Slain

by Harper, Livia

  His anger isn’t toward me at all. The number one villain to Nicolas is Nicolas.

  “I had one thing to do as her boyfriend, and I failed. I didn’t protect her. Why’d I leave her? Why’d I have to do that?”

  “Oh, Nicky.” I grab his hand. “What would you have done against a gun?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Not let her die like that. All alone.”

  We sit in silence for a moment, then I ask, “Do you have any ideas about who could have done it?”

  “Yeah, but the police won’t listen.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You want to know the first thing I thought, when I found out she didn’t do it to herself? I thought it was her dad.”

  “Her dad?” I know nothing about June’s dad.

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “He’s, like, not a good guy. In and out of prison her whole life. Armed assault, bank robbery, drug possession. The sick bastard has killed people before. Sorry.” He’s apologizing because of the language. It’s automatic. “And when he was around? Let’s just say it was better for her when he wasn’t. I know what the Bible says, but there’s got to be an exception for men like that. He should be the one dead, not her.”

  “What do you mean it was better for her when he wasn’t around?”

  He looks away, says quietly, “He did things to her. Things that shouldn’t happen between a father and a daughter.”

  “I had no idea.” I really didn’t. She alluded to things sometimes, gave testimony about a dark past, but everyone talks like that. The worse your past, the better your testimony. I never imagined anything like this. What did I really know about her? It feels like nothing at all.

  “She even went to see him a couple weeks ago. She’s been working through some of this stuff, trying to move on. She wanted to confront him, forgive him. I don’t think it went well. She barely talked to me afterward.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Oh yeah. But they think someone in our church did it.”

  Me.

  “I thought maybe it was because they had some evidence that they weren’t telling me about. But I haven’t heard anything. Do you know anything? Like, from your dad?”

  “No,” I say.

  “I mean a guy like that? You think he couldn’t break in?”

  “Of course he could.”

  June’s dad is a criminal. It’s a good feeling, like seeing a clean spot on a dirty window. I shouldn’t be glad of anything having to do with such a terrible person. But I am; I’m relieved. There’s at least one person who might have had a reason to murder June.

  I go home right away to tell Mom. She’s sitting on the back deck, wrapped in a blanket even though it’s nearly eighty degrees out, a warm Colorado spring day soon to be chased away by a cold Colorado spring night. I think I can smell cigarette smoke, but I’m not positive. Something about her has been different since June’s murder. She seems quieter, more introspective.

  After I tell her, she gets on the phone to the police, and they ask us to come in. We’re so excited we forget to call Mr. Graham, the lawyer.

  I tell the police everything Nicolas told me.

  “Okay. Anything else?” Boyer asks. She seems annoyed. I’m confused.

  “No. That’s everything.” I say.

  “Thanks for your time,” she says and gets up to leave.

  “So what are you going to do about this?” Mom asks. I feel the way her voice sounds, shrill, panicked. They should be apologizing by now, or at the very least interested. Something’s not right.

  “Unfortunately, ma’am, unless you can tell us something we don’t already know, nothing has changed here.”

  “But her father was a professional criminal! He’s killed people before! Couldn’t he have done this too?” Mom says.

  “We’ve already eliminated Mr. Stuckey as a suspect.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why?”

  “Trust me, Mrs. Grant, he didn’t do it. He has several witnesses who can attest to his whereabouts.”

  “So you think a known, violent criminal, someone who likely surrounds himself with liars, is more trustworthy than my daughter?”

  “There was no forced entry involved in the attack, so it had to be someone inside the building.”

  “But anyone who was there could have let anyone else in.” I say. It gets her attention.

  “Why do you say that? Did you let someone in?”

  Shit. Watch yourself, Emma.

  “No, of course not. I’m just saying it’s possible.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I DECIDE TO GO to June’s house and talk to her dad myself. Maybe it’s stupid, but I don’t care.

  It takes a while to figure out where she lives. I’ve never been there. I don’t even know her parents’ names. I find an article where they’re quoted on the Denver Post’s website.

  Police are searching for an unknown gunman who brutally murdered a teen girl, June Vogel, while she was attending a slumber party at Denver’s Summit Christian Fellowship. Her mother, Trisha Vogel, was devastated by the attack. “I just don’t know who could have done this to my baby. She was such a bright, cheerful little thing. Everyone loved her. Whoever she met, people’d always say how sunny she was. I miss her so much.”

  It’s weird how sentimental people can get. June wasn’t close to her mother, not at all. She said they fought a lot. She said her mother hated her. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to encourage her to think we were close, so I never asked. It feels so selfish now.

  I Google Trisha Vogel and scroll past the news sites. I finally find one of those person look-up sites, enter my credit card, and have her address. It’s farther than I thought, in a dinky suburb north of Colorado Springs, about an hour away. Which means it’s unlikely that June was living with her family.

  She didn’t have a car, and a bus would have taken forever. With Focus on the Family centered in Colorado Springs, there are about a thousand closer churches she could have gone to. It doesn’t make sense for her to attend Summit Christian unless she was living nearby. But where?

  I jot down Trisha Vogel’s address and drive. It’s late now, nearly 7:30, but I can’t wait until tomorrow. I need to know now.

  It takes more than an hour to get there because I get lost. It’s only about fifteen miles east from I-25, but the path is down one-lane prairie roads that go for miles without meeting another road. Google Maps doesn’t seem to know that some of them just end. I have to double back a few times before I find it.

  The place is called The Palace Arms, and it’s a trailer park. June’s house is near the back, by a depression that was probably a creek before the water got diverted to a reservoir or farmlands farther up. Trees spindle out from the ground beside it, leafless and wind-smooth.

  I knock on the door and steel myself for June’s dad. I imagine him big, hairy, menacing. I finger the phone in my pocket, ready to call 911 if I need to.

  A woman answers. It’s the woman who was holding Trisha’s hand at the service. She’s young. Maybe twenty? She has June’s big blue eyes, framed behind dark-green Buddy Holly glasses. Her hair is black with an ombré to bleach-blonde tips, but her roots are June’s same cornstalk blonde. She’s got hipster written all over her. Great.

  “Yeah?” she says. She’s probably ticking off the reasons why she doesn’t like me, why I’m the embodiment of all that’s wrong in the world because my jeans are the new version of her retro-ironic ones. My dad’s voice bubbles up in my head, get a job. And I realize, at the same moment, that she probably does have a job. I don’t. I never have. I’m a jerk. Would we really look all that different, if you took away all the things we decorate ourselves with? No.

  “Can I help you?” she says.

  “Are you—I’m looking for— I was a friend of June’s.” Something clangs behind her. A pan? Trisha barrels toward me. She’s sweat-pantsed and mush-bellied, a disheveled mess f
rom the grieving mother at the funeral service. Red blotches streak her un-made-up face.

  “Who the hell are you, coming here?” She says.

  “Mom—“

  “Don’t you ‘Mom’ me. You think a little bit of college makes you in charge around here?” She turns to me. “And you, from that bullshit factory. I told the others not to come back here.” Probably a visit from the Bereavement Ministry.

  She takes a closer look at me, “I remember you. They had you on the news with your pretty little tears.”

  I don’t know what to say. June’s sister gives me a “sorry” face.

  “If your Jesus was so great, why’s my baby girl dead? Why’d somebody at that place kill my baby? You’re not Christians. You’re bullshitters.” I can smell the alcohol on her breath.

  “Mom—“

  Trisha turns and smacks the girl across the face.

  “I told you not to ‘Mom’ me.” She turns back to me. “A bunch a shit-talkers killed my little girl. So don’t come here thinkin’ you can save our souls. That little girl was my soul.”

  She sobs then. June’s sister puts an arm around her. “Why don’t you lie down, Mom, okay?” Her words are strained. She’s irritated, trying to do the right thing.

  “Those people killed my baby.”

  “I know. I know.” June’s sister leads her mother away, motions to me to give her a minute.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, too soft for them to hear me. I turn to leave. This was stupid. Of course they wouldn’t want to talk to me.

  I hear her footsteps behind me then. June’s sister is standing on the porch in the warm light of the doorway, clutching her arms around her. They wrap almost all the way around her small body, just like June’s. Like she’s trying to shield herself, but doesn’t have enough shield.

  Her face softens to me. “I’m May,” the woman says, “June’s sister.” And all of a sudden it’s hard to think of her as a woman, even though she’s older than me, because her voice becomes soft, a child’s voice, and the harsh edge in her eyes is gone. “Mom’s in bed. Wanna come in?”

  The trailer is big and looks newer. Most of them are around here. Bigger than the ones you see on TV shows about lowlifes. It’s clean too. Pale-grey carpet, hunter-green sofa, knotty pine cabinets in the kitchen. The place is nice, I guess, for a mobile home.

  “You said you were a friend of June’s?” she asks. We sit on the sofa. There’s a book lying there, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. In my house the TV would be on.

  “Yeah. I’m Emma,” I say “I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks.” She looks like she’s sick of hearing that. I am too. I wish I could think of something better to say.

  “She told me once that you were the only person in her family who really loved her.”

  May bites down on her lip, kicking back the tears with her teeth. She nods. “She was the same to me.” She sucks it down. “I don’t get it. I’m sorry, but I really don’t. She shouldn’t have even been there that night. How did she get mixed up with you guys?”

  I have to stop myself from smiling. Mixed up. I’ve never heard anyone say it like that. Like we’re a gang or a cult. Maybe we are.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. She just showed up one night last summer. And then she was there after that. All the time.”

  “But why? Did she believe all that stuff?”

  “I think so. Yes. She did. She really did.”

  May shakes her head. “I knew I should’ve taken her to school with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a freshman at CU.” So eighteen or nineteen then, only two or three years older than June. “I wanted her to move up there with me, but they have this rule about freshmen staying in the dorms, so…we couldn’t figure it out. I was gonna get an apartment this summer, though.”

  “Wouldn’t your parents be mad?”

  “Our parents?” She laughs. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “June said she didn’t get along with your mom. What about your dad?”

  “No. They don’t get along. It’s better for everyone that he’s in prison.”

  “Prison?” My heart sinks. No wonder the police say he’s innocent. “Since when?”

  “Since forever or since the most recent time?” she asks. “First time was when I was five, for grand theft auto. That lasted two and a half years.” She goes to the kitchen while she talks, pulls out a couple beers, hands one to me.

  “Second time was when I was eight, this time for armed robbery. Some people got killed. He’s not getting out anytime soon.” She takes a big swig. I’m not sure what to do with mine. I’ve never had alcohol before in my life.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I decide to take a sip, afraid she’ll think I’m weird if I don’t. It’s bitter and loud in my mouth. I have to stop myself from making a face.

  “After that me and June got stuck with good old mommy dearest over here and her parade of hands-y suitors.”

  “Wow. That’s really shitty.” She looks at me, smirks. I can’t tell if she’s impressed by my use of foul language or laughing at how awkward I still sound when I do it.

  “Yeah. Super fuckin’ shitty. Like, crazy, mega-awful, go-shoot-yourself shitty.”

  I’m way out of her league, swearing-wise. She probably thinks I’m bending my morale code to get on good terms with her. Sometimes it feels like I don’t belong anywhere. I’m too hard for the church kids, too soft for everyone else.

  She sits, leans her elbows on her knees. “Do you know who she was staying with up there? Where she was living?”

  “I was going to ask you.”

  “No idea. My mom hadn’t seen her for months. Since summer. We were emailing, but she said everything was fine. Never said a thing about Denver.”

  So she was staying with someone. But who?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I CALL NICOLAS FROM the car. He agrees to meet me at a park near his house. It’s past eleven when I get there. We sit on the hood of my car, bathed in moonlight.

  “Why wouldn’t she tell me her dad was in prison?” he says, disbelieving.

  “Maybe she thought we’d think less of her.”

  “Still. That’s big. I thought I knew everything.”

  “Did you know where June was staying?” I ask.

  “You didn’t know?” He reads the confusion in my face. “Technically, June was homeless.”

  It hangs in the air between us, a puff of smoke. It can’t be true.

  “I always wondered why you didn’t try to help her,” he says.

  “She never said anything.” I would have helped her, wouldn’t I?

  “She was terrified of her mom. That’s why she ran away in the first place. And obviously, living with her dad was out of the question. She had nowhere else to go. That’s why she was living in the church.”

  “Living in the church?”

  He looks at me like I’m the slowest person he’s ever met. “She didn’t tell me either, but I thought you would’ve figured it out. Ever notice how she’s involved in everything? Around all the time?”

  I did, but I thought she was just clingy. And besides, I’m around all the time too, so is Paige and Mike and half a dozen other kids whose parents work there. It doesn’t seem that weird to me.

  “How long?”

  “Since the first night she came.”

  I remember that night. She arrived late, her hair soaked from the rain, and sat next to me. I talked to her about Jesus. “So she’s been hiding in the church for nine months?”

  “I know. I tried to get her some help but she wouldn’t let me tell anyone. Runaways have no rights. Just the parents. She was too afraid they’d make her go back home.”

  “So, I just…I can’t even believe this, where did she sleep? How did she eat?”

  “She took a few of the nursery mats, set up a bed under the auditorium stage. No one ever goes under there.”

  I’m dumbfounded.

  “I think sh
e was eating stuff from Connections at first, the food bank too. Then she got a job. She even saved up some money for a place, but it was hard to find anyone to rent to a minor. After I found out I helped too, of course. I even tried to convince her to move in with my parents, but she didn’t think it was a good idea. She thought she’d get them in trouble.”

  “I don’t even know what to say. I just…wow.”

  “I was gonna find us a place, as soon as I turned eighteen. Just a couple weeks.” His head is in his hands. “I really loved her, Em.”

  He pulls something out of his pocket then. It circles between his fingertips, no pretty box to present it in. He’s been keeping it close. An engagement ring. It looks foreign in his hands, too old, an object the kid I dated, the sixteen-year-old with a beater truck and a baseball card collection, shouldn’t have.

  It makes me wonder about her, about all the things I didn’t know that made her who she was. Nicolas is a popular guy—smart and good looking and a total gentleman. For him to want this, there had to be something special about June, something more than her making him feel strong. I wish I had taken the time to see it.

  “Did she know?”

  “Yeah. I proposed about a month ago, but she wouldn’t take it. Not until she got baptized.”

  We sit there for a moment, the stars twinkling over our heads like little whispers in the night. Eventually, Nicolas tucks the ring back in his pocket. “If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it to yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  “I just—I have to get it off my chest.” He’s tearing up, choking on his words.

  “What is it?”

  “I—it wasn’t just her past she was worried about. It was us too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We didn’t, I mean—we didn’t stay pure.” He looks me in the eye, and it all tumbles out. “I couldn’t control myself. She was so beautiful, and I loved her so much, and you know I how I used to struggle with that when we were together.”