by Meli Raine
“My God!” I say, my stomach clenching. Bile rises up and pushes at the base of my throat. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I warn her, and then I open the car door and vomit out whatever is in my stomach, which isn’t much. The acrid taste burns through my throat, my tongue, my mouth, my belly. It helps me to feel. I’m having a hard time feeling anything.
When you feel everything at once, you also feel nothing specific.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We walk back into the house to the smell of burning coffee.
“Oh shit,” Marissa hisses, as she sprints into the kitchen and turns off the machine. “We completely forgot about the coffee!” she sputters.
I sigh. My stomach feels like shattered glass is just rolling around in there. I walk into the kitchen, find the junk drawer, rumble around and pull out a cough drop. I slip it in my mouth and hope I can get rid of the nasty taste from earlier.
She looks around the house. Her eyes are so different from mine. This is where I live. Where I’ve lived my entire life. Or most of it, at least. I can’t remember a time before I lived in this house. But Marissa has a cold, calculating look in her eyes.
“According to the people at the town hall,” she explains, restarting the process of making coffee, “we own all of the belongings in the house. Jeff died without a will...”
“Oh, great,” I mutter.
“...but he doesn’t have parents, he doesn’t have siblings. And so, because he died without a will, and we’re his stepdaughters, and because our mom lived in the house...”
“And, and, and,” I say.
“Right.”
“So we’re in charge of getting rid of all his junk, basically.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“Yep.”
“And you’re thinking, let’s get this over with.”
She nods.
I walk upstairs to my bedroom and look around for a notebook and a pen. I finally find both, and stomp back downstairs. The coffee’s almost done, and this time we’ll definitely drink it. We’re going to need it. The cough drop tastes like menthol and honey. It’s not soothing.
Marissa looks at me. “You okay?”
“I’m holding up.”
“You hear from Chase?”
“How am I supposed to hear from Chase? I don’t have a phone. Jeff always took it.”
We look at each other, and then both wordlessly walk into Jeff’s bedroom.
I open the top drawer of his dresser. It’s filled with underwear, socks and... yup, all his spare credit cards and my phone.
Jeff never let me use his phone. He kept a cheap old flip phone that he’d give to me when I went places. It didn’t occur to me until fairly recently that the phone wasn’t given to me so that I could communicate with him. It was given to me so that he could track me down whenever he wanted. He was monitoring me. I was a valuable piece of meat, wasn’t I?
The fact that we’re alone in this house suddenly makes me feel uncomfortable. “Do you think Morty could come and stay with us for a couple days?” I ask Marissa.
She looks up at me, puzzled. “Why?”
“Well,” I stretch my hand around the room. “We’re alone, we’re in the middle of nowhere, a Mexican drug lord expects me to be served to him on a platter...”
Her face goes sour. “When you put it that way, maybe we do need Morty. And an entire gang of men to protect us.”
“Chase,” I whisper.
Where is he?
She pours us both our cups of coffee, and then looks in the fridge for milk. She’ll find a little bit, I’m sure. Jeff always had it in his cereal in the morning.
A ripple of sadness fills my chest. He may have been an asshole, and he may have been ready to sell me into sexual slavery, but he was still my stepfather. He was still a fellow human being. No one deserves to be killed like that.
Then again, he was ready to give my virginity away like it was something you sold on eBay. Like an old stack of Pokemon cards or a GameCube.
Asshole.
We sit at the dining table and drink our coffee, both of us quiet. Marissa’s tapping on her phone, texting with Morty. “He just got home,” she says, “and he has to do a job tonight. Two, actually. But he says he can try to come out here tomorrow again.”
I take a sip and look out the window. It’s nothing but dirt out there. “I feel bad for him, having to do all that driving,” I say.
“He doesn’t mind.” A small smile plays at her lips. “I think he’s shocked that I’m letting him see part of my life.”
“You’re that closed off?”
She nods. “I’m that closed off.”
Chase. His name won’t stop echoing in my mind. We finish our coffee and Marissa takes the notebook and pen from the table in front of me.
“Let’s start with a basic list. I’m lucky if I have two days here, Allie. And I want to do as much as I can.” She rattles off a bunch of technical details from her day at the courthouse. And after the fifth or sixth sentence it’s like a word jumble. She was always really good at being organized, and I was always really lousy at it.
“Just tell me what to do,” I say finally, reaching for her hand.
She squeezes mine. “Okay, let’s do your room last. But let’s do Jeff’s bedroom, the spare bedroom, and see what we find in the closets.”
We divvy up the work. We go into Jeff’s room. I’m supposed to take empty boxes that I found in the storage room and start putting his belongings in them.
“This seems kind of sudden, doesn’t it, Marissa? The guy died just last night.”
“I know, but there was one other call that I made while we were in town.”
“What’s that?” I ask as I mindlessly put his underwear and socks into a box.
“The landlord.” She grits her teeth and says, angrily, “We have eleven days before he evicts us.”
“Eleven days?”
“Look at the calendar.”
I do. “Shit. End of the month in eleven days.”
“Right,” she says. “And I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I have enough money to cover rent for another month at this place.”
I’m speechless. The full impact of everything that’s happened in twenty-four hours hits me. This home isn’t mine anymore. Jeff is completely gone. He’s left a business, he’s left a house, he’s left all these questions and he’s left me completely unmoored. I sink onto the bed.
“Oh, my God. Marissa, we really do have to do all of this, don’t we?”
She frowns. “Yeah. At least the house isn’t that big. It never was. They always made you and me share a room.”
I laugh at the thought. “Yeah, you hated that. You hated having your little sister getting into your stuff.”
She finishes clearing out his top drawer and moves on to the next one, content to talk to me while she does the work.
Marissa opens the bottom drawer of Jeff’s four-drawer dresser, and pauses. “Allie, you’ve gotta take a look at this.”
I stand up and walk over. “What?”
“Look.” She points.
My ballerina music box. “That fucker!” I scream. The feeling takes me over like a fireball of emotion. “God damn it!” I pick up a tray that he used to pour his change and receipts out of his pocket every night, and fling it across the room. It clatters agains the wall and then falls behind the headboard.
Marissa doesn’t say a word. She’s not afraid of me. I’m not upsetting her. In fact, she gets it.
“He stole everything! Didn’t he, Marissa? First he took Mom away, and then he took my money away, and it turns out he was trying to take my virginity and my entire life away! Worst of all, after Mom was gone he took you away!”
“He didn’t take me away, Allie. I stayed away.”
“But he kept you from me. He kept me from you. He was the center of everything evil in my life.”
She patiently bends down, takes my music box out of his dresser drawer, and hands it t
o me. “Here. This is yours. It’s back where it really should belong.”
“Thanks,” I say with a snort. It’s heavy when she hands it to me. I set it down on the bed next to me.
“Let’s keep moving,” she sighs.
“Yeah.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An hour later, almost everything of Jeff’s is out of the room. We’re not moving any furniture, and frankly I don’t think we really know what we’re doing. It just feels better to do something than to do nothing. I’m also trying to just kill time and not think about Chase.
Marissa looks at her phone, and I bite back the words. I want to ask her, Did Chase call? Did Chase call? Did Chase call? I could ask it a thousand times, if I didn’t think it would be rude. She looks at me. “No messages, no texts, nothing from Chase,” she says, reading my mind.
I go over to the coffee maker and pour myself yet another cup. “Thanks,” I whisper, fighting back tears.
We drink our liquid energy and go back to work, stripping the bed.
“What are we going to do with all this stuff, Marissa?”
“I don’t know. Between Jeff’s car and, if Morty comes out with his car, we can at least take some of it back to LA.”
“Not the furniture, though.”
“Maybe I could call some company and get a fair price for it.”
“How does all this work? Who gets the money?”
Her eyes seem tired when she looks at me, and she says, “I have to talk to people at the town hall about that.” She looks so much older than twenty-one. Then again, I’m eighteen and I feel like forty lately.
As we strip Jeff’s bed, the music box tumbles to the ground. I’m not worried about it breaking. It’s not like anything worse can happen to it. I already broke the music player on purpose, so I could hide it in the tampon machine back at the bar. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was tucking tens and fives into the little box, and hiding it in the bathroom. That was just, what, a week or two ago? Not long. And yet forever.
“Allie.”
Something about the way Marissa says my name makes me come to a complete halt. I turn to her slowly, a creepy feeling like someone’s watching us covering my body.
“What?” I ask softly.
“You need to look at this.” She’s pointing at the music box.
“You said that just a couple minutes ago, Marissa.”
“Yeah. I meant it then, and I mean it now, too,” she says.
I look, and I want to scream. There’s a plastic baggie. A bunch of them, filled with little rocks and big rocks. They’re kind of an off-white color. I don’t know what they are, but they look like drugs to me. When the music box fell, it cracked. There was some kind of hidden panel on the side this entire time. Not a special compartment. It looks like someone taped the little bags to the music box and then glued an extra panel on the outside.
“That’s some kind of...”
“That’s meth,” she says firmly.
“You know what meth is?”
“I’ve watched Breaking Bad.”
“Oh.” I haven’t, so I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“That’s a lot of money in meth,” she says slowly. Neither one of us wants to bend down and touch it.
“What do we do?”
“We leave it alone and we call the police,” she says.
“The police?”
“You said Jeff was a drug dealer. Now we have proof.”
Detective Knowles’ words ring through my head. All the ways that he was accusing me of killing Jeff. Maybe if we bring him here and show him the drugs, he’ll understand that I had nothing to do with it. Then again, this was my house, too. Maybe he’ll think I was part of it.
“I’m not sure we can call the police yet, Marissa.”
She looks at me like I have three heads. “Of course we call the police. It’s not like we can leave thousands and thousands of dollars worth of drugs sitting around inside a kid’s jewelry box!”
She’s making sense.
“Okay.” She scratches her head and then runs a frantic hand through her hair.
“Maybe we should wait to call the police until we’ve checked everything,” I say.
Her eyes immediately go to the closet door. “We emptied that out, right?” she says.
“We pulled the boxes and the bags out, but we didn’t check them.”
She gives me a withering look.
“Okay,” I sigh. “Let’s go check them.”
We pulled them out into the living room, and now we spread everything out onto the couch. I find an electric toothbrush. A big one. The kind that has a stand that charges the toothbrush. It’s in a box. It’s untaped.
“Jeff didn’t have an electric toothbrush,” I mutter under my breath, narrowing my eyes. There’s only one bathroom in the entire house, so when you live with someone, you get to know their habits.
I open the box. So far, just the base and the toothbrush. It’s never been used. This is getting weirder.
On a hunch, I take the base and smash it, hard, with a hammer from the toolbox we found in the garage. The plastic cracks into slivers that could cut my wrists if I’m not careful.
What I see inside chills me.
“Oh, my God. Marissa!” I shout.
“What?”
“You need to come look at this.”
She runs over.
I’m pulling fistfuls of wrapped hundred-dollar bills out of the cracked plastic base.
“Oh, my God,” she says. She reaches over and pulls out one of the rolls. “There’s got to be twenty hundreds here.”
She looks at me.
I look at her.
“We’re going to need another pot of coffee,” she says, and stomps off to make one. “And now you’ve got me wondering again about that Big Wheel in the garage.”
An hour later I’ve done as much as I can with Jeff’s room. I’ve found nothing else. But Marissa’s hit the jackpot in the garage.
I’m pacing in the living room while Marissa stands over the dining table. Spread out in front of her are three large plastic baggies, gallon sized, filled with rocks of varying size and a total of what we guess is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. There are about eight or nine small packets of powder and a few baggies of what even I know is pot. Everything else is a mystery.
But the biggest haul of all: two giant, fifty-pound bags of water softener pellets.
We don’t have a water softener in this house.
Jeff was storing one hundred pounds of crystal meth in our garage. One hundred pounds. Hidden in plain sight.
“He did all of this,” I whisper. “He did all of this right under my eyes. And I never saw it.”
“He was good at hiding,” Marissa says, just staring dumbly at the pile of so much crime on the dining table. “I found it tucked away inside a bunch of our kid toys in the garage. He heated the plastic, pried it open, shoved stuff in there and resealed the plastic. Unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, you’d never know where to look.”
“Yeah, but you would think that I would have figured out some of it.”
She shakes her head. “People can hide what they really want to hide, in really desperate ways.”
“So you think he hid all of this because...”
“Because he’s a goddamn giant drug dealer, Allie!” Marissa says, frustration filling her voice. “And because you were his tool.”
“His tool?”
“Yeah, you were his ticket out of whatever debt he was in, and he was just going to sell you off.”
“Why didn’t the police find all this when they searched?” I ask. My stomach is turning into a bubbling cauldron of toil, trouble, and horror.
She shakes her head. “If we hadn’t cracked open that panel on the music box, we’d have never guessed. It wasn’t a hidden compartment. He used our little kid toys to hide the drugs and money.”
“Oh, God,” I moan.
>
“Our little kid toys...all of these symbols of innocence. He turned them into tools to manipulate,” she spits out.
Like me.
“I—I’ve got to go outside. I need air. This is too much,” I say, feeling the bile rise in my throat.
“You know what?” She goes into the kitchen, grabs a step stool, and climbs up, reaching for an old metal canister that’s been on top of the cupboards forever.
“What are you doing?” I ask her.
“There it is,” she says, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A three-year-old pack of cigarettes,” she mumbles. She looks inside. “Damn! Only one left.” Marissa looks wildly around the house. “I need more than this. I need a carton to get through this mess.”
“Ooh, that’s going to taste nasty!” I’m about to throw up for real. I fight it, though. Have to keep my wits.
She looks at me. “Right now, I don’t care. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since I lived here. But, I’m going outside.” She looks at the single cigarette, then the fridge. “You know what? Let me run into town. I’ll gas up, get cigs, and some snacks to much on. Energy drinks. It’s going to be a long night.”
I walk over to where we’ve stashed Jeff’s money and pluck a couple twenties off the stack. “Here. It’s on Jeff.”
Marissa snorts. “Right. It’s the least he can do.” She storms through the front door, the screen door banging twice, like a clap, as I stare at Jeff’s secret life, spread out before me. When we do call the police, this is just going to be an even bigger mess.
I hear Jeff’s car start up and the rumble of tires on the dirt road.
I look at the kitchen and realize it’s eleven forty-five at night, and we haven’t eaten anything for a half a day. I look in the fridge. There’s eggs and cheese, and a couple other things I can put together to at least fill our stomachs. I start cooking.
The front door goes clap clap again. Two sharp knocks of the screen door, and then silence.
“Hey! What’d you forget?” I call out. “We could use some more food, so I’m glad you came back.”
I pour the oil into the sauté pan, and wait until it bubbles up. The screen door opens again, and then the front door opens. I hear Marissa come up behind me, and then I holler back, “Hey, do you want cheese in your...”
