Unraveling

by Elizabeth Norris

  “San Diego PD found his body a couple hours ago in one of the canyons behind Park Village.”

  13:22:43:57

  His body.

  San Diego PD found his body.

  He’s dead. My dad is dead.

  As I’m trying to process that, I’m struck with the most ridiculous thought.

  We’ve done the same thing for Jared’s birthday every year. He invites his friends over, and Struz and my dad play baseball or football with them, and then my dad barbecues ribs, chicken, and hot dogs.

  Next month when I have fourteen teenage boys in our house, who will grill the food?

  And then I feel absurd because who cares about that? My dad is dead. I’m never going to come home to find our garage door wide open again. I’m never going to wake up to a phone call at two a.m. from him, apologizing for missing dinner and asking if he should bring home ice cream to make up for it. I’m never going to wake up for school and find him passed out in his work clothes at the desk in his study.

  The weight of that knowledge sucks all the air out of my body, and I reach out until Struz catches my hand and steadies me. I bend slightly at the waist, leaning forward in some instinctive attempt to protect my organs from physical pain even though it won’t help.

  My dad is dead.

  13:22:43:56

  “J-baby.”

  “J, it’s going to be okay.”

  Struz is talking to me. I force myself to gulp down as much air as I can and straighten up. But something is ripping me apart from the inside out, because this isn’t right. This isn’t supposed to be happening.

  It has to be some awful nightmare and in a minute I’ll wake up and go tell my dad about it and he’ll laugh because he’s going to die an old man in his sleep long after Jared and I have moved out of the house and gotten families of our own. Because the job is never going to claim him—not like that.

  San Diego PD found his body....

  “We’ll figure it out,” Struz says, his hand on my back.

  I pull away, thinking suddenly of the way my dad died. The corners of my vision are blackening. I feel a little like I might pass out. Someone killed him. “Do you know who did it?”

  “Not yet, but we will,” Struz says. I see the determination in his eyes, and I want to believe him. He won’t just sit on this. Neither will the other agents in my dad’s squad. Even if it goes cold it’ll be the case that sits on Struz’s desk, the one he looks at every night before he goes to bed until he figures it out or until he dies. Whichever comes first.

  But that doesn’t make the weight that’s pressing down on my chest let up. “Maybe it’s a mistake,” I say, even though I know it’s not. “What lead was he chasing up? What the hell was he doing in the canyons behind Park Village?”

  It really doesn’t make much sense. Cops patrol the canyons behind Park Village because it’s this crazy huge housing development and kids always hang out there and get drunk or smoke weed. The only time my dad ever went out there was when I was a sophomore and this kid a year ahead of me threatened to bring a gun to school and didn’t show up for homeroom the next day. The teachers locked us down and called the police. Alex’s mom heard about it and called my dad. He and a couple of his agents dropped everything and went searching for the kid. They found him in the canyons.

  They hadn’t needed to; it was a suicide. Not like this.

  Thinking about that—about a case and the death of someone else—helps keep me grounded, helps me focus on what’s important at this second, and I look at Struz straight-on to make sure I can gauge his reaction as I ask, “Was his body dumped there?”

  Struz sets his jaw and doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to. He’s trying to stay composed, but I can see how angry he is, and I know I’m on the right track. My own anger burns in my chest before spreading through my veins to the rest of my body, and my fingertips itch with the urge to break something. Or someone.

  The real question is what was my dad doing and who was he meeting in Park Village?

  The dull throbbing of the car keys digging into my palm makes me realize I’ve been clenching my fists. I believe Struz. I know he’ll work forever to figure this out. I know because so will I.

  The sound of something breaking inside the house brings me back to the immediate problem. My mother. “Did you tell her?”

  “She’s his wife,” Struz says, and he doesn’t need to say that he told her, he doesn’t need to say that it was probably a mistake to do it before I was home, and he doesn’t need to say he wasn’t thinking clearly.

  For once, I’m not mad. I take a deep breath and think about how I can use this to my advantage. Because in the next few days—or weeks or months or even years—while the FBI scrambles to solve the loss of one of their own, I don’t want to just sit on my hands and wait for them to give me a few pieces of the information I’m entitled to know.

  “I’m sorry, J-baby,” Struz whispers, and I know the apology covers everything—from what’s going on with my mother behind this door to the fact that my father is gone, to everything in between.

  I nod and move toward the door, taking my time as I find the right key and make sure it actually fits into the lock. I look at Struz and hope he’s preoccupied enough, and that this is enough of the truth that he won’t catch me when I lie, “You take care of her, and I’ll take care of Jared.”

  He just nods.

  “The Xanax are in her bedroom. Give her two. That’ll put her to sleep.” Which is true, but if she’s well into an episode it’ll take him everything he’s got to get her back into her bedroom and force her to take the pills.

  Which will give me enough time.

  I take a deep breath and turn the key.

  The inside of my house is only a step away from a scene from The Exorcist. The end table in the foyer is overturned, its lamp in pieces. Pizza sauce and some kind of liquid are splattered on the walls.

  “Jared!” I call immediately.

  In the kitchen, there are shattered pieces of porcelain everywhere. A half-eaten pizza is on the tiled floor, and a two-liter bottle of Coke lies on its side, liquid still seeping out and making a puddle on the floor.

  Jared is standing wide-eyed and frozen in the center of the kitchen, watching as my mother pulls dishes from the good china cabinet—her wedding china—and throws them as hard as she can at the floor. As a bowl hits the tile and shatters, Jared flinches, the only evidence he hasn’t gone completely into shock.

  “Jared!” I say again, moving into the doorway of the kitchen. I step on a piece of glass and it cracks under my shoe. Jared’s eyes flick to me before they move back to our mother, who has a few small cuts on her face and arms, obviously from pieces of the broken dishes and glass that have ricocheted off the floor.

  Struz pushes past me into the kitchen, yelling at my mother to “stop” and “calm down.” Instead she turns on him, throwing the dishes at him.

  “Jared, come with me now!” I say, snapping my fingers at him.

  This time he rushes toward me and throws his arms around me. I stumble under his weight. We’re about the same height now, and he outweighs me by at least fifteen pounds.

  For a moment, I just hug him back. He’s crying, and I stagger to move us both away from the kitchen and close to Dad’s study. “Is it true?” Jared keeps asking.

  When we’re almost to the study, I push Jared off me, grab him by the shoulders, and give him a quick shake. “Jared!”

  His eyes focus on me.

  “This is really important,” I say. “I need you to do exactly what I say. Exactly.”

  He nods.

  “I need you to run up to my room and get my swimming backpack, the big one, and I need you to bring it to me, here in Dad’s office, and then I need you to go upstairs to your room and stay there until Struz calms Mom down.”

  “But—”

  “You cannot breathe a word of this to Struz. There’s something I have to do, but I need you to be strong for me. Can you do t
hat?”

  He nods.

  “Okay,” I say, and turn to the study as Jared runs toward the stairs. I hate doing this to him, I hate that I’m about to make him lock himself in his room and wait for me to get back, make him deal with this alone.

  But I have to.

  If I’d died that day at Torrey, my dad would have moved heaven and earth in order to know everything about what happened.

  He was doing that anyway, even though he thought I walked away without a scratch.

  Only I don’t have the same resources. Once the FBI comes in and cleans out everything that had to do with my father’s work, I won’t have any of the information I need. Which means I need to move now, and take care of Jared later.

  In my father’s study, I move immediately to his desk. Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I pick up the files that are open, obviously the last ones he looked at last night. I close them and begin piling them on the desk. Then I grab all the ones in the immediate vicinity, ones that look like he might have looked at them in the last few days.

  And Jared is back with the exact bag I was thinking of. “Hold it steady,” I say as I dump the files into the bag.

  I unplug the laptop and dump it and the power cord in the bag as well, and Jared says, “Why are you taking Dad’s case files?”

  “Because this is what killed him,” I say before I can stop to think how to soften it. But when I look at Jared, he just nods. He’s keeping it together. My chest expands with pride and love. He’s my brother and we’re cut from the same cloth—there’s something of our dad in both of us.

  “Go to your room and stay there,” I say to Jared, moving around him so we can get out of the study before Struz realizes what we’re doing. On a whim, I grab the case file of the girl who disappeared all those years ago, the case he never solved, and stick it in the bag. It was important to him, and I’m just not ready for the Bureau to swoop in and take it away. “I promise I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Where are you going?” Jared asks.

  “It’s better that you don’t know,” I say, pushing him out of the study and toward the stairs. “Let’s go.”

  Struz and my mother are still arguing in the kitchen. I hear him call out to me, and for a moment I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m doing this to him, leaving him to sort her out, but I push the guilt away and run up the stairs right behind Jared.

  “Stay in your room,” I say again. “I promise I’ll be back tonight.”

  Jared nods and does what I say, and I’m glad he’s the kind of brother who respects his sister. Then I go to my dad’s room. Unlike his study, it’s neat and orderly, a throwback to his army days. I’m glad, because this makes it easier.

  The files on his nightstand are important—they must be, since he would have looked at them right before getting into bed—so I grab them and throw them into the bag.

  In the walk-in closet, I push his suits around until I find the safe. The key code is eight digits, my birthday. I key it in—03241995—and pull the lever.

  Inside is a .40-caliber Glock 22. It’s the same issue as the one he got his fourth week at Quantico. My dad carried a Sig Sauer P226 and a Glock 27 for backup, but this gun is the one he taught me how to handle and shoot for my tenth birthday. We used to go to the shooting range once every couple of weeks when I was younger.

  The gun is heavy in my hands, like I’ve suddenly recognized the significance of it, the fact that this could be the same model that killed my dad—if he was even shot.

  I don’t even know how he died. Whether he saw it coming or if he was caught by surprise. Whether he died instantly or if he had time to think of what he was leaving behind.

  My throat constricts, and I remind myself that I’m wasting time. I check the gun—it’s not loaded—before I tuck it into the bag, then I grab the box of bullets, the two file folders, and my father’s passport and put them in there as well. I’ll see what they are later.

  “Janelle, where are you?” Struz calls from downstairs, and I zip the bag and put it on my back.

  13:22:18:41

  I open the door to the hallway and see Struz coming up the stairs.

  So I guess the front door is out. There’s no way he won’t figure out what I’m doing. Pushing the door shut, I lock it and weigh my options.

  One of the windows will put me on the roof of the garage. I move that way, throw open the window, and as I’m struggling with the screen, I hear Struz knocking on Jared’s door. “You guys okay?” he calls.

  Jared’s voice is muffled, so I don’t hear what he’s saying, but it’s very possible he’ll sell me out without realizing it.

  The screen is cheap, and the frame finally bends under my hands. I push it out and watch as it tumbles onto the roof, then slides down into the grass.

  “J, are you in here?” Struz says, and the doorknob to my dad’s bedroom twists a little. The lock holds, but only because Struz isn’t trying to bust in here yet. As soon as he makes the attempt, I’m sure it’ll give way. “Janelle, open this door!”

  Which means I have to move. Now.

  Taking a deep breath, I climb out, one leg at a time, holding on to the window frame as if my life depends on it. I test the shingles with the toe of my sneaker, and when I don’t slip or slide, I go ahead and put my weight on them.

  I hold my arms out wide for balance and move carefully to the edge of the roof. The driveway is on the right, and the side yard is on the left. If I take off in the Jeep, all Struz needs is to make a phone call, and any cop in the area will be ready to pull it over. But discarded thoughtlessly in our neighbor’s yard is a gold beach cruiser with a purple leather seat. On a bike I could take back roads and cut through people’s yards.

  As I get to the left edge of the roof, I hear Struz break open the door, and I don’t even have time to look down and think about how far the grass is from here. I just jump.

  Legs shoulder-width apart, even, not quite straight, relaxed, ready to give when they hit grass.

  My landing is almost perfect, and even though my left ankle turns and pain shoots up my leg, it’s as good as I could ask for. The weight of the backpack hurts my balance and I pitch forward to my knees, but I’m up again before I can think about it, moving toward my neighbor’s yard and that gold bike.

  Pain stabs my left foot every time I put weight on it, but I try to ignore it as I hop-run to the bike. If it was broken, it would feel worse.

  The bike is perfect, maybe a little big for me, but definitely something I can ride. I hop on and start pedaling.

  I think I hear someone call my name—Struz, or maybe even Jared—but I don’t turn back. I was interested in the case before because it involved me and my John Doe. But now it’s different. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the stakes are even higher now.

  Because now this case has taken something from me.

  13:22:07:19

  I’m out of my neighborhood before I realize I don’t actually have a plan when it comes to where I’m going.

  Alex picks up on the first ring. “What’s going on at your house? My mom’s been calling for at least the last five minutes.”

  “It’s a long story,” I say. I’ll tell him in a minute. First I need him to think for me. “If I have a backpack full of things I want to keep from the FBI, where can I hide them?”

  There’s a pause on the other line.

  “I just need an answer.”

  “Couldn’t you have asked this in person rather than over a phone line?”

  “Alex. I don’t have a lot of time, especially for one of your conspiracy theories,” I say, and I hate how harsh my voice sounds. “Can you think for me for a second? I need to know where to go. It would just be to keep something there for a few days.” Until I have a better idea of what I’m doing.

  “You could keep stuff here, obviously, but that’d be the first place your dad would look if he knew you were keeping something from him,” he says, and my eyes water at the mention of m
y dad. “What about Kate’s? Your dad and Struz might not know the details, but they know you had a falling-out and haven’t spoken. And her new house has that pool apartment that nobody ever uses. Her mom keeps the key under the mat.”

  Kate’s house is the last place I want to go, but he has a point. I’m already heading toward Santaluz.

  “J, are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “My dad is dead,” I say, because maybe if I keep saying it, I’ll get used to the idea. “San Diego PD found his body in a canyon behind Park Village.”

  I hear Alex suck in a breath, and suddenly I need to see him.

  “Can you pick me up at Kate’s? I’ll tell you everything when you get there.”

  “Of course,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

  I hang up without saying anything else, because I don’t trust either of us to get the words out.

  Kate, Alex, and I all grew up together, only three houses apart—until the summer before freshman year, when Kate’s parents bought the “new” house in Santaluz and they moved. She already knew Brooke and Lesley because the three of them played volleyball together and Kate was likely going to make varsity, even as a freshman, but once she moved into their neighborhood, I could see her change.

  Even before the party, even before she drugged me for their approval, she had chosen them over Alex and me. She’d started dressing like them, hanging out with them at the country club instead of going to the beach with me.

  That’s what bothers me most about that night: I should have seen it coming.

  I knew she’d changed, and I had a moment when I thought, I should just go home and play World of Warcraft with Jared or watch a lame action movie with Alex, but I stayed. And when Kate gave me that beer, I wanted our friendship to be the same as it had always been. So I did my part to hold on to the past.