All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I see you together all the time at school, and people are talking about how you two are hooking up or whatever. I just want to know: Are these things I should, as your friend, be actively denying, or is there something to all that?”

  “I thought you didn’t listen to gossip.”

  “I don’t, but sometimes you can’t avoid it.”

  I put down my sandwich. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to say anything.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “Audrey asked for my help investigating Carly’s murder.”

  Harvey’s eyes went a little wide. “You’re kidding me. No, you’re not kidding me at all, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t her killer in prison? In fact, isn’t her killer Audrey’s dad?”

  “That is the official story, yes. But Audrey doesn’t believe her father could’ve done it, and neither do I.”

  “And so you’re looking into it by yourselves?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow, man. That’s brave.” He shook his head in disbelief.

  “You’re not going to lecture me about how stupid it is for us to be doing this?”

  “Do you know me, like, at all?”

  If Harvey had pointed that out, though, I couldn’t have disagreed with him. It felt like Audrey and I were playing detective, but the article about Laura Brandt brought things back into focus. I was almost positive Adam had killed Carly, and if he had somehow been involved in Laura’s overdose, then I was starting to see that it went much deeper than Audrey and I could conceive. It felt as though we were stepping into a lion’s den; in the pitch darkness it was impossible to see where the danger was coming from, but it was there all the same, lurking in the shadows. But how could I back down? The closer we got to answers, the more I wanted to uncover; I no longer wanted to know, I needed to know. It was a pull like an addiction.

  “Hey, I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of a girl named Laura Brandt?”

  Harvey thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Never.”

  “Yeah, me neither. You do know the Bean, though, right?”

  “He was a senior last year.”

  I nodded. “Remember anything about him?”

  “Precious little, and that’s enough for me. You know he got in trouble a few years ago for stalking a girl.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. She was a friend of Lila’s, which is how I heard about it. Apparently he got suspended for, quote, harassing her, unquote,” Harvey told me. Lila, his older sister, had also been a Fund kid at Brighton, for all four years of high school. She had graduated two years ago.

  “What did he do?”

  “I’m a bit fuzzy on the details. Why are you so interested?”

  “We think he might’ve been stalking Carly. According to a couple of people, he was completely obsessed with her and is pretty much still delusional about it. Carly got these really creepy anonymous letters in the three months or so before she died. Audrey thinks they may be from him.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Who is this girl the Bean stalked?”

  “Her name’s Allison Kessler. She transferred midway through her junior year to Athenian, and the last I heard she was at Stanford. She and my sister still keep in touch.”

  “Do you think you could get her number? I’d like to talk to her.”

  Harvey nodded. “Sure, I could try.”

  Audrey and I agreed that after school we would each start tailing our primary suspect. Adam and his friends hung around the quad for about a half hour after school, so I sat inside the library near the front doors, watching them through the glass. They tossed around a football and were approached by several different students, most of whom I recognized as stoners. After a while they went to the parking lot and got into three different cars. Once they left, I followed Adam’s truck at a safe distance all the way into the valley. There was a large empty space on the east side of town where the mayor’s office had recently installed a meandering nature walk, a jungle gym, and a basketball court. It was pretty far away from everything, and surrounded by a thick ring of trees, so people rarely brought their kids there, preferring the sunnier parks close to the center of town. It was the perfect place for Adam to conduct business.

  I parked my car at the farthest corner of the lot and slouched down in my seat so that I could just see Adam if I peeked over the top of the dash. My car was rather inconspicuous, but it was possible that he would recognize it, or that it would attract his attention by virtue of being one of the only other cars in the lot. I decided to take that chance—after all, what could he do to me that I couldn’t avoid simply by gunning the engine and getting the hell out of there?

  For a while, Adam and his friends lolled around on the basketball court, smoking what may have been cigarettes, halfheartedly knocking one another around. In about fifteen minutes, though, cars started rolling into the lot carrying people I recognized as the same dopeheads who had approached Adam earlier in the quad. Money and packages surreptitiously changed hands, and I was secretly a little thrilled to be witnessing a drug deal—several, actually—firsthand, like an undercover cop in a movie.

  As Adam went about his business, I considered his cohorts. There were some whose faces I knew but whose names I couldn’t place, students a couple of grades lower whom I had never met or had classes with. There was one guy, Dick Brenner, who was in my grade; his sister had been two years ahead of Carly and me in the program and was now at Yale. Dick, however, had displayed none of his sister’s academic aptitude, only a pretty big appetite for trouble, which explained why he was part of Adam’s crew.

  I also recognized a quiet, muscle-bound junior who hovered on the edges of the assembly, watching the proceedings with an unwavering eye and looking uncomfortable in his own skin. This was Sean Ozrick, known around campus as Oz; he was Adam’s enforcer, although Adam was quite capable of causing his own damage. Oz had a juvenile record and a notoriously abusive father, but he was relatively smart; he was in my English class.

  Suddenly, in the middle of a transaction, Oz paused and looked straight at me. I started, then reached for the ignition. I was well hidden, but it was possible that he had still seen me. He leaned over and said something to Adam, who didn’t look in my direction but wrapped up his conversation with a kid I didn’t recognize and took his keys from his pocket. The rest of the group stirred at a word from him and everyone headed toward the three cars they’d arrived in. In a minute or two, they were gone. My heart was beating wildly, and I decided to wait till they were clear before venturing out of the lot.

  This, it turned out, was a really bad idea. While I was still slumped behind the wheel, eyes closed, trying to even out my breathing, the passenger-side door opened and Adam slid into the seat next to me.

  I sat up. “What the fuck—?”

  Adam pressed the muzzle of a handgun up against my rib cage. I recoiled instinctively. Adam had a trigger-happy temper, but it had never occurred to me that he would be carrying a gun. Things were getting very real very quickly. “What’re you doing here, Think Tank?”

  I inhaled sharply and held my breath, my mind racing with fear. I suddenly wished I had told someone, anyone, where I was.

  “Don’t bother lying—I know what you’re doing. You’re spying for Finch, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I croaked.

  He stared at me. “Then why are you following me?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You think I’m some kind of idiot? Is this your idea of revenge—you narc on me for taking Carly?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not—” He pressed the gun harder against my side. “For fuck’s sake, put that away.”

  “Not until you tell me what you’re doing here.” He thought for a moment. “This have something to do with Audrey?”

  “What?”

  “Lucy told me Audrey’s investigating Carly’s
murder. You know something about that?”

  “She’s not.”

  “You think I killed Carly?” He was nervous now; his hands were shaking, and the gun pulsated against my ribs. “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Enzo Ribelli killed Carly.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve got an alibi,” he said, his voice rising. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Okay. God, put the gun away!”

  He hesitated, then slipped it in his waistband. “This isn’t a toy, Think Tank. I see you around here again, you’re going to find that out the hard way.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Are we clear?”

  “Yeah, we’re clear.”

  “You see me at school, you don’t even look at me. I get called into Finch’s office, I’m going to assume you had something to do with it. Got it?”

  I nodded, praying he’d leave. He opened the door and climbed out, leaning in for one final word.

  “It’s not just me in this. You try to take us down, there’s a shitload of people who’ll make you suffer. You’re in way over your head.”

  I said nothing, staring ahead, desperate to leave. I had never thought of myself as a coward, but all I wanted to do was run and hide. How could Carly have gotten involved with this psycho?

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  “I know, I heard you.”

  “Fine. We’re done here.”

  When he was gone, I left the parking lot as fast as I could, and didn’t stop driving until I was safe at home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Audrey’s evening was a lot less eventful. After school she drove to Keptow Auto Body and waited for the Bean in the Starbucks parking lot across the street. When he left at seven o’clock, she tailed him to a house in Danville where he picked up his girlfriend and took her back to his apartment in Empire Valley. Audrey sat outside for three hours, but the shades were drawn on all the windows and the two of them didn’t come out, so she left shortly before midnight, empty-handed.

  When she asked me how I’d done with Adam, I told her where I’d gone and what I’d seen, but not how Adam had accosted me in my car. I figured she’d just worry, insist we call the cops or something, and I wasn’t going to back down that easy. I was more convinced than ever of Adam’s guilt. The way his voice rose, the way he shook when he contemplated the idea of us launching our own investigation—he was scared shitless. But I wasn’t about to freak Audrey out, and anyway, she’d just think I was on yet another anti-Adam tirade. I needed more proof before I told her what had happened.

  “I think they might’ve seen me,” I said. “I’d probably better back off for a while, see what happens.”

  She nodded, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Do what you have to do, Neily.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No. It’s good that you’re being careful. There’s no telling what he might do if he found out you were following him around.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. No telling.”

  We had a substitute teacher in Phyllis’s class that morning; she handed us a few problem sets and told us to work quietly at our desks, while she flipped through a fashion magazine at the podium.

  “Hey,” Harvey whispered, leaning over.

  “Don’t bother looking at my paper—I haven’t even started yet,” I said.

  “Like I would ever cheat off you. Listen, I talked to my sister about getting ahold of Allison and she gave me her cell number.” He passed me a note and I stuck it in my pocket. “Tell her you’re a friend of Lila’s.”

  “Good work,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. Then I raised my hand and asked for the bathroom pass. We weren’t supposed to be on our phones during school hours, but the bathroom was a loophole to that rule—the teachers rarely used the students’ facilities, preferring the ones in their own lounge. Once I was satisfied that nobody was hiding in any of the stalls, I dialed Allison Kessler’s phone number. It rang twice before she picked up.

  “Hello?” She sounded wary, like a girl who wouldn’t normally answer a call from an unfamiliar number.

  “My name is Neily Monroe. I’m a friend of Lila Rosenberg’s.”

  “Oh.” She paused. “Is Lila okay?”

  “She’s great. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Toby Pinto.”

  “What?”

  “Toby Pinto. I think you knew him at Brighton.”

  “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

  “No joke, I promise. I heard you got the Bean suspended three years ago. I need to know why.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Please don’t. Look, Allison, I know this is a major invasion of privacy, but you accused the Bean of stalking you and I’m afraid he might have done the same thing to another girl—my ex-girlfriend. So if you could just help me out here …”

  “Another girl?”

  “Carly Ribelli.”

  Allison repeated the name, then stopped suddenly. “Isn’t she that girl who died?”

  “Yeah. Are you starting to see why this is so important?”

  She hesitated. “I barely knew the Bean. He asked me out a couple of times and I kept saying no, I had a boyfriend, but he wouldn’t stop. And then he just started showing up random places where I’d be. At the grocery store when I was there with my mom, at the diner, at the gym. He was everywhere. Sometimes I’d look out my window at night and his car would be parked across the street. I even called the cops once, but he left before they got there.”

  “Did he ever write you any letters?” I asked.

  “E-mails, yeah. Creepy ones. That’s how they proved it was him—they traced the e-mail address back to him. I filed for a restraining order, then I left school—I thought this was all over.”

  “You’re sure that he never sent you anything besides those e-mails? He never dropped notes in your locker or your mailbox at home? Slipped something under your door?”

  “Nope. Just the e-mails.”

  “And it stopped when you transferred?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Have you heard from him since then?”

  “No. Thank God.”

  After fifth period, on my way to lunch, I stopped by my locker to drop off a few books and found a note folded at the bottom. It wasn’t another article—it was smaller, handwritten. It said: If the fall doesn’t kill you, the crocodile will. 4:30 today. I read it twice, then folded it up and put it in my pocket. There was no telling who wrote it—I wouldn’t know until I met them—but I was sure I knew what it meant.

  I hadn’t been to the Oakland Zoo since I was ten years old. I had gone on a school field trip there once, and I remembered just where they kept the big reptiles. I knew what the note meant because I’d seen the words before, on a sign hanging over the crocodile pit at the Sydney Aquarium. The biology teacher had a photograph of it in his classroom. I must’ve passed it at least twice a day while walking through the science building, just like everybody else at Brighton.

  At four-thirty on the dot, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Oz?” He squared his shoulders and stared at me but didn’t speak. Trying to lighten the mood, I gestured to the pit. “You know that’s an alligator? They don’t have crocodiles here.”

  He shrugged, but still said nothing.

  “Did Adam send you?”

  “He told me how he pulled a gun on you yesterday.”

  I nodded, backing away slowly. “We’re not going to have a repeat of that, are we? I got the message the first time.”

  Oz shook his head. “That’s why I had you meet me in a public place. So you’d know I wasn’t here to beat you up or anything. I just want to talk.”

  “Look, I’m not going to turn you guys in,” I told him. “Your business is … your business. I’m not looking to mess things up for you.”

  “This isn’t about the drugs,” Oz said. “Or, it is, but not directly.”

  “Okay. So talk.”

  He too
k in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Did you ever hear of a girl named Laura Brandt?”

  “No.” It seemed smart to keep a lid on my knowledge. Any explanation of how I knew a girl who lived several towns away and with whom I had no friends in common would inevitably lead back to Carly’s diary, and I didn’t want anyone to know that Audrey and I had found it. “Does she go to Brighton?”

  “No. She was homeschooled.”

  I waited, but he said nothing else. “What does she have to do with me?”

  “I heard you’re investigating Carly’s murder. Is that true?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “I think I have some information for you.”

  I tried to gauge his expression. “Then I am. Well, sort of. Trying, anyway.”

  “Laura and I go back a long way. We were both home-schooled when we were younger, and we were both in this so-cial group some of the mothers set up to help us make friends.”

  “I guess you knew her pretty well, then.”

  “Yeah, we were close. Even though I ended up going to Brighton and she stayed homeschooled, we hung out a lot.”

  Something told me that Oz and Laura were more than friends, or at least Oz had wanted them to be. “What happened to her?”

  Oz ran his fingers through his dark hair, fidgeting. “I don’t know. She just—disappeared.”

  “She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

  “A couple of years ago, I introduced her to Adam and they got to be friends. She’d hang out with us a lot, even got close to Carly. She’d been doing drugs for a little while, but Adam got her hooked on some strong stuff.”

  “You just let him do that to her?”

  “I figured it was her choice, and who was I to tell her not to? I mean, I deal the stuff, I’m not exactly innocent here.”

  “Fine. She was hooked on, what, coke?”

  He nodded. “About three months before Carly died, Laura ODed on cocaine—or, what she thought was pure cocaine. The doctors at the hospital told her that the coke she bought from Adam had been cut with Special K.”

  “Special K?”