All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  “Yeah, sure.” I took out my wallet and handed her Carly’s driver’s license. Now, objectively Carly and I look nothing alike. She was short with brown hair and blue eyes; I’m tall with blond hair and green eyes. But if you strip that all away, our faces are pretty similar, and when Carly’s driver’s license picture was taken she’d just had her hair highlighted, and with the flash and the crappy quality of the photo it looks blond. When she’d shown it to us all, several people commented on how much she looked like me in it, and I was sure that as long as the clerk didn’t get the sense that I was lying she would think the same thing.

  I stood at a distance that was neither suspicious nor close enough for the clerk to note the exact color of my eyes. Still, she looked unconvinced.

  “It says here you’re five-four,” the clerk said.

  “I know, right?” I smiled and shrugged. “Growth spurt.”

  After a few more seconds, the clerk handed back the license and the letter and led me into a small room with a table. She opened and removed box 42 and left me alone with it, instructing me to buzz her on the intercom when I was ready to pack it in.

  I lifted the lid of the box and peered inside. Slowly, I pulled things out. Miranda’s passport was in there, and so was Carly’s, along with three birth certificates—one for each of them, including Paul. All of Mams’s jewelry was there, too, each piece kept in a separate velvet pouch.

  I worked my way to the bottom, examining family photos and glancing at various uninteresting legal documents until I came to a thick manila envelope sealed with packing tape. There was nothing written on the package, and it wasn’t very heavy. I ripped it open with the edge of my car key and took out a stack of letters, all addressed to Carly.

  There was a plastic chair in the corner of the room, and I sat down to read. I felt weightless, like the floor had dropped out from under me. None of the letters were very long, and they were all typed, but the person who wrote them didn’t feel the need to use capital letters or punctuation. The sentences blurred together, rage-filled rants at Carly’s frigidness, interspersed with violent, staccato declarations of love.

  I read each of the letters several times. They repeated the same sentiments over and over, making veiled threats. It seemed as if the writer was completely out of control, even delusional. I wondered how these letters had affected Carly, whether she had been scared or moved to pity. When I reached the end of the pile, a small square note in Carly’s handwriting slipped to the ground.

  Neily,

  I’m returning these letters to you because I know you would not want anybody else to see them. I think you should destroy them. I want you to get over what happened—our breakup was less than ideal, but I didn’t think you would understand any other way. We’re different people—I have accepted this, and you should, too. I can’t believe you would do anything to hurt me, because I know how deeply you still care for me. But please don’t send me any more letters. They make me too sad.

  Carly

  I put the letters back into the envelope and buried it at the bottom of my bag. I left everything else and drove to the Calamity Diner, where I ordered myself dinner before reading the letters again. My food came, but I couldn’t eat. I tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table, grabbed the letters, and fled the diner.

  Neily called later, and so did Cass, but I ignored both of their calls and spent the rest of the evening in my room. Carly had thought that Neily was her anonymous correspondent, which was why she hadn’t shown anyone the letters or told anybody she was being stalked. She was trying to be kind. I couldn’t believe what she believed, that Neily had written them, that he was following her and feeling the kind of anger that exploded onto those pages. Even though he had never been able to shake the pain of what had happened between them, Neily was capable of restraint. Still, I didn’t relish the thought of having to show him the letters, of having to see his face when he realized just what sort of person Carly had understood him to be.

  The next day at school Neily and I didn’t get a chance to talk in private, so I asked him to meet me at the Calamity Diner around four, when there would be few people around. He sat down and grabbed a menu from the edge of the table.

  “Is it too late for brunch?” he asked.

  “You look well rested,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

  “Yeah, well, Harriet prescribed me sleeping pills and last night I decided to give one a try.” He closed his menu and looked at me. “No offense, but you don’t look well rested. Have you been crying?”

  I shook my head. “Not in the past ten hours.”

  “What happened?”

  “Awkward confrontation with the ex-boyfriend, he kissed me, blah blah blah.” I waved my hand dismissively and popped open a menu.

  “Blah blah blah?”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  “He kissed you?”

  “Just once.”

  “Audrey, come on.”

  “I told him that I didn’t want to be with him, but it was so hard.”

  “I get it,” Neily said.

  “I’m sure you do,” I said.

  “I do,” he insisted. “You can talk to me about stuff, you know.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Yeah, well, I don’t really want to talk, so just drop it.”

  The waitress came then and took our order. When she was gone, Neily asked, “So what’s up? I mean, besides Cass’s heart rate.” When I didn’t smile at the joke, he turned serious. “Okay, what’s going on?”

  I reached into my bag and brought out the packet of letters. “I found the key to Carly’s safe-deposit box. And this was in there.” I slid the letters across the table and he took them. “I’ll give you some time. Just let me know when you’re done.”

  It took him almost a half hour to go through the letters. He pored over them, reading each several times, tracing the words with his fingers. Finally, when he was finished, he passed them to me and took a deep breath.

  “That’s not good,” he said.

  “No kidding.” I handed him Carly’s note. “There’s more.”

  He read the note, shaking his head. “This is—this is—”

  “I know.”

  “This is—you know what? I’m offended. I really am. I’m not upset, just totally insulted.” He crumpled up the note and tossed it away.

  “You can’t blame her—”

  “The hell I can’t! When she broke up with me I thought it was because of her own issues, but it turns out that she didn’t even understand me. I never would have done something like this. Follow her around, send her creepy unsigned letters-threaten her? What did she think I was, some kind of psycho?”

  “Did you read the letter? She didn’t think you were a psycho.”

  “No, that’s right, she pitied me. She pitied me, Audrey.” He put his hand to his forehead. “That might be worse.”

  “You need to calm down. You can’t let this freak you out—you have to think rationally. If you didn’t write these letters, somebody else did, and that person is obviously unstable. We have to figure out how Carly’s assault in June, these letters, and her death two months later are connected. Do you think you can put aside your incredulity for maybe an hour so that we can make some headway? Huh?”

  He hesitated. “Yeah.”

  “Great.” I chewed my lip. “I have a theory. I think that the person who attacked Carly at Cass’s party is the same person who wrote these letters.”

  “And what led you to that conclusion?” he asked. “Just to play devil’s advocate.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

  “So you’re psychic now?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not it. It just seems like the kind of person who would write those letters would also trick a girl and rape her.”

  “But the assault happened first.”

  “We don’t know that. The letters don’t have dates on them, and Carly didn’t keep track of when she got them. I chec
ked the diary again—there’s no other mention of them.”

  “But if Carly was getting them before she was raped, she would have been on her guard.”

  “Not if she thought you wrote them,” I pointed out. “She trusted you not to hurt her. She didn’t know there was somebody else to look out for.”

  “So what next?”

  “We trail Adam and the Bean. One of them is going to make a move, and when they do we need to be there to follow.”

  “Fine.”

  “Which one do you want?”

  “I can’t believe you even have to ask.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After Audrey showed me the letters, I went back to Empire Creek Bridge. I didn’t want to go home and face my mother, whose hopeful expressions and mild encouragements were growing more meaningless as the dark mystery surrounding Carly’s murder unfolded. Audrey wanted to be alone, and so did I, free to pace the winding corridors of our minds in search of answers to questions we had just started to learn how to ask. There was only so much that talking about it could do for me, and I was grateful that Audrey understood.

  I missed Carly. It was the first thought I had as I stood on that bridge, watching as the sun dipped below the foothills and splashed stripes of orange and pink across the water. As the air cooled—summer was almost over, and fall was coming—I thought about the last time I had stood on this bridge with her. It was some months after her mother’s death; she was withdrawn and moody, but things were still good between us, or seemed to be. We were looking out on a sunset just like I was now, and Carly was clutching my hand, her head on my shoulder. Without looking at me, eyes trained on the horizon, Carly asked, “What are you going to do, Neily?”

  “About what?”

  “When you graduate. What do you want to do?”

  I shrugged. “College, I guess. Like everybody else. Why? You want to do something different?”

  “My dad would kill me if I decided not to go to college.”

  “It’s your life, Carly. You should do what you want.”

  “That’s not really my style, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head. “My mother always had the last word.”

  “But she’s gone now—”

  “I don’t want her to be gone, I want her to be here!”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that. All I’m saying is that your decisions are up to you now.”

  “Stop saying it like it’s such a good thing.”

  “I’m not—I …” I took a breath.

  “I miss her so much.”

  “I know.”

  “And I keep taking it out on you—I don’t know why.” There were tears creeping into the corners of her eyes.

  “Maybe it’s because you know that whatever you do, whatever you say, I’ll always be here.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You shouldn’t be with a person who treats you like her own personal whipping boy—you deserve better.”

  “You don’t treat me like that.”

  “I’m starting to. I’m so angry all the time, every little thing sets me off and I’m afraid that I’ll end up really hurting you. I don’t want that. That’s the last thing in the world I want to do. I don’t want to turn into some kind of a monster.”

  “You’re not a monster.”

  “I feel like that’s what I’m becoming.” She looked up at me, searching my eyes as if she thought there might be answers in them—or absolution. “Do you know who I am? Because I don’t, not anymore.”

  “You’re going through something big. It’s normal to feel lost. But I love you, I believe in you, and I’m not going anywhere, even if you try to push me away.”

  “Why do you love me?”

  “I just do.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not an answer.”

  “Because ever since I was a kid, people have had all these expectations of me, and I’ve always been so afraid I wouldn’t be able to deliver. But you make me feel good enough just the way I am and that means a lot. To me.” I knew I should stop talking, but there was no easy way to say what I felt, so I went for a surplus of words to cover it. “You know me, Carly. You know me in a way that nobody ever has, and it’s just so comforting to be with a person who gets you. Before we met, I felt like there was no place safe where I could think and feel and say whatever I wanted. That’s why I love you. Being with you feels like being home to me.”

  She said nothing.

  “It’s true,” I said, afraid that she thought I was just making it up.

  “That’s a really good answer,” she said. One tear dropped, and then another. I kissed her wet cheeks and she put her arms around my neck, pulling me close. I ran my palms up and down her back slowly, the way my mother used to soothe me when I was ill or upset. We hugged tightly, almost bracing each other; I bent my mouth to hers and we kissed there on the bridge until it was dark.

  As I walked back to my car, I thought about the journal Audrey and I had found, and how she was trying to prevent me from reading all of it. She knew what I wanted to read, what I had long imagined Carly felt but had been too afraid or too proud to admit: that she still loved me, that she missed me, that she needed and wanted me in a way that only we could need and want each other. Before meeting Audrey at the diner I had resolved to push her into giving up the journal, to beg or demand as much as necessary to get my hands on it, but she ambushed me with the letters. Now I was afraid to read what Carly had written, because for the first time in a long time I was unsure that any feelings other than pity—or possibly remorse—had lingered in her for me. I decided to drop the matter of the journal for the time being—until I knew that I really did want to read it, whatever it said.

  After leaving the bridge, I followed up on something that was bugging me. Audrey was bent on investigating the hell out of Toby Pinto, but the last entry in Carly’s diary was still ringing in my ears: 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. Neither Audrey nor I had any idea who Laura Brandt was, but I was certain that I could find out. All I needed was access to the Internet.

  My first search on the name turned up swimming records from a high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the personal Web site of a professor at the University of Florida, but coupled with the name of a local newspaper I got just one hit: an article, dated almost a year and a half ago, about an eighteen-year-old girl living in Lafayette, a town about twenty minutes north of Empire Valley. According to the article, Laura Brandt had been rushed to the hospital after suffering from a cocaine overdose while her parents were away on vacation. The OD landed her in a coma for five days, and when she awoke, parents at her bedside, she refused to give up the name of her dealer. The girl had no priors and was allowed to trade jail time for a voluntary stint in rehab.

  How was Carly responsible for Laura Brandt’s overdose? The article asserted that while Laura had never been picked up by the police for possession or driving under the influence, she was a veteran drug abuser. And another question: How had Carly even known Laura Brandt? It wasn’t such a leap to connect them—Laura was a drug addict, after all, and Carly had been dating a drug dealer. Carly clearly felt guilty for something, but as yet it was unclear what. I supposed that the only person who might be able to tell me was Laura herself.

  I called 411 and got the number of her parents’ house in Lafayette, but when a man answered and I asked to speak to her, his only response was a sharp “Laura doesn’t live here anymore” before hanging up.

  Audrey and I met before school the next day in the senior parking lot, in full view of everyone on our hit list. We hadn’t been particularly careful about hiding our friendship-partnership, whatever it was—convinced that nobody at school gave a damn about what we were doing, but now we were an object of interest. Somebody, mayb
e Cass or Lucy, had revealed what we were up to. We got stares from all directions, but the most pointed and poisonous of those stares came from the side of the lot where Adam’s posse parked. Cass was not with them; I mentioned it to Audrey, but she just shrugged.

  “Why do you think that is?” I asked.

  “Let me just consult the schedule he gave me …,” she said, reaching for her bag. “Oh, wait.” I gave her a look and she sighed a little. “I did hear that he and Adam had some kind of falling-out.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I overheard some girls talking in the ladies’,” she said.

  “Haven’t they been friends forever?”

  “You know, I really don’t care. I always thought it would be better for Cass to just stop hanging around Adam, and now he has. Two years too late.”

  “Maybe it’s because of you.”

  “Why would it have anything to do with me?”

  “You told Cass you couldn’t trust him, he knows you don’t really like Adam, he stops hanging around Adam because he wants to prove to you that he’s serious about giving your relationship another shot,” I proposed. “Or, Adam found out Cass still has feelings for you and told him in no uncertain terms that he’s not to see you anymore—Cass refuses and gets the cold shoulder. You want more? I can do this all day.”

  “No, thanks, that’s quite enough.”

  I filled her in on what I’d found out about Laura Brandt, and my inability to track her down. “What now?” I asked.

  “I guess we try to find somebody who knows her.”

  When I sat down with Harvey at lunch that day, he looked surprised.

  “What?” I asked, unwrapping my turkey sandwich.

  “Nothing. I was just wondering where Audrey is.”

  I shrugged, taking a bite. “I don’t know,” I said with my mouth half full.

  A moment of silence passed before Harvey spoke again. “Okay, I pretty much resolved not to ask this, seeing as you like your privacy and I usually don’t care, but it’s getting a little weird for me, so I’m just going to ask. What is going on with you and Audrey?”