by Sara Shepard
Buzz.
It was a text from Thomas Grove. Ferrari Guy says I can borrow his car for the nite. Pick u up at 7?
Ha, ha, Aerin wrote back. Good one.
The phone beeped again. Damn, I thought that would work. I guess u would have been pissed when I showed up on the motorcycle, though.
What kind of bike? Aerin texted.
A Norton. Used to be my grandpa’s.
Aerin smiled. She had a weakness for vintage bikes.
Her phone pinged again. A picture popped up. Just call me Magic Mike, read the caption, and Brett stood half-naked in front of a mirror, flexing his pecs. He squinted with a look that was clearly supposed to be sexy, but really he just looked kind of constipated. Aerin giggled.
A Jeep rolled into the driveway. Seneca climbed out of the passenger seat, dressed in a black tee, a flouncy denim skirt, and red Converse. The back door opened, and Brett emerged next, then Madison. Maddox was typing on his phone. He didn’t look up the whole way to the back gate.
Aerin opened the latch to let them into the yard. Brett caught her eye. ‘Like my text?’
Aerin lowered her lashes. ‘Loved it, big boy. Especially your sexy face.’ She gave him the lightest tap on the butt with the tips of her fingers. He was fun to flirt with. It was so nice that they were on the same page about it, too – bantering back and forth with no pressure of anything more. How refreshing, to hang out with guys who didn’t just want to get into her pants.
She walked back up the first level of the patio and settled onto a chaise. Maddox poked a planter overflowing with impatiens. ‘So how are we going to figure out who this secret Samurai Knight might be?’
‘I’m going to call Helena’s old friends,’ Aerin said. ‘I’ve already started making a list of everyone she was close with.’
‘I put in a call to Becky Reed,’ Seneca said, referencing Helena’s old best friend. ‘But she didn’t tell me anything new. Just about that summer program she did in the city.’
Aerin remembered Helena going off to the city that July. She’d wanted to meet her during those two weeks, but Helena said she was too busy. Aerin had thought it was because her sister didn’t want to be seen in New York City with an eleven-year-old, but maybe she had other reasons. Maybe she’d met someone she didn’t want Aerin to know about.
Seneca crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘Maybe her secret boyfriend was a pre-college kid, like her. In that same program.’
‘Kevin seemed to think he was someone older,’ Maddox reminded her.
Aerin squinted. ‘A guy who taught the course?’
Seneca made a face. ‘I suppose it’s possible. We could look up who was teaching.’
Maddox held up his phone. ‘Here we go.’ On the screen was the NYU home page for a summer program in film and comparative literature. He clicked on the list of course instructors and frowned. ‘Well, there are a bunch of men on the roster for this year’s program. But how do we know who was teaching six years ago?’
Seneca put her finger to her chin. ‘Let’s call NYU.’
‘Let’s go to NYU,’ Brett urged.
Seneca looked at him. ‘We can’t just go without having someone to look for. As far as I’m concerned, Kevin’s still a suspect. What if he killed Helena to keep her quiet about him and the senator?’
‘I agree,’ Maddox said. ‘We can’t rule Kevin out until we have proof that he really was at that conference. Just because he was keeping a secret for Helena doesn’t mean he’s innocent.’
Aerin pulled her bottom lip into her mouth. In the Ferrari, Thomas had mentioned that he’d read something about Kevin in Helena’s file. Was it about him and the senator, or something else?
Seneca looked at Aerin. ‘Can we look through Helena’s room?’
Aerin’s stomach knotted. She’d figured this moment would come, but it still felt unwelcome. ‘I guess …’
She opened the sliding glass door and started inside, then stopped short. Her mom stood in the kitchen – Aerin had thought she’d left for Scoops already. Marissa Ingram stood next to her, holding a long, breezy maxi dress up to her scrawny figure. ‘Skip is going to love this.’
Aerin tiptoed backward. Her ankle turned, and she banged loudly into the vertical blinds on the sliding door, knocking them together.
‘Aerin?’ Her mom craned her neck. Then she spied the others, who were jumbled up behind her. ‘Who’ve you got there?’
Seneca stepped up and held out her hand to Mrs. Kelly. ‘Seneca. Aerin’s study partner.’
Marissa put a hand to her chest. ‘Studying, even over break?’
Madison stepped forward. ‘And I’m Madison. I think we met, Mrs. Kelly – I love your ice cream.’
Brett shook Mrs. Kelly’s hand emphatically, and said, ‘This is a beautiful house for two beautiful ladies.’
‘Um, good to see you again, too,’ Maddox mumbled, and Mrs. Kelly just stared at him, probably not making the connection. Aerin didn’t fill in the blanks. The less her mom knew, the better.
Marissa touched Aerin’s elbow. ‘It was lovely to see you at the party last night.’
Aerin grimaced. Shit.
Her mother’s head swiveled. ‘What party?’
‘Kevin Larssen’s engagement,’ Marissa chirped.
Mrs. Kelly’s mouth dropped open. ‘You went to Kevin’s engagement?’
Aerin shrugged, pretending to be overly interested in the scented candle on the island.
‘It was divine, Elizabeth,’ Marissa cooed. ‘The food … the band … very tasteful. You should have come. But you will come to the Morgenthau Easter party, right?’
Mrs. Kelly was still looking quizzically at Aerin. For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the rushing of the water filtration system inside the refrigerator. Aerin braced herself for a confrontation – and maybe she wanted one. But then her mom turned to Marissa. ‘Let me show you which annuals the gardener is putting in this year.’
‘Of course,’ Marissa said, taking her arm.
Aerin saw that as her cue, and she guided the group upstairs. After a moment, she heard the sliding glass door to the deck open again. She pointed the others to a closed door at the end of the hall. ‘That’s her room.’
Brett was first down the hall, but he stepped aside and let Aerin turn the knob. He seemed to understand that no one had been in this room in a long, long time.
The room smelled like dust. Helena’s bed was carefully made with the same pink sheets that had been there when she vanished. Her bureau was clear of clutter, which was different than Aerin remembered it – the police had left the place tidier than they’d found it. Aerin’s heart squeezed. She’d only come into this room one or two other times since Helena had vanished. All she could think, now, was of how the police had swabbed the place for fingerprints and hairs. Forensically, so much of her sister was still here – dead skin cells embedded in the mattress, picked-off fingernails ground into the carpet, DNA from her lips adhered to her lip gloss. If only all those atoms could gather together and reconfigure Helena.
She looked over her shoulder at the others in the hall. ‘Come in.’
Everyone stepped inside and started to look around. Aerin walked across the room and ran her fingers along the spines of the books on Helena’s bookshelf. Twilight. To Kill a Mockingbird. She picked up Wreck This Journal and flipped through it, but Helena hadn’t filled out a single page. Next to it was the diary Aerin had poked through the day Helena had disappeared, neatly put away. It was one of the first things the police had looked at, hoping for clues, but besides a few pages of copied song lyrics and a list of vintage items Helena wanted to buy (quilted Chanel purse, Pucci shift, silver belt buckle), the journal was blank.
‘Look,’ Aerin said, holding up a course catalog for NYU’s summer program from six years ago. Everyone gathered round as she flipped to the pictures of the professors. All the guys teaching the film classes looked sort of average.
Brett grabbed his phone. ‘I’ll look u
p details about these dudes. Maybe one of them has a record. Or maybe we’ll see evidence on Facebook that they flirt with college girls.’
Aerin nodded, then went back to searching. Seneca poked in the closet. Maddox had Helena’s laptop open on the bed – which Aerin wasn’t thrilled about, especially because the cops had already gone through it. Brett trolled through Facebook, but after a few minutes he let out a sigh. ‘Not a single teacher has a Facebook page. What are the odds of that?’
‘And you know, the police have already gone through all of this room,’ Aerin mumbled. ‘I don’t know what we think we’re going to find.’
She moved to Helena’s desk, yanking open the top drawer. There were a few pencils with worn lead, pink rubber erasers, a blue Sharpie. Aerin touched an old punch card for Connecticut Pizza; apparently, Helena needed to eat only two more slices to get one for free. Then she noticed a ticket stub stuck to the inside wall that could have gone unnoticed. It was for a band called Gel Apocrypha dated the July before Helena went missing. Aerin squinted at the location of the show: Houston Street, in New York City. She flipped it over. Call me, read the messy scrawl. And then the name Greg, a phone number, and the words Love U.
Aerin must have had a strange look on her face, because Seneca came over and inspected the ticket. ‘Do you know that band?’ Seneca asked. Aerin shook her head faintly.
‘I remember them,’ Maddox blurted. ‘This was one of the bands Helena listened to a lot. She told me to download them. They’re very melancholy.’
Aerin raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Wonder who Greg is.’
Maddox was on his phone again. ‘There’s someone named Greg Fine in the band. And hey, they still play gigs. They live in New York City – and they did back then, too.’
Aerin blinked hard. ‘Greg Fine. That name sounds familiar. I think he spoke to the cops.’
‘Meaning he must have had a reason to speak to the cops,’ Seneca said thoughtfully. ‘Like someone had seen him and Helena together maybe. Perhaps someone knew they were an item.’
‘Did he have an alibi?’ Maddox asked.
‘He must have said enough to elude police suspicion,’ Seneca said. She clucked her tongue. ‘What girl doesn’t have fantasies about dating a rock star? Maybe she met him when she was at the summer program – Houston Street isn’t far from NYU, is it?’
Brett pursed his lips. ‘Kevin mentioned art galleries and museums, not rock shows, but I guess you never know.’
‘We should at least try to reach out to him. See what he’s all about.’
‘Maybe his number still works.’ Maddox typed into his phone. He listened for a moment, then raised his eyebrows. ‘Voicemail. But it’s his name in the outgoing message.’
Then Brett held up Helena’s old white iPhone. ‘We could see if she called him.’
‘I guess.’ Aerin shrugged. ‘Though the cops already scoured that thing before they finally gave it back. Phone records, texts, everything.’
‘We might as well look, too.’ Brett surveyed the room. ‘Got an old charger?’
‘In my room, I think,’ Aerin said. Actually, it was a good excuse to get everyone out of Helena’s space. She was starting to feel claustrophobic in here.
She led the group into her bedroom, retrieved a charger from her desk, and plugged it into the phone. The battery-charge icon appeared, and then after a long pause, a welcome screen popped on. Helena’s wallpaper, a cheerful picture of her and Becky Reed, appeared. An icon up top showed four bars of connectivity.
Aerin’s mouth dropped open. ‘This still has service.’
Seneca walked over. ‘You think your mom forgot to disconnect it?’
‘I bet she couldn’t make the call to Verizon,’ Aerin said softly, remembering how Helena’s subscription to Teen Vogue had arrived at the door a full year after she disappeared.
She clicked on the contacts icon and scrolled through the list. Sure enough, there was someone named Greg in Helena’s phone contacts; the number she’d entered matched the number on the ticket. Aerin scrolled through Helena’s received and dialed calls, and Greg’s number popped up a few times. What had they been talking about?
Bzzzt.
Aerin almost dropped Helena’s phone. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, staring at the new message on the screen. One new voicemail.
Maddox crowded behind her. ‘Did this just come in?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ Aerin said shakily.
Maddox grabbed the phone, made a few swiping motions, and then his eyebrows shot up. ‘The message is from January 27, five and a half years ago. I’m surprised Verizon even saved a message that old.’ He pressed the screen a few times. ‘She got a text that day, too. It just says Call me.’
‘Is it from Greg Fine?’ Seneca asked excitedly.
‘Actually, no.’ Maddox looked confused. ‘It’s from a 917 number she entered as Loren, no last name. Spelled L-O-R-E-N. Wonder if that’s a girl or a guy.’
‘Is she in the band?’ Seneca asked.
Maddox shook his head. ‘I didn’t see anyone named Loren on Gel Apocrypha’s Wikipedia page.’ He looked at Aerin. ‘Does the name ring any bells?’
Aerin felt stunned. ‘I’ve never heard that name in my life.’
Maddox pressed the Call Voicemail prompt, then set the phone to speaker. Everyone gathered round to listen. Please enter your password, an automated voice said.
Seneca looked at Aerin. ‘Any idea what it might be?’
Aerin’s mind felt blank. She picked up the phone and typed in Helena’s birthday, but that wasn’t it. The year she would have graduated? Their address, 1564 Round Hill Lane? Then she thought of those silly numbers on top of the karaoke machine. Contains 1,045 songs! With shaking hands, she typed in 1045. You have one new message in your mailbox, a voice said.
Aerin’s heart thudded. Seneca nodded encouragingly. Brett squeezed her shoulder and whispered that it was going to be okay. Taking a deep breath, Aerin pressed the number one to listen.
There was a whooshing noise on the other end. Horn honks. And then an unfamiliar, gravelly male voice blared through, aggressive and insistent: ‘It’s Loren, bitch. We need to talk. I’ll be at Kiko, same details as before. You’d better show up.’
Click.
CHAPTER 19
On Thursday morning, Seneca and the others rode a Metro-North train toward New York. The sun shone brightly through the dirty windows. The clouds in the blue sky looked plush and fluffy, the kind you could make animal shapes out of. Inside, though, Seneca felt gray and tumultuous, the way she always did when she was wading into the unknown. They’d left Greg Fine a couple of voicemails posing as reporters for a college paper wanting an interview about his band, but he hadn’t called back. And Loren? Well, he sounded dangerous. Seneca couldn’t believe the detectives had missed his message. They should have monitored Helena’s phone a little longer. They should have called this guy and interrogated him, asked him what he was so pissed about.
It made her wonder what the detectives had missed in her mom’s case.
Her phone buzzed, and she directed her attention to the screen. A Google Alert for a Dexby news report read New Investigation Shows Restful Inn Fire Possibly Arson.
A sick feeling welled in her. She tapped to read the story, but there were no real details – just that the hotel’s electrical wiring was solid and the police were shifting gears. Should she tell them about the thin, ragged voice she’d heard outside her door? Had she even heard a voice?
To take her mind off worrying, she clicked on the huge bank of old interviews from right after Helena disappeared. Randomly selecting one, she watched as a scene outside Windemere-Carruthers school appeared. ‘All the students have been in intense questioning since Helena Kelly disappeared,’ a reporter was saying to the camera. Behind her lurked a brunette girl with sharp eyebrows and full pink lips. Seneca frowned. Even years ago, she’d noticed this girl – she’d been in the background during a few other interviews, too. There was
something off-putting about her.
She tapped Aerin, who was sitting next to her. ‘Who is this?’
Aerin squinted. ‘Oh. That’s Katie. She was in Helena’s grade.’ She tapped her lips. ‘They used to be friends, but …’
Seneca cocked her head. ‘Did something happen?’
‘All I remember is that my mom asked if Helena wanted to invite her to her birthday dinner, and Helena was like, Definitely not. It was right around the time Helena started changing – dressing differently, hiding stuff, you know.’
Seneca stared at the screen. She had hit pause at a precise moment where Katie’s lips were pursed mischievously. ‘Should we talk to her?’
Aerin wrinkled her nose. ‘They weren’t friends when she vanished. And anyway, I remember the cops interviewing her. She had an alibi.’
Seneca didn’t feel convinced. But she let it drop – they had bigger suspects to question.
Then Aerin gestured to Maddox across the aisle. He had his head tilted back, and his eyes were closed. ‘Can you believe he’s sleeping right now? I’m so nervous I can barely breathe.’
‘Seriously.’
Maddox made a blustery sleep-snort. Seneca giggled. ‘Well, at least someone will be well rested when we arrive.’ Smiling devilishly, she wadded up her ticket stub and tossed it at his head, aiming for his mouth. It bounced off his cheek, and he jolted up with a gasp.
Maddox twisted in his seat and caught her staring. He raised his eyebrows challengingly.
Seneca rolled her eyes, then turned to face the window.
She hoped he hadn’t seen her blush.
After a bumpy cab ride so short they probably could have just walked, the group pulled onto Twenty-sixth Street in Chelsea. Wind gusted down the street. Tall concrete buildings rose on either side, some with scaffolding papered with band posters and advertisements. The Hudson glittered at the end of the block. A jogging path ran parallel to the river, with people biking and walking. It seemed so peaceful here. Not a place where a murderer spent his days.
Last night, they’d decided to focus on Loren first. The threatening phone message put him at the top of the list. After him, they’d concentrate on tracking down Greg the guitarist. They looked up Loren’s phone number on Google, but no results appeared. After listening to Loren’s message a dozen times, they’d determined he was saying the word Kiko. They’d searched for matches in New York, and there were a dozen listings for businesses called Kiko in the city: a store that sold professional-quality make-up; a no-kill animal shelter; a place in Chinatown that, as far as they could guess, sold goat meat; a wireless accessory wholesaler. Finally, Brett found an entry for a Kiko Art Gallery in Chelsea. According to its website, the place specialized in Asian art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. ‘Asian art,’ Seneca had said, her excitement building. ‘Like the cranes. Like Samurai.’ And Kevin had said Helena’s secret boyfriend was cultured. If Loren was that guy, then maybe Kiko was their rendezvous spot. Maybe they’d fought about something. Maybe Helena had told him she wanted to end their tryst. Maybe he’d traveled to Connecticut and stolen her out of the woods that snowy day.
