Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  “Holy shit,” I say.

  Frankie raises his chin at me in a short jerk of recognition. “You too,” he says. He puts his hands in his pockets, a studied attempt at ease that doesn’t match the set of his jaw or the firm line of his eyebrows.

  “I … good to see you,” I manage.

  “You were going to say, ‘I didn’t know you were out of prison,’ ” Frankie says.

  “Ethan,” my uncle says behind me, and I turn to see Uncle Gavin, in his flat tweed cap, walk into the kitchen. He stops outside of hugging distance.

  “Hey,” I say. I’m still processing the fact that Frankie is here and feel awash in guilt. I’m caught between my uncle and Frankie, like a bit of metal being repelled by two equally powerful magnets. I make my choice and turn to Frankie. “When did you get out?”

  “Few months ago,” Frankie says. Then he looks past me to Uncle Gavin. “New cook hasn’t shown up yet.”

  My uncle shakes his head. “Give him ten more minutes, and if he shows up after that, throw him out on his ass.”

  “A few months ago?” I say. I look at Uncle Gavin. “You didn’t tell me?”

  “You never asked,” Uncle Gavin says. He seems about to say more when the door swings open and a man walks in, about my height but with broad shoulders, muscled chest and arms, and a waist cinched tight as a ballerina’s. My first thought when I see him is that he’s a gymnast—he moves like he’s walking on an enormous ball, rolling the world beneath his feet. I’ve seen oiled hardwood floors that are darker than him, but not by much. His head is shaved clean except for a trim moustache and goatee. He frowns when he sees me. “Who is this?” he asks, his voice quiet and unfriendly.

  “My nephew,” Uncle Gavin says. I don’t detect much enthusiasm in his voice.

  Now all three of them are looking at me like I don’t belong. Then the man pointedly turns to my uncle. “Mr. Lester, do you want to talk in your office?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I say to Uncle Gavin. “Now. Please.”

  The man turns back toward me, his frown deepening like an ugly wrinkle.

  “Caesar,” Frankie says. The man looks at Frankie, who shakes his head. Still frowning, the man crosses his arms and waits.

  Uncle Gavin grunts. “Are you okay, Ethan?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I say.

  He considers me, nods, and turns for the stairs. I follow him to the swinging door. Once there, I look back at Frankie. He’s still standing in the middle of the kitchen, watching me. Caesar is still to the side, arms folded. “I’m sorry,” I say to Frankie. “I just—there’s a lot going on. Susannah’s in trouble, and I have to find out what this woman—”

  “Your sister?” Frankie says. “She okay?”

  “Ethan,” my uncle calls, already halfway up the stairs, and I shrug at Frankie, who motions me to go on and follow my uncle.

  * * *

  MY UNCLE’S OFFICE is upstairs, above the bar. It has bookshelves on one wall and an Oriental carpet and some upholstered chairs, but it is dominated by a massive, claw-footed desk that must weigh a ton. As in all of my memories of Uncle Gavin’s office, the top of the desk is a pile of disorder, a blizzard of newspapers, magazines, torn notepad pages, precarious stacks of loose-leaf papers, a food wrapper or two, and two abandoned mugs, both half-filled with what is presumably old tea.

  Uncle Gavin sits behind the desk, his chair creaking as he lowers himself into it. “What’s wrong, Ethan?” he asks.

  I sit in my old place in front of his desk, suddenly uncertain and not a little overwhelmed. “Susannah’s in the hospital again,” I say, to my surprise.

  Uncle Gavin’s face is, as usual, inscrutable. “Is she all right now?” he asks.

  I rub my face with my hand. “I think so,” I say. “She’s not … she isn’t suicidal, right now. I had to talk her off of a bridge.”

  Silence stretches between us, a spool of wire uncoiled and being pulled taut. Uncle Gavin shifts in his chair, making it creak again. “You said you need help with something,” he says.

  Some people might think my uncle particularly coldhearted for not expressing more concern about Susannah, or at least asking more about her. They wouldn’t be right, exactly. Uncle Gavin has never been an overly warm person, although he can be friendly enough and allows himself to smile and even laugh occasionally. It’s more that he is extremely practical, solving problems and moving on to the next bit of business without much sentimentality. Given the nature of his business, his practicality is as necessary as it is fortunate. He asked about his niece and learned she’s alive and safe for the moment, so he’s on to the next most immediate item of concern.

  Haltingly at first, and then with increasing clarity, I tell him about Marisa. He listens behind his desk, those dark eyes of his always on me. Twice—when I talk about her relationship with Susannah, and when I say that I found her phone—I think I detect a flash in his eyes, a sharper awareness, but he says nothing, aside from encouraging me to go on when I occasionally stop to put my thoughts in order. When I’m finished, the silence makes me wish I was still talking.

  “Why haven’t you gone to the police?” he says.

  “And tell them what? This woman is stalking me? They’ll have to investigate; it’ll take time. She’s hurting other people right now—students, kids. My sister. She’s pretending to be me on social media. She’s trying to ruin my life.” I take a breath. “She knew about my parents being killed. She said she knows who killed them.”

  Uncle Gavin continues to look at me, unperturbed. “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s what she said. It might be bullshit, but I need to know. I need to find her, Uncle Gavin. I need to find out what she knows and keep her from doing any more damage, to me or to anyone else.”

  Uncle Gavin nods and leans back in his chair. “So what do you need me to help you with?” he asks.

  “Marisa’s phone,” I say, taking it out of my pocket. “She left it at my house. She kept texting me, telling me to give it back. She was taunting me, so I turned the phone off. And now I’m wondering if maybe she sent more texts. Maybe about my parents.” The words are heavy and hard to say, and once spoken they seem to lie on the desk between us, ugly and leaden.

  “You can’t read her texts now?” Uncle Gavin says.

  “I don’t know her password. I blocked her on my phone, so she started texting her own phone, the one she left at my house. I could only read the texts right when she sent them, and then they’d disappear off the screen.”

  His eyebrows quirk. “How was she texting her own phone?”

  “She had another phone. Her mother’s, probably. All the texts she sent came from someone named ‘Mom’ in her contacts.”

  Uncle Gavin calls out, “Caesar?” After a few moments, the office door opens and Caesar and Frankie both walk in. They must have both been standing in the hallway outside the office. Frankie looks slightly abashed, as if Uncle Gavin has caught him eavesdropping. He glances at me, then looks away. Caesar maintains his frown.

  “I need you to look at a phone,” Uncle Gavin says to Caesar. He gestures to me, and I stand and hold the phone out to Caesar.

  Caesar doesn’t even look at the phone. “Is it turned on?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Because if it is—”

  “It’s off,” I say. Unless the phone is on or plugged into a power source, it cannot be accurately located.

  Caesar gives me a look of disappointment, even disdain, like I’m a promising student who has failed the most basic test. “Next time wrap it in tinfoil,” he says. “Blocks the radio signals—”

  “Like a homemade Faraday cage,” I say. “I know.”

  We eye each other, like gunslingers waiting for the other to make a move. I’m still holding the phone out to Caesar. Frankie looks from me to Caesar and back again. Slowly, still maintaining eye contact with me, Caesar reaches out and takes the phone out of my hand. He glances at it, then raises an eyebrow
at me, presumably because of the pop-art phone case. Then he slides it into a pocket, nods at Uncle Gavin, and walks out the door. Frankie trails him, glancing back at me, and I take that as an invitation to follow them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the tiny lot beside Ronan’s are two parking spots. Uncle Gavin’s Lincoln Navigator, a newer model, is in one. To my surprise, Frankie’s old Trans Am, the Frankenstein, is in the other. “You kept it?” I say.

  Frankie shrugs. “My pop kept it for me,” he says. He gets behind the wheel. Caesar opens the passenger door, flips the seat forward, then steps back to let me in, his expression as inviting as a drill bit.

  We drive to a refurbished industrial area where Tenth Street dead-ends into the rail yards, old brick warehouses converted into hip new restaurants, art galleries, and furniture stores. Frankie pulls the Trans Am behind one such warehouse, all red brick and black iron, and we get out of the car. At this hour, the area is pretty deserted, the streets filled with heat and light and not much else. I stop midstep as I realize where we are. A mile south of here is the Bluff and the abandoned house where we found Susannah and Luco. I glance at Frankie, wonder if he is remembering that night, but he doesn’t seem to be on the same wavelength, instead inserting a key into a padlock on a garage door. He pulls the door up with a metallic ratcheting, and Caesar walks inside. Frankie follows, then halts and beckons me to come in. I step inside, and Frankie pulls the garage door down behind me with a crash.

  The room’s ceiling is two stories above us, windows high up on the wall letting in the clear morning light. The rough brick walls contrast with the polished concrete floor. A spiral staircase in the corner leads up to a shadowed loft. Caesar flips a switch on the wall, and one of the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling illuminates with a harsh hum. Beneath that light on the far wall is what seems to be a workstation, a metal table with a laptop and what looks like a countertop microwave and an assortment of electronic equipment I don’t recognize.

  Caesar takes Marisa’s phone out of his pocket, places it on the table next to the laptop, and sits in a space-age office chair, the back of it a mesh of black webbing and anodized aluminum. “You try the pass code?” he asks me while booting up his laptop. “Or try to jailbreak it?”

  “No.”

  Caesar grunts and starts typing. A window opens on the laptop screen, displaying what looks like machine code.

  I look at Marisa’s phone and feel the back of my throat go dry. We are about to try to break into another person’s phone. Not we, I think. Me. The fact that Caesar is the one actually doing something with it is irrelevant. “Can you hack it?” I ask, hating the anxious whine in my voice.

  Caesar barely spares me a glance before he picks up the phone and removes the pop-art case, then examines the phone carefully. He holds the power button down until the phone lights up, then opens the door to the microwave. Inside, a lightning charger cable sticks out of the back wall of the microwave. Caesar picks up the phone and plugs the lightning charger into it, then puts the phone into the microwave and closes the door. I almost say something, afraid he’s going to nuke the phone, but I manage to hold my tongue. Caesar picks up a cord protruding from the back of the microwave and plugs that into a black box the size of a hardback book. Then he takes a USB cable from that box and plugs it into the laptop. As soon as Caesar plugs the box into the laptop, strands of alphanumeric code start cascading down the open window on the laptop.

  “This will take a minute,” Caesar says, his eyes on the code. I look at Frankie, who motions me to step away with him, and we walk across the room toward the spiral staircase. Underneath the upstairs loft area is a kitchenette with a sink and a refrigerator. Frankie takes a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, hesitates, then holds it out toward me. I shake my head, and he closes the fridge door.

  “He likes to work alone,” Frankie says.

  I look across the room at Caesar, the light from the laptop softening his sharp jawline. I lower my voice. “You trust him?”

  Frankie’s expression darkens. “He saved my life,” he says. “In prison.”

  I raise my hands as if surrendering. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad he did. Save your life. I just …” I let my hands drop, a gesture in futility. “What happened?”

  Frankie takes a sip from his juice, then slowly replaces the cap. “Couple of years ago,” he says, “this guy, another inmate, he was annoyed I wouldn’t give him my lunch tray, so he threatened me with a shiv. Caesar stopped the guy, did something to his wrist and made him drop it. A week later, the same dude and one of his buddies try to jump Caesar, and I was there and helped fight them off. Got six extra months for it, but from then on Caesar and I had each other’s backs.” He shrugs.

  This makes me feel even worse. Even in prison Frankie was loyal and brave, while I am neither. I’m a yard away from Frankie, but we might as well be on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. It’s been eight years since he went to prison, almost three thousand days. Every one of those days was another opportunity for me to reach out to him, another chance I threw away.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m sorry I stopped coming to see you, sorry I didn’t keep in touch. Sorry I’m a shitty friend.”

  Frankie screws up his mouth, like he is chewing on my words, and he is on the verge of saying something when Caesar calls out, “Done.”

  We return to the workstation and stand behind Caesar, peering at the screen. I can feel my pulse in my head, a quick throbbing against my eardrums.

  “These are the most recent texts sent to this phone,” Caesar says. “I wanted to see if she mentioned her location.”

  On the screen, I read the texts Marisa sent to me on her own phone, starting on Saturday: Ethan if u have my phone give it back. I want my phone ethan. PHONE BACK. PHONE MFer. Ridiculously, I feel a slight embarrassment that Caesar and Frankie are reading these.

  I’m going to eat your heart.

  You should check out Twitter

  I know who killed your parents

  I’m not going anywhere, Ethan

  “Lovely girl,” Caesar says.

  “She knows who killed your parents?” Frankie asks, eyes wide.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But now you see why I want to find out?”

  “You don’t know where she lives?” Caesar asks.

  “With her parents, in Buckhead.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “But instead of driving to her house and knocking on the front door, you want to break into her phone?”

  “She’s not home. I called. She didn’t show up to work today either.”

  Frankie asks, “What does she mean about Twitter?”

  “She was pretending to be me on Twitter,” I say. My stomach burns with acid. “She was bullying students.”

  Caesar opens a window on his laptop and pulls up Twitter. “What was the handle she used?”

  “EthanF8,” I say. When Caesar and Frankie both look at me, I say, “I know. It’s not me, it’s her.”

  Caesar finds the account, and he and Frankie read Marisa’s tweets about the naughty picture.

  Frankie lets out a low whistle. “You must have pissed her off.”

  I close my eyes briefly, as if waiting for someone to stop shouting at me. When I open them, I see what she tweeted to Sarah Solomon:

  You write beautiful essays but you hide behind those cat-eye glasses like the world’s youngest virgin librarian

  Maybe that’s why you sent this pic

  And now Sarah is in a hospital. As is my sister. Both women recovering from attempted suicides. Both impacted by Marisa.

  I realize Caesar is saying something to me. “What?” I say.

  “Her tweets were all posted from Atlanta,” he says. “So she hasn’t left the city. Or at least she hadn’t before her last tweet, which was”—he checks on the screen—“just after four PM on Sunday.”

  I frown. “When was her last text to me? On this phone?”

&nbs
p; Caesar checks the screen. “Six seventeen PM on Sunday. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Ethan.’ ”

  She didn’t text me anything else about my parents, or about who killed them. An idea strikes me. “Can you figure out where the texts she sent me came from?” I ask Caesar. “Location-wise?”

  Caesar shakes his head. “Not from here. If I had the phone she used to send these texts, I could. Or access to that person’s cell records.” He pauses, considering something, then shakes his head. “Let’s see what else we can find,” he says. He types and pulls up two windows on his screen. One is apparently her call history, and a string of phone numbers appears, calls Marisa either made or received over the past month. I see my own cell number on there, as well as Archer’s main line, and one called Home seems self-explanatory, but I don’t recognize the others. The other window shows Marisa’s Safari history. Caesar scrolls down past various shopping sites and restaurants, and then he says “Hmm” and pauses on one item from last week: Fulton County Jail.

  “Why would she research the jail?” I say.

  The website she visited just after going to the jail’s website seems even odder: Our Lady of Mercy Monastery.

  “A monastery?” I say. “That’s the last place I’d imagine her being interested in.”

  Frankie pulls out his phone and Googles the monastery. It’s outside Dahlonega, about an hour north of Atlanta. “Place holds retreats,” he says, reading his phone. “Maybe she went to one of those?”

  “Like I said, it’s the last place I’d imagine her being interested in. At all.” I shake my head. “Might just be something she had to look up for work, one of the history classes she’s subbing for.”

  Frankie raises his eyebrows slightly. “Probably not why she’s got the Fulton County Jail up here, though, right?”