Life Is Short and Then You Die_First Encounters With Murder From Mystery Writers of America

by Kelley Armstrong

  “I’m sorry,” Elijah says.

  I nod and don’t look up. My head is over the edge, my fingers trailing in the water. He sets the oar down and kneels beside me. A pause, as if he’s going to say something. Then he stretches out beside me, and I stiffen at that because …

  The tears prickle with yet another reminder of those times past. So much simpler. Everything’s gotten complicated, and the reason I stiffen is one of those, and then I’m ashamed of the impulse because Elijah is only offering comfort and support. Exactly what I need.

  I look over at him, my mouth opening to say something. His face is right there, and then his lips are on mine, and damn it, no.

  I pull back. “Eli…”

  His jaw clenches, and he looks away. Anger pulses from him. This is why I tensed, why things are complicated, why I’ve withdrawn over the last few years.

  The first time Elijah kissed me, we were twelve. I told him I wasn’t interested, and he cut it out, and I thought everything was fine. Then he tried again, two years later. After that, he kept trying.

  “Eli…,” I say, my voice softening. “No, okay?”

  He looks back at me, his eyes hard emeralds. “Why not? He’s messing around on you.”

  “So I’m going to mess around with you? One, I don’t want revenge. Two, I’d never do that, because it’d be unfair to you. I’d be leading you on with a promise I don’t intend to keep.”

  “It’s not a promise,” he says. “It’s giving me a chance, Kylie. That’s all I want. All I ever wanted.”

  I sit up. “A chance for what? To get to know you better? I’ve known you since we were three, Eli. I love you, and you are an awesome friend, but I’m just not interested in you that way.”

  “Why?”

  I throw up my hands. “Who knows?”

  “I do,” he says as he rises. “It’s because I’m a nice guy.”

  “Don’t pull that—”

  “You want a bad boy. Like Landon.”

  I sputter a laugh. “Landon is not a bad boy. At all.”

  “He’s messing around on you. With your best friend. He’s an asshole, and you know it.”

  “No, he’s…” Pain stabs me. It isn’t the pain of remembering Landon’s betrayal. It’s something else. The exchange between Landon and Mia by her pool that I told myself I didn’t catch. I did, though. I heard it just fine.

  “She’s my best friend,” Mia had said. Then, “I won’t lose her, Landon. If I have to choose between you and her, it’s her.”

  “I know, and I don’t want that. I wish … I wish I could do this without hurting her, but I keep trying to talk to her, and she won’t listen.”

  I flash back to the ride home from school. To the part I skipped in my memory. Landon wanting to talk about us, telling me how much he cared about me, how much he didn’t want to lose my friendship. I cut him off because I knew what was coming. We’d been there twice before. He ended it, and I told myself he was just being moody. He wasn’t. He had tried to break it off gently, and I hadn’t let him.

  Landon had fallen for Mia, so he had to end it with me, and I wouldn’t let him.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s been vibrating for a while, and I’ve been ignoring it, but now I take it out to keep Elijah from saying anything more.

  It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize. I pop it open.

  I send back:

  A long pause. Then she texts:

  I reread her message, and it slowly hits me. She just said she misplaced her phone. The phone that sent me the Snapchat message to come to her house.

  She didn’t send the message.

  As soon as I realize that, a piece clicks into place. A piece that wouldn’t fit before. I’ve known Mia more than half my life, and she has never done anything remotely cruel. Luring me to see her with Landon wasn’t just “slightly out of character.” The only explanation for it would be demonic possession. I’d realized that. I’d just been too hurt to think about it.

  So who sent the message? I consider Landon only for a moment. He’s not underhanded, not devious. It wouldn’t occur to him.

  How would someone get Mia’s…?

  I look up at Elijah.

  “You were doing a project with Mia after school,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know she’s always misplacing her phone. You took it. You’re the one who sent that message. You wanted me to see them together.”

  I brace for him to deny it. Instead, he squares his shoulders and says, “Yes, I did. She got a message from him while we were doing our assignment. I saw it. He needed to talk to her. I swiped her phone and saw that they’d arranged to meet at her place after her parents left.”

  “You lured me there, and then you drove around waiting for me to run home so you could … so you could…”

  “So I could be there for you.” He straightens. “You had to know, Kylie. He’s an asshole, and Mia isn’t any better. She’s no friend of yours, and he’s sure as hell no boyfriend.”

  Elijah is wrong. What I saw tonight wasn’t Mia and Landon sneaking out together. It was them falling for each other and trying to figure out what to do about it. How to handle it with me. Handle it respectfully. Yes, he kissed her, but I had a feeling it was their first, and if I knew either of them, they regretted it now.

  “I’m your friend,” Elijah says, leaning toward me. “And I should be your boyfriend.”

  “No, Eli, I’m not—”

  His mouth comes to mine. I push, but this time his arms are around me, and when I fight, he doesn’t let go, just keeps kissing me. Panic ignites. I shove at him so hard that when he does let go, I topple backward, right off the raft, into the lake.

  The shock of that hits me hard, my mouth opening, water rushing in. I flail, coughing and sputtering. The panic subsides, though. I’ve gotten away from Elijah, and I’m fine. I just need to catch my breath and get back on the raft.

  As I dog-paddle, my heart rate slows. I swipe wet hair from my eyes and look around. Seeing the raft, I start toward it. Elijah paddles away.

  “Hey!” I say, treading water. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “Don’t be a bitch.”

  “What?” My voice rises. “You—”

  “I’ll let you back on if you promise to give me a chance.”

  “You call me a bitch and then expect me to go out with you?” I shake my head and squint around. “Forget it. I can swim to shore.”

  “It’s a long way.”

  “And it’s a calm lake. I’ll be fine.”

  I start out. It is a long way, and I’m not sure I can swim that far. I don’t intend to, though. I just need Elijah to think I can. I take a few strokes, and he’s keeping pace alongside, just out of reach. He’s talking to me. I’m paying no attention.

  I swim until he relaxes. Then I swerve for the raft. My fingers brush it. He jerks back in surprise. Then he swings the oar. I see it out of the corner of my eye, but I’m focused on holding the side of the raft, ready to heave myself onto it. It’s not as if he’ll hit—

  The oar strikes the side of my head. Hits so hard that the moon explodes, lights flashing. Then everything goes dark.

  * * *

  I’m in the morgue hallway. My heart pounds, breath coming fast. My head throbs, and my mouth tastes of lake water.

  I turn slowly. Elijah stands against the wall now, his arms crossed.

  “You hit me with that oar,” I say as I walk toward him. “You didn’t mean to hurt me. You just didn’t want me getting on the raft until I agreed to your conditions. But the blow knocked me out, and when I went under, you left me there. I’m sure you thought I was fine, and I’d swim to shore, but you never looked back. You were too busy being hurt and angry to even think of me. You left me to die.”

  He has his chin down, his gaze on the floor. I stand right in front of him. His head jerks up, as if he senses something. I see his eyes. I see grief, and I see remorse, and I don’t care.

  “You
killed me,” I whisper, and he shivers, arms tightening around himself.

  The woman appears down the hall, waiting. I walk toward her.

  “You have your answer,” she says.

  “I do,” I say as that numbing sense of calm falls again. “Now what?”

  “Now you can take me up on my offer. Go back to the lake, to before your mother arrived. Forget all this. Forget what happened to you. Forget how it happened.”

  I look at Elijah again, and my gut clenches.

  “I loved you,” I say to him. “As a friend, yes, but I loved you, and now I never can again. Everything you were to me is ruined. All those memories…”

  I inhale.

  “Yes, then?” she says. “Go back? Forget this?”

  I turn to Landon and Mia, and the pain stabs harder.

  Go back. Rewind to when I climbed into Landon’s car. To that girl, bouncing along with her boyfriend. The girl whose boyfriend wanted her. The girl whose boyfriend did not want her best friend.

  Go back to the girl who never doubted her best friend. I know this wasn’t Mia’s fault, but it still hurts. It’s still a smudge on our friendship. Not the indelible black stroke of Elijah’s betrayal, but a smudge nonetheless.

  Going back would be easier, wouldn’t it? So much easier.

  Then I look at Elijah again.

  “He doesn’t deserve that,” I whisper.

  “Hmm?” the woman says.

  I don’t answer. What I mean is that Elijah doesn’t deserve that clean slate in my memory. He doesn’t deserve to go back to being the friend I still cared for, still remembered fondly.

  I have no idea whether he’ll be caught. I hear my mother talking about a Peeping Tom—that must have been the case she’d been investigating. She’ll wonder, of course, whether that was my killer. Whether he graduated from peeping on girls to killing one. Maybe the police will get stuck there, searching for a stranger.

  They’ll be looking for a big answer to my death. Some terrible and violent explanation, a dark force that stole me from them. Instead, the answer is small. So small and so personal. A fight. A shove. A blow. The end. My life snuffed out in what should have been no more than a night of hard but ordinary truths, one rough bump in the life of a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Whether or not they catch Elijah, he knows what he did. And I want to remember what he did. That will be his punishment. That I will remember, wherever I go from here.

  As for Landon, as much as that hurts, I want to remember my mistakes there, too. I liked him as a friend, and I liked having him as a boyfriend. No, I liked having a boyfriend, and part of that had been about erecting a wall between me and Elijah. See, I have a boyfriend now, so we can’t be more than friends. Landon deserves better. He deserves Mia, and she deserves him, and I don’t know if they’ll work out after this, but I wish them the best, and I will never forget them.

  I walk over to the group, past my friends, to my family.

  This is what I want to remember most. That I was loved. If I rewind those final hours, I erase my last memories of my family, and those are all good. I would forget Mom, laughing with me as we washed dishes, her insisting on helping before she went back to work. I’d forget Dad, buying me a milkshake and talking to me and just being Dad. And I’d forget Will bringing me frogs. My little brother—who wanted nothing to do with me these days—finding me exactly the frogs I wanted.

  “I love you,” I say to them, one by one, finishing with Will, leaning over to kiss the top of his head.

  He looks up, startled.

  “You’re still a pill,” I say. “But you’ll outgrow that. I just wish I could be there to see it.”

  One last look at them all, and then I walk to the woman waiting patiently down the hall.

  “Where do I go next?” I say.

  “Back to the lake?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Forward. I want to keep going forward.”

  She puts an arm around my shoulders, and we walk down the hall as the voices fade behind us.

  THE DAY I KILLED COACH DUFFY

  By R .L. Stine

  Tyler’s new girlfriend, Cathy, was on the sidelines watching our soccer practice the afternoon Coach Duffy went berserk on him. Cathy is Tyler’s first serious girlfriend, I think, and I could see how embarrassed he was, and how hot he was becoming.

  His neck turned bright red. Just his neck. His face went white as flour, but his neck darkened to a deep red, almost purple. I’ve seen it before. Tyler has a temper. Luckily, he never turned it on me. We’ve been good buddies since the end of middle school, and I know how to stay on his good side.

  As the coach let him have it, the two of them standing so close, Duffy actually spit in Tyler’s face as he shouted at him. Tyler kept glancing over at Cathy, and each time I could see his neck darken a little more and see that pulse he has on his throat throbbing away.

  Truth is, Tyler and I were playing like goofballs. We were never really serious about soccer, and the team is a joke anyway. We’ve only got one good player, LeMarr Oates, and he was sitting out practice with a sprained ankle. Or so he said. Maybe he just got tired of having to play with so many losers.

  So Duffy was right about us today. Tyler and I had a secret contest to see how many balls we could let go through our legs. It was actually a riot, because we were really good at it.

  I don’t know if the coach had even noticed our little joke, until Tyler and I started to laugh like hyenas and fall on the grass on our stomachs, pounding the ground with our fists.

  That’s when Duffy called the two of us over to talk, and I knew it wasn’t going to be a pep session. Go, team.

  He turned to me first. I sucked in a deep breath, kept my eyes to the ground, and prepared to get slaughtered.

  But he just shook his head, like he was sad, and said, “That’s about what I expect from you, Doug.”

  Then he turned to Tyler and went crazy on him. He shouted and spit and said Tyler used to be a real athlete till he got mixed up with me. Then he called Tyler a waste of his time and said he was going to send him to the girls’ team because he played like a little girlie.

  That’s what Duffy said. No lie. He said Tyler played like a little girlie. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to say things like that anymore. Didn’t Duffy have any sensitivity training at all?

  Well, Tyler’s neck was red and his bottom lip was trembling. He kept curling and uncurling his fists down at his sides. And the way he stuck out his chest and stood his ground, only inches in front of Duffy, made my stomach tighten in dread. And I silently prayed that he wouldn’t punch out the coach, because I knew that could be the end of Tyler at Johnson Falls High.

  I glanced over at the sidelines and saw Cathy covering her face with both hands. Was she embarrassed for Tyler? Or was it that she just couldn’t stand the coach abusing him like that?

  I couldn’t tell. But suddenly, she lowered her hands, and I saw her unhappy expression. And I watched her turn and run away, her blond hair flying behind her like a kite’s tail. She ran hard, taking long strides across the grass and not looking back once.

  When I turned back, Duffy was saying something about Tyler’s whole family being worthless, especially his older brother, Donny, who’s had a lot of troubles since he dropped out of school.

  I knew that was going too far. And I almost cried out as Tyler moved forward, his whole face blazing now, on fire, his eyes wide, eyebrows arched, features tight with anger.

  Please hold back. Please don’t hit Duffy.

  Tyler gave a sudden lurch—and he and the coach bumped chests. Like some kind of manly thing. They bumped chests. And Tyler didn’t back up. He stood his ground, challenging the coach.

  Duffy was the one to back up. “That’s it, Tyler. You’re out of here. You’re gone.” He kept motioning with both hands for Tyler to shoo. “Don’t come back. If you do, I’ll forget I’m a teacher and I’ll grind you into hamburger.”

  He really said that. Said he’d grin
d Tyler to hamburger.

  I knew Duffy could lose his job for saying stuff like that. But I didn’t want to be the one to report him, and I knew it wasn’t Tyler’s style, either.

  The rest of the guys had backed off to the sidelines and had their heads down, like they were pretending they weren’t there and hadn’t heard any of it. Wimps, but that’s no shock.

  Tyler didn’t hesitate. He spun around and started to lope away, trotting across the grass as if he were happy and carefree, not showing anything on his face.

  I stood there, my stomach in a knot, cold sweat on the back of my neck. I didn’t know what to do. Should I follow after Tyler? Should I stay for the rest of the practice?

  Duffy settled the problem for me. He shouted that practice was over and we should all get out of his sight. He was trying to act tough, like the fight with Tyler didn’t affect him at all. Like it only made him angry.

  But I could see his lips twitching, and he was breathing hard, his chest pumping up and down. So I knew Tyler had given back a little of what Duffy had given him.

  Too bad. It had all just started as a joke between Tyler and me. But Duffy didn’t seem to have any sense of humor.

  I texted Tyler as soon as I got home, but no reply.

  I kept thinking about Cathy. Was she embarrassed for Tyler? Or was she just embarrassed?

  I mean, they had only been together a few weeks, so I didn’t know her well at all and had no idea of how she’d react. She probably had no idea about Tyler’s hot temper and how he never could back away from a fight.

  I guessed she learned that today.

  And then after dinner, my phone buzzed and it was Tyler. He sounded weird. “Doug, get over here, okay? Can you come right away? I need you here.”