If I Die Tonight

by A L Gaylin

  Jackie slipped her own phone out of her pocket. Texted Hello to Wade’s number. Sent it.

  The phone in Wade’s pocket made a soft dinging sound.

  Wade sat up. Slipped his phone out of his pocket. Looked at the screen. ‘Mom?’

  A lighter, thinner phone with a different text tone. ‘It was a different phone,’ she whispered.

  Wade looked at her, his face red and tear-streaked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The other day. In the kitchen. Your phone. It had an explosion for a text tone.’

  His eyes went big. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said. But he did. It was obvious. When it came to lying, teenagers were just children, and that’s what Wade was. A child, lying. Trying to protect a burner phone. Secret texts from some girl who clearly didn’t want to be seen with him.

  ‘You had a different phone,’ she whispered. ‘You talked to “T” on it. You wanted to keep it private.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does “T” have a boyfriend? Is that why?’

  ‘No. No, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m going to get them back in here,’ Jackie said. ‘You can tell the truth.’

  Wade stared at her, his face changing, fear sparking in his eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘Just tell them about the burner phone. Tell them it was a girl. Tell them this is all about a girl and they’ll let you go.’

  ‘I wasn’t with a girl.’

  Jackie moved toward him. ‘Wade, please.’

  She put her hand on his shoulder. He swatted her away. ‘I mean it. You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not going to tell them that. I won’t.’

  ‘Wade, please. Wherever you were, it’s an alibi. Protecting some girl from her boyfriend is not worth going to jail for.’

  There was another knock on the door. Jackie and Wade froze, staring into each other’s eyes.

  ‘You can come in,’ Wade said.

  Jackie held her breath.

  Kendall Wind and Alex Wacksman walked into the room, watching both of them carefully as they took their seats at the table.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Wind said it to Wade.

  He was composed now, sitting up straight in his chair, face wiped free of tears. ‘I want to leave,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I want to go home now.’ He looked at Wind. ‘It was just an old phone I found in the school parking lot. I told Connor to throw it out because I was scared someone would think I stole it.’

  ‘Where were you at three in the morning of October twentieth?’

  ‘I was walking in the rain.’ His voice was as dry as sand. ‘I was alone.’

  Wade stood up. So did Jackie, though she was yearning to speak, the words pressing up inside her. It was a girl. He was with a girl that night. But her words were worth nothing, and, really, neither were his.

  The only words that mattered were the words of that girl.

  ‘Don’t you want to help out, son?’ Wacksman was saying. ‘I mean, Liam Miller was one of your classmates. I’m sure you want to help us find out who murdered him?’

  ‘I told you everything I know.’

  Wacksman and Wind looked at each other. ‘All right,’ Wind said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  Wade moved toward the door, and Jackie followed. I’m going to find that girl, she thought.

  Twenty-three

  The following are selected comments from the Reddit subgroup True Crime Discussion, under a post begun on October 22, titled: ‘Upstate New York Teen Dies from Injuries in Aimee En Hit-and-Run.’

  Magpie22

  Just devastating that Liam Miller died. My niece knows him from church camp and says he was one of the nicest people she ever met. At least he died a hero.

  Ted4041

  Okay, guys. I said this on yesterday’s thread. No disrespect, but this whole story is super-hinky to me. I’m a New Yorker, and I’ve been to Havenkill. No way is it a place where carjackings routinely – or ever – happen. This story feels like one of those ‘shaggy-haired stranger’ tales (i.e. Diane Downs, Susan Smith). Anybody know much about Aimee En?

  Savannahgirl

  I thought the same thing so I did some research. Aimee En was busted for cocaine possession in 1997. She’s also got a couple DUIs under her belt, plus driving with a suspended license. Here’s a link to an archived LA Times article about the cocaine bust: Dead Enz Lead Singer Aimee En Arrested; Pop Star Faces up to Seven Years

  Marciamarciamarcia

  Looks like she copped a plea. Fine and rehab. Check out this People mag story from 2004: (link to article) Where Are They Now? : Aimee En’s Sweet, Sober Life

  Ted4041

  Can anybody find anything written about her in the past decade? I can’t …

  MissMystery

  Am I the only one who feels sorry for Aimee En? Looks like she was trying to make a comeback, she finally gets a gig, and then this happens. She is sober, so wasn’t driving drunk. If she did hit that boy, what was he doing out so late to begin with? It was probably very dark, with few streetlights. Those who don’t wear reflective clothing take their lives into their hands.

  Savannahgirl

  I get what you’re saying but let’s not shame the deceased for not wearing reflective clothing.

  Ted4041

  Did you miss the part about her three past DUIs? Sober people fall off the wagon and get into car accidents/hit-and-runs.

  MissMystery

  She could be telling the truth, tho. I saw an FBI profiler on ID once, and he was saying that a lot of times, the weirdest stories are the ones that turn out to be true. Keep in mind, Diane Downs’s ‘shaggy-haired stranger’ story was actually very plausible!

  MissMystery

  Lookee here! I was right! (Link to AP story) Breaking News: Footage from Hit-and-Run Teen’s Phone Exonerates Aimee En

  Savannahgirl

  Whoa sorry @MissMystery!

  MissMystery

  Apology accepted @Savannahgirl ☺

  Ted4041

  Just watched the footage. Anybody else feel like Liam Miller knew the carjacker? Not sure why, but there was something about the way he called out to him that felt familiar.

  Savannahgirl

  Could be a fellow athlete. The way he pushed Aimee En to the ground looked a little like a football move.

  MissMystery

  Wondering if they’ve done a clean sweep of that street corner. She could have drawn blood during that struggle outside the car. Anybody else see him rub his arm after tangling with her?

  Savannahgirl

  Who is the attacker???? I’ve been following this case from the beginning, and I’m wondering about his motivation. I’m also wondering why nobody else came to help. Looks like there were houses around. You mean to tell me not one person even called 911?

  Magpie22

  Bystander effect.

  Ted4041

  Just saw on Twitter that they were questioning a local kid.

  Magpie22

  I saw that too. No name released yet. He’s a minor, so they’re keeping things quiet until an arrest is made, but I hear through the grapevine that he’s a Satanist. A known animal torturer.

  ConnorR

  HE’S NOT A SATANIST!!!

  Magpie22

  Whoa, dude, watch the caps.

  MissMystery

  @ConnorR do you know the suspect?

  Magpie22

  Are you the suspect?

  Ted4041

  *crickets*

  Magpie22

  Methinks we’ve been invaded by troll. A very young one. Anyway … more info. Suspect was in the same class as Liam. Rumor has it he was selling pills. And Liam was threatening to turn him in.

  Ted4041

  A drug-dealing animal torturer? Sounds like a winner.

  Magpie22

  Yep.

  Savannahgirl

  Wow. The weirdest things happen in small towns.

 
From the Facebook page of the Havenkill Police Department. Posted on October 23 at 11:00 am.

  URGENT REQUEST

  A carjacking/hit-and-run took place on Shale Street near Orchard at approximately 3:00 am on Saturday, October 20. The video posted below was taken from the phone of the victim, a 17-year-old white male. Anyone with any FACTUAL, SERIOUS AND PERTINENT information is encouraged to call the tip line, listed below.

  45K views; 1.5K shares

  Twenty-four

  ‘Happy kid, huh?’ said Kendall Wind.

  Pearl nodded.

  The two of them were in the evidence room, in front of a glowing laptop, Wind showing Pearl the content of Liam Miller’s cell phone at Pearl’s request. Already, Pearl had looked at some of the texts and scrolled through his pics, but what had really interested her was his collection of videos. Pearl maybe had four videos on her phone, all of them dirty and better off deleted. Liam’s phone, on the other hand, held close to a hundred of them, arranged into folders that he’d named and alphabetized. It struck her as unusually organized for anyone, let alone a teenage boy, and it made her think about the type of person he might have grown up to be, had he been allowed to grow up. There was a folder called Tamara, consisting mostly of sappy, romantic messages from his girlfriend, as well as older, smaller folders with other girls’ names, still more videos named for proms, vacations, stays in summer camps. Such a short life, yet so painstakingly archived.

  Most of the larger folders contained downloads – movies, music videos, viral stuff, grouped and placed in folders according to artist or genre. Pearl had asked which folder Liam’s final video had been in. Unlike all the others, this one had initials for a name: ‘SL.’ What could that stand for? Wind had opened it for her – a file of just three videos. They were looking at the oldest, taken the previous March. At the start of it, Liam’s face filled the screen, laughter overtaking him, his smile huge and open, eyes scrunched into crescents. Happy. Hence Wind’s comment.

  ‘Any sound?’ Pearl said.

  ‘No,’ Wind said. ‘But there’s quite a punchline.’

  As Liam continued to laugh silently, the camera panned up to reveal a night sky, then panned back down, the person behind it taking shaky steps back, until Liam’s surroundings were revealed. He was in the town graveyard, leaning against a tombstone.

  ‘Kind of chilling, isn’t it?’ Wind said. ‘Considering what happened to him?’

  Pearl nodded, but she was more interested in the beer bottle in Liam’s hand. ‘Cemetery’s closed at night,’ she said. ‘It’s illegal for him to be there.’

  Wind shrugged. ‘He’s a teenage boy,’ she said. ‘Was. Nobody’s saying he was a saint.’

  ‘Actually …’ Pearl started, then stopped. She couldn’t go down this road, not with one of her superiors – a state detective who was doing her a favor by letting her see this footage. But she couldn’t help but think it. Everybody is saying he was a saint. At least three GoFundMe’s had been started in Liam Miller’s name since his death, one of them to raise money to build a statue of him. People all over social media were eulogizing Liam, calling him brave and golden-hearted and wise beyond his years. Not to mention the shrine. An actual shrine at the spot where Liam was killed, and now it spanned half a block. It was affecting traffic. Yet somehow, this video was more touching than any of that – Liam laughing his ass off on someone’s grandpa’s grave, high as a kite, breaking rules. Human.

  Liam smashed the bottle against the tombstone, breaking it into a thousand shards. Pearl jumped back. Okay. That wasn’t quite so touching.

  ‘I heard yesterday morning wasn’t your first school assembly,’ Wind said.

  ‘Huh?’ Pearl closed the video and let the cursor hover over the next one, taken in August.

  ‘You’ve had more contact with the high-school kids than just that morning.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ Pearl said. ‘Yeah, I did safety assemblies at the middle and high school last May.’

  ‘Did you have any contact with Wade Reed during those assemblies?’

  Pearl’s hand stilled on the mouse. ‘I don’t think he asked any questions,’ she said. ‘Or if he did, I don’t remember him.’

  ‘Hmmm … Okay.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Not that big a deal. Just looking for a baseline.’

  Pearl looked at her.

  ‘He seemed a little out of it when we were questioning him back at the school,’ she said. ‘I’m wondering if that’s a recent thing or if he’s been at it for a while.’

  ‘Out of it?’

  ‘Drugged up. A little belligerent. Come on. Even the guidance counselor was looking at his pupils. You didn’t notice?’

  ‘No,’ Pearl said. ‘I thought he just seemed scared.’

  ‘That’s helpful.’

  Pearl wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not.

  ‘I mean it,’ Wind said. ‘Ever since I found out Amy was telling the truth, I’ve lost all faith in my own powers of perception.’

  ‘Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve gone back and forth on Amy myself,’ Pearl said. ‘I think anybody would. She doesn’t come across as the world’s most reliable narrator.’

  Wind smiled, tapped her fingernail against the next video. ‘This one has sound,’ she said, and opened it, the laptop filling with a tanned Liam in his bathing suit, bouncing on a diving board against a twilit, pink-spiked sky. ‘Watch me!’ he said. ‘Watch.’

  And who could help but watch as this shining boy jumped off the board, touching his fingers to his toes and then arching into a perfect dive, straight as a spear, the blue water accepting him without so much as a splash?

  ‘Awesome,’ said the voice behind the camera. And then Liam emerged from the water, thumbs first and then wrists and arms and then finally, the reveal of his smiling face, spitting water at the camera. Pearl took note of the pool’s pink Mexican tiles and male laughter in the background and how Liam’s blue eyes matched the blue of the chlorinated water. ‘Man,’ she whispered. Pearl knew those voices. She knew that pool. She knew exactly what was going to happen next.

  ‘Cops!’

  ‘Pool-hopping night,’ Pearl said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Ed Tally and I went to that house on a call from one of the neighbors. The owners were out of town, and those boys broke in and used the pool. Liam and three of his friends. Two of them ran away.’ She turned to Wind. ‘Bobby Udel’s cousin Ryan Grant was the one taking the video.’

  Wind paused the video. ‘Bobby never told me that.’

  Pearl looked at her, taking note of the way she’d said his first name, the familiarity of her tone. ‘Maybe Bobby never knew about it,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t on duty that night, and I doubt it’s something Ryan would want to brag about, especially to his cop cousin.’

  ‘We spoke to Ryan yesterday.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘And broken. He really wanted to help.’

  ‘And did he?’

  She breathed in sharply. ‘Liam texted him two hours before the incident. Ryan was asleep. He was taking the SATs the following day, so he’d gone to bed early. He said he didn’t even see the text until after the SATs. He found out what had happened to Liam, then he saw it.’

  ‘Did he show it to you?’

  Wind nodded.

  ‘What did it say?

  ‘S’up.’

  Pearl gave her a sad smile. ‘Too bad we can’t plan the last things we say to our friends.’

  ‘Yep.’ Wind hit play. On screen, Liam’s smile dropped away. His eyes focused on something beyond the camera and went wide with terror. ‘He was looking at me at that point,’ Pearl said. ‘Oh my gosh,’ said Liam. And then the screen went black.

  ‘Did you arrest those boys?’

  ‘No. Just gave them a talking-to.’ Pearl’s gaze returned to the laptop screen. ‘What do you think this folder is about? Just three videos in it. “SL.” What do you think that means?’
r />   Wind shrugged. ‘Summer Lovin’?’

  ‘He’s breaking the law in two of the three.’

  ‘And he’s a hero in the third,’ Wind said. ‘Maybe this is his adventure folder.’

  Pearl nodded. ‘That makes sense,’ she said. Though a feeling nagged at her, like a puzzle missing one piece.

  ‘Funny. I bet Liam thought he’d add hundreds of videos to that file.’ Wind closed out of the file and shut down the laptop. ‘Actually, that isn’t funny at all.’

  There was a knock on the door, and Wind opened it to her partner as Pearl kept staring at the dark screen, thinking. ‘Wade Reed’s mother is here,’ Wacksman said. ‘She’s brought a lawyer.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Pearl turned around and followed them both out of the room, locking the door behind her.

  She had to pass the conference room on her way out, and as she did, she cast a quick glance through the open door at Wade Reed looking up at his mother, dark eyes big with hope. ‘Mom. I’m so glad you’re here.’

  Maybe this terrified kid really had pushed Amy to the ground, stolen her car in the middle of the night and run over one of his classmates with it. Maybe the detectives knew something Pearl didn’t know about Wade, something that justified carting him in here at the start of a school day and subjecting him to this. But right now, Pearl wished she’d never said his name out loud to Bobby Udel. And when she walked out the side door and into the parking lot and saw the small cluster of curiosity seekers that had formed in front of the station aiming phones at the door, some clutching bulky cameras, she wished she could will Wade and his mother somewhere far away from this town.

  Her next shift was a patrol – the usually peaceful area between the park and the schools. As she slipped into a cruiser, Pearl’s mind returned to that folder. What does SL mean? Why did he group those three videos together? There were plenty of other folders with outdoor activities in them. Why did he open this one to film a carjacking? Pearl sighed. For all she knew, SL did stand for Summer Lovin’ and he’d randomly opened it in his haste to save the day. But she couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more to it than that. When a folder contains the last video of someone’s life, it should also hold answers.

  By the time Jackie and Wade left the police station, it was late morning, close to lunchtime. Jackie offered again to let him take the rest of the day off, figuring he might jump at the chance to avoid his classmates and hole up in his room. But Wade insisted on going back to school. ‘I’m going to flunk out if I keep missing classes,’ he said.