All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  “There’s a place in Danville,” Neily told me over the phone on Saturday morning. “Keptow Auto Body. The Bean’s some sort of foreign-car specialist.”

  “Figures,” I said. “Only the best spark plugs for an upper-middle-class mechanic.”

  “You should’ve heard how they talked about him,” Neily said. “Reverently, like he was some sort of BMW god.”

  “Maybe I should have him take a look at my car,” I said. “Are you at home?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’m coming to pick you up. We’re going to pay a visit to the Bean.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Danville was a few towns away, which in northern California can mean thirty miles with the way the foothills separate everything. They cordon off Empire Valley on all sides, and we had to hop on the freeway to get out. It was Saturday, so the traffic was light, and it only took us about twenty minutes to get to the Bean’s garage.

  “Wow,” Neily said as we got out of the car. “It’s like Beamer heaven. The gleam of the sun off the expensive German parts is blinding.” He shielded his eyes.

  We went into the front office and approached the receptionist. “Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see Toby Pinto? He’s one of your mechanics.”

  “I know who he is,” the girl said haughtily. She looked about sixteen. “The Bean is my boyfriend.”

  “So they’re still calling him ‘the Bean,’” Neily whispered. I swatted at him and he retreated to a corner, burying his face in an old issue of Foreign Auto.

  “You’re Toby’s girlfriend? That’s really great,” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Just an old friend from high school. I wanted to stop by and pay a visit. It’s been a really long time.”

  “Not that long. He graduated in June,” the girl said. She was not entirely unattractive, but definitely horse-faced, and her snottiness worked not at all in her favor. Still, my smile never wavered. Probably no one was ever nice to this chick.

  “I don’t think Toby ever mentioned you. What’s your name?”

  “Amanda,” she said.

  “Amanda. Look, I’ve known Toby for years, and I think he’d like to see me, so if you could just tell me whether or not he’s here, I’d really appreciate it. As a favor?”

  “He’s here,” she told me reluctantly. “Just go on back. If Leo gives you trouble, tell him you’re a customer.”

  “Great, thanks,” I said, grabbing Neily.

  “How’d you get her to back off?” he said.

  “It’s all about confidence,” I said as we wound our way to the garage at the back. “You act like you have all the power, and people will normally give you what you want. Cass taught me that. He does it all the time in restaurants.”

  “Nice.”

  “Plus, there’s something to say for just being polite. Look, there he is. Let me do the talking, all right?”

  Neily nodded and gestured for me to go ahead. I strolled up to the Bean and gave him a big smile. “Hey, Toby. How’s it going?”

  “What are you doing back here?” the Bean asked, furrowing his brow in agitation. I couldn’t tell if he guessed the reason we were there, but it was pretty clear from his expression and the way he drew himself up as straight as possible as I walked toward him that he was surprised and unnerved to see us.

  “I came to have a little chat. I called you a few days ago, but you might not have gotten the message. I was really hoping to talk to you,” I said, inching closer to him. I was wearing a low-cut top (one of the reasons Amanda had been eyeing me suspiciously, I’m sure) and I leaned in to the full advantage of my cleavage. Nothing too slutty, just the right amount of interest combined with the right amount of … well, let’s call them “assets.”

  “Yeah, Audrey, right?” he said uncertainly, staring at me in the predictable way.

  “I thought you might not remember me, since I wasn’t in school all last year. It’s really great to see you.”

  “Yeah, you too,” he said, still looking befuddled. “But can we sign each other’s yearbooks another time? I’m kind of in the middle of something.” He pointed to a car that was jacked halfway up to the ceiling.

  “This’ll be real quick.” I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  The Bean relented. “Okay, sure. But what’s he doing here?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” I said, unsure how much the Bean remembered Neily.

  “You’re that guy,” he said to Neily. “You used to date Carly Ribelli. We have that in common.”

  To his credit, Neily didn’t make a face. “Yeah, man.”

  “So what do you want?” The Bean had gained weight since I last saw him, but he was tanner now and he had cut his hair. He was about three or four inches shorter than Neily, and seemed anxious around him.

  “Actually, this is about Carly,” I said.

  He turned away and rummaged through a box of tools. “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember the last time you talked to her?”

  “Um, I guess it was a couple of days after prom. I got a hotel room that night and she seemed to be really mad about it, so I left her alone and let her cool down.” He shook his head at Neily. “Women.”

  Neily shrugged. “Then what?”

  “Then I saw her after school with Adam Murray and I got pissed, you know? I mean, here’s my girl, making out with her ex-boyfriend. I had a right to be pissed.”

  “Sure.”

  “So I went over to her house that night and confronted her about it. She said that she was sorry, but she was still in love with Adam or some shit. She dumped me. It was brutal.” He shook his head. I looked over at Neily, but he had wandered away, pretending to admire a Lexus nearby, still within ear-shot.

  “And that’s it?”

  “She avoided me after that. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You didn’t try to talk to her again?” I asked. “Like maybe at Cass’s School’s Out for Summer party, the one he threw at the end of your junior year?”

  “Maybe for a few seconds. Adam told me that if I ever came near her again he’d kick my ass so bad even my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. And you know he could do it. He bench-presses his own goddamned body weight. I knew better than to mess with him.” He looked around nervously. “That better be it, because my boss has been riding me lately about my ‘commitment’ to the job. You should probably go.” I nodded.

  “We’re leaving. Thanks for your help, Toby.”

  “Okay.” He looked puzzled, but I didn’t stop to explain further. I just grabbed Neily by the arm and dragged him out of the shop.

  “Did you catch that?” I asked him when we got back to the car.

  “Yeah, Adam’s jacked. All you have to do is look at him.”

  “No, I mean what the Bean said about Adam bullying him. Do you think he’s just being melodramatic?”

  Neily shook his head vehemently. “I’ll admit, where Carly’s concerned the Bean is still living in a fantasy world, but I don’t doubt for a second that Adam threatened to maim him.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because he did the same thing to me.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Really? When? How come I didn’t hear about this?”

  Neily hesitated. “It was at the start of sophomore year, three months after Carly dumped me. I’d kept my distance, but she hadn’t dropped out of the program yet and I saw her around sometimes. Once, she came up to me at my locker and asked how I was. I told her where she could stick her concern, but I guess Adam saw us talking and got pissed. Five minutes later I had my head shoved under a faucet in the bathroom, and I was choking on running water. Adam told me that if I ever spoke to Carly again I would seriously regret it.”

  “Did Carly know about this?”

  Neily shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  I leaned against my car. “Adam’s not exactly a teddy bear, but I had no idea he got so out of control.”

  Neily grimac
ed. “That’s nothing. You know that kid who got seriously beat up in San Leandro last summer?” San Leandro, a notoriously sketchy town where the rich kids from Empire Valley sometimes bought and sold drugs, was about twenty minutes down the freeway. I remembered hearing about it but hadn’t really paid much attention.

  “Adam did that?”

  Neily squinted, pausing as he struggled with how to put it. “I don’t know. But that was the rumor. People said it was a bad deal.”

  “Jesus.”

  “How could you not know about all this?”

  I shrugged. “Nobody ever said anything to me. According to Lucy, there was a whole conspiracy in place to keep me out of the loop. And I’m sure Carly didn’t know about it.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  “Carly was a good person,” I protested. “She may have treated you badly, but she never would have stood aside and watched her boyfriend wreak havoc.”

  “Seriously? You expect me to believe that? Just because you’ve got all these warm and fuzzy memories of Carly kicking around in your head doesn’t mean you should let them affect the way you look back on her behavior. Carly wasn’t always good. Sometimes, she was horrible.”

  I took in a sharp breath and let it out slowly, trying not to get angry with him. Because he was right, of course. For every act of kindness Carly was capable of performing, there was an equal amount of trouble that she doled out, almost unconsciously, in my opinion. I should know—I was often the receiver of that trouble, those sharp remarks, those impatient outbursts. Still, I felt compelled to defend her, and was annoyed that Neily did not. “Those last few years were really hard. Miranda’s death—it changed her.”

  “That’s not an excuse,” Neily said.

  “No, but it’s an explanation,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re being so uncompromising about this. I’m positive that Carly didn’t know anything about what Adam was capable of, even if you aren’t.”

  “Fine,” he said, in a tone that told me it was absolutely not fine. “What’s next?”

  “I think we should talk to Adam,” I said.

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Contrary to what you might like to believe, Adam knew Carly pretty well,” I said. “He spent a lot of time with her.”

  “He spent a lot of time jerking her around. That’s not the same thing.”

  “You’re awfully protective of someone you say you hate,” I pointed out.

  “Look, just because I was stupid enough to get involved in all this doesn’t mean you get to start making assumptions about how I feel or what I think,” he fumed. “When it comes to Carly, it gets complicated, and I don’t need you throwing everything I say in my face.”

  I stared ahead, watching the cars fly past on the street.

  “I don’t trust Adam,” Neily continued. “He’s a dealer and a liar, and I think”—he paused, as if uncertain of whether or not to go on—“I think he killed Carly.”

  “You do.” I drew myself up slowly, straightening my shoulders, pushing my hair back from my eyes, like I was preparing for battle.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think Adam shot his girlfriend in cold blood?” Even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t as implausible as my tone implied.

  “Yeah, that would be unusual. You almost never see an episode of Law & Order where someone is murdered by the person they’re sleeping with,” Neily said sarcastically.

  “You know that the police investigated him, right? They didn’t find any evidence. What does that tell you?”

  “That they fucked up.”

  “He has an alibi, Neily, remember?”

  “Right. And those have never been known to be falsified.”

  “He was with Cass the whole night.”

  “Of course,” Neily said, but he sounded unconvinced. He took out his cell phone and checked the time. “Shit. I’m supposed to have dinner with my dad.”

  I nodded. “We’ll talk later.”

  That evening, Neily called me on my cell.

  “I thought you were having dinner with your dad,” I said.

  “I am. I’m at Casa Orozco and guess who just walked in?”

  “Who?”

  “Lucy Miller and Adam Murray.”

  “What would Lucy and Adam be doing together?” I asked Neily the next day. We were sitting at Neily’s usual table in the library.

  “What do you think?” he asked, raising an eyebrow suggestively.

  I shook my head. “No way.”

  “Why not? They’ve been friends since middle school. Maybe they’re something more now.”

  “I don’t think so. Back when I was hanging out with them, Adam was always complaining to Carly about how clingy Lucy was, how desperate.” It had annoyed Cass, too. She was always hooking up with the guys on the basketball team and then obsessing over them to him.

  “Maybe that was all a front. If Adam was secretly hooking up with Lucy behind Carly’s back, of course he would trash-talk her to Carly’s face. They looked more than chummy at the restaurant,” Neily went on. “I watched them all night, and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”

  “Ugh. Just what we needed—another wrinkle.”

  “This is just what we needed. What if there was something going on between them back then, too? Lucy might know something about why Adam killed Carly, even if she doesn’t know she knows,” Neily suggested. “Hell, she might be the reason.”

  “So now we’re operating under the assumption that Adam did, in fact, kill Carly?” I gave him a dubious look.

  “I am.”

  I sighed. “We have no proof of that.”

  “Well, if you want to talk about proof, maybe we should go over all the evidence that your father killed Carly. That should be fruitful.”

  “Do you always have to go there?” I snapped.

  “I thought you wanted answers. Answers that contradict the status quo, I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Then why are you fighting so hard against my theory that Adam is to blame? What do we have to lose by exploring that possibility?”

  “We’ll look into Adam. But don’t forget, he has an alibi for the murder.” An alibi my ex-boyfriend had given him.

  “What? That he was getting drunk and high and playing video games at Cass’s house? Yeah, that’s rock solid. There’s no way that Cass, under the influence, wouldn’t have noticed Adam sneaking out of the house,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay. But we have to approach this very carefully—if Adam is as dangerous as you think he is, we’re going to land on his shit list real fast if he finds out what we’re doing.”

  “Agreed. So, where do we start?”

  “We need to find out who had Carly in that room at Cass’s party,” I told him. He shot me a dark look. I threw up my hands. “What? We can’t just ignore that it happened because you’ve already got Adam fitted for a noose. I don’t believe in coincidence—I’m sure that it had something to do with what happened to her.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “It’s just a feeling. That’s not the sort of thing Carly would be able to let go of. She must have gone looking for answers, and if she became a threat to the wrong person it might have landed her in a lot of trouble.”

  “Okay, but what about Adam?”

  “I’ll talk to Cass again about his party, and I’ll also try to fish around about the night that Carly died.”

  “You’re going to talk to Cass again?”

  “It’s the fastest way to the answers we’re looking for. Believe me, I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t you? Just a little?” he asked.

  “No,” I insisted, slamming my chemistry book shut and getting up. “Not even a little.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I lied to Neily. The way I felt about Cass—the way I had felt about him, the way I still felt about him—resisted definition, and I could hardly explain that to Neily, even though he was likely one of the few people who would unde
rstand. But Neily deeply distrusted that whole group, he fundamentally hated the Casses and Adams of the world, and he wasn’t going to go through the trouble of trying to understand what was going through my head. Regrettable, yes, but I had learned to handle things on my own.

  I had never expected Cass Irving to like me. Back when we were freshmen at Brighton he was far and away the best-looking and most popular boy in our class. I never imagined that he would notice me, but I couldn’t help but obsess over him like every other girl our age. It felt more like worshipping a movie star than liking a flesh-and-blood boy—that was how untouchable he seemed to me.

  Carly wanted the best for me, even from the beginning, when we were still getting to know each other. When I moved to Empire Valley, she seemed determined rather than inclined to like me, and expected Neily to feel the same way. He never did, as far as I could tell, but he made a good show of it for Carly’s sake, and he put up with us patiently. I think it was because he knew how much it meant for her to have some family member she felt connected to as her mom became sicker and sicker. Paul was no help at all; he ignored her and spoiled her and left her to her own devices, trying to combat his depression over his wife’s illness by plunging headfirst into his work and rarely surfacing. All Carly had was me, and I her, and Neily appeared to respect that.

  After her mom’s death, Carly began to change. At first she buried herself in Neily, seeking comfort in him and shutting out the rest of the world, especially me. It was as if she resented me, although I could never figure out why—after all, I was also motherless, except that my mom had left me behind by choice. Maybe she thought I was the luckier one, because my mom wasn’t entirely lost to me—there was at least a chance that she might return, and Carly probably assumed this gave me some sort of comfort. It did not. It never has. My mom wasn’t coming back, that much was obvious. She may not have been dead, but she was as good as.

  But Carly’s loss was always threatening to catch up with her, and by the end of freshman year it had. It didn’t happen overnight; it happened slowly, progressively, over several months, and we would’ve been powerless to stop it. Except that I didn’t try to. I was dating Cass, and it was like I was part of a different world. I wanted Carly to be there with me, to join me in the popular crowd so that I didn’t have to be alone, so that people wouldn’t be aware of how much I didn’t belong. My runaway mom and my drunk of a dad had made me painfully insecure, but Carly could protect me. She could help me hide it. I used her to my own advantage just like everybody else.