As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  “You guys should still go,” Pip said. Please go.

  “But you’re not well,” her mom said. “I should stay and take care of you.”

  Pip shook her head. “Honestly, I haven’t thrown up in a while now. I think it’s over. I just want to get some sleep. Really. I want you guys to go.” She watched her mom’s eyes flicker as she considered. “And just think about how annoying Josh will be if you don’t go.”

  Her mom smiled, tapped Pip under the chin, and Pip hoped she hadn’t felt the way it had quivered. “Can’t argue with you there. You sure you’ll be OK, though? Maybe I can get Ravi to come check in on you.”

  “Mom, really, I’m OK. I’m just going to sleep. Day-sleeping. Practicing for college.”

  “OK. Well, let me at least get you a glass of water.”

  Her dad had to come in as well, of course, after being told she wasn’t well and not coming.

  “Oh no, not my little pickle,” he said, sitting beside her and making the entire bed sink, Pip almost rolling onto his lap because there was no strength left in her. “You look terrible. Soldier down?”

  “Soldier down,” she replied.

  “Drink lots of water,” he said. “Plain food only, even though it pains me to say that. Plain toast, rice.”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad.”

  “OK. Mom says you lost your phone, and apparently you told me that last night, but I remember no such thing. I’ll call the landline in a few hours, check you’re still alive.”

  He was about to walk out her door.

  “Wait!” Pip sat up, scrabbling against the comforter. He hesitated at the threshold. “Love you, Dad,” she said quietly, because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d said it, and she was still alive.

  A grin broke across his face.

  “What do you want from me?” he laughed. “My wallet’s in the other room.”

  “No, nothing,” she said. “I was just saying.”

  “Ah, well, I’ll just say it too, then. Love you, pickle.”

  Pip waited until they left, the sound of the car peeling up the drive, cracking the curtains to watch as they drove away.

  Then, with the very last of her strength, she pushed herself up and stumbled across the room, feet dragging beneath her. Picked up the damp sneakers she’d hidden back in her backpack, and the two burner phones.

  Three boxes left to check; she could do this, crawling toward that finish line, the Ravi in her head telling her that she could make it. She slipped the back cover off her burner phone. Pulled out the battery and the SIM card. Snapped the small plastic card between her thumbs, through the middle of the chip, just as she’d done with Jason’s. Carried it all downstairs.

  Into the garage, to her dad’s tool kit. She replaced his duct tape roll with another “Fucking duct tape” under her breath. Then she picked up his drill, pressing the trigger to watch the head spin for a moment, twisting the particles of air. She drove it through the small Nokia phone that used to live in her drawer, right through the screen, shattering it, black plastic scattering around the new hole. And again, to the phone that had belonged to the DT Killer.

  One black garbage bag for the sneakers, tied up tight. Another for the SIM cards and batteries. Another for the small smashed-up burner phones.

  Pip grabbed her jacket, hanging on the rack by the front door, slipped on her mom’s shoes, even though they didn’t fit.

  It was still early; hardly anyone was out and about town yet. Pip stumbled down the road with the garbage bags in one hand, holding the jacket tight around her with the other. She could see Mrs. Yardley up ahead, walking their dog. Pip turned the other way.

  The moon was gone, the sun trapped behind the clouds, so Pip had to guide herself, but there was something wrong with her eyes, the world moving strangely around her, stuttering, like it hadn’t loaded completely.

  So tired. Her body close to giving up on her. She couldn’t really pick up her feet, only shuffle, tripping on the edges of the sidewalk.

  Up on West Way, Pip picked a random house: number thirteen. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so random. To the garbage cans at the end of their drive, the one for general waste. Pip opened it and checked there were already garbage bags inside. Then she pulled the top one out, a waft of something rotten, and placed the bag with the sneakers underneath, burying it under the other trash.

  To Monroe, the road where Howie Bowers had lived. Pip walked up to his house, though it could no longer be his house, and she opened the garbage can, shoving in the bag holding the SIM cards and batteries.

  The last bag, the Nokia 8210 and some other kind of Nokia, with holes drilled through their middles, Pip put that in the garbage can outside that nice house on Weevil Road, the one with the red tree in the front yard that Pip liked.

  She smiled up at that tree as she checked off the final box in her head. The entire night of them, done, now falling to pieces inside her mind.

  The garbage was collected on Tuesdays. Pip knew that because every Monday evening her mom would call through the house: “Oh Victor, you’ve forgotten to take the garbage cans out!”

  In two days, the burner phones and those sneakers would find themselves on the way to a landfill, disappeared along with everything else.

  She was free of them, and she was done.

  Pip returned home, tripping through the front door as her legs tried to give out under her. She was shaking now, shaking and shivering and maybe this is just what bodies did, in the aftermath of a night like that, destroyed by the adrenaline that had kept them going when they most needed to.

  But there was no more doing. No more going.

  Pip fell across her bed, too weak to even get her head to the pillows. Here would do, here was comfortable and safe and still.

  The plan was over, for now. On pause.

  There wasn’t anything more Pip could do. In fact, she was supposed to do nothing, live life as though she had just gone out for junk food with her friends and then to bed, nothing else. Call Ravi from the landline later to tell him about her lost cell phone, so there was a record of that conversation, because of course she hadn’t seen him. Go replace the phone on Monday.

  Just live. And wait.

  No googling his name. No driving by the house just to see. No impatiently refreshing the news sites. That’s what a killer would do, and Pip couldn’t be one of those.

  The news would come in its own time. Jason Bell found dead. Homicide.

  Until then, she just had to live, see if she remembered how to.

  Her eyes fell closed, breaths deepening in her hollowed-out chest, as a new darkness crept in, disappearing her.

  Pip finally slept.

  Pip waited.

  The raw skin started to heal on her face and around her wrists, and she waited.

  It didn’t come on Monday, Pip sitting on the sofa while the nightly news was on, her mom shouting over it to remind her dad to take the trash out.

  It didn’t come Tuesday either. Pip had MSNBC on in the background all day while she set up her replacement phone. Nothing. No bodies found. Kept it on even when Ravi came round in the evening, talking with haunted looks in their eyes and brief touches of their hands because they couldn’t use words. Not until they were behind the closed door of her bedroom.

  Had they not found him? That was impossible: the fire, the blood. Surely employees at Green Scene must know, they must have been told something was wrong, why they couldn’t go in to work, the fire, the crime scene. Pip could just look them up—

  No. She couldn’t look anything up. That would leave a trace, a trail.

  She just had to wait, fight that impulse to know. It would get her caught.

  Sleep was difficult; what had she expected? She had nothing to take, and maybe she needed it even more now, because every time she closed her eyes she was
scared they’d never reopen again, that they were taped down, and so was her mouth when she tried to breathe. Gunshot heartbeats. It was only the exhaustion that ever settled her.

  “Hello, sleepy,” Pip’s mom said to her Wednesday morning, as she made her way unsteadily downstairs, skipping the third one down out of habit now. “Couple of my showings canceled this morning, so I’ve made us coffee and breakfast.”

  Pancakes.

  Pip sat at the kitchen island and took a deep sip of her coffee, too hot in her still-ragged throat.

  “I’m going to miss you when you go off to college, you know,” her mom said, sitting across from her.

  “You’ll still see me all the time,” Pip said around a mouthful—not hungry, but she wanted to make her mom happy.

  “I know, but it’s not quite the same, is it? So grown-up now, time goes like that.” She snapped her fingers, glancing down at her phone as it pinged from its place on the counter. “That’s weird,” she said, picking it up. “Siobhan from work just texted me, telling me to put on the news.”

  Pip’s chest closed around her heart, filling her head with the sound of cracking ribs. Her neck too cold, her face too warm. This was it, wasn’t it? What else could Siobhan mean? She kept her face neutral, digging her fork through the pancakes to have something to do with her hands. “Why?” she said casually, watching her mom’s downturned face.

  “She just said put it on, I don’t know. Maybe something’s happened at the school.” Her mom dropped from the chair and hurried out into the living room.

  Pip waited for one moment, then two, trying to breathe down the panic rising up inside. This was it, the moment it all became real, and not real; she had to put on a show and do it right, perform for her life. She put down her fork and followed her mom.

  The remote was already in her mom’s hands, the TV ticking on. Straight on MSNBC, where Pip had left it last night.

  A newscaster, cut in half by the scrolling text at the bottom.

  Breaking News.

  A crease in her brow as she spoke to the camera.

  “…in Connecticut, a town that has had more than its fair share of tragedy. Six years ago, two teenagers—Andie Bell and Sal Singh—died in what has since become one of the most talked-about true crime cases in the country. And earlier this year, a man confirmed to have been Child Brunswick, who had been living in Fairview under the name Stanley Forbes, was shot and killed. The suspect, Charlie Green, was only arrested and charged last week. And here we are now, this same small town in the news again with confirmation today from local police that resident Jason Bell, the father of Andie Bell, has been found dead.”

  A gasp from her mom, mouth open in horror. Pip mirrored the look on her face, shared it with her.

  “Police are treating his death as suspicious and gave a statement outside Fairview Police Station a short while ago.”

  The shot cut away from the newsroom to a bright outside scene with a gray sky and a graying building behind that Pip knew too well. The bad, bad place.

  A podium had been set up in the parking lot, a microphone reaching out the top, swaying slightly in the wind.

  He was standing behind it, clean shirt, crisp suit jacket, his green padded one clearly deemed inappropriate for press conferences.

  Detective Hawkins cleared his throat. “Today we sadly confirm that Jason Bell, aged forty-eight, a resident of Fairview, was found dead early Sunday morning. His body was found at his place of work, at a company he owned based in Weston. We are investigating Jason’s death as a homicide, and I cannot comment any further on the details of the case, as this investigation is still in the early stages. We are appealing for any witnesses who were in the area south of Devil’s Den Nature Preserve late Saturday evening, particularly in the vicinity of Woodside Lane, and may have seen anything suspicious.”

  No witnesses, Pip thought, telling him with her eyes through the glass of the TV screen. No one near to hear her screams. And that other thing: late Saturday evening, that’s what he’d said, wasn’t it? But what time did that mean? That could mean anything, really, from seven, or maybe even earlier, depending on who you asked. The term was too loose, too vague. She still couldn’t know if they’d pulled it off.

  “Any questions?” Hawkins paused, looked past the camera. “Yes,” he pointed at someone.

  A voice off-screen: “How was he killed?”

  Hawkins stretched out his face. “You know I cannot tell you that. It’s an active investigation.”

  Hammer to the head, Pip answered in her mind. Hit at least nine times. Overkill. An angry, angry death.

  “This is awful,” her mom said, hands clasped around her face.

  Pip nodded.

  A different voice behind the camera: “Has this got any connection with the death of his daughter Andie?”

  Hawkins studied the man for a second. “Andie Bell died tragically more than six years ago, and her case was brought to resolution last year. I was personally in charge of the investigation when she went missing. I have a connection with the Bell family, and I promise I will find out what happened to Jason—who killed him. Thank you.”

  Hawkins stepped back from the podium with a curt wave of his hand, the shot cutting back to the newsroom.

  “Terrible, terrible,” Pip’s mom said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it. That poor family. Jason Bell dead. Murdered.” She turned to look at Pip, hardening her face. “No,” she said firmly, raising one finger.

  Pip didn’t know what she’d done wrong with her face. Jason Bell deserved to be dead, but her mom couldn’t tell that from her face, right? “What?” she asked her.

  “I can tell exactly what that glint in your eye is, Pip. You are not getting obsessed with this. You are not going to start looking into this.”

  Pip looked back at the TV and shrugged.

  Except that’s exactly what she was going to do.

  It’s what she would do, if this really were the first time she was hearing about it. This is what she did: investigate. Drawn to dead people, missing people, chasing the why and how. It was expected, normal. And Pip had to act normal, in the way people expected.

  The final part of the plan was kicking in, rehashed over and over in tense whispers with Ravi last night. Interfere, but don’t interfere too much. Guide, don’t lead.

  The police had their killer. They just had to know where to look for him.

  Pip could give them a nudge in the right direction, to find the person behind all that evidence she’d left for them. She had the perfect, expected, normal way to do it. Her podcast.

  A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Season 3: Who Killed Jason Bell?

  And she knew exactly who to interview first.

  Pip’s face in the near-dark, underlit by the ghostly glow of her laptop, shadows like bruises around her eyes. A voice in her ears, Jackie from the café, and her own, in an interview recorded yesterday, Cara murmuring in the background. It went perfectly: Pip pushing her just the right amount, to get her to say what she needed her to say, sentences dancing around each other and silences that were full of meaning. The way Jackie’s voice hissed between her teeth as she spoke Max’s name, the hairs rising up the back of Pip’s neck.

  She listened to it again, in the dead of night, an old pair of white earphones plugged into her laptop. Josh must have stolen her black headphones again to play FIFA, but that was OK; he could take whatever he wanted from her. Just a week ago she thought she’d never see him again, thought she’d become the ghost he tried not to think about. He could take whatever he wanted, and Pip would love him back twice as hard.

  She studied the spiking blue lines on her audio software, the erratic picture of her own voice, firm when it needed to be, quiet when it should, up and down, mountains and valleys. She isolated a clip and copied it into a new file.

  Pip imagined Haw
kins listening to these same words in a couple of days, imagined him snapping to attention, pushing out of his chair as this out-of-time Pip pulled the strings. The same Pip he’d find grinning in the security footage from McDonald’s if he ever needed to look. Pip couldn’t include Max’s name—Hawkins would have to go find it himself—but she was showing him exactly where to look.

  Follow the trail, Hawkins. The path of least resistance was right here, he just had to follow it, as he had once followed it to Sal Singh. Pip was making it so easy for him. All he had to do was follow, step into the world she was creating just for him.

  File Name:

  Teaser for AGGGTM Season 3: Who Killed Jason Bell?.wav

  [Jingle plays]

  [Insert clip]

  NEWSCASTER: Fairview […] a town that has had more than its fair share of tragedy […] confirmation today from local police that resident Jason Bell, the father of Andie Bell, has been found dead […] police are treating his death as suspicious […]

  [End clip]

  [Insert sound file of police siren]

  PIP: Hi, my name is Pip Fitz-Amobi, and I live in a small town. Over six years ago, two teenagers were killed in this small town. A few months ago, a man was shot dead in this small town. There’s that saying, isn’t there? That things always come in threes, even murder. One small town and this week we learned that someone else is dead.

  [Insert clip]

  DETECTIVE HAWKINS: Jason Bell […] a resident of Fairview, was found dead early Sunday morning […]

  [End clip]

  PIP: Jason Bell, the father of Andie and Becca Bell, was found dead at his place of work in a nearby town last week.

  [Insert clip]

  DETECTIVE HAWKINS: We are investigating Jason’s death as a homicide […]

  [End clip]

  PIP: It wasn’t an accident, or a natural death. Someone killed him, but beyond that, very few details of the case are as yet known. It appears the murder took place on the evening of August fifteenth, judging by information police have released when appealing for witnesses in the area. Jason was found at his place of work, a grounds-maintenance and cleaning company he owned called Green Scene and Clean Scene Limited. That’s it. We might not know much, except one thing: there’s a killer out there, and someone needs to catch them. Join us for a new season as we attempt to piece together this case alongside the active police investigation. Someone killed him, so someone wanted him dead, and there must be a trail somewhere. People talk in a small town. And there’s been a lot of talk over the last week—the town is practically cracking open with whispered secrets and furtive glances. Most isn’t worth listening to, but there is some that cannot be ignored.