All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  “Saw the light in the foyer, but Mr. Ribelli didn’t warn me that anyone was going to be in the house, so I stood on the planter to get a look.” Frank pointed to a small half-circle window over the door; all the other windows had their shades drawn. “But when I was getting down, it tipped over and broke. Was it expensive?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. But his wife bought that planter in Carmel on one of their anniversaries, right before she died. He’ll be upset, understandably.”

  “Upset enough to fire me?” Frank asked, his eyes widening.

  “Not sure. I guess I could tell him it was a raccoon or something.” I gave Frank a pointed look.

  “You’re a manipulative little thing, aren’t you?” He glanced at Neily, and we both shrugged.

  “The break-in happened about a week after his daughter got shot.” Frank sighed. “Whoever it was climbed up the drainpipe and got in through an unlocked window. They went through her room, but I don’t think anything was taken. At least, nothing I heard about.”

  “Why didn’t Paul report this to the police?” I asked.

  “Don’t think he wanted to get them involved. All that red tape. Plus, like I said, nothing was stolen. What would be the point?”

  Neily shot me a meaningful look; we were having the same thought. Not reporting a break-in that happened the week after Carly died served to keep the case against my dad airtight—since there was no way he could’ve broken into the house from jail, Paul chose not to alert the police. Maybe Paul thought it was a coincidence, but I didn’t believe in them. One reason for the break-in could’ve been that the real killer had left something in Carly’s possession, some piece of evidence that could prove my dad’s innocence and move the investigation in a different direction.

  We took our leave of Frank, with me promising to back him up when he said an animal knocked over the planter (though, really, the planter had no sentimental value to Paul that I knew of), and returned to the house. Back in Carly’s room, Neily asked, “You think Paul kept this from the police because he didn’t want anyone to suspect somebody besides your dad?”

  I nodded.

  “Why would he do that to his own brother?”

  “Maybe he killed her.”

  “You really think that’s possible?” Neily asked.

  I sighed. “No, I don’t. He couldn’t have—he was at the hospital all night; he has witnesses for practically every minute of his shift. But my dad and Paul have hated each other my entire life. Maybe he was so certain that my dad killed Carly that he didn’t want anything derailing the investigation.”

  “If that’s true, he may have helped Carly’s real killer get off scot-free,” Neily said darkly.

  “May have? Oh, I can pretty much guarantee it.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I started going through Carly’s closet, which was, of course, very messy. I have to admit, I was much more uptight about the state of my own bedroom, and had been arranging the clothes in my closet by color since I was seven. Carly had always taken sort of an English-garden approach to her life; instead of everything having a place, she believed that things would come to her when she needed them.

  My phone began to ring, breaking apart the silence into which Neily and I had lapsed since getting back to work. He was still concentrating on her desk and nightstand, though he didn’t seem to be getting much accomplished.

  “You going to get that?” Neily asked.

  “No need,” I told him, shoving a bunch of the school papers that were littering the closet floor into a trash bag. “I know who it is.”

  “Who?”

  “Cass.” It had to be. He had his own ringtone. “Third time today.”

  “Oh.” Neily raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t talking to him.”

  “I’m not. I ran into him outside Harriet’s office the other day and we spoke for, like, two seconds. It’s really no big deal.” I tried to sound nonchalant, but it wasn’t an accident that today I was wearing my cutest outfit: a pair of tight, ridiculously expensive jeans I had picked up in San Francisco over the summer, a black and white striped tube top with a black sash and white buckle under the bust—made appropriate for school with a lightweight black cotton cardigan—and a pair of black patent-leather flats. Back when things were different, when Carly was alive and I was dating one of the most popular guys in school, I had dedicated a lot of energy—maybe too much—to maintaining my appearance. But since she died and Dad went to prison I had been too distracted and too depressed to make much of an effort. Even though I questioned my own motives in dressing as nicely as possible and making certain my hair and makeup were perfect today, I did feel much more like myself than I had in a long time.

  “And he’s been calling you? That doesn’t sound like no big deal.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.” I wanted so badly for that to be true, and I was trying so hard to make it so. There was this wall inside of me—I could feel it in my chest—and it hid all the vulnerable parts that had been damaged in the past year. I had put my feelings for Cass back there so that he couldn’t hurt me again. Maybe that was what was so comforting about Neily’s presence, the sense that he was hiding stuff behind a wall too.

  “Why do you think he’s suddenly so chatty?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe he’s regretting what happened,” Neily suggested. “Maybe he wants to kiss and make up.”

  “And you think that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” Neily said. “But you’re the one who just gave me the speech about forgiveness. If you expect me to work through my issues, you should think about working through yours.”

  “Hey! Don’t psychoanalyze me, Freud. I don’t expect you to work through anything. Your issues are your business.”

  Neily rolled his eyes. “Are you going to call him back?”

  “Not a chance. He abandoned me,” I said, taking a deep breath. “You know how that feels.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right choice.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “But,” he continued, “just because you hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t still love them.” He gestured to himself. “Case in point.”

  “Okay, let’s just stop talking about it.” I held up a piece of paper. “Look. Carly’s first article for the Brighton Public Address.”

  He took it from me and read it. “An exposé about the parking permit lottery?”

  “Don’t you remember? She found out that the varsity athletes were getting preferential treatment and flipped her shit. I thought her head was going to explode.”

  “She was just mad that she didn’t get a permit.”

  “If you asked her, she’d tell you that she was fighting for justice,” I said. I pulled the rest of the papers out of Carly’s desk. Inside the mound of clippings, catalogs, and receipts there was a manila envelope with IMPORTANT scrawled in bold across the front.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a letter authorizing Carly to access her parents’ safe-deposit box. It’s signed by Paul.”

  “Why would she need that?” Neily asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she put something in it, something too valuable to keep in the house.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mams’s jewelry?”

  “You know we’re going to have to get into that safe-deposit box,” Neily pointed out.

  “Why?”

  “Because even if your grandmother’s jewelry is in the box, Carly might’ve put something else in there for safekeeping.”

  “Okay, but how am I supposed to get access to it? Legally I have no claim on it, remember?”

  “Carly apparently did.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not Carly.”

  “We’ll figure out a way,” he said assuredly.

  I put my hands on my hips and surveyed the scene. “We’re never going to get through all this.”

  “Yeah we are. Is there a box in that back co
rner over there?”

  I reached past a few empty suitcases and a stack of old fashion magazines and grabbed the edge of a small cardboard box. Inside was a scratchy orange wool sweater that had probably been an unfortunate Christmas or birthday gift from a distant relative. I lifted the sweater out to show it to Neily, and when I unfolded it something fell to the ground with a thud. I picked it up—it was a book, but it had no binding, no spine. It was just the guts of the book.

  “What’s that?” Neily asked.

  “Edgar Allan Poe,” I read from the flyleaf. “The Purloined Letter and Other Stories.”

  “I know that book,” Neily said, as if from far off. “Carly was reading it the first time we—No.” He shook his head. “The Purloined Letter …” He stood up and went over to examine Carly’s bookshelf. After a moment, his face lit up like a slot machine that was about to pay out. He pried a hardcover book off the shelf and held it in his hands as if it were some sort of artifact, an ancient chest he was afraid to open. “She wasn’t reading The Purloined Letter, she was writing in it. Do you know what ‘The Purloined Letter’ is about?”

  I shrugged. “No.”

  “It’s a mystery set in Paris. Somebody is using a stolen letter to blackmail an influential person and the police can’t find it. Eventually, a private detective figures out where the blackmailer hid it—with all the other mail in the room, in plain sight.” He handed me the book and I opened it up to the first page, where Carly had scrawled her name. “Tell me that’s not a journal glued into the binding.”

  I nodded. “Looks like it.”

  Neily came to look over my shoulder.

  “I had no idea she kept a diary,” I said. “I sometimes saw her writing things down, but I always thought it was ideas for newspaper stories.” I flipped through the pages carefully. Carly’s handwriting was messy and not easily legible, but I had gotten used to copying her class notes and was pretty good at deciphering it. “It doesn’t look like she wrote in here very often. Maybe once a month, if that. She started it when she was twelve, but stopped after a few entries. She didn’t pick it up again until just after her mom died. Look.” I pointed to the date on the left-hand corner.

  “Let me see,” Neily said, reaching for it.

  I turned quickly to the last page. “I think we should read the end. Maybe she wrote something that will help us.”

  Neily narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “You’ll get distracted,” I said. “I know what you’re looking for.”

  His expression clouded. “Okay, let’s read the end.”

  My breath hitched. “The last entry reads: ‘Now I know that whatever happened to Laura Brandt was because of me. I’m a monster for what I did to her, and I can’t rest until I make things right.’”

  “Who’s Laura Brandt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We should read the whole thing,” Neily said, taking the journal. “Maybe she says something more.”

  “I’ll take it home tonight. It’s not very long.” I held out my hand, but Neily refused to give me the book.

  “I want to read it first.”

  I tried to grab it from him. “No way,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What makes you think that you have any right to read this?” I challenged. “This is Carly’s diary and now that she’s dead it belongs to me. You have no claim on it.”

  “We had a deal!”

  “I’ll show you anything I find.”

  “Audrey, I have—” he began.

  I put my hand on his arm. “I know what you’re looking for. But now is not the time for that.”

  Neily hesitated, then nodded with resignation and let go of the book.

  I slipped Carly’s journal into my bag, then went over to her bureau and took the jewelry box down. It wasn’t long, but it was deep, with a top level separated into smaller compartments that could be removed. Everything in the jewelry box was of the costume variety; I wasn’t particularly interested in keeping any of it. I took the top compartments out and placed them on the desk. In the lower bed of the jewelry box, there was only a small manila envelope on which Carly had written OLD in black permanent marker.

  The envelope contained pictures. They were mostly of Neily and Carly, but there were some of Carly and me, too, and a couple of the three of us together that had been taken by Miranda. In those pictures, Carly was always between the two of us, her arms draped around our shoulders. I called Neily over to look at them.

  “I guess that’s what Paul meant,” I said, pressing them into his hand. “You should keep them.”

  He handed them back. “No, that’s okay.”

  “You should. You might want them someday.”

  Neily took the photos and glanced through them. He had made it about halfway through the stack when I realized something. I snatched one of the pictures from his hand. It was one of the three of us, and I pointed to Carly’s hand.

  “You see that?” I asked.

  “Carly’s ring?” Carly had a claddagh ring that her mom and dad had bought for her in Ireland when she was ten. She had worn it on her right ring finger; ever since her mom’s death, as far as I knew, she had never taken it off.

  I started rummaging through the compartments of the jewelry box. “I don’t see it in here, and I’m sure it wasn’t in the box of her effects the police turned over after they closed the case.” I grabbed the files out of my bag and found the inventory. “It’s not listed on here.”

  “Maybe she lost it.”

  “She loved that ring. She was always so careful with it—it’s not something she would just drop down the drain.”

  “You’re thinking that the person who killed her took it,” Neily said.

  I nodded. “Nobody thought about it because of the necklace—who would notice some cheap silver ring missing when they were all focused on the diamond?”

  “Do you think that would be enough to start building an appeal on?”

  “I’ll check with Dad’s lawyer, but I doubt it. I guess there’s really no way to prove she didn’t just lose it. Or give it away, or put it somewhere we haven’t found yet.”

  “At least we know that the motive wasn’t theft. I mean, the ring is gone, but it’s not the sort of thing you’d steal because you could pawn it. It’s too personal.” He grew silent, shuddering. “It’s like a trophy.”

  “What? What are you thinking?”

  “Adam. It has to be him. Who else would want something like that?”

  I gave him a pointed look.

  “I thought you agreed not to do that anymore,” he said angrily.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I would never do something like that.”

  “I know, but you could forgive someone who didn’t know you very well for thinking that you would.” I sighed. “I’m not saying Adam’s innocent—from where I’m sitting, he looks just as guilty as anybody else—but I’m not going to settle for a simple ‘he was her boyfriend, so he did it’ solution, and I know that’s where you were heading, so I thought I’d cut you off at the pass.”

  “Who has more of a motive? We know he and Carly fought the night before she died, he has a reputation for having a short temper and getting into fights, and he knew you well enough to get his hands on your father’s gun.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to jump to any conclusions. I’ll read the diary tonight and call you if I find anything.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Go home.”

  That night, after dinner with my grandparents, I settled down on my bed and combed through Carly’s diary.

  January 10

  My mother died thirteen days ago. Harriet says that it could help to write the words, to tell some inanimate object what I’m thinking and feeling. Well, I think and feel that this is a waste of my time, but she’s going to check to see if I’m writing in the journal, so I thought I’d better give it a shot. It honestly isn’t so
bad. I’ve had this journal for years, written stupid little-girl things in it, which I don’t read, but I know that they’re there. It’s easier to write how I feel than to say it aloud. I can’t talk to anybody about this, especially Dad. Mom is the one who died, but he’s the ghost in this house. He stays up until all hours, pacing his study. He can’t work, and he won’t eat. I have to force him, beg him, which is unfair. I’m the child. I miss her too, so much that sometimes I can’t breathe, but I can’t let him see it because I’m afraid that it will just make him sadder. Sometimes I think that she’s coming back, that she caught the travel bug and took off to Mexico, or England, and that next month she’ll show up in Empire Valley. Sometimes I let myself imagine it, before I go to sleep, hoping that maybe I’ll dream it that way. If it’s a dream, I won’t have to feel bad for pretending.

  After a while, these sorts of entries stopped with no explanation. There were a couple of paragraphs written around the time that Carly broke things off with Neily. I was afraid to let him see these. It would hurt him, and Carly had hurt him enough.

  I knew that Neily held me partially responsible for their breakup, but I had less to do with it than he thought. It was true that after I started dating Cass I had tried to draw Carly into my new group of friends. It had nothing to do with Neily. Carly was my best friend, and I wanted her around. When Adam started showing interest in her, I encouraged it. Neily thought I had changed her into someone else, but the truth was that Carly’s transformation was her own doing, and her relationship with Adam was a symptom, not the cause of it. I knew Neily resented me for standing idly by while Carly broke his heart and humiliated him publicly, and I was probably guilty of that. She convinced me that it was the only way to make absolutely clear to him that she wanted to end things, and the plan sounded oddly noble.

  “I don’t want to torture him by drawing it out,” Carly had told me the day before. “He’ll fight for me—that’s the kind of person Neily is—but he shouldn’t. I’m not worth it. He needs to see that.” The incident was carefully choreographed, and Neily had gotten the message. Even though I knew it was for his own good, when I saw his face, everything changed. I went after him, called his name from the door as he walked away from the party, not knowing what I’d say if he actually turned around.