The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  Besides, my skeptical mind says that if she searches that cave in the desert and finds nada, maybe she’ll start realizing she can’t trust her visions. It’s the only option that seems both harmless and potentially effective.

  “Plan Three wins,” I say. “Hands down. You think so, too, right? That’s why you’re planning this trip to Albuquerque. To find that cave.”

  “Exactly.” She nods eagerly. “The B-and-B I wrote to—I still can’t believe you hacked my e-mail, by the way; that was an unbelievably shitty thing to do—”

  “I know.” I spread my hands in surrender. “But you wouldn’t have told me anything otherwise.”

  “You practically blackmailed me—don’t brag about it. But I guess it felt good to tell somebody. So, anyway, the B-and-B is in this tiny town called Algodones. Close to the cave.”

  I nod, feeling a blush creep over my face. It felt good to tell somebody. I was right—Nina needs someone on her side. Maybe even needs me. “So you can just forget about this other plan, right?”

  And I point to the last item on her list:

  Plan Five: Kill him.

  What kind of girl invents a psychopath? And then makes plans that range from guilting him into walking the straight and narrow to gunning him down like the Man with No Name?

  This girl, who’s training her eyes on me—bronze irises, long lashes, the calligraphy strokes of her black brows. This girl with her delicate neck, her fragile wrists. She’s not tiny, but I could bring her down, and I’m well aware of my physical limitations.

  Nina couldn’t have abducted the Gustafssons by herself. Or could she? Sometimes unimposing people perform amazing feats—lift overturned cars, win marathons, kill their whole families with axes.

  Dylan Shadwell could have done it, easy. His Facebook pic shows him standing on a mountain summit in profile, tall and wiry-strong.

  But all I really know about Dylan Shadwell is that he happened to be in Schenectady that morning.

  “Plan Five is a last resort, yeah,” Nina is saying. “But, see, I’ve been…watching him since it happened.”

  I try not to let the doubt show on my face. Disbelief suspended.

  “He’s been watching the same news videos as you. He’s never had this much media attention. It gets him keyed up, knowing he’s the mystery man they all want, and then he can’t settle down. I think he’s already jonesing for the next kill. And I can’t just let it happen. If we’d been an hour earlier to the Gustafssons’ house…”

  If everything she told me is true, and we’d been an hour earlier, we might be dead, too. But I don’t say that, just let her keep talking:

  “A couple days ago, you were trying to make me feel like a piece of crap because I didn’t go to the police. Well, it worked.”

  That gives me a stab of guilt. “I just needed you to start talking to me.”

  “I did. I am.” Her gaze says, Now I’ve told you, will you try to stop me?

  “So you’re going to drive to Albuquerque and try Plan Three. And if it doesn’t work, Plan Five is on the table. Nuclear option.”

  Nina looks straight at me, no blinking. “Yes.”

  Is that why she asked me for a gun? I try not to show I’m rattled. “And you’re not worried about being arrested for the murder of a guy because you had psychic visions about him?”

  “It’s a last resort.”

  I swallow hard. Don’t pretend you believe her, but don’t flip out and tell her she’s nuts. That won’t help, and you’re here to help. “Your mom’s never going to let you take a huge road trip for no reason. Alone.”

  Nina’s face lights up like she’s back on solid ground—proud to tell me about her plans. “There is a reason. It’s a trip to find out where I came from.”

  I just stare at her.

  “My birth mom—I didn’t lie to you about being adopted. She lives in Arizona, close to the New Mexico border. We’ve been e-mailing. I did lie when I said my mom didn’t want me to see her. She’s cool with it, so I’ll arrange to visit Becca for five days—that’s her name, Becca Cantillo. My mom will think I’m staying for a week. The other two days, I’ll go to Algodones and check out the desert site.”

  She has planned this out. “That birth mom makes a pretty convenient excuse, huh?” I say.

  Nina doesn’t answer, her eyes following a car as it rambles down the quiet street.

  A slowing car—the Legacy I drove to Schenectady. “Shit, your mom?” I ask as it crunches into the driveway.

  “Why ‘shit’? My mom likes you.”

  “Oh-kay.” I can’t say that seeing her mom just reminds me of my earlier plan to call her up and spill everything about Nina. I kept quiet, and now I have to face Ms. Barrows right after hearing her daughter discuss killing a stranger in cold blood.

  I get up and make a show of brushing myself off to leave. “I have homework.”

  But before I can escape, Ms. Barrows opens the front door from inside, brandishing a giant pizza box and shouting, “I got us American Flatbread! Warren! I feel like it’s been years since you came around.”

  “It has.”

  We shake hands, Ms. Barrows looking me in the eye like a politician. She works at the statehouse, so she’s well aware of my dad and brothers, the town gadfly and the county pariahs, but she’s never seemed to hold them against me. “Why don’t you come in? We’ve got plenty to go around.”

  What the hell. Yes, it’s too late for me to tell Nina’s mom everything. But if I’m going to stop Nina from going to Albuquerque to kill someone, this woman is my best ally.

  “Sounds awesome,” I say. And become the perfect guest.

  I help set the table and pour the ice water and portion out the pizza—excuse me, the flatbread. Luckily, I’m hungry enough to act enthused about fancy pizza with smelly cheese and roasted parsnips.

  As we munch on the dense crust, the long blue dusk falls outside, and Nina’s mom turns on the lights. Their house feels quiet and neat, like a church or a funeral home, so I keep up my nervous jabbering, filling the silence, while Nina stares at her plate.

  Nina’s mom tells me to call her Kathleen instead of Ms. Barrows and asks how my dad’s campaigning for the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate is going. Nina looks bemused, then bored—she hates politics. But I don’t shut up.

  It’s my secret weapon: I’m good at talking to people’s moms. My dad and brothers rarely make it to the dinner table, so I’ve carved out my niche as the one who compliments Mom’s meat loaf and listens to her complain about the rude lady who runs the general store. And the truth is, I’d miss those dinners if I left home.

  My mom might miss them even more—which is why it’s an if for me, not a when.

  Nina just shakes her head as her mom and I debate the future of renewables. I’ve done my research, and Kathleen seems impressed.

  After about twenty minutes of enviro-geeking, with Nina looking the whole time like she wants to stick a fork in her gut, I manage to steer the conversation to the American Southwest.

  “How long till it’s basically an apocalyptic wasteland?” I say. “With the whole water shortage issue…”

  “Tell me about it,” Kathleen interrupts. “I lived near Phoenix for twelve years.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see the desert. It looks amazing on film.”

  “Everybody should see it at least once.”

  Before I can casually bring up the subject of Nina’s road-trip plan, Nina says, to my surprise, “Warren’s, like, a real filmmaker now. He made an amazing video for the Lonesome Chuckettes.”

  The Lonesome Chuckettes are a local girl band—Woodchuckettes, get it?—who sing sad country songs. I met one of them at the cable-access station where I get my cameras and mics, and she talked me into forty hours of free labor. Now she’s pestering me for a second video.

  “I’m just messing around,” I say, shaking my head. “I have to borrow most of my gear. Can’t even shoot DSLR yet.”

  “No, it’s really goo
d. He’s got almost four thousand hits on YouTube.”

  Maybe she’s trying to change the subject from Arizona, but I can’t help blushing. I never told Nina about the Chuckettes video. “That’s not really a lot,” I point out. “I’m planning another vid for them that’ll be way better.”

  And then I have an idea.

  “A ton of stuff gets filmed in New Mexico,” I say. “They’ve got tax incentives. I hear the film program at their state university is awesome.”

  Kathleen beams at me—maybe she’s relieved to know I’m college bound. “You should apply there! You are applying to film schools, aren’t you?”

  “Uh…of course.” It’s no time to bring up my leaving-home dilemma, so I turn to Nina. “If you go out to Albuquerque on your road trip, maybe you could snap pics of the campus for me. You know, this summer.”

  Kathleen swings to face her daughter, her mouth hardening. “What road trip this summer?”

  Nina looks like she just found a fingernail in her flatbread. She may never talk to me again. “It’s in the early stages. I was going to work out the details before I told you.”

  “You told me you were going to explore Route Sixty-Six,” I say innocently. “Tucumcari. Amarillo. Albuquerque. All the way to Arizona. For a week, right?”

  Kathleen’s eyes haven’t left her daughter. “Nina, is this about…Ms. Cantillo?”

  Nina wedges her fork into a crack between the table leaves. “I told you I was e-mailing her.”

  “Planning a visit is different than e-mailing.”

  “You told me,” Nina says, “you’d be fine with me getting to know her.”

  Emotions flit over Kathleen’s face, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t kicked this hornet’s nest.

  “We could fly into Phoenix together,” she says, “but I can’t take time off this summer. Maybe a weekend in October. I’d love to visit my friends out there.”

  Nina’s mouth is set. “I don’t want to just fly there, meet her, and come back. I want to take a road trip. I want the experience. I was going to tell you.”

  Kathleen relaxes a little, like she realizes Nina isn’t abandoning her. “Whose car were you planning to take?”

  If I told my mom I was taking off for Arizona, she’d bawl me out for five minutes straight. Then cry and tell me she didn’t mean to be harsh, the world is just so dangerous. And I would promise to stay in town forever.

  Kathleen, by contrast, is a model of mellow. When Nina says, “I was going to buy a secondhand Toyota with my savings from working in the library,” her mother actually nods.

  “I don’t want you taking on consumer debt. But tell me more.”

  Nina’s crazy idea is fast becoming a real plan. Why’d I open my mouth?

  Nina launches into a spiel about the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest and other stuff she supposedly yearns to see. “I don’t want to stay with…Ms. Cantillo the whole time,” she says. “I mean, I’d feel more comfortable if I didn’t have to be her guest. I want to do campgrounds and motels.”

  Roadside motels—another suggestion that would make my mom flip. If I were a girl, she’d probably keep me chained to her waist till I was thirty.

  Kathleen doesn’t bat an eye. “I know places along the way,” she says. “Family-run, good people. I could ask the owners to keep an eye on you. You’d have to check in every day with me. Send me pics. Blog it all so I can imagine what you’re doing.”

  Nina nods, and I wonder how she plans to pretend she’s in Arizona when she’s really in Albuquerque, digging up bones.

  A lonesome stretch of red desert. Sun slanting across the mouth of an abandoned mine shaft. I shake off the images—Don’t you start believing, too.

  There are no bones to dig up. But maybe Nina has to see that to believe it.

  “I went out west the summer I was seventeen,” Kathleen is saying dreamily. “I drove to San Francisco by myself. One night I was so tired, I parked on the shoulder and slept in the desert.”

  “Your folks didn’t mind?” I hear an edge in my voice.

  Nina’s mom shakes her head. “They barely noticed I was gone. I had the time of my life in SF. Saw my first live show, kissed my first girl.”

  “Mom, please. I’ve heard this story a million times.”

  “I know. Get your laptop. Let’s plot an itinerary, just for fun.”

  The two of them are A-OK again, best of friends.

  “You’re going to need to learn to drive on the freeway,” I point out, remembering how I drove Nina six hours to and from Schenectady like her chauffeur and bodyguard in one.

  “You are a nervous driver, Nina,” Kathleen says, brows creasing. “And it’s quite a slog.”

  Then she turns to me, her face brightening like she’s had a brainstorm, and says something I could never have guessed she’d say in a million years, wouldn’t have fantasized about even in my sappiest moments.

  “Hey, Warren! You want to visit UNM, and it’s right on the way. What if you two went together?”

  I wait for Nina to cross her arms or pop her eyes or push her chair out in frustration. Nothing happens.

  I look right at her, and she looks back with a question in her eyes. I’m not sure, but I think it’s Why not?

  I don’t make any decisions that night—too many new sensations have me feeling brittle and shell-shocked. I just mutter something noncommittal about how I’ll run the idea past my folks, while Nina watches me warily.

  I can guess what her next thought was after Why not. If you think you’re going along so you can tattle to my mom when I take a desert detour, think again.

  I need to convince her I’ll keep her secrets. Because I will, won’t I?

  At home, I check on WRGB in Schenectady. Nothing about the Gustafssons. Rapes and domestic murders and suspected mob killings are happening all over upstate New York, but no one seems to remember the older couple that disappeared that weekend.

  Sometimes I see the Gustafssons’ photo in my head as I drift off to sleep, or their neat little house with the stone walkway and the wheelbarrow in the yard. Don’t forget us. Don’t let us vanish.

  But who took them? So far, I’ve heard just one alternative theory—anti-slaughterhouse protestors did it—and that came from an anonymous commenter with obvious whacko credentials. Nina knew they were going to disappear before it happened, and she tried to help them. That much I believe.

  As for the rest, I decide, I’m going to maintain an attitude of benign neutrality. Like Switzerland. I won’t say I do think Dylan Shadwell is a killer, or that I don’t.

  But I won’t let her do anything crazy. If I come along to New Mexico, maybe I can distract her. Be the voice of reason. Encourage her to look for bones in that cave and cushion her fall back to reality when she doesn’t find any.

  I open a new window and check out the University of New Mexico’s film program. It’s not one of the top twenty-five in the nation, but it looks solid, with an emphasis on production.

  A professor named Ethan Sandoval is teaching a summer production course with a location shoot. I shoot him an e-mail with a link to my Chuckettes video. He probably won’t bother to answer a high school kid bugging him from thousands of miles away, but it’s worth a shot.

  Not that I’m really going to apply to college in New Mexico—my mom would flip. This is just an excuse for the road trip with Nina. But if I do some crewing out there, while she visits her birth mom in Arizona, maybe I can spin it as an internship when I apply to NYU.

  After all, New York is only five hours away.

  I go to sleep seeing the red-washed desert in my head like I’m viewing it through a monitor. I adjust my light levels, frame carefully, capture the whole landscape—except for Nina, who’s somewhere in the corner of my frame, always half out of sight.

  I know she’s looking for that cave.

  I arrange a meeting at the town’s crunchiest coffee shop with Violet Sadler, the youngest Lonesome Chuckette, to talk about making a video for their “
killer” new cut.

  “Guess what?” Violet says when we meet up. “We ran a campaign, and we can pay you a whole two hundred dollars this time.”

  “Is it another song about how a cowboy left a girl alone in a desert dive bar to smoke a million Marlboros?” I ask, pretending we don’t both know that figure is insulting.

  She pats my arm, her mammoth earrings tinkling. “You know it is, kiddo. Only kinda song I write.”

  I duck my head to hide my blush. “If you wait a few months, I can get you fresh B-roll of the desert. For atmosphere.”

  “No kidding?”

  It must be synergy, because that night I get an e-mail from Ethan Sandoval, the UNM professor. It’s short: If you shot and cut this by yourself, nice job. We can always use extra PAs on location, assuming they’re willing to WORK. Please send your official school transcript and two letters of rec to our departmental admin, along with a parental letter if you’re under 18, and tell her if you want temp housing in the dorms. Best, ES.

  This thing, this trip, is becoming real.

  When Nina invites me over for dinner a few days later, she has a surprise for me. Her mom has bought herself a shiny new Prius and dumped the Legacy on Nina as a belated birthday gift.

  “Wish I got presents like that,” I say. It’s an older car, but with only fifty K on the odometer.

  Nina ducks her head. “I think she just wants me to be safe. On the trip. Us to be safe—if you’re going.”

  I manage not to break out in a huge grin. “I’ll talk to my mom tonight.”

  When Kathleen comes home from the statehouse, she unpacks Indian takeout and solemnly promises me there’s dessert.

  I glance at Nina, who says, “I told her about your sugar fixation.”

  She smirks like she’s ragging on me, but I’m glowing inside. Nina told her mom something about me. I’m part of her life.

  I tell myself I’m only happy because this bodes well for the success of Operation Us on the Road. And now I have the possibility of experience on a real, live film shoot, even if I’m just getting takeout and driving props from place to place.