by Barry Lyga
Jorja blew out a breath and looked away. Liam stiffened; he knew what this meant. Jorja always looked away when she was going to say something deep and real.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said, her voice toneless. Only those who’d known her for a long time knew that the less emotion she showed, the more she felt. “I feel helpless. And scared.”
“Me too.” It came out before Liam could stop it. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but someone had cut El. And that person was anonymous and, as his dad sometimes said, at large.
As a kid, Liam had always laughed at the phrase at large. He thought it meant the criminal was overweight.
Wasn’t funny anymore.
Liam burst through the front door that afternoon after school, his bladder about to explode. He knew he shouldn’t have ordered the trenta. What had he been thinking?
“Outta my way!” he yelled. “I’m gonna pee my pants!”
Dad was alone on the sofa. He peered over the top rim of his laptop. “Why? There’s a bathroom right there.”
Liam’s lips twisted into a grimace, and he ripped open the bathroom door. “You think you’re funny,” he shouted as he dashed inside, slamming the door behind him. “But you’re not!”
He relieved himself with an audible sigh, washed up, and went out into the living room. Dad glared at his laptop as though it had insulted his mother. A reality show about people working on a yacht played on TV, muted. Which actually made it more entertaining, in Liam’s opinion.
“Pop left some stew in the fridge. It’s amazing,” Dad said without looking up. “Three minutes in the microwave, but tell him we heated it up on the stove top.”
Ignoring his grumbling stomach, Liam leaned against the entryway into the living room. “Dad, how’s the case going?”
Dad blinked repeatedly, as though clearing something from his field of vision. “You know I won’t discuss a case with you.”
“Come on. It’s El.”
“All the more reason. Listen to me: I promise you we’re doing everything we can to find the person who attacked El. We’re combing through all the evidence we pulled from her room. Fingerprints, fibers. Stuff I can’t tell you about. Everything.”
“The ladies think it has to be connected to that knife.”
Dad sighed. “I’m sure. But, Liam, that knife… like I told you, it’s probably a dead end.”
“Pun intended?”
“Nope.” Dad cracked a grin. “I’m not telling you what you’re about to hear, okay? Lab report came in on the knife. Results were inconclusive. Probably deer blood—those knives were used a lot for dressing deer.”
“What about the note? Have you talked to everyone who put stuff in the time capsule?”
Dad shook his head. “Some of them. Not as easy to get in touch as it used to be. You kids are tight, but we’ve all got our own lives.”
Liam pondered that. It had been a long, long time since the four families had convened for a barbecue or a cookout. He hadn’t really noticed how the adults had drifted over the years.
“Look, Liam, no one remembers anything. We buried that thing close to Halloween. Someone probably thought it was a funny prank. Take a deer knife with some blood on it, make it look like a confession. A couple of the guys had that kind of sense of humor. But it wasn’t a big thing. People forget.”
Liam didn’t even ask if Dad was one of those guys. His dad hardly even laughed.
“One thing you learn as a cop,” Dad went on, “is that the percentages are usually right. A woman goes missing? You check the boyfriend or the husband. Money disappears from a cash register? You look at the cashier. But the percentages aren’t always right. And for something like this… well, it’s entirely possible that someone disturbed saw that story online. And they constructed a whole narrative in their head about what it meant.”
“Someone crazy, you mean.”
With a wince, Dad shook his head. “Most people with mental health issues are victims, not perpetrators. But it’s possible someone with some sort of delusion or hallucinatory disorder thought the story was about them. And took action.”
“I don’t know,” Liam said doubtfully. “Seems a lot simpler if someone was trying to get rid of evidence.” He left unsaid the One of your friends part.
Dad stood up and stretched. “Trust me, that would be less simple. Could you imagine all the coincidences that would have to line up? No, Liam. Odds are that the knife is just a prank or a goof, like I said, and the person who attacked El isn’t related to it at all.” He clapped his hands together. “Can I warm up some stew for you?”
Liam’s gut warred with his brain. His gut, as usual, won. “Sure, Dad.”
1986: DEAN
Since the age of ten, Dean had had trouble sleeping. His parents saw this as a struggle to be won, not a problem to be solved. They had tried commanding him to bed earlier and earlier, then had tried letting him stay up later and later; the former on the theory that he needed more time in bed to relax and unwind from the day, the latter on the theory that he needed to be exhausted before his head touched his pillow.
Neither had worked. Eight o’clock or eleven o’clock, Dean would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, turning to glare at his clock, the red glowing bars of the digits steadfastly refusing to change under his gaze. It would be midnight forever, and then it was one in the morning and he was still awake.
Sometimes, he tried music. Other times, he tried talk radio. He’d recently discovered Dr. Ruth’s show and had been surprised that something so explicit and so sexual could be heard for free over the public airwaves. Perhaps as a sop to propriety and decency, Dr. Ruth’s show did not air until midnight.
It was called Sexually Speaking, but Dr. Ruth’s heavy German accent rendered it Zexually Zpeaking whenever she introduced it. “Hello, zis is Zexually Zpeaking vit Dr. Ruth Vestheimer.”
The accent and the subject matter combined into a jarring, utterly unsoothing experience, an almost unsettling juxtaposition of the harsh Germanic syllables—the intonations of the Nazi villains in everything from Hogan’s Heroes to Raiders of the Lost Ark—with Dr. Ruth’s puckish, playful ribaldry. She spoke like a horny Teutonic elf, but seriousness and sincerity crackled like static in every exchange with every caller. Dr. Ruth never put him to sleep, but she made it possible for him to pass the minutes between midnight and twelve fifteen AM without obsessively checking the time. When she signed off, he always groaned into his pillow and settled in for the long, dark caesura between sign-off and sleep.
Tonight was not a Sunday. He had no Dr. Ruth to look forward to in—he checked the clock—forty-seven minutes.
With a defeated sigh, he flipped his pillow, looking for a cool spot. It was a beastly hot Indian summer. A thin breeze wafted in through his open window, but only enough to tease him with the promise of cool air.
He went to the window and pressed his hand against the screen, willing more air to find him. Imagining that he could control air currents with his mind. Closing his eyes, he tried to conjure wind, not mere breeze.
Nothing.
Except a sound.
He opened his eyes and looked out into the dark. Dean’s bedroom window opened into the backyard, a quarter acre of flat grass rolling out to a barbed wire fence that separated his family’s plot from a huge field attached to the Winslow farm. During the days, the Winslows’ cows wandered in that field, eating grass and leaving enormous piles of flat cow dung that Dean’s mom had him steal for fertilizer for her garden. At night, there should be nothing out there. Nothing except for bats in the old cherry tree that rose against the moonlit sky.
By the tree, something moved. Something much bigger than a bat.
THE PRESENT: LIAM
Back in Elayah’s hospital room that afternoon after school, Liam thought her mom seemed almost grateful to see them this time, slipping out moments after they arrived.
“I think she’s going stir-crazy in here,” El said.
She’s not the only o
ne, Liam thought. As El’s health improved, she seemed more manic. Her eyes were brighter than the day before, and there was a sort of nervous energy shedding from her; excitement flung like sweat with every movement.
“How’d everyone sleep last night?” she asked with an almost wicked gleam in her eye. “I slept like a baby—up every couple of hours to cry and complain.”
Liam had slept perfectly well but wasn’t about to admit it. Not when he knew El had been up and had been keeping Marcie up.
“How about you, Jorja?” El asked.
Jorja said nothing, then shrugged, eyes downcast. “You know.”
Liam knew Jorja had spent her life learning how to be tough. Even around friends, it was difficult to be weak.
“Tell us,” Marcie said gently.
“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep, either,” she said eventually. “My father. I see him and it comes into my head, without warning: Did he kill someone? Did he help cover it up? He’s a public defender; he spends his life making sure people aren’t abused by the system, and I always thought that was noble, but what if it’s self-serving? What if—”
“Calm down.” Marcie put a hand on her wrist. Jorja, once started, was a boulder rolling downhill. “We’re not there yet.”
“This doesn’t bother you? At all?” Jorja pulled her arm away. Not aggressively or angrily. More in a self-protective way.
Marcie pondered for a moment. “I don’t know. You’ve always thought your dad was perfect. He’s always been there for you, no matter what. My mom… my mom had a drinking problem for a while, you know? And my dad cheated on her when I was little, I guess. I mean, if I’m reading between the lines right. They’ve been divorced so long I don’t even remember them ever being together. I never had any illusions about them being perfect. But I know they didn’t kill anyone.”
“I’m not deluded,” Jorja sniffed.
“No one said you were,” Elayah told her. “And for all we know, they just covered it up.”
“I don’t want to think that.” Marcie’s voice, usually so confident, was small.
“I like all your parents,” Liam said, unbidden. “And I don’t want to think any of them had anything to do with this. Not my dad, not any of our dads or your mom, Marse. But… there’s this thing called linkage blindness. It’s where cops don’t see the evidence right because they don’t want to. And I think my dad’s getting that. Because all the suspects that make sense were his friends.”
“This sucks,” Marcie pronounced.
“Dad always says that cops need to be aware of what they don’t know as much as what they do know.”
“So let’s do this the right way, then.” Marcie dug into her shoulder bag, a wondrously large cornucopia of every sundries and necessities you could imagine. She emerged with her iPad and Apple Pencil. “Let’s walk through this, okay?” She held up the tablet and wrote THE MURDER across the top of the screen.
“We don’t know it’s a murder,” Jorja said immediately.
“Someone stabbed someone,” Elayah argued. “The note mentions killing someone.”
“We don’t know it’s blood on the knife.” Jorja had a way of being infuriatingly reasonable about very important things that demanded a sense of drama.
“Well, it might be animal blood,” Liam told them. “But the results were inconclusive, so who knows?”
“We know someone put the knife in the time capsule,” Marcie put in. “And it had to be one of our parents, right?”
Marcie looked around the room after this pronouncement. No one spoke. El shifted uncomfortably and prodded gently at the stitches on her throat. They knew it had to be true.
Except it didn’t have to be true.
“All we know for certain is that they came up with the idea and they buried it,” El pointed out. “Maybe someone else put the knife in there. Did anyone else know about the time capsule back then?”
“Mr. Hindon did,” Liam supplied.
“Anyone else know?” Marcie enunciated as she wrote the same words under THE MURDER. No one spoke. “Okay, so our parents buried the thing. They put stuff in there. We start with them.”
Jorja cleared her throat meaningfully. “Have we considered… I mean, I’ve considered, but have the rest of you considered that whoever put the knife in the time capsule…”
“Is the same person who held a knife to my throat,” Elayah finished for her.
Marcie jumped in. “We don’t know that for a fact.”
Jorja shrugged. “Occam’s razor.”
Liam didn’t know what that meant, but Jorja, Elayah, and Marcie all nodded grimly at one another as though they’d just solved an impossible equation, so he figured it was significant. As hard as he tried to keep a puzzled expression from his face—he hated showing off his stupidity—Jorja knew him too damn well. And took pity on him.
“Occam’s razor is a—”
“Doesn’t matter,” he told her. Jorja’s heart was in the right place, but he couldn’t bear to listen to another dumbed-down version of some obscure fact. “Say it was one of our parents. That still means we’re looking in our own houses.”
Jorja nodded soberly, and then she said…
ELAYAH
Most likely candidate is El’s dad.”
Jorja had the grace to say it with a note of apology in her voice.
Before El could speak, Liam jumped up from his chair and told her, in very Anglo-Saxon terms, to attempt sexual reproduction with herself.
“We have to consider everything,” Jorja replied. If Liam’s outburst shocked her, she didn’t show it. “El, you know I think your dad is great. But he was already in the house. It makes him the prime suspect.”
Liam snorted in disgust and kicked his chair. Elayah couldn’t decide if she was touched by his anger on behalf of her father or annoyed that he was sucking up all the oxygen that would allow her own outrage to flame.
“The guy was white, though,” Marcie said, then arched an eyebrow at Elayah. “Right?”
“And you really think Mr. Laird would put a knife to his own daughter’s throat?” Liam insisted before Elayah could jump in.
“He would if he didn’t want to be a suspect,” Jorja said with infuriating calm. “I’m sorry, El. But you said he sounded white. That’s not much of a trick. Voices are easy to change. And he could have worn some kind of cologne or something that reminded you of the way white people smell.”
“Right,” Liam said, his voice edged with a nasty, dark sarcasm. Elayah couldn’t remember a time she’d ever seen him so angry. “He just stopped off at the drugstore and bought a bottle of Eau de Cracker.”
Again, Jorja’s tone was annoyingly calm, as though she knew it was the only way to keep Liam in check. “I’m not saying he was trying to smell like a white person. Just that whatever he wore happened to seem that way to El.”
Of course it was all nonsense, all conjured from Jorja’s fecund imagination. This was, after all, the same Jorja who’d gone as Harvey Weinstein in Hell for Halloween. Twice.
But as rapidly as she dismissed it, Elayah had to force herself to reconsider. It had been late. She’d been awoken from a deep sleep, rattled into wakefulness by a blade at her throat. She’d been positive of what she’d told the sheriff, but now, she couldn’t be. Jorja was wrong, she knew. She also knew that there was a chance—small, but not zero—that Jorja was right.
“We have to consider my dad,” she said quietly, not daring to look at Liam. He seemed more upset than she was at the idea.
“It wasn’t your dad.” Liam’s tone was concrete, definite, embedded in confidence.
“We can’t make assumptions,” Marcie admonished.
“Don’t talk to me about assumptions,” Liam shot back. “We know what we know.”
“We’re like Jon Snow; we know nothing,” said Jorja with infuriating confidence. “Nothing at all. We’re just stumbling around, figuring it out. We won’t know anything until we know it.”
Her words hung alone and he
avy and true in the air.
“Well, that makes perfect sense,” Liam grumbled.
“We still don’t even know it’s a murder,” Elayah reminded them all. “Someone could have been stabbed and still lived.”
“Any of our parents have weird scars?” Marcie asked, half joking.
“We’re going about this all wrong,” Liam said, and the serious tone of his voice caught them all off guard. “I know I’m the dumbass of the group, but I grew up around this stuff. You have to think like cops: motive, means, opportunity.”
“Who wants to kill someone, who was able to kill somebody, who had the chance to kill somebody…?” Elayah hated herself for ending it in a question. She knew she was right. But this was a whole new arena for her, and Liam’s sudden take-charge attitude threw her.
“Yeah,” Liam said. “But also: Who had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to use the time capsule to throw away the knife?”
“Just our parents,” Elayah said, miserable as she said it. “And I guess Mr. Hindon.”
Silence. For too long.
“Guys,” Marcie said, her voice almost a whisper, “I’m really not cool with thinking any of our parents could have done this.”
“Other people could have gotten to the time capsule.…” Elayah said. “It was a long time ago. We don’t know who might have—”
“Means?” Marcie interrupted. “Sure. But motive? Why would someone uninvolved in the time capsule think to put a murder weapon in there?”
“We still don’t know it’s a murder!” Jorja nearly shouted, her face twisted in aggravation. “Stop calling it a murder weapon when we don’t have proof there was a murder!”
“Be cool!” Liam hissed, glancing toward the door. “We don’t need parents in here.”
“Why not?” Jorja fired back. “Let’s invite them in so that we can interrogate them right now and get to the bottom of this.”