Time Will Tell

by Barry Lyga

  Elayah wiped her mouth and finally looked up at her best friend.

  “I think I know what happened,” she said. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away with the heel of her palm.

  My dad is Antoine. My dad is Antoine.

  It made sense. It made absolute perfect sense.

  The decision to skip University of Houston and go to Howard. That had been Antoine’s plan, not Da—Marcus’s.

  Marcus. She had to think of him that way now. She’d never known Marcus. Marcus died thirty-five years ago. Her father was Antoine, the man she’d been told had disappeared.

  It fit. It fit so perfectly that she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. Mom had told her: She and Dad had been casual, not serious… until Antoine disappeared. What if that was because Marcus was literally a different person afterward? Antoine had killed Marcus. Taken his place. Maybe because he’d always been in love with Mom? Oh, God…

  Dad/Antoine had had access to the time capsule. It all fit.

  “We need to go to your house,” she told Marcie.

  “What?”

  She thought of her father—of Antoine—downstairs. A murderer. On the sofa. Arm draped around Mom’s shoulders.

  “I just can’t stay here. I’ll explain when we get to your house.”

  Once safely ensconced behind the door of Marcie’s bedroom, they called the others into a Group FaceTime.

  She laid it all out. Hoping against hope that one of them would tell her she was crazy, would point out some flaw in her theory that would make it impossible. Jorja, she was certain, would find a flaw. Jorja would make it all unhappen.

  “The only part I can’t figure it out is the postcards from Mexico,” Jorja mused. “But the handwriting matches. So maybe he wrote them here and then mailed them to someone in Mexico to send back. To cover his tracks.”

  “Can we get a sample of your dad’s handwriting?” Marcie asked suddenly. “Just to be sure?”

  “Handwriting changes over time,” Liam said. “That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. I don’t think it would match after thirty-some years.” He paused, and when he spoke again, there was honest grief in his voice. “I’m really sorry, El. It looks like your dad was involved somehow. But maybe it’s not as bad as it looks. Maybe someone attacked him with the knife.…”

  “You’d think he would remember something like that,” Jorja sniffed. “Seems more likely he’s covering up—”

  “God, Jorja!” Marcie exclaimed. She put her arm around Elayah and squeezed against her. “Shut up, okay?”

  Abashed, Jorja busied herself with something off-camera. Liam gazed out from the phone’s screen, melancholy.

  Jorja had failed her. Her dad was Antoine. She knew it. She could feel it. The other details all swam in a dense fog, but that one stood out clear, like a buoy caught in a lighthouse’s beam.

  “Now what?” Elayah whispered.

  “This is sort of out of our league,” Marcie said quietly. “It’s getting complicated.”

  “My dad can—”

  “No.” Elayah cut Liam off. “How are we supposed to trust any of them? I want the truth, not what they want us to know.”

  Liam opened his mouth to protest, then shut it.

  “We need someone else who can get information,” Jorja supplied, speaking a bit hesitantly after Marcie’s chastising. “We’ve done everything we can on our own.”

  “Like hire a private detective?” Marcie asked.

  “Oh yeah, they’re all over Canterstown,” Liam snarked.

  While the three of them batted ideas and sarcasm back and forth, Elayah brought her knees up to her chest. She couldn’t go to the police. She couldn’t go to her parents. And her friends wanted to help but couldn’t.

  And out there—somewhere—someone was willing to hurt her. And she had no idea if he would try to again.

  In the middle of the night, she awoke for no reason. Marcie slept soundly beside her. She fumbled for her phone in the dark to see what time it was.

  The photo app with the handwriting samples was still open. And the handwriting still matched. That was incontrovertible. Indubitable.

  He was her father, but he wasn’t who she thought he was. What did that mean? Was she at risk? She didn’t want to imagine that, but if her father had killed his own twin…

  What was she going to do? What the hell was she going to do?

  Sobbing silently next to Marcie in the dark, she clutched her phone to her chest as though it could serve as armor. But nothing could protect her when she didn’t know from which direction the attack would come.

  Her phone buzzed. Wiping her eyes, she forced herself to look at the screen.

  And suddenly she knew exactly what the hell she was going to do.

  1986: DEAN

  Jay, it turned out, had been going into the school almost every night since that first night. Alone.

  At first, Dean was horrified. Every time they went into the school, they increased the risk of being caught. They’d agreed that first time that they would only do this together. Safety in numbers. More eyes and ears on the lookout for danger.

  But then Jay explained what he’d been up to: recon. Over the course of those nights, he’d painstakingly identified the doors that matched each and every key on the ring they’d duplicated. His key ring, unlike Dean’s, was now meticulously labeled. Main office. Janitor’s closet. Kitchen. Nurse’s office. And so on.

  In the process, he’d also uncovered other sets of keys that opened other doors. Lockers. Cabinets.

  “We can go anywhere,” Jay told him, eyes dancing with excitement. “We can go anywhere, man!”

  Dean tried mightily to imagine where in the school he would want to go and came up empty. It was just school.

  “Sometimes,” Jay told him, “you do a thing just because you can.”

  It was hard to argue with that.

  “It’ll be worth it,” Jay promised.

  The thing about Jay was this: When he promised something, it almost always came true.

  He and Jay went alone that night. As though unlocking the door to his own house, Jay opened a side door and let them in near the science wing. He wore a backpack filled with a glassy clinking noise; when Dean had inquired as to its contents, Jay had gazed at him inscrutably and said nothing.

  They wended their way through the dark, silent corridors, preceded by the funny yellow cones of their flashlights. Jay pointed out doors Dean had never noticed before, like the one nestled between a drinking fountain and a girls’ bathroom. That one he actually unlocked, revealing a tiny closet crammed with mops and a wheeled bucket. Nothing to write home about, Dean thought, until Jay cleared the implements away and ushered him in.

  There was room for only one person, so Dean stood there and obeyed as Jay told him exactly where to look. Two small holes at roughly eye level resided beside a shelf bracket, nearly invisible in its shadow. You could look right into the girls’ room. One of the janitors had done this.

  “But why?” Dean asked.

  “To see tits!” Jay erupted, as though Dean’s sheer idiocy had lit a fuse in him.

  Dean pondered this. He couldn’t imagine girls going into the bathroom and taking off their shirts and bras in the middle of the school day. Especially right at an opportune moment when the mops would be out in use. It made no sense.

  But it didn’t have to. He shrugged and stepped out of the closet. “Is this why we came here?”

  Jay grimaced with the frustration of a man who has been trying to make a point and can’t find the right words. The two of them restocked the closet, locked it, and proceeded down the hall.

  They trotted up a flight of stairs to the second floor. The business classrooms, with their computer terminals, were off to the left, the SGA office to the right. Where it had all started.

  “Up ahead,” Jay told him.

  Another door that Dean had never noticed, this one tucked into an alcove near the teachers’ restroom. Dean expe
cted another janitors’ closet and maybe a peephole into the bathroom, but instead he beheld a narrow flight of stairs rising up into darkness. The air within was slightly stale and humid.

  The school was only two stories tall. And they were on the second floor already.

  “Where do these stairs go?” Dean asked.

  Jay grinned wickedly. “They go up.”

  At the top of the stairs, there was another door. Jay pushed it open, and a blast of cooler, drier air hit him. They were outside. On the roof of the building.

  “Voilà!” said Jay.

  Dean had had no idea. Of course, it made sense that there would have to be some way to get to the roof, for maintenance. He’d never really thought of it before.

  “Pretty cool, right?” Jay asked as they wandered the perimeter.

  The school wasn’t all that high, but Dean felt a sort of imperious power as he strode the rooftop. A combination of unearthed knowledge and unexpected perspective. The parking lot, from here, lay like a black blister on the surrounding green skin of grass. The football field seemed small, hemmed in by its ring of bleachers. Off in the distance, a copse of trees now at eye level, when usually they loomed from a hilltop.

  “I was talking to Brian—”

  “Why?” Jay interrupted with a smirk.

  “Stop that. We pile on him too much. It’s not right.”

  Jay shrugged. “He’s just so…” He faded off into nothing, then rallied. “He’s so needy. Like he wants everyone to like him. Like he’s afraid of them not liking him.”

  Them in this case meant other people. People not in their group. Who were, therefore, irrelevant in Jay’s worldview.

  “So? Don’t you want people to like you?”

  With a snort, Jay shook his head. “Who cares? I have enough friends. Life’s not about who you know—it’s about what you do.”

  Somewhere in the cracked mortar between those two notions, Dean felt, there was the glimmer of an idea, a revelation, an epiphany. But he couldn’t suss it out.

  “Anyway,” he said, after giving it some thought, “I was talking to Bri, and he said we should bury the time capsule there.” He pointed out to the trees.

  “Why there?” Jay asked, as though the fact that it was Brian’s idea made it less palatable.

  “For one thing, it overlooks the school. And he said there are covenants on that land. He says no one’s allowed to build there for something like a hundred years.”

  Jay shrugged and stopped as they turned from the eastern side of the school to the northern. From here, the lights of town twinkled like earthbound stars in the distance, barely visible over hills and treetops. With most of the town obscured and only the lights visible, it was almost beautiful.

  “Here.” Jay crouched and hauled two beat-up lawn chairs from under a mounted air-conditioning unit.

  They settled into the chairs, and Jay rested his backpack between his feet and unzipped it, revealing four bottles of beer.

  “To friendship,” Jay said, and it was the most sincere thing Dean had heard in a long time from his friend. So sincere that at first he doubted it and thought it must be a setup for a joke.

  But Jay’s expression was utterly guileless in that moment. Dean clinked bottles with him and popped the top, then took a long pull. He actually hated the taste of beer, but there were no other options.

  Wordlessly they drank, staring up and out. Wisps of cloud cobwebbed the sky, leaking threadbare light from the moon and stars.

  “I haven’t told anyone else about my mom,” Jay said. “Mum’s the word.”

  “Of course.” But Dean knew that the secret wouldn’t remain so for long. Word would get out. There was something wrong with Jay’s mom. That kind of secret was perishable; it had a shelf life.

  Dean reached into the backpack for another beer and yanked back his hand at the touch of sharp, cold steel. A line of blood spilled out red below the second knuckle on the inside of his left index finger. He sucked at it to stanch the flow.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  Jay rummaged in the backpack and handed him another beer, then held up the hunting knife he’d had stashed in there as well.

  “I thought you left that in your car.” The bleeding seemed to have stopped. He used the opener on his key chain to pop the new beer.

  “I’ve been carrying it around since then. You never know.”

  “Never know what?”

  Jay’s shrug no doubt was intended to evoke an air of mystery, but it had the opposite effect. Dean could tell that Jay knew exactly why he now carried the knife everywhere.

  “Just in case,” Jay said, and leaned back in his chair, dropping the knife almost idly into the backpack.

  EP. 002

  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:

  Days after her assault, Elayah Laird returned to Canterstown High.

  (CROWD NOISE)

  BHATTI-WATSON:

  Escorted by deputies, Ms. Laird walked from her father’s car to the school door. Reporters shouted out to her as she made her way to the building.

  VOICES:

  —know who attacked you?

  Over here, Elayah! Look over—

  —any sort of comment—

  After digging up—

  —over here, look this way—

  —time capsule with—

  For God’s sake, look this way—

  Have the police informed you of—

  —any way to tell if—

  —for just a second, over here!

  BHATTI-WATSON:

  Conspiracy and speculation, like nature, abhor a vacuum. With few facts to go on and no information forthcoming from the sheriff’s department, the air around Canterstown has filled with innuendo, punditry, and hot takes.

  JONATHAN WELLER, MECHANIC:

  Ask me, it all has to do with the Challenger explosion. That was in eighty-six, too. And it never made no sense to me.

  CURTIS REINHOLT, CPA:

  Let me get this straight: The girl’s father buried a time capsule back in eighty-six, and now she just happens to be the one to dig it up? And then she gets her throat cut? Something’s going on, right? You have to ask the father. It’s always the man in the house.

  ZACHARY HINDON, HIGH SCHOOL MEDIA SPECIALIST:

  Marcus Laird and his brother were something like local celebrities back then. They were the fastest relay team in the county, and they would have proved to be the fastest in the state, I bet.

  BHATTI-WATSON:

  Would have. Perhaps. But Antoine Laird went missing in the fall of 1986, at the same time the time capsule was buried. Another tidbit of information in this case that has spun out theories by the locals and captured imaginations nationwide. There seem to be overlapping puzzles, or perhaps puzzles that share pieces, and none of them are anywhere near complete.

  The entire town has been caught up in the fervor of the mystery of the time capsule, turning Canterstown into what some are calling a tragedy circus. There are exactly two hotels in town: a somewhat shabby Holiday Inn and an even shabbier El Car Motel, which we’ve learned is willing to rent by the hour, though it does not advertise this fact. Both are packed to capacity.

  Beyond town, you’ll find a few bed-and-breakfasts catering to those passing through on their way to more picturesque locales. Bigger chain hotels loom the farther east and south one goes, but the press—always seeking advantage and a short drive—has begun offering cash to rent people’s homes.

  CONSUELA KENT, NBC NEWS:

  Look, my producer said, “Stay close to the action.” So that’s what I’m doing.

  BHATTI-WATSON:

  And recently a local listed her two-bedroom Colonial on Airbnb and received an astounding $680 for a week. This has kicked off an Airbnb frenzy. Extended
families packed into one house in order to rent out others. Friends crashing on couches in order to sublet apartments and old row homes.

  As we of the press settle in, spending money, the three local diners have seen booming business. In a town that was suffering the ravages of wealth inequality, even before the COVID-19 recession, the circus—tragedy or not—is a welcome infusion of financial largesse.

  MARK SMITH, PROPRIETOR, MARK’S DINER:

  I hate what happened to that poor kid, but damn if it hasn’t been good for my bottom line. Refill?

  1986: KIM

  Kim had a plan.

  Saturday night, her parents had a wedding to attend. She would be home alone. Except not.

  No skulduggery required in this case—her mother in particular worried with the same ease with which most people breathed, and the idea of her only daughter home alone terrified her. When Kim suggested that Dean could come over to keep her company, Mom had almost wept in relief.

  This was going to be the night. No question.

  She wore a skirt without leggings. Considered wearing nothing underneath, a notion that caused fear, shame, and exhilaration to well up in her as though pumped into a single fountain. She settled for her skimpiest underwear, frilly things she’d bought on a dare at the Victoria’s Secret in the mall.

  For her top, she wrestled with options, finally deciding on a button-up IZOD shirt in mint green, the sleeves rolled up. It was almost shapeless, but it would be easier to take off than the tight turtleneck she’d also contemplated.

  After her parents left, she went into the kitchen, where Mom had left her a twenty, and made a quick call before returning to the living room, where Dean was watching TV.

  “I ordered pizza for dinner,” she told him.