Like a Bad Penny

by Harper Crowley

  My phone buzzes, so I pull it out of my pocket and glance at the screen.

  How much longer do you think it’s going to take? Russ texts.

  I don’t know. The cops haven’t said anything. I’ll let you know ASAP.

  “Yeah, I don’t know how long we’re going to be, either,” Graham says, looking over my shoulder. He flushes at my raised eyebrows. “Sorry.”

  I wave off his apology. “It’s fine. We’ve both had a long day, night, et cetera. Hopefully we don’t have to wait up too much longer.”

  As if on cue, Graham stifles a yawn. “I know what you mean.”

  An hour later, Officer Fontaine finally says we can go back to our hotel room. “But don’t leave town,” he says with a smirk. He seems to be the type who relishes being in control, like a lot of small-town cops we’ve run into in the past. This may be our first dead body, but it’s not our first encounter with the police.

  “We wouldn’t dream of it, officer,” I reply. Internally, I groan. It seems like the fates aren’t going to let us escape Oak Cliff that easily.

  After leaving Shelley with his father, Graham walks me back to the house. “Don’t sound so enthusiastic,” he says.

  “I think your house’s cursed.” I kick a rock out of my path.

  He chuckles bleakly. “Yeah, I’m starting to agree with you.” But his expression is hollow, and I remind myself that he might have found the bones of his missing mother. He deserves whatever slack I can give him and then some.

  I close my eyes. I can’t take my frustrations out on him. He didn’t know Bear would dig up some bones that might or might not be human. “I’m sorry. It’s just... I don’t mean to sound crass, but I have a business to run. In order to keep subscribers, we have to keep investigating. It’s not good for the bottom line if we stick around in one place for too long.”

  His gaze shutters and he shoves his hands in his pockets. “Your bottom line. Sure, of course.” He stops onto the front porch. “So you’re heading back to the hotel?”

  I shift from side to side, uncomfortable. “Yeah. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Sure. Thanks for your help,” he says, but I wonder if he means it, or if he even hears the words coming out of his mouth. What would I say if I were in his position?

  Back in the hotel room, Russ uploads all of our footage online and backs it up. “Just in case the cops come back,” he says. “I want to be prepared if they take our cameras.”

  Jess snorts. “Which is exactly our luck, given the circumstances.” She flops across the bed and pulls out her phone. “But now we’re stuck in Bumfuck, Georgia until the stupid cops realize we couldn’t have had anything to do with some stupid skeleton that’s probably been there from before we were born.”

  “There’s not much we can do about it, though. At least we’re not going back to Michigan. I think the next case will be in Oklahoma.”

  Jess dramatically covers her eyes with her arms. “As if that’s much better.”

  “We could always go back to that cemetery,” Russ says, his furtive glance over the top of the laptop barely catching my glare. “It’s better than nothing, and it’s almost fall. People love that stuff before Halloween.”

  It’s honestly not a bad idea if we’re stuck here for too much longer, but I hope we won’t be.

  “Or,” Russ says, his face lighting up, “we could stop fighting this thing and do what all those podcasters are doing and make a miniseries. Let’s interview the neighbor again, talk to more people in town, and do research in the library. Think of it is as our own docudrama.”

  I arch my eyebrows. “A docudrama around the mystery of what happened to Graham’s mom? Isn’t that a bit opportunistic? I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right.”

  Jess sits up and tosses her phone on the bed. “I like it. What if we help solve the case? Wouldn’t that be awesome? We could be famous.”

  “Or we could end up dead,” I say.

  Jess glares at me.

  I throw my hands in the air. “Have you forgotten about the creep who stalked you in the woods and destroyed our equipment? This is escalating. I don’t want the next dead body Bear finds to be one of ours.”

  Russ snorts. “Stop being so dramatic. Jess has a point, though. We could rake in the money and sock some of it away so if we have a crisis like this again, we don’t have to rely on someone else, like Graham, to bail us out.”

  He has a point. “I’m not going to exploit them in their grief.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that,” Russ says. “I just want us to keep our options open, okay? We’re stuck here anyway, so we might as well make the most of it.”

  My phone vibrates under my pillow, jolting me awake. I fumble for the device and stare at the screen. It’s Graham. For God’s sake, why is he calling me in the middle of the night?

  “Answer it,” Jess mumbles, her face buried in her pillow. “I can hear the stupid thing vibrating over here. You have got to have the loudest vibrate setting in the entire world.”

  I give her a half-awake middle finger and tap Answer. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Graham says, his voice hesitant but wide awake. I wonder if he ever got to sleep. Probably not. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry... I... I can call back in the morning.”

  I yawn and glance at Bear, who is curled into a little ball by my feet. “No, I’m already up. What’s going on?”

  He takes a deep breath, so loudly that I can hear it over the phone. “It’s probably better if I tell you in person. Do you mind if I come over to the hotel?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Jess rolls over so her back is to me. I don’t think I’ll get any objection on her part. Russ would probably try to stop me, which is why I’m not going to tell him. “I’ll meet you outside,” I say. “Bear needs a bathroom break, anyway.” At the mention of his name, my dog stands up, tongue lolling, and stretches slowly. He hops off of the bed and noses the leash hanging over the chair. I swear it’s almost as if he can read my mind sometimes.

  “Great,” Graham says, sounding relieved. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.” He hangs up before I can respond.

  Careful not to wake Jess, I get dressed and clip the leash on Bear’s collar. The October air caresses my skin, but it lacks the chill that was present at the MacIver house. I lead Bear around the side of the hotel for him to do his business as Graham’s truck pulls into the parking lot. He parks next to me and hops out of his truck.

  “That didn’t take you long at all.”

  A ghost of a smile flits across his face. “Well, I couldn’t sleep, so I was driving around. Thanks for saying I could come over.”

  “No problem. What’s up?”

  He hesitates then gestures at a rickety picnic table probably inhabited by man-eating spiders. “Do you want to sit down?”

  Not exactly. “Sure.” I eye the picnic table dubiously, but after it holds Graham’s weight, I join him. “So what do you want to talk about?”

  Graham stares at his hands, flexing his knuckles. “After you left the house, the police took the body and asked my dad and me to come down to the station for questioning.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  He shrugs. “This is big news around here. We haven’t had a murder since Betsy Knapps shot her alcoholic husband after she caught him sleeping with her sister. That was like ten or fifteen years ago.”

  “Huh.”

  “Anyway, they found some stuff with the bones they wanted us to identify, and while we were there, the medical examiner knocked on the door to talk to the cop who was interviewing us.”

  “Fontaine, right?” I have to keep my names straight, or my head’s going to start spinning.

  “Yeah, he can be a jerk, but I’ve heard he’s pretty good at his job.”

  I’ll believe that when I see it. Bear snags his leash around the edge of the picnic table, and I reach down to free him. My fingers tangle in spiderwebs as thick as shoelaces, and I jerk away, disgusted. M
aybe we should head back up north, where it’s too cold for the eight-legged bastards to live this time of year.

  “They found this.” Graham digs in his pocket and pulls out a picture. It’s a silver locket in the shape of a heart and encrusted with dirt, resting next to a ruler.

  “Is that your mom’s?”

  “Yeah.” He pulls out his wallet and retrieves a folded Polaroid picture. In it, a young blond woman crouches, holding a baby in a white dress while a little boy clings to her knee. Her smile is so carefree, so happy, that the love radiates off of her. Graham touches a spot under the woman’s head. “I know you can’t really see it here, because the picture’s so faded, but she wore that locket every day.”

  “I’m so sorry, Graham.” I touch his hand, and he curls his fingers around mine.

  He stares down at our linked hands for a few seconds before responding. “Me, too. But this is what I don’t understand. The locket was my mom’s, I’m sure of it, but the ME said the bones belonged to a man. Something about the pelvis being too narrow for a woman who gave birth twice.”

  “Wait, what?” I rock back, stunned. That’s impossible. “How... what... who?”

  “Yeah,” Graham says, a hollow laugh escaping his lips at my shock. “That’s pretty much what I said. The locket was my mom’s, but the bones aren’t. So whose are they, and what was this person doing with my mom’s locket?”

  Chapter 13

  I wait until I’ve gotten some caffeine into Jess and Russ before I tell them about my visitor.

  “You should have woken me up.” Russ scowls over the lid of his disposable cup.

  “Yeah, well, she woke me up, and that’s bad enough. Besides, it was Graham. He’s, like, the least likely to hurt someone ever kind of guy. Totally harmless.” Jess lies on her stomach on the bed, her fingers flying over the laptop’s keyboard. “You should see the comments, guys. It’s crazy. I just posted to let people know we’re okay, but it was nuts. Someone copied the video and released it on YouTube, and it’s got over a hundred thousand views. They tagged us, thank God, and we already have eighteen new subscribers.”

  “Thank God for pirates, eh?” I gulp the rest of my coffee, still feeling as if I haven’t slept a wink. That seems to be a theme lately. I’m used to late nights—most investigations call for it—but this has been pretty brutal.

  Russ chuckles. “I guess you could say that. So when is Graham coming back over?”

  I glance at the clock on my phone. It’s a few minutes after ten, but I doubt he’s managed to fall asleep. “I’ll give him until eleven, then I’ll text him. We thought we would see if we could track down Mr. Rasputin again and see if he knows anything about missing people, since he’s lived here all of his life.”

  “Good idea. We’ll finish going through the video and hit up the library. I’ll see if I can pull anything from the good old microfiche.”

  Jess groans. “Can I come with you?”

  I shake my head. “Nope. You and Russ can hatch your docudrama plan to rule the world, and let me know how it goes.”

  “Seriously?” she asks, her eyes shining.

  “Seriously,” I reply, already having second—no, make that third thoughts about agreeing to that venture.

  Neither of them batted an eyelash when I told them the bones weren’t Graham’s mother’s. For some reason, they almost seemed to expect it. “It’s never that easy in the movies,” Jess said. Something tells me this wouldn’t be, either.

  GRAHAM PICKS ME UP just before noon. It’s not a very long drive to Mr. Rasputin’s house, since it’s right across the street from his old house, but my host spends his time drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and staring morosely down the road. I could cut the tension with a knife.

  Instead, I fiddle with the camera in my lap, my fingers running over the buttons and familiarizing themselves with the different configuration. Using the same equipment all of the time makes it an extension of ourselves, and we can use it without looking at it.

  I clear my throat to get his attention. “How’s Shelley?”

  He lifts one shoulder then drops it. “As good as you’d expect, I guess. Now that we know the bones aren’t my mom’s, she’s back to thinking Mom’s still alive and that it’s some massive conspiracy or something.”

  “That’s...” I don’t know what to say. I’d expected him to tell me she was depressed or crying a lot or sad, but not that she was in denial and thought the whole world was conspiring against her. Though, I guess if I were in her shoes—and I was, three years ago—I would be tempted to feel the same way. I wanted to believe my parents were alive, too. I held on to any shred of hope I could find until my fingers bled and until there was nothing left but the truth, and then I kicked that away, clawed at it, and refused to see it until I couldn’t look at anything else. Sometimes, I still have nightmares about having to go to the morgue.

  “Crazy, right?” Graham must still be talking about his sister.

  “No,” I say, my voice so quiet that I don’t think he hears me until he glances quickly in my direction. “She’s not crazy. She’s desperately missing her mom. There’s nothing crazy about that.”

  Graham flushes. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I remember you told me that you lost your parents.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Okay, not that long, but I really don’t want to get into it. Lucky for me, the understanding look in Graham’s eyes tells me he gets that I don’t want to talk about it, and he drops the subject.

  About a minute later, we pass the MacIver house, and my eyes are instinctively drawn to its threatening, foreboding countenance. I wouldn’t mind never going back there again, but somehow, I have a feeling that the house isn’t quite done with me yet.

  Just past his old house, Graham slows and pulls into Mr. Rasputin’s driveway. In the dappled sunlight, the little clapboard house looks worn and old, but not in the same abandoned way as its neighbor. Before I get out, I slip on the GoPro’s harness and turn on the camera. It’s better to be overprepared than underprepared. Graham gives me a long look but doesn’t comment.

  The weathered wooden porch sags on the right side, creaking under our weight. Faded flowered curtains cover the windows, keeping us from peering inside. Wait. Did the curtains move?

  “Did you see that?” I point at the window.

  Graham shakes his head. “No. What was it?”

  I frown. “I thought I saw the curtains move. It was probably nothing.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he says, pressing his face to the glass. Then he ducks down, pulling me along with him. His face pales, and his eyes widen. “There’s someone in there.”

  I feel stupid for asking, but I have to. “Are you sure it’s not Mr. Rasputin?”

  “No. Whoever it is is too tall, and the way they moved, they were sneaking around.”

  We creep alongside the porch to the front door. Graham touches the doorknob and it swings open a couple of inches. We share a glance.

  I fumble for my phone and pull it out. “I’ll call the cops.”

  A mulish look enters his eyes. “Good idea, but I’m not waiting.”

  “What?” My squeaky voice comes out louder than I meant, and I clap my hand over my mouth.

  “What if it’s the guy who destroyed your equipment at the house or stalked your sister in the woods? Mr. Rasputin could be in danger. Besides”—he cracks a reckless grin—“I’m pretty sure I’m taller than him, so I can take him in a fight.”

  “Not if he has a gun.”

  “You’re no fun.” Graham snorts and pushes the door open, slipping inside before I can object again. As it swings shut behind him, I grab my phone, quickly dial 9-1-1, give our location, and describe what’s going on. When the dispatcher tells me to wait outside, I half-heartedly laugh.

  “Too late,” I say, and hang up the phone before she asks why. I’m not going to leave Graham alone in there with whoever that is. If it is the same person who destroyed our cam
era equipment, then they’re already violent. It’s not a far leap to believe they could be responsible for the bones in the rose bushes. At least if I die, I’ll have the GoPro recording it. Too bad I’m not live streaming it. That would have been smart. Maybe I’ll do that next time, if I live that long.

  As soon I slip inside the door, I pause to get my bearings. The plaid yellow couch that must have sat in front of the vintage cabinet TV has been upended, its cushions ripped off. Dark stains mar the faded brown rug. Even the cheap pressboard entertainment center next to the TV has been knocked over, spilling picture frames and books onto the floor. Pages from the books litter the living room. Even the small round kitchen table has been knocked over, two of its legs snapped off.

  Adrenaline pulses through me, followed by a healthy dose of fear. This is so not what I signed up for. Maybe I should have listened to the 9-1-1 dispatcher and stayed outside. No. Graham’s in here, and if anyone’s less prepared to handle this than I am, it’s him. He’s never dealt with anything like this, I bet. I can’t leave him to handle the intruder alone.

  I tiptoe forward, the glass embedded in the thin carpeting crackling beneath my shoes. Crap. Whoever’s in here is going to hear me for sure.

  Thump.

  The sound echoes from one of the rooms, down the short hall, and past the kitchen. I freeze. Was that Graham? My heart races, the beating sound so loud in my ears that I can barely hear above it. I don’t dare call out, just in case it’s not him, but I can’t leave, just in case it is, and he needs help.

  When I reach the kitchen table, I crouch and grab one of the spindly table legs. It’s not much, but it’s better than smacking someone over the head with my camera. As I sneak past the table, a crumpled something on the floor moves. I hadn’t seen it before because the table was in the way, but now I can’t look away from the blood-soaked blue plaid shirt, blue-jeaned legs bent at an unnatural angle, and the pale, liver-spotted skin. It’s Mr. Rasputin.

  He groans, his hand twitching slightly. I fly to his side, slipping to my knees in the blood. “Oh my God. Don’t move, okay? The cops are coming.” I hope they bring an ambulance. They’re supposed to, right? I mean, I told them there was an intruder in the house, wouldn’t they normally send one?