Sweet Cherry Pie

by J. D. Monroe

  “Fine,” she says. She reaches into her bag for the stack of papers.

  Adam grabs them greedily and flips through them. “I’ve got most of this,” he says. He lays the papers flat. “I thought you had something new.”

  She reaches over and pulls out one of the arrest reports. “There’s your drunk and disorderly,” she says. “That’s just a couple of them. You should search the newspaper archives for Charleston and Richmond if you want more.”

  He sighs. “Is that all?”

  “Yeah, that’s all,” she says flatly. “How about you try this thing called ‘doing your own damn work’?”

  “Whatever,” he says. He shoves his chair back and taps Patrick’s shoulder. “I’m out.”

  Patrick glances at Georgia, then frowns at Charity. “Hold on a sec, I’ll be right behind you.” He hurries to close his laptop and gather his papers. “Sorry, he’s my ride. I guess we gotta go. Give me a call sometime. You have my number.”

  “You bet,” Georgia says, smiling brightly. “Thanks for the help.” She watches in silence as Adam storms out the door, Patrick calling after him. As soon as the door closes behind them, Georgia whirls and throws her hands up in exasperation. “Seriously, Charity?”

  “What?”

  “Could you have been more of a bitch?”

  “History says yes,” Charity says. “I was downright hospitable, all things considered.”

  “You ran him off,” Georgia says. “Clearly not.”

  “Oh, tell me about the difficulty of flirting with Patrick, who is, like, so totally hot,” Charity says. “Next time, you can sit and listen to the pompous hipster douchebag talk trash about your mother screwing her brother.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Charity,” Georgia says, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “Really, Georgia? See, I don’t know anything about you. I’m going to hazard a guess. I bet your mom was the town pickup truck,” Charity says. “Everyone’s invited to jump on the back and ride.”

  Whipcrack. Hot face. She barely saw Georgia move, but Charity’s face stings, and tears glisten in Georgia’s eyes. It’s about time. It’s almost worth the pain and the sudden lull in the noise, just to see the porcelain mask slip and reveal the turbulence deep beneath the surface.

  “What’s the matter, Georgia? Did I hit a nerve? Did I get too personal?”

  Silence.

  “Not so fun now, is it?” Charity says.

  Georgia is still silent. Her throat works slowly, and her eyelashes flutter. Charity suddenly realizes she’s trying not to cry.

  Guilt washes over her, and her stinging face flushes even hotter. She feels like she kicked an old lady’s cat and then stole ice cream from a baby just for kicks. Her stomach twists into a knot and she grabs her bag. She can’t quite meet Georgia’s eyes, which are turned up and glistening with the sheen of tears.

  “I—I’ll be at the car,” Charity stammers as she hurries out of the restaurant. “The hell is wrong with me?” She’s got a mouth on her, but she’s not mean by nature. This case has her all ass-backward and upside down, and she’s not handling it well. It’s certainly not Georgia’s fault, and for all she knows, Georgia’s mom is dead and buried. Congratulations, she thinks. She’s reclaimed Asshole of the Year status from her sister.

  A boot scuffs on the gravel. She turns to see Georgia standing at the front of the car. “I’m sorry I slapped you,” Georgia says flatly. “But I’m not sorry about the rest.”

  “That so?”

  “It’s so,” Georgia says. She unlocks the doors, and they drop into the seats in near-unison. She turns to look at Charity, eyes clear and dry now. “I know you’re upset, and I get it, but I’m not going to apologize. Tommy Crane is already dead, and more could die. I don’t care if you have to trot out every traumatic memory you’ve got. If it saves a life, then you’d better damn well suck it up and do it.”

  Now it’s Charity’s turn to sit in silence. She wants to argue with Georgia, but the younger girl is right. She sighs. “Fine.”

  “That’s it?”

  It feels she swallowed a prickle-burr and got it stuck halfway down. “I’m sorry I said what I did,” Charity says. “It was out of line.”

  Georgia tilts her head, eyes narrowing slightly like she’s trying to figure out if Charity really means it. “Okay,” she finally says. Her face relaxes, and she cranks the car. Apparently that’s the end of it, which is perfectly fine with Charity. “So what did you get from Adam?”

  “He’s a creep. He thinks multiple murders are super awesome, and his favorite theory is that Harmony was boning her brother,” Charity says. “The interesting thing was that he kept trying to deflect it like it was all Patrick’s idea. I’m not buying it. You?”

  “Not much,” Georgia says. “He seemed nice enough. He said Adam was the one who was really into the case.”

  “I want to follow Adam,” Charity says. “Let’s go play detective.”

  20. VACANCY

  ADAM KELLER LIVES IN 117-B, a corner unit in the delusionally named Brookside Estates, whose crumbling stucco buildings are as far from estate-like as possible. His neighbors in 117-C are laying waste to an alien race, giant TV strobing through bent-open blinds. Adam’s apartment is dark. Nothing about it screams serial killer in training.

  While Charity ordered dinner to go, Georgia searched a background check website and generated personal files on Adam Keller and Gabriel Mullins. Twenty minutes later, they picked up a printed copy from the campus copy shop, complete with addresses ready for GPS.

  “Is he even here?” Georgia asks. They sit in the car with the lights off, watching his apartment like a couple of crazy ex-girlfriends looking to slash some tires. A weak yellow streetlight casts a hazy glow over the car.

  “One way to find out,” Charity says around a mouthful of her turkey sandwich. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

  “We are not knocking on his door,” Georgia says. She takes a messy bite of a vegetarian abomination, then hurries to wipe a dab of sauce from her face.

  “Nope,” Charity says. “You are.”

  “I am not!”

  “You wanted me to train you,” Charity says. “Get on it, grasshopper.”

  “I didn’t want you to train me,” Georgia says. “I wanted us to be partners. As in, equal shares.”

  “No such thing as an equal relationship,” Charity says. “Can’t be done.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Well, there’s a shocker. Anyway, this is us being partners. Partners share the work, sugar. What’s wrong, you never played ding-dong ditch?”

  “No!”

  “Come to think of it, neither have I,” Charity says. “But I grew up half a mile from the closest neighbor in Nowhere, North Carolina. I don’t know what your excuse is, city girl.” She crumples her sandwich wrapper and stuffs it into the paper bag. “I can teach you.”

  “This is so childish.”

  “Well, how about you sit here staring at the door and let me know how that works out for you,” Charity says. “You know, if it’s too hard for you, I’ll do it. I just thought—”

  “Fine,” Georgia snaps. She tosses the remains of her sandwich into the bag and unbuckles her seatbelt, then throws an irritable stare like a thundercloud at Charity.

  “First step, and this is super important. Are you taking notes?”

  “Charity—”

  “Step one, remove the stick from your ass. Seriously, it’s gotta hurt by now,” Charity says. “Then walk up to the damn doorbell and ring it.”

  Georgia rolls her eyes and throws the car door open, flushing the car with a blast of humid air and night noise. Charity waggles her fingers and watches as Georgia tiptoes up to the door like a bad movie spy. Her foot bumps an overstuffed trashbag on the small stoop, and she stumbles to right it. She taps lightly at the door, then dives to hide behind the overgrown hedge along the sidewalk.

  Charity nearly chokes
laughing at her. This almost makes up for the conversation with Adam Keller.

  The redhead throws her hands up in a helpless gesture. Charity sighs and pantomimes knocking again, punching the air violently. Georgia creeps back around the hedge and bangs on the door. After a few seconds, she presses her ear to the door.

  No movement in the apartment. No lights come on, no flicking of the tattered blinds in the front window.

  Charity pulls the keys from the ignition and tucks them into her shoulder bag. She joins Georgia on Adam’s doorstep. “Not home, huh?”

  “No shit,” Georgia says. She brushes off her knees and picks a dead leaf out of her ponytail. The expression on her face looks like she just picked a gooey chunk of fresh corpse out of her hair. “What now?”

  “Grab your shit,” Charity says as she takes out her lock-picking kit. “We’re going to get to know Adam a little better.”

  Adam’s apartment is neat and sparse. The walls are bland beige, with a handful of movie posters tacked to the walls. Pulp Fiction hangs over the couch, while A Clockwork Orange is mounted behind the TV. A stack of textbooks is tucked under an end table. There’s a souvenir ashtray from Mexico on the table. She gives it a sniff and gets the overwhelming pungent funk of weed. He’s got an Xbox plugged into a smallish TV. She presses one hand to the side of the TV—cool to the touch.

  “I don’t think he’s been back since we met,” Charity says.

  “Maybe he has a job,” Georgia says. “Or maybe he’s out killing someone. Did you think of that?”

  “Well, unless you happen to be a psychic on top of being a neat freak, we can’t do anything about that,” Charity replies. “Get the EMF out and see what you can find.”

  “I’m not a neat freak.”

  “Really? Have you ever met you?”

  “Whatever,” Georgia says as she digs the EMF meter out and walks in a curving path through the darkened living room. “It’s reading hot.”

  “It’s also an apartment complex filled with big-ass electronics,” Charity says, passing her own meter over the end table. The meter is reading high, but it’s steady, not jumping around like a kitty-cat tweaked out on catnip. EMF is virtually useless in a city, where everything from microwaves to TVs to cell phones give off their own electromagnetic fields.

  She drops the meter back in her bag and sets out to stick her nose in Adam Keller’s business. The textbooks catch her eye first, and she crouches on the carpet to look at them. Statistics. Yuck. Comparative French Literature. Double yuck. Sheaf of spiral-bound papers—History of Homicide. Calloway’s class. She thumbs through it and finds a bright pink sticky note hanging out halfway through. It marks the Harmony Pierson case.

  She can’t help but skim over it, like slowing to gawk at an accident on the highway. She doesn’t want to see it, but she can’t look away from the mangled wreckage.

  Pierson was critically injured during her arrest, resulting in a lengthy rehabilitation process in North Carolina’s medical prison… Despite being deemed physically able, Pierson refused to speak on her own behalf. She was deemed incompetent to stand trial and was committed indefinitely by Judge Janice Sturgeon… She has never stood trial, making her an anomaly in the line of famous killers of American history.

  Articles from the local paper are photocopied into the packet. The blood runs out of her face when she turns the page to see her father staring out from a crooked black-and-white photocopy. It’s a poor copy of him. The flat paper and monochrome is a harsh reminder that it’s been ten years since she saw the glint of firelight off his warm brown eyes, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. Ten years since his rough cheek scratched against hers in one of those bone-crushing hugs. God, he gave the best hugs. Her daddy used to hug her like it was the last time he’d ever see her, every single time. Four days before he died, they came back from the hunt, and he picked her right up off her feet, ignored her complaining seriously, Dad? and squeezed her until she could barely breathe. Turned out, that really was the last time.

  Her vision blurs with tears, and she curls her hand into a tight fist. The article tells the story of a loving father and raises the question of why he died. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen, but it doesn’t belong here in Adam’s collection. This is Aran business, and that’s where it should have stayed.

  She flips the page again and shakes her head.

  “Well, this is charming,” Charity says. She holds it up to show Georgia. The next article is an excerpt from a law journal about the ethics of mentally incompetent defendants standing trial. Adam apparently lost interest, based on the elaborate pencil drawing of a knife dripping blood in the margins. Item #384 on her list of Reasons Adam Keller is a Total Dickwad.

  “Does it look like the knife?”

  “It looks like a knife,” Charity says. She slides the packet into her bag as she heads to the closed door past the TV.

  Adam’s bedroom smells like a candle recently blown out, the smoky sulfur smell lingering in the still air. After scanning the sparsely decorated room, she perches on the edge of his neatly made bed. A handful of crumpled tissues litter the nightstand. She shudders and blows them off. A stack of thin paperbacks emerges from beneath the tissues.

  A History of Murder.

  Inside the Serial Killer’s Brain.

  The Manson Legacy.

  Now that’s more like it. A brushed silver lighter catches her eye, and she palms it instinctively. It’s tiny, but pressing the raised fleur-de-lis design shoots out a two-inch blade that glints wicked sharp in the low light. That would have been easy to sneak onstage and to hide in the chaos after Tommy’s death. She takes out her flashlight and shines it on the blade. The light glints white off the silver surface, no trace of red. Doesn’t mean anything. Cleaning a knife isn’t exactly brain surgery.

  She retracts the blade and drops it on his nightstand. None of this is a home run. Adam’s a creep for sure, but she needs more. Besides, there’s no way this is the knife that killed Tommy. It couldn’t have gone through that foam and still gone deep enough to hurt him. She needs to find Harmony’s knife.

  “If I were being possessed by a cursed knife, where would I keep it?” she murmurs. She yanks open his dresser drawers and paws through the contents. Under a stack of boxers, she finds a metal tin with three hundred bucks cash and a baggie of weed in it. Despite the temptation, she leaves his stash alone, then roots through his closet and under his bed. He doesn’t have much stuff to look through, and ten minutes later, she’s got nothing.

  If he’s really their guy, he probably has the knife on him, or hidden somewhere safe. She’s got one last idea. The brownish carpet is flat and rough under her palms as she kneels and closes her eyes. Patience used to laugh at her for doing this, but her sister’s not here. She exhales slowly and lets the booming game from next door fade into silence.

  When she can shut the rest of the world out enough to focus, she can sometimes sense the supernatural. It’s not magical; it’s just paying close enough attention to the primal instinct that knows when something is wrong, the same sense that prickles when you’re being watched.

  She suddenly sees Tommy Crane, pitching forward with blood blooming through his white toga like an unfurling rose. She squeezes her eyes shut. Focus, Cherry. Then it’s Andy Pierson, bloody lungs lying on his flayed chest as he draws a last, shuddering breath.

  Find the shadow, Charity, her mother taunts. You want revenge, don’t you?

  Something creaks behind her. An electric tingle shoots down her spine. Her hand flies to the Colt, and she whirls with it aimed squarely at Georgia’s chest. “Jesus, Georgia.”

  Georgia jumps and puts her hands up in surrender. “What are you doing?”

  “Being useless,” Charity says, holstering her gun. “Did you find anything?”

  “Some more books on homicide. Not much else. You?”

  “Same,” Charity says. “Come on. There’s nothing else here.”

  They lock Adam’s doo
r behind them and return to the car. “What now?” Georgia asks.

  Charity leans over and jams the keys into the ignition and cranks it. She turns the air conditioning all the way up and leans back. She is more capable than this. Why is this case such a pain in her ass already? “You got an address for Gabriel Mullins?”

  “Yep,” Georgia says. “Can we risk leaving Adam’s place?”

  “In case you didn’t notice, he’s not here,” Charity says. “I’ve got some police contacts I can call while we drive to Gabriel’s. Did he ever get back to you?”

  “No,” Georgia says. “You think it’s him?”

  “I’m pretty damn sure it’s Adam, but I’ve been wrong before. And Gabriel might have new information for us either way,” Charity says. “Let’s go.”

  Georgia consults her folder, then enters Gabriel’s address into her GPS. She’s silent as she pulls out into traffic. Her fingers drum a jittery cadence on the steering wheel.

  Charity scrolls through her contacts and lands on Nicky Baker, an old friend of theirs in Atlanta. Her stomach rolls as the phone rings. Patience has always done the talking with Nicky, and she’s not sure where he fell in their split.

  “Hello?” a gruff male voice answers. There’s a cacophony of voices in the background.

  “Hey, Nicky, this is Charity Pierson,” she says.

  Awkward silence. “Hi, Charity,” he says coolly. “Listen, I’m on duty, and—”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” she says. “I need a phone traced.”

  He pauses again. “Can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” she asks sharply. “This is important.”

  “I guess it’s really the same either way, isn’t it?”

  “Nicky, you used to do it all the time for us.”

  “For Patience.”

  “But not for me.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Jesus. Protect and serve, my happy ass.”

  The line goes dead. Oh, that rat bastard.

  Georgia gives her a sidelong glance. “What was that?”