by Barry Lyga
“Expedite what?” Elayah asked as she uploaded the photo. “We already compared it to the postcard.”
“Yeah, but I want to compare it to publicly available samples of Chisholm’s handwriting, just in case,” Indira told her. “You guys might have been wrong.”
“Won’t his handwriting have changed over the years?” Jorja asked.
Indira shrugged. “Let’s leave that up to the expert.”
“Could you double-check it against the Antoine postcard?” Elayah asked eventually.
“Sure. But you know what would really be great? If we could get access to the knife,” Indira went on. “We could run a DNA test on the blood. I have a lab guy who owes me a favor. We could compare it to each of your parents’.”
“What would that tell us?” Marcie asked.
“If nothing else,” Elayah jumped in, “it would tell us if one of our parents bled on the thing. Right now none of them admit to knowing about the knife.”
“And if the DNA doesn’t match any of them, it proves something else,” Indira put in. “It proves that there’s someone else who’s involved and maybe your parents are in the clear.”
“And if it matches El’s dad…,” Liam said slowly. “Doesn’t that mean El’s theory is right? Marcus is really Antoine? They’re twins—they have the same DNA.”
“Common misconception,” Elayah said automatically. “Identical twins have super-similar DNA, but there are differences.”
“It’s a moot point,” Jorja pronounced, “because there’s no way for us to get access to the knife and the blood.”
“We’ll do what we can.” Indira stood to leave. “I have a budget conference call in a few. I’ll be in touch soon.”
They piled out of the minivan just as buses began arriving in the parking lot.
Indira poked her head out the window. “Oh, also, consider this: How did Lisa’s lust letter get in the time capsule in the first place? De Nardo wouldn’t have done it. Chisholm wouldn’t have done it. So who did?”
She grinned at them, and then she was gone.
Jorja and Marcie, holding hands, strode off toward the school as students began filtering in from buses and cars. Elayah stood frozen at the spot where she’d disembarked from Indira’s ridiculous minivan, unable to move.
Who had put the love letter in the time capsule? Had it been the same person who put the knife in? Why?
None of this made any sense! The more she learned, the less she knew. It wasn’t supposed to work this way!
“Hey, uh, El…”
Liam was still standing near her, hands jammed in his pockets. He clearly wanted to say something to her. She waited patiently, but he only stared at her, then dragged his attention over to the school, clenching his teeth.
Whatever he had going on in his head, she couldn’t fathom it or fix it. She thought instead about the night of the second break-in. How her father had immediately charged into the garage. Wasn’t that sort of crazy? Why would he run toward danger like that, with his wife and daughter nearby?
Unless it was an act. Unless he knew the person in the garage was an accomplice.
She shook her head. It was becoming too complicated. She was seeing connections where they probably didn’t exist. Threats looming from every shadow. Next she would be one of those conspiracy nuts who thought the government was out to get them and that every politician was a child molester.
Martin Chisholm and Lisa De Nardo floated to the top of her thoughts. Well…
“So, El…”
She blinked back into the present. “What?” They had a couple of minutes before the homeroom bell.
“I…,” he said.
She gave him a second or two to get to the next word, but nothing came out. His hands, now out of his pockets, actually shook.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He grimaced and gazed into the distance for a moment, steeling himself. Then he returned his attention to her and said, “I have to… There’s something I have to say to you. Can I say something to you?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded faraway, papery.
He licked his lips. A single second stretched to the breaking point, like putty.
“Actually, never mind,” he said. “I’m not so good with words.”
And he lunged forward, taking her face in his hands, kissing her with an ardor channeled from every extremity of his body, sluiced through every blood vessel, driving every last atom of passion and heat and life into his lips, which pressed into her own, reviving her, transferring to her. Her own body came alive, relit, hot again, her hunger and her glow feeding back to him.
It wasn’t even a surprise. It was the opposite of shock. It felt like the most natural conclusion to the most familiar song.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked with soft wonder when they broke apart.
“I’m… I probably should have asked,” he mumbled. “Was that wrong? I should have asked, right?”
Staring at him, she asked, “How long have you been wanting to do that?”
She watched him give up on doing the math. “Third grade…?” he said at last.
“What took you so long?” she yelled, then grabbed his face between her hands and hauled his lips back to hers.
1986: DEAN
On Friday night, the Canterstown Sledgehammers narrowly defeated their rivals to the south, the Brookdale Bobcats, with a field goal in the last thirty seconds of the fourth quarter. The next night, the SGA’s homecoming committee threw open the doors to a gymnasium reconfigured by crepe paper, banners, and gel lights borrowed from the drama club into a glittering dance hall that almost—almost—didn’t look like a high school gym.
Decked out in a tuxedo that appeared to have been cut from a sheet of pinstriped tinfoil, Marcus danced with Dinah, the two of them grinning into each other’s eyes as though nothing else existed in the world. But dancing with Kim, Dean found his thoughts roaming—as they often did now—to Antoine.
He was not so foolish as to imagine a time when he would dance like this with Antoine, but there had to be a way to balance out the halves of his life. A way to reconcile Daylight Dean with Nighttime Dean. Could he really live the rest of his life as this bifurcated creature, this bizarro version of Jekyll and Hyde?
“Ow!” He’d stepped on Kim’s foot.
“Sorry.”
She grinned up at him with an expression that said, Oh, my man. “We’re getting you some dance lessons before prom, mister.”
Prom. Oh, Lord. “Maybe take a break?” he said. “Get some punch?” And without waiting for an answer, he disengaged and headed for the food table.
BRIAN
The ride to school occurred in near silence. Brian was used to Antoine’s reticence, but Jay said nothing other than the occasional monosyllabic grunt when answering a question.
Did you bring the duffel bag for the Cup?
Yuh.
Did you bring gloves so we don’t leave fingerprints?
Yuh.
Jay drove with a grim intensity, a monofocus that Brian found deeply concerning. But Antoine, in the back seat, said nothing. And Jay said nothing.
So Brian said nothing.
They parked in the student lot, which was packed with the cars of those attending the dance. This way the car wouldn’t stand out in one of the other lots. But as soon as they got out, they headed not for the entrance near the gymnasium, but rather the side door that opened into the social studies wing. It was farther from the display case, which was only a few yards in from the main entrance, but the big double doors at the front of the school seemed too dangerous.
In silence, they entered. Antoine faded back against the wall, keeping an eye out as Brian and Jay navigated the hallway to the display case.
And there it was. The Steingard Trophy. Brian had to admit he felt a thrill at the idea. In fifteen years, they would dig up the time capsule and reveal the greatest practical joke in the history of Canterstown. That might not be much, but it would b
e something. After graduation, he would leave this town knowing that he’d left his mark. Even if the rest of the world wouldn’t know until September of 2001.
He chuckled to himself. By then they’d all be flying around in hovercars and vacationing on the moon. Cool.
He prepared to head down to the language arts wing and take up his post there, but Jay was standing before the case, staring straight ahead.
“Hey, man,” he whispered. Sound carried in these wide, empty halls, lined with cinder block and linoleum. In the distance—down one floor and on the other side of the school—he could hear music from the dance. “Dancing in the Dark.” That girl was hot.
“Jay? Man?”
Still Jay did not move. Staring straight ahead.
Brian closed in on him. Looking over Jay’s shoulder, he could make out his reflection in the display case’s glass doors. Tears dripped along his cheeks.
“Um.” Brian didn’t know what to do. What did you do when a guy was crying?
And then Jay slammed the edge of his gloved fist against the display case and howled like a wolf cut off from its pack.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
She wandered the halls between classes in a daze. She’d kissed Liam. He’d kissed her. They’d kissed each other. And wow, oh wow, oh wow.
Marcie. She should have texted Marcie immediately, but she’d been so blown away, blown apart, that she’d been unable to think straight or focus. Her mind was a playback loop of the kisses, overrunning and overpowering every other thought as though she’d drifted off to sleep. Her classes were background noise. The world thought everything was normal. The world thought nothing had changed.
Stupid world.
She’d thought up some extremely naughty combinations of emoji to send to Liam and was in the process of deciding if she dared do it—too soon?—when she spied an incoming message from Indira. She tapped on it and her heart sank.
Indira: No match between Chisholm and the note. Double-check confirms note and postcard in same handwriting. Sorry.
So that much was definite, at least. Whether Antoine or Marcus, the same person had written the note and the postcards. Meaning there was a damn good chance that her father or her uncle had killed someone with that knife.
The glee and giddiness of the kiss could not stand against the steamroller of that news. Elayah crumpled against a wall, staring at the screen and the two sentences that would—she knew—absolutely destroy her family one way or the other.
Marcie spotted her from down the hall and raced over, her expression panicked. “Bathroom. Now.”
They slipped into the closest lavatory and crammed into a stall together. And then, without preamble, Marcie produced from her backpack a copy of the 1987 Canterstown High yearbook.
“Was looking through this in study hall. I have news.”
“Yeah, me too,” Elayah mumbled.
Either ignoring her or not hearing her, Marcie planted her butt on the toilet and opened the yearbook.
“I realized who Katie is. We had it all wrong. It’s not a Kathleen or a Catherine. It’s my mom.”
That made Elayah stand up straight. “What are you talking about? Your mom’s name is Kim.”
“Yeah,” Marcie said morosely, “and her maiden name was Tate. And I remember her telling me there were like ten other Kims in her class, so they called her Kim T. And…” She twisted the yearbook around so that Elayah could see it, pointing at the picture of her mom and the line of text right below it.
Kimberly Alice Tate. Kim T. K. T. Love you, Dean!!! Western MD or bust! Marching band 4ever!
“K. T.,” Elayah whispered. “Katie.” She smacked her forehead. “Duh.”
Peej and K. T. That was what her dad had said to Liam’s dad on FaceTime that one night. Now they had “Katie.”
“What did they do?” Elayah asked. “Did you text her about it? Did you ask her about Jorja’s dad?”
Marcie curled into herself, folding her body over the yearbook as though to block it out of reality. “No. I can’t do this. It’s crazy. It didn’t seem real before. But now—”
“Now that it might be your mom, you mean?” It came out nastier than Elayah had intended. But given everything she’d been through, given how insanely, terrifyingly real this had been for her since the first night, she discovered that she could not muster so much as a scintilla of empathy for her best friend.
Marcie grunted, closed the yearbook, and muttered, “Sorry.”
It had been personal for Elayah almost from the beginning. Just the synchronicity of her uncle’s disappearance with the time capsule’s burial. Only now, she thought, maybe it wasn’t mere serendipity. Maybe there was correlation.
Maybe there was causation.
She showed the text from Indira to Marcie. Soon, they were wrapped up in each other, huddled as though against the whole of winter.
“You think my mom did something bad?” Marcie asked.
Elayah ruminated on that for a while before the only worthwhile and sober answer occurred to her:
“I hope not.”
Only DNA, she realized, could solve this problem. They’d discussed it before, but now they had exhausted all their other avenues. DNA would at least eliminate some possibilities.
we need dan from our parents, she texted.
dan? Liam asked.
DNA damn autocorrect
easy enough, Jorja responded.
Marcie: what will we do w it?
Indira has a lab she can use
then what? Liam that time.
She gnawed at her lower lip and didn’t respond. He wouldn’t like the answer.
When she saw him in the halls after last bell, she told him: “We need the knife. To compare the blood DNA to our parents’.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, chuckling. “They let you check evidence out with a library card.”
An idea had occurred to Elayah. It was the sort of idea that you knew was awful but barged its way into your thoughts nonetheless.
“What if we took a page from our parents’ book—”
“Nope!” Liam backed away abruptly, colliding with some freshmen who scampered away in fear. “Nope! No way!”
“—and broke into the sheriff’s office and took a sample from the knife?” she finished.
“No!” Liam stomped. “No way. Not gonna happen. Are you nuts? The building is staffed twenty-four seven. And the knife is probably in this vault they have, which is pass-code protected, so there’s no key to duplicate in the first place.”
“Can you get the code from your dad?”
Liam folded his arms over his chest. “You’re talking about breaking and entering, theft, obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, interfering with a police investigation, and pissing off my dad, most of which are big deals. Not happening. Haven’t we done enough crazy stuff for one semester?”
“Liam—” Elayah began.
“No.” She was shocked at how defiant he was. “Besides, getting DNA off the knife doesn’t matter. We’d still need a sample from Antoine to compare it to, and guess what? No way to do that.”
A bit red-faced from his heated rejection of the plan, he bobbed his head, took a deep breath, and said, “Sorry, El. Really. It’s too far.”
He was right, and she hated him for it, and she also half hoped he would jump forward and start making out with her. Sure, it would make everyone else in the hallway uncomfortable, but that was what she wanted anyway.
Liam sighed. She knew he couldn’t say no to her. Not entirely.
“We can’t get the blood from the knife, but we have the report. The one I took pictures of that told us it’s AB. I can give that to Indira. That’s something, right?”
She smiled at him. Life was good again.
Now their mission was simple: Get DNA samples from the parents who’d buried the time capsule.
It was easy enough. A strand of hair from a brush here, a used Q-tip there… Liam walked them all through some basics of evidence
collection, relying on half-remembered comments from Dad and a couple of YouTube videos.
None of the evidence they gathered would ever stand up in court, but at least it could point them in the right direction.
They delivered their DNA bounty—a motley collection of used tissues, hair, Q-tips, and an old toothbrush—to Indira at a coffee shop in broad daylight. The meeting seemed to call for something more clandestine, but even punctilious Jorja had to admit that absolutely no one in the place so much as glanced in their direction.
“How long will this take?” Elayah asked.
Indira shrugged. Today, she wore a blue patterned scarf with another set of mismatched earrings. “However long it takes. I’ll let you know.”
Such a promise was eminently reasonable and understandable. That didn’t stop it from aggravating the living hell out of all of them.
While they waited for the results of the DNA, they decided to focus on the mystery of Peej and K. T. With Kim’s two jobs—one of which was an unpredictable Uber schedule—it had taken them this long to find a time when they could get to her. And even Marcie agreed that it was time to get some answers from her mom. The four of them went to Marcie’s apartment together.
As they entered and paused in the narrow little entry hall, Elayah had the oddest sense of… whatever the opposite of déjà vu was. She had been to Marcie’s mom’s home roughly a jillion times, but now she experienced the sensation of entering for the very first time. An impression of familiarity overtook her, swiftly overwhelmed by the certainty that she’d never been here before. She shivered; Liam put an arm around her.
Marcie’s mom had an hour before she was due to fire up the app and go Uber it up. They found her in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a steaming mug emblazoned with the slogan MAMA NEEDS HER COFFEE. Marcie had bought it for Mother’s Day one year. Elayah had been with her.
Were they really about to interrogate her?
“Hey, Mom, what happened with Jorja’s dad?” Marcie asked.
I guess we are!
Marcie’s mom did a double take. “Nice to see you, too, sweetheart. I thought you were over at Jorja’s, but it looks like you brought the whole crew.” She gestured for Elayah to come to her, which Elayah dutifully did, accepting a tight one-armed hug and a kiss on the forehead.