When all the drama was swept away, they were pretty simplistic clues for someone who thought himself so clever. Or at least that’s what she’d always thought. Some were near impossible to figure out, but it was not because they were complex; it was because there just hadn’t been enough detail.
Simon, more than anything, wanted to show how smart he was. How he could outwit them time and again. But, taken at face value, the photos weren’t a reflection of that.
Unless you didn’t take them at face value.
Despite the low-level hum in her veins, the one she got when everything in a case started making sense, she didn’t spill it all out to Sam yet. Instead, she watched the ripples from a jumping fish roll and crest across the otherwise smooth surface of the lake, which had turned silver in the moonlight.
This one was different, she’d said. Why had that never felt more accurate?
Sam sighed, an exhale of air that spoke volumes. “I know, kid.”
“What did Roger say?” She side-eyed him so she wouldn’t be so obvious about assessing his emotional state.
“He keyed in on the boyfriend until I told him that Peterson positively identified Simon. Even Roger can’t ignore that. He’s flying up tomorrow.”
“Our white knight to save the day,” she said, not even trying to hide the bitterness that coated her words. Roger had blood on his hands. He had blood on his hands for pulling resources from the Simon manhunt, and he had blood on his hands from Sam, when he’d chosen career advancement over him. Back when politicians were scared of the idea of a gay man leading the FBI, Roger had put the rumors to rest by simply making sure there was nothing for anyone to talk about. In the end, he’d gotten what he had so highly coveted, and Sam had gotten screwed over. “Do you think he’ll bring his expensive suits for the cameras?”
Sam’s relaxed smile always confused her when the topic came up. “It’s time to forgive him, Clarke. For his crimes against me, at least. That’s between him and me. And it’s over.”
“Fine,” she bit out. “But you can’t deny he’s left us out to dry on this case.”
“He did what he thought was best.”
“He did what he thought would secure him a promotion and limit the bad press.”
“You got me there. He let us keep Della.”
“After you threatened to quit entirely,” she said, not willing to give Roger points on that one. “No way would he have let you out of his control like that. At least we know what his weakness is.”
“It was an empty threat on both sides,” Sam sighed. “He wouldn’t have taken Della.”
The argument was old and not worth their time. “Speaking of our resident genius, I had her help me with something I’ve been thinking about.”
Sam showed no obvious signs of relief at the change of topics, but she knew his body language well. He had been tense, and at the switch of subjects his shoulders dropped slightly, the knuckles around his glass relaxed, and the muscles of his face sagged back into his hangdog everyday expression. “Oh yeah, trying something new? What have you been thinking about?”
She ignored the teasing remark delivered to lighten the mood.
Not the destination. The journey.
“Our guy. The bastard . . .”
“Simon.”
“Simon.” She acquiesced. There was something about calling him by his name that made him human. Maybe that’s why Sam did it. Humans could be caught. They could be brought to justice. They could be killed, if needed. Scary monsters in the night, well, not so much. At least in Clarke’s experience.
“He’s a planner,” she continued, reopening her laptop. “He’s meticulous. Everything he sends us, it means something.”
Sam nodded. “Even if we don’t realize it at the time.”
“Precisely.” She jabbed her pointer finger in his direction. “Precisely. So all these pictures, these messages, these clues for our scavenger hunt. We’ve been looking at them as individual pieces. Solve one, move to the next, solve that one, move to the next. Always a dead girl at the end of the line.”
Sam straightened. “But what if there’s a bigger message?”
She pressed her lips together in a grim line. “Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Sam breathed out, and she almost laughed. He’d tipped his head so that the bald spot she knew was there rested against the back of the chair. The moonlight bathed his grooved and creviced skin in silver.
“I’m going to text Della. She’s got some crypto friend that can help us out, but I’ve been working on it, in the meantime,” she said, tabbing over to her spreadsheet. “Sam. He gave us the location two or three clues out. Every time.”
“How?”
“Look at Lila Teasdale. She was found in that town in West Virginia. At 147 Meadow Drive, Elkins, West Virginia, precisely.”
“I remember.” His voice was thick.
“Look.” She flipped through the pictures that sat in the file resting on the arm of her chair. “Look.” She held the one she’d been searching for up, her finger a staccato against the glossy paper. “This was his first clue. Do you see the address? It’s the Chinese place next to the bar he sent us to. One four seven.”
He took the photo from her and rubbed the pad of his thumb over the numbers. “How did we not see that?”
She honestly didn’t know. She’d studied these pictures until they were no longer places, just blurs on glossy paper. And then she’d studied them more until they turned back into places. She hadn’t seen it, though.
“Look, there’s no way we could have known to look for any of this shit. And not all of them were that obvious.”
She shuffled the photos again. “The second clue. There in the corner. The billboard just almost out of the shot. Forever Meadows Nursing Home. Meadow.”
“Drive. Meadow Drive. What was . . .” Sam paused. And then he got it. “That old drive-in.”
“Third clue.” She found the photo of the dilapidated throwback to the 1960s. Weeds had overtaken the place, but the screen was still there, the speakers that piped the sound into viewers’ cars. The concession stand with its barber-pole-striped awning.
“Holy Christ.” Sam ran a gnarled hand through his hair, before covering his eyes with it. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“The next one’s harder. But that’s what Google’s for,” she said. “That little town in Maryland. Look at the intersection in the background.”
“Route 355?”
“Yeah, this one stumped me,” she said. “I was looking up every single thing I could find in the photo. The ‘three five five’ was about thirty-six Google searches in. Nothing was coming up. But then . . .” She unlocked her phone and pulled up the keypad, as if to dial a number. She flipped it in her hand to hold it out to him.
He took it gingerly.
She helped him get there. “Three five five. E L K.”
He pushed to his feet and walked to the very edge of the water. His toes tipped into the frigid lake, but he didn’t react. He just stood there, rocking back, his heels sinking into the soft sand-mud at the edge of the grass. There was nothing to see except for the trees across the way.
She stood, the soles of her feet sinking into the thick, damp grass. The wind had picked up slightly, enough to ruffle the strands of her hair that had escaped the sturdy beige rubber band that had served as her makeshift hair tie.
She was tall for a woman, so their shoulders bumped when she stopped next to him. She leaned her body weight into him, just at that one contact point on their arms. And everything that was between them narrowed to that one place where sweatshirt met sweatshirt. The years of frustration, hope, despair, laughter, crushing defeat, friendship. The memories were palpable entities, as if she could reach out and capture them. Fireflies that she would be able to hold in her palm, that she could put into a jar and watch as they lit the world. Or let fly away. He shifted, rocking forward, his toes curling into the loose pebbles that rimmed the water’s edge, and the connection w
as broken. She missed it immediately.
“He’s all but drawing an arrow for us,” Sam said. His lips were drawn tight. This was a new and different Sam. One she’d rarely seen in the past two years. She had come to think of him as her own personal Yoda. Calm, centered, always having the answers. She was the one who doubted. Who turned inward with self-loathing. Who was the rain cloud on his sunny day.
His mess he had to clean up. The one he always cleaned up.
Clarke sat on the cracked porcelain of the toilet seat and traced over the graffiti decorating the stall’s walls. The music from the bar drifted in under the bathroom’s door. Someone had selected the entirety of ABBA’s second album on the jukebox, and the impossibly cheery notes provided an ironic soundtrack to her current breakdown. Light Swedish pop music shouldn’t be playing at this type of hole-in-the-wall, the one she’d chosen because the bouncer didn’t glance too closely at IDs. And because people who frequented it knew how to mind their own business.
Drunken, slurred shouts of “Waterloo” crashed into her brain, but she tuned it out as best she could, instead concentrating on the words littering the cool metal beneath her fingertips.
Susanna wuz here. Mary sux cock. Screw you chris. H+L 4evah.
All the classics.
She paused at one written in gold sparkly marker. She liked the glitter, the way that it was textured beneath her thumb. But the words themselves were what stopped her. They would probably be scraped off or covered up in the next night or so. But for now, they were here.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
It was signed with two x’s. Kisses. Or hugs. She could never remember which was which. She imagined what the girl would have looked like, hunched and bent finding a blank space among the poorly spelled insults and declarations of love. Was she a poet? Why did she have a gold sparkly marker with her? Had she come in with the intent to destroy the very souls of the girls who would follow her in as they sat to pee?
It didn’t matter, Clarke told herself, shaking off the image of a Goth with a pixie cut and mischief in her eyes. As if she could predict Clarke would sit here running her thumb over the words over and over again. At the broken places.
Her breath hitched, and she dropped her head in between her legs.
What did that make her? she wondered. Strong? Had the world broken her? She didn’t want it to have. But she knew the truth. It had broken her. And she wasn’t strong in those broken places. She wasn’t fooling anyone that she was.
She saw it in their eyes. Those around her who called themselves her friends and family but didn’t act like it. Not in the way she desperately needed. She saw the hesitation, the delicacy in which they couched the words they spoke to her. The pauses where nervous breath spilled over chapped lips, and fretful tongues darted out to wet the cracks, not able to form sentences for fear she might tumble over the edge if the sentiments were wrong.
There was only one person who might get mad, who might yell, and he wasn’t here. Or not enough, even though she knew she could call him and he would come.
She didn’t know if she could handle that. Because, yes, maybe he’d get mad and tell her so. But far more likely he’d just be disappointed in her. It always seemed to lurk there behind his eyes, the disappointment.
“You’re so smart, kid,” he’d told her one time. She hated when he’d called her “kid.” She wasn’t a kid. She’d been through enough of life to never be a kid again. He knew it, too. But she’d warmed at the words anyway.
She couldn’t remember anyone else telling her she was smart, worth something. They told her she was nice. That she was a good girl. That she was polite. But they hadn’t told her she could do something with her life. He had. He wanted her to do so much with it. As if it meant something. As if it weren’t already completely ruined.
She pushed the thought of him away because it was too sharp and she was too raw.
Her fingers tucked into the pocket of her jeans, searching. The bite of the sharp metal edge against her soft pads startled her more than it should. She sat up, scooching her hips down so that she could pull the razor out without causing further damage.
Clarke held the blade in her palm. It was so small, nestled into the little lined crater there. It immediately made her heart rate steady. She’d been feeling like her synapses would just not stop firing, and then she held the cool little piece of metal, and they seemed to calm immediately. The manic fire that had burned in her brain was about to be doused. And that was one real and true thing she could count on.
The fingers of her free hand worked at the button of her jeans until she was able to push the fabric down over her hips. She ran a hand over the jagged little scars that decorated her upper thigh. They were her talismans. The white ridges, the pink ones. They made the pain go away. She would lay her lips on each one of them in thanks if she could make her body bend that way.
Her breath quickened as she brought the tip of the blade against her soft, pale skin. The relief at the first burst of blood streamed through her veins, releasing the tension in her shoulders, her neck, her clavicle, her stomach, her toes. Each piece of her relaxed into the bite of the wound as she drew the razor down the length of her thigh.
She wanted to cry out, not because of the pain but from the intense rush from the high that swept through her. It was better than any of the drugs she’d tried in the past few years. And she’d chased enough highs to rate them.
Clarke pressed into the cut, which was only leaking blood now. It wasn’t enough. The hand that had been holding her spine in its steel grasp all evening was back, working its way toward her throat. She clutched at the skin there now, terrified of the feeling of suffocation she knew was only a whisper away.
When she curled her hand around the razor, its sharp bits cut into her palm. She flipped her hand over so that it was resting on her freshly cut leg, wrist up. She plucked at the blue veins there with her fingers, like they were guitar strings. Her skin puckered and pulled back to its normal state when she was finished with the machinations.
Sam would be disappointed with her. But he always was. If that was her only reason not to do it, well, he’d be better off without her in his life anyway. Screwing it up. Calling him at three in the morning, sobbing.
She dug the blade into the delicate skin right below the heel of her hand. She bit her lip to keep from crying out from the relief. She went deeper than she usually did. Then switched to the other side. The deep red pulsed with each beat of her heart. Her eyes were pulled to the glittery gold words that shimmered in and out of her vision. She blinked the tears away so the words would become clear again. She needed to see them. She needed to see them.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Her breath caught on a sob, and she stood. Black dots swam in front of her, but she pushed them away. She yanked up her jeans from where they’d pooled around her knees, ignoring the bloody trail she was leaving behind. The wounds had not stopped weeping.
She managed to get the door open and rushed past a startled girl swinging into the bathroom.
“Oy.” Then, “Hey, are you okay?” followed her down the poorly lit hallway. She ignored both as she steadied herself with one hand against the flyer-papered wall. She collapsed against the phone booth but was able to dig enough change out of her pocket. With shaking fingers, she slid the coins into the machine and dialed the numbers she might as well have had tattooed on the back of her eyelids.
It rang. And again. She almost hung up after the third one. But then she heard his voice.
The word caught in her throat. She panicked as she tried to make her tongue work even as it sat damp and heavy at the bottom of her mouth. He was going to hang up, her mind screamed at her. She pinched herself hard, and the little bolt of pain was enough.
“He
lp.”
The next hours were a blur of shapes and colors and sounds. Of brusque hands reaching for her, of flickering fluorescent lights, of that familiar alcoholic burn in her nostrils, of the quiet beeping of medical equipment. She feigned sleep as long as she thought she could get away with it. Then Sam shifted in the chair beside her hospital bed. She peeked at him beneath one lowered lid.
“You scared me, kid,” Sam said, and she could hear the emotion there. He didn’t always let it show. Almost never, really. He was the strong constant in her life. But he was scared. Her skin was oversensitive from it.
“It got too much for a second there,” she admitted.
“You’re supposed to call me when that happens.”
“I did call you.”
They were both silent, maybe both grateful that she had.
“Kid, this can’t happen again,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. She wanted to look away but didn’t.
“I know.” Gone was every defense mechanism she usually employed. She was completely stripped down and raw and hurting, and she had messed up and she knew it.
“No.” He scooted forward, his hands clasped together, forearms resting on the tops of his legs. She’d rarely seen him this intense. “That’s not good enough. This can’t happen again.”
She couldn’t promise. She tried. Even though she wanted to, she couldn’t. She just looked back at him.
“It doesn’t have to be forever.” Sam’s eyes flicked over her face, searching for something. She didn’t know what. “Today. All you have to make it through is today.”
She narrowed her eyes, because she knew him too well. “All the ‘todays’?”
Smirking, he saluted her with his coffee cup. “When tomorrow becomes today, you’ll make it through that one, too.”
“In perpetuity,” she said, without the bitterness the promise usually would have made her feel. Maybe it was the memory of that graffiti that was forever burned into the back of her eyelids. Strong at the broken places.
She could be strong. If only for today.
She nodded slowly, just one tip of the chin down, but Sam relaxed completely, melting back into the chair.
It Ends With Her Page 13
