by Hayton, Lee
“Look, Mrs. Walsham, I never put any pressure on Miranda to take back her story. I wanted nothing more than for her story to be true.”
“It was true. Do you really think after all this time that Miranda’s still fibbing? Still trying to grab herself a bit of attention.”
Victoria took a step back and bumped into Edwards. He shifted to the side, leaving her on her own. Unprotected.
“When she said she wanted to take back her statement, I was angry,” Victoria admitted. “I handled it badly.”
“You got her killed.” Mrs. Walsham advanced and stood on her tiptoes, so her face was level with Victoria’s. An inch away. “You thought you knew better than anybody and you ended up getting her killed. Who the hell did you frame for this the first time? Why would you do that? Get a front page of glory and leave the killer out there on the streets waiting for his chance to take revenge?”
Edwards stepped forward, putting an arm between the two of them and gently coaxing Mrs. Walsham to take a step back. “I don’t think this is the time for anyone to be laying accusations. There’s a lot more to be understood before any of us will know what’s really happened here.”
Gratitude flooded through Victoria. She stood to the side so Mrs. Walsham could leave the room unimpeded. She did so, pausing once at the door to lock eyes with Victoria again.
“It’s your fault.”
#
“You just make friends wherever you go,” Edwards said. They were looking through the drawers in Miranda’s dorm room. Trying to see if there was anything there that hadn’t already been poked, prodded, and categorized.
Victoria knew it was an attempt to lighten the mood and was grateful, but she could only nod. She didn’t trust herself to speak. The attack had shocked her, punched through to her core. The same place her doubts lived.
“You know I read a book once.” Edwards left a pause. Victoria could see the gap, could even hear herself saying “only once,” the joke serving to get them back onto an even keel. But she couldn’t say it. “It was called ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’” he continued. “Seems to be you could be a bestseller with ‘How to Make Enemies and Alienate Everyone.’”
The most Victoria could manage in reward was a small grin.
“Come on, Collins. You’re killing me here.” A second too late, he realized his choice of words and a look of horror passed over his face.
The tension inside Victoria broke in a wave of sympathy. How many times had she finally got her foot out of her mouth, only in time to insert her other foot?
“Literally.”
He stared for a second longer, then burst out laughing. “Oh. Good one, grandma. I’ll have to start keeping my handgun on my nightstand. Don’t want to be caught out by the terror that is Killer Collins.”
The laughter was infectious, and after a moment, Victoria joined in. He gave her a slap on the shoulder, then started to insert his hand between Miranda’s bed springs and mattress.
“Better you than me,” Victoria said. “Be careful there aren’t any needles under there.”
“What?” Edwards mocked horror. “Nobody told me she was a diabetic.”
“I wonder where they shipped her roommate off to?” Victoria took a second glance at the doorway to ensure it was clear before she opened a drawer in the opposite nightstand. “It’s so early, they’ll be short of options.”
It took at least a month before students would start to realize that the college life wasn’t for them and start to drop out.
“Yeah. It’ll certainly keep me up nights.” Edwards tipped over to lay on the floor on his back and slid himself under the bed. The glow from his standard issue flashlight seeped out a moment later. “Here we go!”
“What?”
Edwards pulled himself back out from under and flipped the mattress on its long edge. “Party favors,” he said, dangling a strip of condoms over his forefinger.
“I’d say, ‘well at least she was using protection,’ but it seems to have done sod-all in her case.”
“The heat of the moment, Collins. Who has time to tear one of these babies open with their teeth when your passion’s in full flow?”
“Speaking from experience, are we?”
He grinned, and the wide expanse of teeth did something to his face that made Collins stomach flip over. And sex was the last thing on her mind.
“I don’t know what you could possibly be suggesting. I’m an upstanding member of the police, I’ll have you know.”
Collins opened her mouth in surprise, then began to laugh hysterically. When Edwards frowned in confusion, she mocked. “An upstanding member, are you?”
He slapped at her shoulder again, the mattress banging back down onto its base as he mistakenly let it go. “Get your mind out of the gutter, woman. What’s roomie got in her drawers?”
This time he caught the double entendre before she needed to point it out and laughed before she did. Her chest started to ache from the force of her laughter, but she couldn’t stop. She turned, pressing a hand to her mouth to try to mute the barks of laughter, and saw Mrs. Walsham standing in the doorway. Victoria’s laugh caught in her throat as her face suffused with blood. It felt as though her tongue were thickening in her mouth. Edwards turned to see what had happened, and his laughter abruptly cut off as well.
Mrs. Walsham walked across the room, looked at the prophylactics that Edwards had dropped down on the bed, and knelt beside them to unpin a series of pictures of her daughter with another girl, probably her roommate.
“I checked with your Captain, and he said it was fine to take them,” she said defensively, as she stood back up from the bed. A tear rolled down her cheek as she looked at the photos for a moment, then tucked them into her purse. “Sorry to interrupt.”
#
“You know you’re going to hell when you die, Collins?”
Victoria punched Edwards lightly on the shoulder, but the smile she produced didn’t do anything except use the muscles in her face. The feeling of shame was too awful and overwhelming to imagine feeling normal pleasure again.
They’d left the university campus in search of Miranda’s roommate. Tiffany Roberts had been hastily ejected from the dorms and safely put up in a secure village just off the corner of Rodding Street. Unlike the fortress that protected Iris Mancini, Tiffany’s new accommodation wasn’t as secure as its name suggested. The front gate appeared to be locked until they drew closer. The padlock meant to be securing the chain had been broken open and was hanging free.
Victoria pulled it free while Edwards jumped back in the car to drive through. When the car had passed her, she then hooked the padlock into the chain again. It wouldn’t keep anyone out who wanted in, but it might fool someone passing by in a hurry. The front desk was unattended, but the guest book was helpfully left out on open display on the desk. Edwards turned it around and found out that their newest resident had a lot of traffic recently.
“What do we even want to ask this girl?” Edwards asked as they waited for their knock to be answered. “It looks like half the department has already been through here.”
Victoria shrugged. “I don’t know. I just wanted to get a feel for Miranda as she is—was—now. According to the state of her body, her life had taken a very different path than the one she used to be on.”
“Yeah, you said at the briefing. Head of the chess team, wasn’t she?”
“Certainly on the academic pathway. Looking at Miranda’s transcript for last year, she’d have been lucky to last out the semester, let alone the next three years of study.”
“Not everyone’s cut out for college.”
Victoria felt the familiar drowning wave of despair welling up inside her. “The girl I knew was born for college.”
They waited for a few minutes, but nobody was answering. As they walked back down the complex stairs, sobs echoed from beneath the staircase like the mournful tones of a church bell. Victoria put her fingers to her lips for Edwards, th
en slipped down the last few steps as quietly as she could.
Turning, she saw a young woman sitting with her back to the side of the ground floor unit. Her knees were pulled to her chest, arms squeezing them in a bear hug. Her shoulders shook with each devastated sob.
“Tiffany?”
The girl looked up. Tears carved glistening streaks down the light brown skin of her face. Victoria recognized her from the pictures that Mrs. Walsham had taken from the dorm room. In those, this girl had been smiling in rays of joy. Her arms flung around her roommate.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Tiffany said. “I’ve already talked to the police.” Her voice gathered a note of resentment. “Then talked to them again. And again.”
“Sorry.” Victoria stood there helplessly. She couldn’t just leave the girl there.
“Can I help you to your room?”
“That’s not my room,” Tiffany said angrily. “My room is back on campus. They just threw me out, you know?” She wiped her tears away from her cheeks with quick, aggressive movements.
“I didn’t even get a choice of where I went. The dean packed up all my things while I was in a lecture. I walked out to find out my missing roommate’s dead, and I’m stuck in this hovel.”
“It’s not fair,” Edwards said. He crouched down and put his hand gently on top of Tiffany’s, but the magic it had wrought from Glenda at reception backfired with Tiffany. Her lip curled in disgust, and she tossed his hand off.
“What do you want?”
“I wanted to know about Miranda,” Victoria said. “But if you’d prefer not to talk about her, that’s okay. I met her a few years ago, and she was a very different girl, I think. I suppose I wanted to talk to someone who knew her well, to get a feel for her now.”
Tiffany rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, then got to her feet. “You’re the cop she talked to last time, are you?”
Victoria nodded, but when Tiffany didn’t look up, she said, “Yes.”
“She fucking hated you.”
Edwards gave a snort, and Victoria elbowed him in the ribs, then relented. “Yeah. It seems to be a common reaction these days.”
“You didn’t think she was telling the truth.”
Victoria hesitated. After a moment, she shook her head. “Actually, I did believe her. That’s why I was so angry when she changed her story. Didn’t help her out any, though.”
“I don’t know what she was like, beforehand. Met her on the first day of college.”
“You roomed together last year, too?”
Tiffany nodded. “We were put together randomly last year and requested the same room this time around.” She smiled. A private memory. “Miranda was mental. Half the time she didn’t turn up to lectures, didn’t even bother buying the textbooks.”
“We saw she’d had a bit of trouble with her grades.”
Tiffany sniffed and nodded. “She was wicked smart. If I’d slacked off as much as she did, I’d have flunked out in the first month. D’you know she actually got higher marks than me in English 4.0?” She laughed. “And I bloody studied for those exams.”
“Tiffany, if you were friends how come you didn’t report it when she went missing?”
The girl winced so hard her head jerked back and hit the plasterboard walls of the housing unit. Her eyes looked to the side, a panicked rat looking for an escape. But there was only one path in under the stairs. Victoria and Edwards were more than enough barrier to keep her trapped there. Victoria felt a strange pride when Tiffany didn’t attempt false tears as a method of exit, wiping her nose with the back of her hand instead and looking Victoria straight in the eye.
“To be honest, I was relieved that she was gone.”
Edwards leaned in, giving Tiffany such close attention that even Victoria felt awkward for her. “You asked to room with her this year, you said. If you didn’t want her there, why do that?”
“She changed. Even when we first got back to college, she was the same old Mandy, but in the last couple of weeks she wigged out.”
Victoria thought quickly. “Was it the drugs?”
The path downhill was usually littered with the remnants of pleasure-seeking.
Tiffany nodded. “She was into more drugs, harder drugs. One time I came back from class and caught her injecting.”
She held out her left hand and tapped on the nail of her forefinger. “Under the fingernail.” Her face crawled with disgust and fear. “You don’t do that if it’s your first time, do you?”
“Did she need help?”
A bitter laugh. “Miranda needed something. I caught her talking to her radio once, as though it was a person. More than she’d spoken to me for a while.”
Tiffany sniffed again as fresh tears of memory formed in her eyes. “There’s a shrink on campus. I told her to go to him. He’s there to deal with students scared to be away from home, learning difficulties, and that sort of shit, but he’d have proper training. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have landed the role. I told her to see him and get herself sorted, but she didn’t.”
Tiffany squinted as she looked at Victoria. “You know, she told me all about you. How much she hated you, that stuff, but also how you’d caught the guy who attacked her. That day she came back to the dorm after classes and saw his picture in the paper, she was ecstatic. Kept going on and on about how she’d never been happier that someone wound up dead.”
Edwards nodded. “She recognized him? From the paper.”
“Nearly had a heart attack when she saw his picture, then got hysterical—exultant—when she read that he was dead.” She looked over her shoulder, as though someone might be listening in. “There’ve been rumors around campus about the lawsuit, but I never joined in. Miranda was certain you’d shot the right guy, and that was good enough for me.”
It was a strange relief to hear the words. Victoria closed her eyes for a moment, reconciling the girl who hated her with the one who appreciated her for killing her attacker. For killing the right man. The doubts that had crowded into her brain from the moment she heard about Miranda, retreated.
“That’s why it was so weird,” Tiffany continued. “When Mandy started to say he was coming for her. That he’d never stop.”
Victoria’s eyes sprang open, and a cold snake of terror slithered down her backbone. Anxiety fired her nerves in random patterns. “Who was coming for her?”
Tiffany tilted her head back, stopping a new flood of tears in their tracks.
“That’s why I told her she needed to see the shrink. On top of everything else. She said that the Birdman was dead, but he was coming for her.”
Even gravity didn’t work, and new tears tracked silver trails down Tiffany’s cheeks. “That’s why I was so relieved when she buggered off, and I had the chance to get a night’s rest without her shaking me awake to tell me what the voices were saying. She was so damn needy!”
Transported back in time, Victoria felt her irritation as Shelly got in trouble again, Shelly needed to be picked up from the principal’s office again, Shelly needed someone to come in and discuss her excessive truancy again.
Barely there, not to talk to, not to interact with, but Shelly’s absence as she went out to another party, another tryst, left a vacuum that pulled out Victoria’s energy and soul to fill. She thought of the morning her sister hadn’t come home, and the relief of those few hours she sat on the couch waiting. In a complete absence of need.
“Really, I thought she would have gone home, or got shacked up with some lowlife, or got herself into some trouble that only an adult with money or authority could get her out of. I never expected . . .”
Tiffany shook her head, grief strangling her words so that she was unable to finish.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nicole Atiya retched once more, producing a thin line of burning dribble that she repeatedly spat to clear. The flush for the toilet was so far out of reach it may as well have been mounted on the ceiling. Instead, she closed the lid on the awful mess. The so
ur odor of her own fresh vomit cut off.
The dirty, cream porcelain lid was cool to the touch, and Nicole leaned her burning forehead against it. Her skin was so hot she felt like she was running a dangerously high fever. Sometimes, she could even fool herself that it was a threatening virus that made her throw up. Yeah. A virus growing in her womb.
After five minutes with no further urge to retch, Nicole clambered to her feet and sat on the toilet seat lid, pressing the wide button to flush. Her schoolbag didn’t have a lot of textbooks in it, but there was a bottle of water and a baggie with baking soda. Nicole tipped some into her mouth then swilled the water around before swallowing. The salty fizz was a refreshing change from the detestable bite of stomach acid.
The soda was a trick learned when she had “issues” with food. When Nicole’s teeth started to feel porous and ached like her nerves were strung over razor wire, she’d sought help online. A non-judgmental site informed her that brushing them after every bathroom visit was a mistake. Instead of wiping her teeth clear, it drilled the stomach acid further into their sad enamel surfaces. She’d been eroding them away, one regurgitated meal at a time.
The same forum had led her to cut her fashionably long fingernails to avoid scarring and infection from accidentally cutting the inside of her throat. Refining a process she’d taken years to master, then years to kick.
It was disgusting to sit in a bathroom stall and drink water. Then again, it was disgusting to do many of the things Nicole did. Or let people do. Shoving intimate parts of themselves into her like it was a gift she was meant to enjoy. The only gift Nicole enjoyed was not paying for drinks or movies. A pulsating cock, she could live without.
Her mother was onto her already. Of course, mom thought her friend “Mia” was back. When Nicole felt ill the week before, she’d taken a shower to cover the noise as she retched. Having no food in her stomach meant the evidence swirled away, mixing with her no-tears shampoo and the body wash that smelled of peaches. A smell that made Nicole retch again.