The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  “Maybe we’ll just get coffee,” I said. “Give me a call.”

  It was hugs and call-mes all around, and then Natalie left, dragging her drunken date out with her. Mac wandered off into the kitchen to intrude on a conversation about Faith No More, leaving Sid and me sitting awkwardly next to the now-empty bookcase. I had a torn dress, some DVDs, an ice cube tray, and her cat. I didn’t really need anything else.

  Chapter 5

  BOYS ON THE RADIO

  Saturday night found me halfheartedly watching a rerun of 30 Rock when I heard a knock on the door. It was Hillary, holding a big pink Betsey Johnson box and a binder. “Here,” she said, passing them to me. “I don’t know what to do with these—they’re her old mix tapes. Doesn’t seem right to just throw them out, but no one took them.”

  I muttered a thanks and tried not to show my hesitation. She might as well have given me a bag of KitKat’s mismatched socks or her high school yearbooks. I didn’t have a tape player, and even if I did, the tapes would have meant nothing more to me than a brief nostalgic trip with Ace of Base or something new to download. Hillary would have been more likely to know the people who’d made the tapes and might have even made a few herself. It didn’t seem right that they should be handed over to a stranger.

  “You want to come in for a drink?” I asked, not knowing what else to say and hoping I had an extra bottle of wine in case she agreed.

  “Nah,” she replied. “I’m catching the late train back to Boston. I kinda can’t stand it here.” Baldrick hopped off the couch and rubbed against her legs. She crouched down and scratched his face. “Take good care of him,” she said. “He was KitKat’s baby. She found him behind our house when he was just a kitten and took him with her everywhere for the first month she had him. She wouldn’t go anyplace he couldn’t go too—he used to sit on her lap at the movies. One time she accidentally ate one of his cat treats in the dark, thinking it was a Raisinette.”

  KitKat had never told me that story. There were a lot of stories that she never got to tell me. I’d always liked her but never made enough of an effort to go downstairs and ask her out for coffee, dinner, a movie night. I told myself it was because we were both busy, but the truth was, even with only two years’ age difference between us, she was the cool senior to my awkward freshman. I hadn’t wanted her to think I was some needy dork trying to hang with the queen bee, so I’d avoided any situation where I might look desperate.

  Add that to the pile of regrets.

  Hillary stood up and gave me a grim little smile. “KitKat really liked you,” she said. “She may have been way too into this whole stupid scene, but she thought you were genuinely cool. Not like the rest of those pretentious fucks.” She put a cigarette in her mouth, but didn’t light it.

  I opened the door a little wider. “You can smoke out the living room window,” I offered. “One for the road, right?”

  She came in and sat on the low bookcase, opened the window, and flicked open a silver Zippo. Baldrick jumped into her lap and she petted him with her free hand. There was a momentary flicker of happiness across her face. “A cat and a cigarette,” she said. “What more could any girl want?”

  “Maybe a cupcake?”

  “Why, you got one?”

  I didn’t.

  “Figures,” she said. “And some Brony covered in shitty tattoos took her recipe book. He’s in for a surprise. You know what her secret was?”

  Once again, I didn’t know the answer. I shook my head and she continued. “Cake mix,” she said. “Just ordinary cake mix. She added stuff, yeah, but it wasn’t even the good shit from Whole Foods—it was the kind of dollar-store cake mix that’s so cheap the company can’t even afford a box, just the pouch.” She laughed, but I could see there were little fringes of tears on her thick black lashes.

  “When we were in Girl Scouts, she was so awful at baking that our troop leader, Mrs. C, finally just gave her the badge out of pity. She didn’t improve when she got here; she made these cupcakes from scratch and they all tasted like variations on concrete. She must have tried a dozen different recipes before going to cake mix. Did you ever have the ones she made with the rose petals and custard? They were amazing.” She sighed and wiped her eyes, taking plenty of her mascara off with the back of her hand. “I’m going to really miss her.”

  “We all will,” I said. “Have you had a chance to talk to Bronco?”

  “Not since the funeral,” she replied. “I like that guy, I really do, but he was acting, sort of, you know, weird.” She exhaled like it exhausted her. “And not weird like the rest of her friends—present company excluded, of course—just, jumpy. Distant. I can’t really explain it.”

  She took a last drag and looked around for an ashtray. I got her the plate I’d used for the leftover pizza I’d eaten for dinner. She snuffed out her cigarette and slid off the bookcase. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t just come here for a smoke and to give you KitKat’s shit. I need a favor.”

  “Anything,” I said, hoping she’d ask for something I could actually deliver. I’d already failed her on the cupcake front.

  “Natalie said you do some private investigator work,” she said.

  “I work for a PI, yeah, but it’s all insurance fraud, and all I do is proofread—”

  She cut me off like she wasn’t even listening. “I know she’s just another dead body in a city full of them, but she was my sister. I need all the help I can get on this. I need to know who murdered my sister, Jett, and I need to know they’ll be punished.”

  “I’m sure the cops have a handle on it—”

  “Half of the murders in this city go unsolved every year,” she said insistently. “I don’t want KitKat to be in the unsolved half. They have no motive, no suspects, and one fingerprint. One lousy fingerprint. The chances of it matching anybody are astronomical. Please, Jett, whatever connections you have will help.”

  How was I supposed to say no to that plea? “I-I’ll see what I can do,” I offered. “But I can’t make any promises.”

  That seemed to satisfy her. She gave Baldrick a last stroke and gave me a hug. “Whatever you can do,” she said. “Just let me know.”

  Chapter 6

  WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?

  Mix tapes are like diaries. Each corresponds to a very specific place and feeling, and to go pawing through someone else’s collection is a huge breach of trust. It’s musical espionage, emotional voyeurism, and just plain rude.

  But KitKat was dead, and curiosity quickly got the better of me.

  I opened the binder with a thick plastic crack. Preserved in plastic sheeting was a lifetime of track lists, each with a photograph of the tape’s compilation artist.

  The first was a track list handwritten in pencil on torn-out composition paper, titled Hi Katie from Luke. I’d never thought about her name being anything but KitKat. It was a tape that could have been played at any middle school dance in the country: John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear”; Bryan Adams, “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”; Celine Dion, “Falling into You.” I didn’t know boys were allowed to put Celine Dion on a mix tape.

  I dug the tape out of the box. It was the only one without a case, the label lay slightly crooked, the title written in ballpoint pen. The matching Polaroid showed Luke as a blond boy with a jade-green T-shirt from Freehold Middle School—I recognized the T-shirt as one KitKat had worn as a tube top—posing with a preteen KitKat in front of a panther diorama at a museum. KitKat had her eyes closed; Luke was grinning with the sad dirty face of a kid just a few years away from his first beer, his first smoke, the last of his innocence wasted on the lies of becoming a man. He reminded me of my second-grade boyfriend, Josh, who’d pushed me on the swings at recess until third grade, when we got put in different classes. He’d started coming to class drunk in sixth grade, dropped out in ninth, and would routinely show up in the Loring Free Press police blotter.

  Calvin, creator of the next mix tape, Let’s Get the Hell O
ut of This Place, was photographed in the moment he’d heaved his graduation cap off the edge of the Grand Canyon, sandy, soft hair blowing in the wind, flannel shirt wrapped around his waist. He had decorated his case with a road map and mislabeled “Baba O’Riley” as “Teenage Wasteland.” Thom, of You & Me @ the End of the World, was a beautiful geek, all angles and glasses and open-lipped pout, posed with his telescope in a concrete-walled dorm room. His track list, comprised mostly of Weezer and Radiohead and Mazzy Star, was typed on the back of one of KitKat’s college astronomy tests. She’d gotten a 90. Good for her.

  Baldrick hunkered down in the space left in the box by the cassettes I’d pulled out. There were tapes for parties, tapes from summer camp, mixes of dance music, and Broadway show tunes. On page after page of her musical scrapbook were photos of KitKat and her friends from Girl Scouts to college, track lists covered with stickers and magazine cutouts, songs I knew by heart, bands I’d never heard of. There were boys who loved her, friends I’d never met, stories I’d never heard her tell. I was beginning to feel like I’d never known KitKat at all.

  But for the last three track lists at the back of the binder, there was no photograph of GPL.

  GPL, whoever he was, had compiled three tapes—How Fucking Romantic, Songs for a Girl Genius, and Without Words. He wrote his titles in small, evenly spaced handwriting, centered on the label, and his track lists were all neatly typed with the faded ink of an old typewriter.

  Though there had been no name on the return address of the tape I’d received the day she was killed, the handwriting in the upper left matched the print on these three tapes. Paying no attention to the care that had gone into wrapping it, I tore the paper open.

  There was no typewritten track list. No letter. I even checked the back of the paper I had just shredded. Nothing except a cassette labeled Cure Kit in that same meticulous handwriting. I flipped back to the first track list for How Fucking Romantic. Whoever GPL was, he had been crazy about KitKat. All three track lists read like a hipster love song compilation off late-night TV—Stevie Wonder’s “Knocks Me Off My Feet”; the Magnetic Fields, “Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing”; Marshall Crenshaw, “Whenever You’re on My Mind,” each with a little note about why he’d chosen that particular song. Next to Sara Hickman’s “Simply,” he’d typed, How better can I say it? I’ve fallen for you.

  But if some other man was sending her love songs, what did that say about Bronco?

  My stomach had a long crawl back to where it had dropped from. I might have been holding in my hand what cop shows called a motive. Maybe that’s why Bronco was acting weird at her funeral, why he hadn’t shown up at the memorial. My throat went dry, and although I got up and got a drink of water, it didn’t help. If Bronco had killed her in a jealous rage, he had a pretty good reason to play it normal at the funeral and lie low afterward. The last time I had seen him was the day she died, in the foyer as he was leaving KitKat’s and I was headed to work. He’d been all smiles, and we made a few minutes of small talk before he got on his bike and rode away.

  I picked up the card Detective Muffin Top had given me from where I’d left it on my side table and started to dial. But I hung up before I finished. Something in my gut didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t the two-day-old pizza I’d had for dinner. I wanted to do a little more digging before I turned Bronco over to the hard boys. I just couldn’t believe, for myself, that he would kill her like that.

  I tried to entertain another notion. Maybe it was a romantic game for them, a chance to pretend like they were fifteen again. Then I remembered that Bronco was a tech junkie, the kind who waited in lines for a new phone or the latest tablet. He rolled his eyes whenever anyone talked about vinyl. If it was a choice between eating meat and making a mix tape, he’d probably order the bacon double cheeseburger.

  I called Bronco’s number. I got his voice mail. He still hadn’t updated his Facebook or his Twitter. It wasn’t like him at all to be so disconnected, and I hoped he was all right.

  Frustrated, I put the box of tapes away and flipped on the TV to a Law & Order marathon, but it was Chris Noth, and I hate Chris Noth, so I turned it off. I’d check back when it was Jerry Orbach.

  That left me in the silence of the clues at hand. Baldrick hopped up on the couch beside me and nestled against my leg. I once watched a show that claimed that if a case wasn’t solved in a week, it was never solved and wound up stuffed in the file cabinet of some overworked civil servant. I may not have known her as well as I should have, but KitKat was my friend, and with her one-week-old case already collecting dust, I owed it to her to help put her spirit to rest. It was the least I could do.

  The problem was, I didn’t even know where to begin. I couldn’t take DNA samples or bag up evidence, didn’t have a hot light to interrogate our friends under. Hell, I didn’t even know where she’d gotten the supplies for her pot brownies. Maybe her dealer killed her because she owed him money. No, that didn’t make any sense; it was a couple of dime bags, not a brick of China White. Shit, what do I do?

  I pulled up KitKat’s Facebook page. Even a week later, memorial posts and old photos were still coming in strong. The most recent was from Thom, the same one who’d made her You and Me @ the End of the World. I’ve been playing “High and Dry” over and over since I got the news, he wrote. I miss you every day, KK. He was married now, expecting a child, doing postdoc work at the University of Kansas.

  I scrolled through a week of posts but found no one with a name starting with G, let alone the whole set of initials. A scan of her friends came up empty too. I checked her Twitter and her Tumblr for followers, but for as much as his track lists proclaimed his love, GPL was a digital ghost.

  I closed my laptop and tried to walk back through the crime scene in my head, ignoring the sick feeling in my stomach as I played the scene out over and over. I stood in the hallway. I put my hand on the doorknob. I put the key in the lock. . . .

  The door.

  The door had been locked when I got there. All the doors in the building locked from the inside automatically, which meant that KitKat had probably known her killer enough to open the door and invite him—or her—inside. The killer would have closed the door on his—or her—way out, and it would have locked automatically after. This wasn’t some lunatic on bath salts coming up the back staircase. This was someone she knew.

  But that didn’t narrow down the list of suspects, and it certainly didn’t rule out Bronco. In addition to her friends, KitKat had a lot of clients and had lived here long enough that it was fair to assume she felt safe inviting strangers in. That’s what people did on Barter Street, whether it was a friend of a friend at a house party or to exchange a teapot from Freecycle. We opened doors. We invited people in.

  And I got up to double-check that mine was double bolted.

  Chapter 7

  WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

  I was still mentally walking around KitKat’s crime scene when my work ringtone, Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend,” interrupted me from where I had left my phone on the table.

  “You want to go to the Hartford Firm on the third shift?” Susan, the MetroReaders dispatcher, asked when I answered. “They want you to come in at ten tonight.”

  I didn’t normally like third shift, but I wasn’t exactly ready to go to sleep. Maybe working among the investigative reports and the legal jargon would spur me on, help me with this case. Of all the places MetroReaders sent me to proofread, Hartford was my favorite. The law offices were stuffy and the financial sector attracted the late-hour crazies, but Hartford kept a small enough roster that I knew someone on call no matter what shift I was working. “Sure,” I said. “Tell them I’ll be there.”

  I RAN INTO Birdie, one of the other Hartford regulars at MetroReaders, on her way out of the temp lounge. “I’m making a coffee run, you want anything?” she asked. I started to shake my head, but she quickly added, “Hartford’s footing the bill—”

  “I’ll take a cherr
y Danish and a vanilla latte.”

  She grinned. “I knew you’d listen to reason,” she said. “And hey, make sure to grab one of my postcards—I got a show coming up with a guy that was in Kill Bill, says Tarantino’s going to be there opening night.”

  Temp work was a better look into New York’s art, music, and theater culture than any review in the Village Voice. All the temps at MetroReaders were actors, musicians, filmmakers, and other wonderful weirdos. Unlike the trust-fund dopes I used to live with, they were genuine artists who needed the freedom and space only temp work could provide. There would be months where someone wouldn’t show up for work, only to return with stories of six months spent driving to dirty nightclubs and summer festivals in a van with no AC, a film shoot with an A-lister who’d complimented them on the way they delivered their three lines, or backstage whispers of the Broadway diva they’d danced chorus for. It was the center of enjoyable narcissism, and no work night was complete without someone slipping you a flyer for their upcoming show or the link to their latest YouTube short film. More than once I’d been hit up for an album review, and more often than not, I gave it. It was a way of getting my name out there, a portfolio I could show around to Rolling Stone and Spin.com and finally get my journalism career off the ground.

  I picked up Birdie’s card and stuffed it into my backpack. Now it was just a matter of time before Lauren, the third-shift secretary, arrived with an envelope full of investigative reports to proofread. It was easy enough work, and late at night, there was never much to do. Most nights, I could even catch a nap.

  Lauren came in, but her arms were empty of the manila folders that told us it was time to get off the couch. “Mr. Hartford would like to see you,” she said.

  None of us temps ever interacted directly with the investigators; most of them were gone by the time the third shift arrived, and we were told never to speak to them directly unless spoken to first—which, as far as I could tell, had never happened. Birdie had told me of one legal office she’d worked at where the lawyers had used the temp lounge like a private brothel. My stomach dropped back to the first floor as the elevator doors opened.