by Barry Lyga
Liam chuckled without mirth. Elayah had never witnessed such an expression of solemnity on Liam before. It was as disturbing as though an alien face-hugger from that old movie had glommed onto his face.
“Guys, you aren’t thinking this through,” Liam said. “We’re talking about our parents. We’re saying—”
“All we’re saying is one of them might have been involved somehow,” Jorja assured him. “Maybe covering it up. Maybe hiding the knife for a friend, right? I don’t think any of us believe one of them actually killed someone.”
“What if all of them did?” Liam asked quietly.
Elayah hadn’t even considered it. And now that Liam said it out loud, it was the only thing that made any sort of sense. From the moment she’d seen the knife, she’d operated under the assumption that one of the group of parents had hurt or killed someone and used the time capsule to get rid of the knife, probably assuming—correctly, as it turned out—that they would never actually dig it up. Not accounting for Elayah stumbling upon its existence.
But that “lone gunman” theory now seemed naive and oversimplified.
“They all had access to the time capsule. They all knew each other and were around each other all the time. And they conveniently didn’t bother to dig it up.” Liam was still talking, as though he had to convince anyone of anything. Marcie wore a gut-punched expression. Jorja was studying the ceiling tiles, avoiding everyone’s eyes.
“We could all be living with criminals,” Elayah whispered.
Elayah couldn’t sleep after they all left. Her parents once again filed in as soon as her friends left, first Mom, then Dad when his shift ended at the factory. He leaned in to kiss her, and she smelled the unique combination of his aftershave and the chemicals they used to process the tapes at the factory. It was a smell she’d known her whole life—Dad found an aftershave he liked and stuck with it—but on this night, she didn’t find it comforting. Dad’s sad eyes and concerned expression seemed more a mask than reality to her.
Did you do it? popped into her head unbidden. Was it you?
Pleading exhaustion, she turned over in bed without so much as a “Hi” to her father, closing her eyes, pretending to sleep. She hated herself for thinking this way, but suddenly her father was a different person to her.
He was a suspect.
Which was an absolutely insane thing to think. It couldn’t be her father.
Then who?
It had to be one of the friends, the group that had buried the time capsule. One of her friends’ parents.
Jorja’s dad worked for the county as a public defender. Probably could have made a lot more money somewhere else, but he was—in his own words—“a true believer.” Elayah couldn’t imagine him killing someone. He was gregarious and funny and brewed his own root beer. That didn’t strike her as the homicidal type.
Marcie’s parents had split when Marcie was four—her dad lived down in Finn’s Landing, near the river. Elayah didn’t know him terribly well. He tended not to show up for events or parties, and when he did, he usually lurked near the door and disappeared halfway through. Unlike Kim—Marcie’s mom—he always insisted on being called “Mr. Ford.” He was a writer, she knew—he wrote technical manuals and stuff like that. She’d spent some weekends with Marcie at his apartment when they were younger; the place had been clean, but cluttered, and smelled of something stale and sweet that years later she identified as marijuana.
If she was being honest, Elayah didn’t like Marcie’s dad. But that didn’t mean he was capable of murder.
And Kim was… well, Kim was Kim. As a child, Elayah had spent many a day and sleepover at Kim’s apartment, which seemed cozy and cluttered in the best possible way. Marcie had had bunk beds back then, and they’d kept track of who slept on the top and who slept on the bottom, alternating, occasionally trading, sometimes turning the top bunk into the prize for a bet. Kim kept them plied with a steady stream of junk food that was forbidden in Elayah’s house, often leaving them unattended for hours at a time while she worked one of her jobs. It had seemed magical to Elayah, and only now did she notice the creases in Kim’s forehead, the wrinkles around her eyes, the hard sighs.
Impossible to imagine this woman with a knife in her hands.
That left Liam’s dad, and yeah, he’d definitely been home in bed when she’d been attacked.
Good job, Detective Elayah—you’ve eliminated every suspect! That’s not how this is supposed to work.
EP. 001
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
INDIRA BHATTI-WATSON, HOST:
This is No Time Like the Present, an NPR podcast. I am Indira Bhatti-Watson, reporting from Canterstown, Maryland.
(SOUND BITE OF MUSIC)
BHATTI-WATSON:
The town itself seems not so much developed or planned as emerged from the surrounding fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco.
If you are of a certain age, you probably remember Wantzler cassette tapes, with their distinctive blue-and-green packaging, and perhaps the company’s late foray into videotapes and floppy disks. In a digital world, such media have fewer and fewer uses, and the factory’s attempts to adapt to the times have failed more often than not. In recent years, a risky factory reconfiguration to begin producing components for computer flash memory seemed like a gamble that would pay off… until the coronavirus temporarily shut down the factory and wiped out many local businesses. Unemployment and opiate addiction rose hand in hand here in Canterstown, but back in 1986, this was an example of President Ronald Reagan’s paean to “morning in America,” a thriving slice of small-town America where the collars were blue, the moms were stay-at-home, and the cars were built in Detroit.
We came here for many reasons: an attack on a young woman in her own bed. A time capsule unearthed, bearing mysteries. And we found not just the story of a group of friends trying to understand the past, but also a town on the precipice of its own unknowable future.
On this podcast, we’re going to take you through Canterstown. Its history. Its present. Its likely future. We’re also going to try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: Who attacked seventeen-year-old Elayah Laird in her own bed… and why?
MARTIN CHISHOLM, LOWE COUNTY (MD) SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS:
This town was once a thriving example of middle-American values and initiative. It can be again. Send me to Annapolis to represent you, and I will do whatever it takes, fight whatever battles there may be, to revitalize and reenergize our community after the destruction wreaked on us by the economy, by the coronavirus, by decades of politicians who just didn’t care!
(CROWD NOISE)
CHISHOLM:
If you need any further evidence for why there needs to be a change in Annapolis, just look at what happened the other night!
BHATTI-WATSON:
That’s the voice of Martin Chisholm, running for Maryland state senate. In the 1980s, he was a teacher at the school Elayah Laird now attends. We spoke to him between campaign appearances.
CHISHOLM:
You know, it was different back then. I hate it when old people like me say that! But it’s true. You didn’t have to watch your kids every single second. They could go outside and play unsupervised or run over to a neighbor’s house. It wasn’t all sunshine and dandelions, don’t get me wrong. But is there maybe a way to incorporate the good parts of the past into our future?
BHATTI-WATSON:
Forgive me for saying so, but that sounds pretty regressive for someone running as a Democrat.
CHISHOLM:
I’m trying to be realistic. I don’t want every part of the past back. God, no. But I can tell you this: Back then, nothing like what happened to poor Ms. Laird would have happened in this town.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
While Mom was at the nurses’ station haggling over some insurance thing on the day of her release, Elayah got dressed, packed her pajamas and some toiletries into a canvas tote Mom had brought, and then sat on the bed to wait.
Eventually, she had to start sorting through her phone. Now was as good a time as any.
holy snap @elayahlairdrox got stabbed!!!
not stabbed you idiot SLASHED. There’s a diff.
whatevs
guys I heard @elayahlairdrox got killed last night!
FAKE NEWS! She wasn’t killed. Just got her throat cut.
Just?
Whew! That’s good news. She’s my lab partner.
She couldn’t bear much of it. The people she truly cared about—her family, her teachers, her friends—knew the truth, and that was what mattered. For the first time in a long time, she tapped out of Twitter and Insta without looking at every tweet and comment. Social media was too much noise, not enough signal.
Opening her browser revealed the last page she’d visited before going to bed that fateful night—Rachel’s second story, the one that had gotten serious. The comment section on that particular article had lit up with gossipy speculation. Elayah was accustomed to such behavior from her peers and the occasional putative “real housewife” on TV, but to see actual adults in her actual town—people with jobs and mortgages and kids—descend into a murk of guesswork, supposition, and baseless surmise was disheartening.
Worse yet was the story about her own attack, linked in an update squib at the bottom of the story. LOCAL TEEN ATTACKED IN HOME AFTER HINTING AT DARK SECRET screamed the bold, red, overwritten headline. Rachel had the byline again, no doubt fist-pumping at the memory of the day she’d met Elayah and the others.
The story was lean, thankfully, devoid of most facts. The phrase “The Canterstown Sheriff’s Department refused to comment” was deployed.
But the basics came through: Elayah had spilled the tea and then had her blood spilled. Light on actual content, Rachel’s four breathless paragraphs compensated with attitude, verve, and lurid implication. Was her attack connected to the mystery from decades ago? How could it not be? All the story lacked was an autoplaying audio of a dramatic drumbeat to drive home the point.
She had to scroll past two screens of trackbacks before the first comment appeared.
Lots of speculation, lots of rumor. Half-true tidbits, links to personal Facebook accounts with “pix from right across the street!” Elayah realized, to her dismay, that photos of her being wheeled out of her house on a stretcher would now live forever in the depthless, borderless tracts of the internet. Image searches for Elayah Laird would, years from now, regurgitate grainy, half-dark cell footage of her unconscious body, covered in blood.
Splat! went her phone. It was the alert sound she’d chosen for Twitter DMs. At some point, the idea of a direct message landing on her phone with a wet thud, like bird poop, had seemed amusing. Now it just seemed juvenile and idiotic.
She tapped to get into Settings and change the sound but missed the icon, her thumb sliding along the notification panel instead. The next thing she knew, Twitter opened and spat out the DM:
“Hi, Elayah!
“My name is Indira Bhatti-Watson, and I’m a producer at NPR in the podcast division. I’m wondering if anyone has approached you about the rights to your story? I’m already in town, and I’d love to bring a crew to interview you about your discovery. Maybe you’d be willing to walk us around town and give us a local’s perspective?”
There was another paragraph—this one all business—including an email address, two cell phone numbers, and a link to an NPR bio page.
Okay, so first of all: She had to close up her DMs because what on earth had she been thinking? But second of all…
NPR. National Public Radio.
National Public Radio.
National.
What the hell?
Elayah pondered for a moment, then went back to the article about her, sliding her finger up the screen until she hit the trackbacks. This time she didn’t skip them.
cnn.com
msnbc.com
foxbaltimore.com
wjla.com
The list went on. A local TV affiliate picked it up on a slow news day from the local news. And then a network decided to throw it into the nightly report. Weird angle, time capsule. Sins of the past and all that. And then, as best she could tell, Black Twitter picked it up and ran with it precisely because the story of a young Black girl having her throat slashed in her own bed wasn’t getting the sort of traction it would have gotten if it had happened to a white girl.
Which led to cable news and the news cycle that eats itself alive.
Yeah, that was the Hansel and Gretel of it all. Whatever the specifics, she’d gone viral, and there was no sign of the bug abating anytime soon.
Well, Instagram would be safe, right? Just pictures of pretty people. She switched over only to find a DM there as well. This Bhatti-Watson person was persistent.
She tapped into DMs to erase it, but it wasn’t from the NPR lady at all. And it was short and to the point.
You weren’t supposed to get hurt, it said.
Wait, what?
She had no idea who notarealaccount237483423 was, but she had a sneaking suspicion it might—might—be a burner account.
You weren’t supposed to get hurt, the DM began. No one else needs to get hurt. Leave it behind the statue of Susan Ann Marchetti in the park tonight at midnight and this all ends.
Elayah skimmed it another time. There wasn’t much there, and there were no lines to read between. Pretty obvious. Pretty blatant.
When she tried to respond, she got an alert telling her the account was deactivated. Yeah, a burner.
“What the hell?” she murmured.
A phalanx of photographers greeted Elayah and her parents when they left the hospital late that morning, along with a slew of locals wielding smartphone cameras as though they’d taken an online course in photography and general asshattery.
Dad shielded Elayah’s face with his hand, while Mom shucked off her jacket and put it over Elayah’s head, a measure that was at once absurd and comforting.
At home, her room had been cleaned and straightened, but she experienced a tiptoe tingle of fear and memory up her spine as she stood in the doorway. A mélange of half memories eddied around her, a clutter of stumbles, hitched breaths, slick warmth pooling in her palm. Her Solange poster was gone, four tiny pinholes at its missing corners the only evidence of its past presence. She imagined it blood-swiped, a smeared handprint emblazoned along its surface. Imagined her parents glancing at each other in silence before taking it down, throwing it away.
Or had the police taken it as evidence? There were smudges of black powder here and there, and some dim memory from years ago struggled to the surface: Liam, regaling the class with a report on police procedure. And the thing most people don’t know, he’d blurted out, his words always racing to catch each other, as though desperate to unite into a single unit of sound, is that fingerprint powder is really messy and it’s not white like on TV; it’s black and it gets everywhere and my dad says you probably don’t even want to bother having them fingerprint your house because it’s a hassle and they probably won’t get anything usable anyway.
How was she ever going to sleep in here again? There was a new lock on the window, a stout one. The problem hadn’t been the original lock, though—she’d had the window open, after all. What was her dad going to do, put bars over the window?
Actually, yeah, she could see him doing exactly that.
“When you’re ready.” Mom’s hand on her shoulder. Mind reading Elayah’s own thoughts. “You don’t have to sleep in here until you feel like you can.”
Elayah shook her head, though what she was trying to communicate in that moment, she couldn’t say.
Her phone buzzed for her attention. She’d turned off most notifications, allowing only people she actually knew to get through.
Marcie: u doing ok? want me 2 come over?
She really, really didn’t, and she really, really did. She didn’t know what she wanted anymore, other than to not be afraid of her own bedroom
.
u home yet? feeling ok?
Liam, this time. Her heart skipped a beat and the pulse in her throat strained against the stitches.
Not bad, she thumbed to him. Then added:
He dapped back:
u need anything he sent after a moment.
She considered. An idea was forming. actually could use a favor. talk later?
It was the middle of the day; Dad was at the factory. Mom would usually be at the real estate office, making copies, making coffee, doing whatever. When Elayah found her in the kitchen, she seemed out of sorts, being at home during the day.
“Mom, you can go to work.”
Mom sat on the floor by an open empty cabinet, rearranging the plastic containers, matching bottoms to lids. “No, no,” she said without looking up. “I’m fine.”
The people at Morris Realty were pretty understanding, but Mom was hourly, not salaried. Every hour she stayed home with Elayah was money out of her pocket.
“Mom, really. I’m okay.” Her own voice surprised her. It sounded stout and confident, utterly at odds with the turmoil that roiled her gut in the same instant. She knew her mom should go, but she truly, almost desperately didn’t want her to.
Mom snapped a lid into place, realized it didn’t quite fit, and stood up, arching her back, then looking around at the Tupperware she’d scattered all over the floor. “How is there one lid that doesn’t match anything?” she asked the universe. “How does this always happen?”
Elayah sank into a kitchen chair. “You used a container to bring water outside for the plants, remember?”
Mom heel-palmed her forehead. “Right. Right. It’s in the garage.” She smiled wanly at Elayah. “Thank you, baby.”
Baby. She was an only child, and she knew she would always be her parents’ baby, but normally that word rankled, chafed. She was a woman. Hell, she’d survived a knife attack.