I’m not gonna go finish first period, Alex.” Bridge scoffed.
“No, we can break into the solitary block at Arclan and talk to Frankie Ellery.”
“What happened to waiting?”
“Things have changed, haven’t they?” Alex squared up.