If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  “I could have told Bobby about how you and Liam broke into the Schwartzes’ house, and I didn’t.”

  “I thought maybe you didn’t remember me.”

  “Oh no, I remembered.”

  “Okay.”

  “So obviously I’m not going to tell your teachers you cut class.”

  Ryan gave her a weak smile. “Thanks.”

  Pearl unlocked the passenger-side door. “Get in.” She said it like an order. “Warm up.”

  He opened the door and slid into the front seat, dragging the cold air in with him. He blew on his fingers and clasped his hands between his knees and sniffled, his shoulders shaking.

  “Amazing how much things can change in a few hours,” Pearl said.

  His back stiffened. “Huh?”

  “It was warmer this morning.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  Ryan wouldn’t look at her. Pearl studied his profile, the tension in it. Back at the police academy, she’d taken a course called verbal judo, which was just a catchy name for questioning techniques. When talking to anyone—witness, suspect, suicide threat—reading body language was key, and the idea was finding a way to balance it. If the subject was keyed up, for instance, your aim was to calm him down. If he was calm and cocky, you wanted to scare him a little. But Ryan was hard to read. Plus, he wasn’t a suspect or a witness or a suicide threat. He was a kid who had slept through the last text his best friend would ever send. How do you get information out of that kid? Pearl had no idea, so she just asked him flat out. “Would you happen to know what ‘SL’ stands for?”

  “Umm . . . Am I supposed to?”

  She watched his face, and then his hands grasping each other. “Liam had a folder of videos in his phone,” she said.

  “He had tons of folders,” he said. “He’d been collecting videos for years.”

  “Right,” she said. “But this folder had only three videos in it. And one of them was of the carjacking. The folder was called ‘SL.’”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “But how would I know what that means?”

  “Because you shot one of the videos,” she said.

  “I did?”

  “Liam’s dive. The Schwartzes’ pool. You were holding his phone and taking the video.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “The other one was Liam drinking in the cemetery.”

  He looked at her blankly. She pressed on. “So you understand, right? This tiny folder, just three videos in it. In two of them Liam’s misbehaving. Then the third . . . You ever do that thing in school where your teacher gives you three different-looking pictures and you try and figure out what they all have in common?” She forced out a laugh. “I guess that’s more something you do in kindergarten.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyway . . .”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “‘SL.’ What do you think? Is it a club or something? You have a friend with those initials?”

  “I don’t think so.” He shifted around so he was facing the window again, shoulders slumped, shrinking into the seat. Pearl watched him, waiting for him to say more, but he stayed silent. She wished she could read his thoughts.

  “I’m just asking,” she said, “because we’re trying to figure out who killed Liam. And I know you want to help.”

  Ryan turned to her. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days and maybe he hadn’t. As sad as he’d looked at the police station, there was something else in his eyes now—anger and exhaustion and something that burned. “You guys know who killed Liam,” he said. “Bobby knows. Everybody knows who killed Liam.”

  She stared at him. “Do you, Ryan? Do you know?”

  His eyes clouded. “Doesn’t matter. He’s gone. He died a hero. And now he’s dead and nothing will ever be like it was, ever again.”

  “I agree with all of that,” she said, slowly, “except the part about it not mattering.”

  A tear slipped down his cheek. “May I leave the car now, please?”

  “Yes, of course,” Pearl said. “Just wait one sec.” She pulled a Kleenex out of the box she kept in the front seat, handed it to him, along with a business card. It had her name on it, plus the number of the Havenkill Police. She’d written her cell phone number as well. She kept a few of them around like that. She knew the sergeant wasn’t a fan of her giving out personal information, but this was Havenkill, and a lot of people would rather call a cell phone than a police station, especially kids. “Call me if you hear anything,” she said. “Or if you just want to talk.”

  Another tear fell down his cheek, and he swatted at it with the Kleenex. Then he opened the door and walked back down the path and into the park, Pearl watching him until she couldn’t see him anymore. He knows what ‘SL’ is. He just doesn’t want to say.

  Pearl pulled away from the curb. She drove in silence for a few blocks, an image in her mind—Ryan and Liam sitting next to each other at the Schwartzes’ pool as they waited for their parents to show up, exchanging a quick look, a smile . . .

  Nothing will ever be like it was, Pearl thought. And then her radio sprung to life, Sergeant Black summoning her to the high school to assist in searching a student’s locker.

  THE STUDENT WAS Wade Reed. Pearl hurried down the hallway to the principal’s office, weaving through throngs of students just leaving class, many following her out of curiosity and milling outside the office, straining to hear what was going on. And there was much going on, much to hear. “I didn’t do anything!” from behind the principal’s closed door, hoarse and angry. “This isn’t fair!”

  She opened the door to find Udel and Tally on either side of Wade, gripping him by the shoulders as he thrashed about, Sergeant Black standing in front of them, telling him to calm down. “Listen,” he kept saying, “Listen to me. If there’s nothing in your locker, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You aren’t allowed to look in my locker.” Wade looked directly at Pearl. “He isn’t, is he? Doesn’t he need a warrant?”

  “He doesn’t need a warrant,” said the principal, a tall, balding man in horn-rimmed glasses. “Your locker is technically considered school property, not private property.” He looked at the sergeant. “Am I right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Let go of me,” Wade said.

  “Take it easy.” It was Tally, and he looked irritated. Udel, on the other hand, looked flat-out angry, his grip too tight on Wade’s arm, his face twisted up and red.

  “Let’s all try and be calm,” said Pearl, more to Udel than anyone else.

  Tally and Udel led Wade out of the office, Pearl filing in behind the sergeant. “What’s this about?” she whispered.

  “We got a call on the tip line.”

  As they passed, the throng in the hallway went silent. Though Pearl did hear whispers: “Murderer . . .” “Crazy . . .” “Worships the devil . . .”

  She kept her eyes on the back of Wade’s hanging head, his frail neck and narrow shoulders, submitting to the grip on them, falling into it, with Tally and Udel practically holding him up. “Don’t drag your feet,” Tally said.

  When they finally reached Wade’s locker, which was on the bottom row, Sergeant Black said, “Officer Maze,” and so she slipped thin evidence gloves out of her pocket, put them on and knelt down to open the locker. As the principal read off the combination, Wade kept saying, “Please,” and “No,” and “This isn’t fair,” over and over, to the point where Pearl thought maybe she’d been too kind to him, maybe he did have something to hide. When she turned the lock to the final number and opened it, the first thing she saw was a stack of sketches. And when she put her hand on them, Wade made a noise as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

  “What’s in there?” someone said behind her, which made her notice they had an audience. “Back up, please,” she said to a girl leaning over her shoulder, so close she could feel her breath. “Please step away.” She flipped through the sketch
es—five nudes, all of the same woman, her face erased in each. Pearl looked up at Wade. His face was red.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  “Who’s that?” a girl said.

  “Probably one of his victims,” said another.

  “Perv,” replied a boy’s deepening voice.

  Pearl glanced up at the principal, who said nothing.

  “Be quiet,” Pearl said to the boy. “If you are going to stay here, you aren’t allowed to say or think a goddamned word.”

  The principal frowned at her, and Pearl went back to the locker. She wasn’t quite sure where that had come from, but honestly, she didn’t care. She had no tolerance for name-calling from these rich little bastards, one of whom had no doubt slashed Wade’s tires.

  She lifted a stack of books out of the locker, and noticed the glint of a plastic bag, wedged into the back corner, under several sheets of lined paper. She lifted it out. Oh, Wade, she thought. Why . . .

  There were more than a dozen pill bottles inside. Alprazolam, hydrocodone, clonazepam. Clorazepate, chlordiazepoxide. Pain pills and benzos, just as Amy had described. “Like a pharmacy,” she’d said. And indeed, each bottle bore a prescription label, each with a different name, each label from CVS. She looked up at Wade.

  He stared at the bag, his jaw dropped open. “No,” he whispered.

  Pearl handed it to the sergeant.

  “Bingo,” said Udel.

  Tally said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to take you in.”

  Wade’s voice came back. “That isn’t mine!” he shouted. “I swear to God! I’ve never seen those before!”

  He struggled to get away, but Tally and Udel held him back.

  “Anything else in there, Officer Maze?” the sergeant said.

  But Pearl couldn’t answer right away. She felt cold and motionless—frozen, down to her blood.

  “Officer Maze?”

  It had been placed beneath the bag of pills and now it sparkled out at her—a ring, adorned with a yellow citrine heart. She plucked it out of the locker and held it up, high enough for Wade to see.

  “What is that?” the sergeant said.

  Pearl turned to Sergeant Black, putting Wade behind her. “This is Amy Nathanson’s ring,” she said. “She lost it when she was fighting with the carjacker.”

  FIND THE GIRL, Jackie told herself. Find the girl, as she arrived home, headed straight down the hall and pushed open Wade’s closed door, without thinking about it, his privacy no longer important, not now with his whole life at stake and Wade too dumb or too in love or too much of both to understand that.

  As ever, the room was a mess. The first thing she noticed was that the dress shirt she’d folded and placed on his bed two days ago had been unbuttoned, turned inside out, and tossed to the floor. She checked the pocket, but the box was no longer in it. Wade had gotten rid of the T necklace—proof that he was still thinking about her. He’d disposed of evidence of her as recently as yesterday. It made Jackie even firmer in her belief that Wade had been with her, or at least he’d been trying to be with her, the night Liam had been killed. Find the girl.

  There had to be more evidence.

  Wade’s phone was gone, but his laptop was on his unmade bed. Jackie yanked it off the bed, flipped it open, went to Google, and opened his search history. He clearly hadn’t erased it in a long time. Jackie saw searches for figures and events from seventeenth-century history, a course he’d taken last year, SparkNotes for books that had been required summer reading, porn . . . Jackie ignored that. She skimmed the list and found nothing helpful, though his most recent search choked her up: art scholarships + college.

  Jackie exhaled. She opened up his e-mail—most all of it junk, college and pharmaceutical spam in equal measures. She saw several assignments from his SAT prep teacher, all of them unopened, and gritted her teeth. Don’t get angry. Don’t get distracted. Find the girl. She looked for his Facebook icon, but it was no longer on his desktop. And when she went onto Facebook and logged on as herself, her heart dropped. He’d deleted his account. Who could blame him, what with that awful video from the parking lot, those cruel, hateful comments? She folded up the laptop, thinking, What now . . . where to go now . . . and spotted three spiral notebooks stacked up under his bed. Had he been keeping journals? She went for them, hoping with all her heart that he had.

  They weren’t journals. They were notebooks for classes. And they weren’t even from this year. Jackie wanted to punch a wall. Great. But she opened the most recent one anyway—an English notebook from the previous spring—just to see his handwriting. Wade had always had the most beautiful handwriting.

  Jackie ran her hand down the page, losing herself in the carefully formed block letters, the pristine O’s and the sharp-edged A’s. It was the handwriting of an artist, an architect, each letter perfect and complete. The notebook was from last April, around the same time he’d texted with Rafe Burgess about English assignments, Jackie remembered, and really the last time he’d seemed to truly care about a class. Mrs. Crawford. That was the teacher’s name. He used to talk about her. Well, as much as Wade ever talked about anyone.

  She flipped the page, reading his words. “Creative Writing assignment: Imagine yourself in the same situation as the Count of Monte Cristo . . . Spark word: Revenge . . .” Jackie looked at the date at the top of the page: “April 2,” and wished it could pull her back in time. Had he known the girl then, before the Summer of Odd Jobs? Had she been in this English class as he took notes? Jackie flipped another page, her eyes starting to blur and burn, her throat clenching up. What was she expecting out of a class notebook? What was wrong with her?

  She flipped to the very last page: “Spark word: Devotion.” Jackie’s gaze shifted from his notes to a doodle on the inside of the cardboard notebook cover. A girl’s face in profile, the faintest of sketches. Below it, one word, written with a calligrapher’s care: “Tristesse.”

  Jackie read it and reread it—tristesse, the French word meaning “sadness,” but Wade had no interest in languages. He’d flunked Spanish last year.

  Tristesse.

  Jackie closed the notebook. She placed all three of them back under the bed. A spark had ignited within her, the slightest hint of hope. And if she could only breathe on it, if she could turn it into a flame and then a raging fire . . . Tristesse, French for sadness, began with the letter T. It also happened to be Stacy Davies’s full first name.

  JACKIE HAD NO idea what Helen’s work schedule was like this week, but when she arrived at Helen’s house, she saw her car outside and took it as proof that the tide was turning. She could save Wade.

  She only had to ring Helen’s doorbell once too, before her friend answered the door wearing sweats and no makeup or contacts, her hair tied up in a ponytail, squinting at her from behind cute coed glasses. “Oh Jackie,” she said. “I’m so sorry about the communication breakdown. I did call Garrett, but his secretary apparently never gave him the message and—”

  “It’s okay,” Jackie said. “Can I come in, please?”

  “Sure, honey, sure.” She stepped aside.

  Jackie hadn’t been in Helen’s house since the boys were little, and it had been remodeled completely since then: polished wood floors, an enormous abstract statue in sleek pink marble, a colorful, expensive-looking throw rug that made her think of that Iggy Pop song she and Helen and Rachel used to sing in high school: “Here comes my Chinese rug . . .” It was like walking through a familiar door into a completely new house, and it took her a few minutes to get her bearings.

  “Hey, how did everything work out at the police station? I haven’t had a chance to speak to Garrett.”

  “He’s not taking the case.”

  Helen’s face fell. “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Look. Stacy’s been hostile to Wade.”

  “She has? I’m sorry. She can be so thoughtless. I’ll get her to apologize.”

  “No,” Jackie said. “No, hone
y, that isn’t why I’m telling you.”

  Helen frowned at her. “Come on into the living room.”

  Jackie followed her through to a room with beamed ceilings, Mexican tile floors, a bright bay window, and a buttery leather couch. Helen sat down on the couch and motioned for Jackie to do the same. “Can I get you anything?” she said.

  Jackie was starting to get frustrated. “I just need you to listen to me.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I think Stacy has been hostile to Wade because there’s been something going on between them.”

  “What?”

  “Helen, I think Wade is in love with Stacy and she doesn’t feel the same anymore. I think he’s been with her in the past, and he was with her the night Liam was killed and for some bizarre reason he’s refusing to tell anyone.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe she’s just embarrassed. I know how all the kids feel about him. But you have to tell her to let it go. Talk to the police. This is my son’s life, Helen . . . He refuses to say a word.”

  Helen stared at her, concern flooding her features. “Honey, Stacy wasn’t with Wade that night. She was here. Home. Sleeping.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She had SATs the next morning. Ryan Grant picked her up and took her there. They’ve been seeing each other, sort of. Stacy doesn’t hang out with Wade.”

  “You saw her in the morning,” Jackie said, very slowly. “But did you see her in the middle of the night?”

  “Well, no. Of course not . . .”

  “We don’t know what our kids do in the middle of the night, Helen. Trust me. They have these entire lives we know nothing about.”

  “Jackie. You’re scaring me.” Helen stared at her, and for a moment, Jackie could see herself how her friend did, how little sense she was making, how scant and sad her evidence was.

  “He wrote her name in his book,” she said weakly. “He wrote ‘Tristesse.’”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Jackie said. “I . . . I think I’m grasping at straws. Not thinking things through.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Can I use your bathroom?”