by Lamar Giles
“I wouldn’t classify this a shakedown. I do want you to stop. You’re just retracing our footsteps, and if anything comes from our previous interviews, your interference muddies things. So here’s what I’m offering, and it’s a final offer: Ask me what you want. I’ll tell you where we are, on the condition it stays between us. Then you start acting like kids close to wrapping up a school year. Plan for the summer. Go to this memorial concert everyone’s talking about. That will be good closure for you.”
Closure. One last song, one last dance, one last turn-up! Before we act like ParSec didn’t exist. For a millisecond, I disliked Detective Barker.
Kya took him up on his offer. “Have you interviewed people we don’t know about?”
“Depends. I haven’t tailed you twenty-four/seven, so what you got?”
“Reggie, we know.”
Barker was back to eating his sandwich, confirmed with a nod.
“Miss Elsie?”
Another nod.
Kya went rapid fire. “Paula Klein. Winston Bell. Shameik Larsen.”
In the middle of a big chew, Barker raised his hand. “Say that name again.”
“Shameik Larsen—”
A head shake. “Before that.”
Evangeline’s Kitchen got a few degrees cooler. I said it for her. “Winston Bell.”
Barker’s head cocked, he abandoned his sandwich altogether. “Who?”
Fuse said, “You don’t know Winston Bell? But he—”
I pressed my heel into her sneaker, right at the toes, shutting her up. “He writes music articles. He was writing a piece on Paris.”
Barker got inquisitive, pulled a tiny pad with a tinier pencil from his shirt pocket. “Local reporter?”
The question burned. Barker knew nothing about Winston, so none of the police did. Carefully uncertain, I said, “I think he maybe worked for a magazine. MIXX or something.”
“I know the publication. Either of you ever speak to this fella?”
“I saw him at her memorial service. Fuse, you?” I kept pressure on her foot, felt her fighting the wince.
“He was around the studio sometimes.”
Barker jotted his notes. “Should be easy enough to run down. Anything else I need to know?”
“Nope,” Fuse said with a fist pump. “You really scared us straight, Detective Barker.”
Why, Lord? Why was she so awkwardly dramatic?
Barker’s eyes narrowed. “This was my nice warning, girls. I can see where you’re coming from. I’ve lost good friends. This ain’t your job, though. Next time your loyalty’s going to get you in trouble. We clear?”
“We are.” My hip nestled next to Fuse’s, I nudged her from the booth. “Thank you for lunch, we’re going to go home and think about what we’ve done.”
His suspicious stare didn’t drop, but nothing could be done about that. I shoved Fuse toward the door. We didn’t speak again until the yellow Evangeline’s Kitchen sign was well behind us.
Fuse said, “Winston told us the police questioned everyone she’d been close to. He said they’d questioned him. I didn’t imagine that.”
“You didn’t.”
“Why—”
“He played us, Fuse. I bet he played Paris too. More than played her.”
Fuse mumbled under her breath, accelerating on a straight stretch of road. Ahead, the light flicked yellow, but she didn’t slow down. When it went red, she still hadn’t noticed. “Fuse!”
She jammed both feet on the brake, bringing us to a screeching stop. Her chest heaved. “He was around her for months! Around after us, Kya. When we were all bitter and bickering, and she didn’t have anyone—”
“She had him. He used her up.”
Despair sank in, shaking me. Fuse went full tantrum, smacked her wheel over and over. I let her have her moment until the light changed, and the driver behind us leaned on their horn, reminding us our pain was limited to the confines of this compact hybrid. Fuse didn’t go right away, and that driver swerved around us. The world moved on.
“Go,” I said. “To the Savant.” I shot a text to Florian, told her to meet us.
Fuse put us in motion. “Why?”
My flash drive necklace with all the music Paris and I did together still hung beneath my shirt. I squeezed it. “Someone once said super teams need lairs. We’ve got work to do.”
By the evening my voice mail icon was lit with a red 1. I played it on speaker for Fuse and Florian.
“Kya, this is Detective Barker. Just checking on that name you gave me. Are you sure it was ‘Winston Bell’? I’ve found a music journalist named Winston Zaius, and another one named Anthony Bell. Both did some work for MIXX, even collaborated on a few cover stories, but nothing under the name you gave. Call me back.”
Not yet. We were hunting ghosts too.
The sky shifted from bright blue to the color of a bruise, and we left the balcony door open for the salt-seasoned breeze. Florian stretched her legs across the couch, her back on the armrest, and her laptop balanced on her thighs. After every short typing burst and dead end, she shook her head. “All his social media is janky. No selfies, or any other photos with him in it. Concert shots of crowds and random music magazine covers. He doesn’t have a ton of followers. Doesn’t really post. This is bad catfish stuff.” Her tone turned accusatory. “Nobody checked this guy out? If I’d known it was that easy to get next to her, I would’ve said I was from MIXX too.”
Fuse said, “He had credentials.”
“Obviously fake,” I said.
She recoiled.
“I’m not blaming you. Just saying he worked to fool you, and Paula, and anyone else who didn’t dig deep enough. It’s con man stuff, he played the long game.”
“Why?” Fuse said, almost a plea. “What was in it for him?”
The question hung between us for a while. Florian caressed the couch, awed, occasionally mouthing, She sat here. The girl was still a fan, still slightly disturbed. Fuse paced, up the hallway to the bedroom, back to us. Me, I stared beyond the balcony railing. Knowing I couldn’t guess what Winston wanted from Paris. What he wanted from us, though …
“He’d gotten onto the Dark Nation sites,” I said, hovering over Florian, motioning for her to do her thing. She accessed the sites that used to poll the Dark Nation’s feelings on Fuse and me. No pie chart now, only a sound widget for playing and downloading the song I’d given Florian. “Fuse, when did you last hear from him?”
She checked her text. Told us a date and time. As I suspected.
“It was an hour after that sound widget posted,” I said.
Fuse leaned over Florian, checked for herself. “He’s watching, and he’s worried.”
“Right. He was working so hard to get in tight with Paris, he would’ve weaseled onto the ParSec Nation sites—regular and Dark—long ago, for all the insider info he could get. When the police never came to him, he would’ve thought he was golden.”
Fuse resumed the pacing. Balcony to kitchen, hands dancing the whole time. “Oh, oh. The Dark Nation started messing with us. Posting about a murder team and forcing us to dig deeper. He got spooked and—”
“Decided to feed us this garbage about helping get our story out there.”
Fuse came to an abrupt stop, locked eyes with me. “We were his direct line. We told him every lead we had. He knew they’d be dead ends. As long as we weren’t questioning him, it meant he was still clear.”
Florian watched the back and forth like a tennis match. “You two are a little scary.”
“What?” we said simultaneously.
Florian focused on her computer.
Fuse, wary, said, “Should we call Detective Barker back? Tell him what we know?”
The detective had been correct about some things. We should’ve been thinking of summer, and the end of school, and the concert. We should’ve been allowed to be just high school kids.
The possibility of such a mundane existence was taken from us the minute we
saw our friend gone too soon. Covered in blood. We had a right to see this through. “He’s not wrong about us running into dead ends. So let’s try it his way for now. We tell Detective Barker what we know. But we won’t let him keep us in the dark either.”
Fuse said, “How?”
“That’s where Florian comes in.”
She perked up on the couch. “Yeah?”
“That Wi-Fi hack you’ve been running at the school. I’d like to hear more.”
We all have our strengths. Mine included savvy thoughts on social media platforms, hot outfits, some pretty mean dance moves, and pro-level snark. Kya’s strengths were her STEM-minded practicality and sort of emotionally detached zombielike demeanor (except when she’s really mad … watch out then) that allowed her to make sound decisions, with purpose. When she and Florian started in with the techspeak, and Kya began formulating, then explaining, her plan, I realized another of her strengths.
Evil genius.
The #MadScientist moniker I slapped her with may not have been too far off. That became clear over the next few days as we went through the motions of giving Detective Barker a crack at Winston Bell. First thing’s first, our return to the OSPD precinct for another chat with Barker.
He was wary when he greeted us, then had us follow him into an interrogation room for privacy. “Didn’t expect to see you two again so soon.”
Kya held up her phone. “I got your message.”
“You could’ve called.”
“We know,” Kya continued, “but we wanted to give you more information on the reporter we told you about. After our talk yesterday, we felt more comfortable doing it in person.”
I said, “And there’s nothing suspicious about that.”
Kya tensed beside me, and I could fully admit my weakness there. I was not built for covert operations.
Barker, more interested in possible leads, had his full attention on Kya, though. “What you got?”
“I wanted to point you to some of his social media.” She was, very obviously, having trouble getting to the info she wanted to share. She tapped her screen, tried opening several apps, then her web browser. Nothing worked.
Having the phone in airplane mode didn’t help, of course. Barker didn’t need to know that, though.
Kya said, “I can’t get a signal. Could I have the Wi-Fi password here?”
Barker didn’t think twice about it. “Sure.”
It was “c0p$R0ck.”
I laughed. Kya tensed again. Sorry.
She deactivated airplane mode, logged on to the station’s network. Kya supplied all of Winston’s useless social media and the phone number he’d sent his texts from. Maybe the detective would have better luck than we did. Who knew? That was never the point of the visit.
Barker escorted us from the station, and as we stood in the sunshine, Kya asked, “Will you bring him in?”
The detective said, “It might not go that way, Kya. We don’t know who he is, or if he was even in the state the night your friend died. Right now it’s just a conversation.”
Kya nodded. “Thank you.”
On our way back to the car, I asked, “Why’d you even go there with him? Does it matter?”
“Just confirming that even with his good intentions, we can’t count on him. So I feel less bad about what we’re doing.”
Florian waited in the backseat of my car, her laptop balanced on her knees. Kya said, “You got it?”
Florian tapped a key, and Detective Barker’s voice flitted through her weak speakers, a direct feed from his phone’s newly co-opted microphone to us. “—told you guys when you empty the coffee pot, make another batch!”
And we were off.
We mostly kept our promise to Barker. We attempted to focus on school and the upcoming memorial concert. We didn’t try to track down Winston ourselves, leaving it up to the detective and the OSPD. But our monitoring of the situation didn’t leave much to be encouraged about.
From what we could tell, Barker was working a lot of cases, old and new. Florian compiled the audio, and we were at the Savant every night listening for progress. Nothing. Winston hadn’t returned his calls, and he didn’t seem super stressed about it. That didn’t sit well. But we agreed to give patience a try. For a while anyway. Plus, I was plenty busy otherwise.
With the concert rapidly approaching, Shameik had planning meetings every day after school. Fuse hung around for me to finish but steered clear of Shameik. By then, I knew the details of what went down between them, so I got it.
Midweek, I was assigned the job of creating a looping, Paris-centric slideshow meant to run on the venue’s big screens between sets. Easy enough. Shameik said he wanted as many photos as possible. Recent, childhood, baby, whatever. Most of that I could handle on my own and with Fuse’s help, but for way back in the day, there was only one source.
On the Thursday before the concert, I met Fuse at her car and asked, “Do you mind if we skip the Savant tonight? I want to put the final touches on the slideshow, and I need to go by Miss Elsie’s and scan some baby photos.”
Fuse tapped her phone. “Fine by me. I’m letting Florian know she’s got the night off. I don’t think I could sit through another thrilling episode of the audio play I’ve come to think of as ‘Barker Farts’ anyway.”
The detective was rather gassy.
Fuse pulled up to the curb in front of Miss Elsie’s but kept her engine running. I said, “You should come in. You can help me pick the best photos.”
Her hands wrenched the steering wheel. “You think I should? I never met her grandma. Won’t it be weird?”
“You’re helping people remember her fondly. It will be fine.”
She killed the engine and joined me on the porch. Miss Elsie was dressed in actual clothes today. Jeans and a flower-print blouse, with a good wig. That made me happier than I’d been expecting.
“Hey, sweetie!” She kissed my cheek. “Who’s your friend?”
I said, “This is Fatima Fallon. She knew Paris too.”
“How are you, ma’am?” Fuse shook Miss Elsie’s hand.
“Is it still okay for me to take a look at your photo albums?” I asked.
Miss Elsie wrung her hands, nervous. “You’re going to be careful? Those photos are all I have.”
I raised my phone. “No worries. I’m basically taking pictures of the pictures. I won’t even have to touch them.”
She visibly relaxed and pointed us to a hutch beneath one of her end tables. “They’re all right there. I’ll make y’all some sweet tea while you look.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Fuse said, while I freed three separate albums as thick as dictionaries at the public library.
We went to work flipping pages, looking for the best shots. I needed maybe eight to ten solid pics, but we didn’t move with urgency. We marveled at not just pictures of Paris in her infancy, but her mother when she was young. A late ’90s teen with finger waves in her hair, big hoop earrings with her name—“Tracy”—suspended in the center. Designer overalls, with one strap loose.
“They looked alike,” Fuse said, her voice airy. Maybe a little awed.
She wasn’t wrong. Teen Paris could’ve impersonated Teen Tracy if she’d ever hopped in a time machine and went back to the prior century. I always thought Tracy Secord looked so fun and healthy in those photos, much different than the frail woman shuffling through my, admittedly vague, memories.
We switched albums, immediately found Paris’s baby pictures. She couldn’t have been more than two months old when someone decided a sailor outfit, hat and all, was the move for picture day. Her raised cheeks and toothless grin said she didn’t know enough to mind.
I aimed my phone and snapped the photo to my cloud account. “That one is definitely making the cut.”
We found more, an equal mix of sweet, goofy, and outright hilarious. Maybe enough to call it a night. Then I flipped to a new page, prominently featuring a photo of Tracy—emaciated-looking now, her ha
ir unkempt, the signs of her long, arduous sickness just starting to show—holding an eight- or nine-month-old Paris on the porch of this very house. I was about to turn the page again, when Fuse grabbed my wrist.
“I’ve seen that shirt before.” Her voice shook.
“What shirt?” There were five smaller photos on the page, and I didn’t understand the gravity of what Fuse was saying.
Fuse snatched the whole album up and left her seat for the kitchen. “Miss Elsie!”
I chased.
Miss Elsie said, “Tea’s just about done, sweetie.”
“I had a question, actually. Do you know anything about this photo?” The heavy album clapped thunder when it fell on the kitchen table.
Miss Elise paced over, examined the picture, eyes narrowed in confusion. “Yes, I took that one myself.”
“Do you know what that shirt is about? Where it came from?”
At that, Miss Elsie rolled her eyes, and I mistakenly thought Fuse had offended her. But no. It wasn’t Fuse. Not even close. “I do,” she said. “That is what a no-good deadbeat thinks passes for support. Like a baby can eat a T-shirt.”
Huh?
Miss Elsie said, “Paris’s daddy was good for that nonsense. Sending shirts and expensive baby shoes and records to Tracy. Never money. Then when Tracy passed, it wasn’t even that.”
Miss Elsie shrank, and I was a little mad at Fuse for sapping her energy. But when I glared at her, Fuse was shrinking too. “I’m sorry, Miss Elsie,” Fuse said, then, to me, “I need to go to the car.”
She walked out. Really, it was more like a jog. Miss Elsie said, “Is that child all right?”
“Sure,” I lied, because I honestly didn’t know. “I’m sorry to run like this, but, the slideshow.”
Miss Elsie’s “these kids today” look was unmistakable, but she didn’t seem offended. “Just come back soon because I can’t drink all this tea by myself. It’ll mess with my sugar.”
Before I left, I put away the albums, still trying to figure why a T-shirt in a photo had Fuse acting so strange. It was just a concert souvenir.
The Fugees. Europe. 1997.
