I’d always considered myself an observant person, but since coming to New York, I had to admit that I was a little overwhelmed. There was just so much going on at any given moment that it was nearly impossible to keep track of it all. The escape room hadn’t been as crowded as the neighborhood in general, but the small rooms were crammed with clues and red herrings and random distractions.
I took a sip of my coffee and was surprised to find my cup empty. Sweat trickled down my back. I’d sat in the park longer than I’d realized, lost in thought. I pulled out my phone and saw multiple message notifications. I still had half an hour before my shift started and Untapped wasn’t even a five-minute walk away, so I pulled up the notifications.
Ever since taking over the Untapped Books & Café’s social media accounts, my digital footprint had gone through the roof. If I didn’t check the accounts several times a day—whether or not I was on the clock—it easily got away from me. The café had a few dozen new followers. I scrolled through them, making sure to follow back repeat customers while ignoring or blocking the bots. All of the DMs were spam, so I deleted them without replying.
I opened Instagram, careful to avoid my page. I once lost a few—and by a few, I mean ten—hours playing with Instagram filters. Hashtag never again. Instead, I searched for Vickie Marsh, and her account popped up. The last posting was a long-armed selfie shot of Vickie flashing a radiant smile at the camera, looking self-confident and happy. She’d tagged it “Winning!”
It was hard to believe that she was dead.
According to the comments below the picture, I wasn’t the only person who was struggling to accept that the vibrant Vickie was gone with no warning. Dozens of people had expressed their shock and grief with everything from simple emojis to long-winded eulogies. She had a lot of friends, or at least a lot of online acquaintances.
Or maybe they were suspects.
Now that was a rabbit hole I wasn’t going to go down. It wasn’t my job to figure out who killed Vickie. It was Castillo’s. My job was to serve cold craft brews and whatever delicious creations Parker was inventing in the kitchen. Sure, a few weeks ago when Bethany, one of my fellow servers, was murdered, I had managed to solve the case and bring the killer to justice before the police were even convinced that her death was more than an accident, but that was a fluke.
Right?
Besides, even if I did have a natural talent for solving murders—which was impossible; I think I just listened to too many true crime podcasts—I didn’t want to get involved. The last time it hadn’t ended well. I’d come awful close to becoming a second victim. Out of habit, I found myself rubbing the inside of my left wrist, where I’d gotten a colorful owl tattoo in memory of Bethany. I hadn’t known her for long before she was murdered, but the tattoo was a constant reminder to live life at the fullest because no one ever knew when the end would come.
Just like it had come early for poor Vickie Marsh.
The police were looking into her death, I reminded myself.
Detective Castillo would never forgive me if I inserted myself into his murder investigation.
Again.
However, it wasn’t actually investigating if all I was doing was looking at pictures on the internet, right? I recognized one of the commenters as Amanda, the woman who’d been in the escape room with us, and clicked on her username. By the looks of it, she posted multiple pictures an hour. She was the main subject in all the pictures. Other people occasionally popped up in the background, but Amanda was always front and center. I scrolled through the pictures until I reached a selfie of her in the NYPD waiting room. Not exactly something I would want on my public feed.
I could imagine it now. My mother would be so disappointed if she saw a picture of me inside a police station, surrounded by men and women in uniform as well as the flotsam of human society. Thinking of my mother, I knew I should update her on the Aunt Melanie situation. I wished I could text her, but she hardly ever had her cell phone charged, much less nearby.
As if my thinking of her ignited some kind of psychic mother-daughter connection, my phone rang and the caller ID displayed my home phone number. As in the landline number, the one I’d memorized back in kindergarten and would probably always remember. I accepted the call and could imagine my mother standing in our kitchen, the curtains decorated with sunbursts and a row of cookie jars shaped like chickens lined up along the buffet table.
“Hey, Ma,” I said, answering the phone. “I was just about to call you.”
“Odessa! Darling! I’ve missed your voice!”
I smiled. My mother had a way of making every person she met feel like the most special person in the universe, but I knew that position was really reserved for me. “Ma, we Skyped yesterday morning.” I’d installed Skype on the computer in the den before I’d left so we could video-chat anytime she wanted.
“I know, but it’s not the same. Did you get my package?”
“Yes, thank you!”
“I know you’ve been missing having your boots. I picked up a few patterns I thought you would like at the store yesterday. They were on sale. Wasn’t sure if I should send them to you in another care package or wait until you got home. One of the dresses has those pretty panels you like so much, and it even has pockets!”
“Thanks, sounds great.” My mother and I had vastly different ideas when it came to fashion, but it was the thought that counted. “Might as well keep them in Louisiana. Looks like I might be coming home sooner than expected.”
“What? Really? What happened? You’re not sick, are you? Have you seen a doctor yet?”
“Ma, don’t worry, I’m right as rain. Promise.” Maybe it was because I was an only child, but even after I turned eighteen and was legally an adult, she would immediately schedule an appointment with my old pediatrician if I so much as sneezed. “Aunt Melanie fractured her ankle.”
“Honey, I know all about that. She posted it on Facebook.”
“Then you know she had to cut her trip short, so I’ll probably be headed home soon.” At the thought of leaving New York, maybe to never come back, my heart sank. But it wasn’t like I could afford an apartment here. Besides, I always knew this was temporary.
“Odessa Morgan Dean, I did not raise you to be like that!”
I blinked at the phone. It had been years since she’d pulled out my full name. The last time she’d done that, I’d gotten caught sneaking out after curfew to go meet up with my friends at the lake. I couldn’t have been much more than sixteen at the time. “What’d I do?”
“You’re not gonna leave my baby sister all alone in New York City with a broken foot, are you? You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”
On one hand, I wanted to laugh. My mother knew Aunt Melanie better than that. She might not have seen her pin Izzy to the wall with her crutch, but she knew that my aunt was gonna do exactly what she was gonna do, and not nobody was gonna tell her different, cast or no cast. But on the other hand . . .
My mother might have inadvertently struck gold.
I had the perfect excuse to stay in New York for however long it took my aunt to heal. Weeks, at least. Months, maybe.
“You’re so right, Ma.”
I heard a soft snort on the other end of the line. A ladylike snort, of course, but a snort just the same. “I always am, darling dearest. Now, you get off the phone and go help your aunt this instant. Call me tomorrow?”
“I will,” I promised. “Love you.”
“Love you, too, Odessa.”
I ended the call and slipped my phone into my messenger bag, grinning from ear to ear. I had the perfect excuse to stay in New York!
9
Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ July 13
Raise ur hand if u 100% don’t believe in ghosts, but also kinda secretly 10/10 believe in ghosts? #whoyougonnacall #cocacolaremovesbloodstains
When I go
t to Untapped Books & Café—a full ninety seconds before my shift started, thank you very much—I must have still been smiling like a clown because Izzy looked up from her usual position behind the checkout counter and said, “You look like someone who just stumbled across a whole buncha free street tacos. What’s up with you?”
At the mention of tacos, my stomach grumbled. I hadn’t wanted to make breakfast at the apartment and risk waking up my aunt, but now that I realized how long it was until my lunch break, I was starting to regret that decision. “Hey, Izzy. I’m so sorry about yesterday. You didn’t have to leave like that.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “No biggie. Besides, it was time to move on.”
“I tried calling you earlier but you didn’t pick up.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to charge my phone.”
“Uh-huh.” I hoped that didn’t mean that she had stayed someplace without electricity. I wouldn’t put it past her. Izzy had a long, storied past of crashing wherever she could, for as long as she could. “I thought you were gonna stay with Vincent last night . . .”
“Changed my mind.” She cocked her head, but her short, spiky hair barely moved. What she saved on rent she certainly invested in good hair product and revolving dye jobs. “How’d you know that, anyway?”
“Bumped into him on my way into work. He wanted me to pass along a message that you need to call him.”
“I’m sure he did,” she said. A customer approached the desk, several books in her arms and a young child glued to her leg. “Did you find everything you were looking for?” she asked the customer brightly.
That was my cue. Izzy would call Castillo back or she wouldn’t. She’d tell me where she was staying or she wouldn’t. Her life, her choice. I was worried about her, but I wasn’t her keeper. It was none of my business. Besides, I needed to get to work.
I started to head back toward the café, but Izzy gestured at me to wait a sec. While I waited for her to finish up with the customer, I took a quick snapshot of one of our bookshelves. It was bulging with books ranging from newly released bestsellers to small-run, hard-to-find cult classics. I captioned it “Got books?” I doubted it would take off as a meme, but at least I could tell Todd I was trying.
As soon as Izzy finished her transaction, she told me, “I need five, ten minutes of your time before you clock in. Before you say anything, I already cleared it with Todd.”
“And?” I asked suspiciously.
“He said it was fine. Come on.” She stuck her head into the hallway and shouted for Todd to come relieve her, and then we hurried out the front door before he could object. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“What is it?”
“If I tell you, it’s not much of a surprise,” Izzy said with a smile. “Trust me.” We walked a few blocks before stopping in front of a building. I looked up at it. The first floor of the building was retail space. I could smell Thai food sizzling in one of the restaurants. The corner store was selling refurbished electronics, and the checkered awning next to it advertised exotic vacations.
The second floor was mostly windows, and judging from the tiny plants in the windows and cubicle walls, I assumed this was office space. I couldn’t tell from here if it was one of those workplaces with standing desks and foosball tables in the break room or a button-down place, and I wondered what they did there. Never having worked in an office before, they were a bit of a mystery to me. Other than going to meetings and sending emails, I had no idea what sorts of things office workers did.
Above the office, I counted four flights of black iron balconies jutting out of the building, contrasting nicely with the light beige brick exterior. Judging from the size of the balconies, the units were spacious. There was no dirty laundry hanging off the rails or kids’ bikes crammed onto the balconies. Instead, there were padded chairs and delicate tables, with lights strung along the railing.
But best of all was the location. The iconic four-story tall mural of a little girl staring off into space that had come to symbolize Williamsburg was right around the corner, and in the near distance, the Williamsburg Bridge rose out of the city streets and soared over the river.
“Whoa, nice digs,” I said.
“Right?” Izzy led us around to an entrance between a lunch counter and the travel agency. She buzzed one of the buttons and the door popped open. We climbed the stairs to the third floor, and Izzy pushed a door open without knocking.
The apartment was enormous, with seemingly thousand-foot-tall ceilings and a single pane window where the far wall should be, letting the morning light stream in. It was also completely empty, bare of any furniture or knickknacks or any of the touches that made a house a home. However, the most noticeable feature by far, other than that enormous window, was that someone had splashed what looked like ten gallons of brownish paint over every surface.
The tightly woven industrial-grade carpet was splattered in paint. The walls, which featured floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves, were splattered in paint. Even the ceiling—a lovely checkerboard of white-textured drop tiles—was splattered in varying shades of brown paint.
And there was a smell that I couldn’t place. Industrial cleaners, yes, but underneath it, something like the rotting vegetation in a Louisiana swamp, but sharper. More pungent.
“This place is so zhuzhy,” Izzy said.
“Zhuzhy?” I asked. I hadn’t heard that term before.
“You know, bougie, but zhuzhed up,” she explained. “Can’t you see me living here?”
I was fairly certain she’d made that word up on the spot, but it fit. “You could never afford this place.”
“Never say never.”
A woman entered from the kitchen, holding a disposable coffee cup in one hand and a tablet computer in the other. I recognized her. She’d been one of the escape room attendees, the older woman with the sour expression. “Lovely to see the two of you again,” she said, beaming. Today she was wearing a white ruffled blouse paired with a tan pantsuit. She juggled her coffee, freeing up a hand to offer for us to shake. “Marlie Robbinson. I don’t think we were properly introduced the other day. You’re Izzy, right?”
“Yup. And I’m sure you remember Odessa,” she replied. Izzy turned to me. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”
I blinked at her. “Well, yeah.” The apartment was enormous, even larger than my aunt’s. When I met Izzy, she’d been living in an abandoned public school with several other squatters. This wasn’t just a step up, it was a whole year’s worth of steps up. Maybe more.
“Let me show you around,” Marlie offered.
Izzy started to follow her, but I grabbed her elbow and asked in a whisper, “What are we doing here?”
Izzy grinned. “I need an apartment, and a roommate. What do you say? Move in here with me?”
“I’d love to,” I admitted. “But where would we get the money? I’m flat broke. We could never afford this place. It must cost like a gazillion bucks a month.”
“That’s the beauty of it. They’re practically giving it away.” Izzy followed Marlie into the kitchen. Like the spacious living room, brownish paint splattered all the surfaces, from the white grout between the light gray floor tiles to the shiny stainless steel appliances, the kind I’d always wanted.
“Ignore all the blood,” Marlie said. “The landlord has cleaners coming out today, and it will be tip-top before you move in. It will be like nothing ever happened here.”
There was a loud ringing in my ears like I’d been standing in front of the giant speakers at a rock concert, and my head felt too big for my body.
“Odessa, you okay?” Izzy asked.
I shook my head mutely, unable to think. I leaned against the counter to get my balance, but when I realized that my hand was clutching one of the brown stains on the white marble counter, I snatched it back. “Blood?” I finally choked out.
“Well, yes. There was a little, um, incident here a while back. But the police have cleared the scene and like I said, it will be good as new in a day or two. A fresh coat of paint and new carpet, and you’ll never know that anyone was murdered here.” She blinked at me, as if expecting me to speak.
When I didn’t say anything, she continued, “I know it might seem a little gruesome, but it’s old news now. The perpetrator has been convicted and sentenced to life. You’re as safe as houses,” she declared. But I noticed that she was careful not to touch any surfaces.
“The Williamsburg Slasher,” I announced, putting two and two together.
“Why, yes, the papers did call him that. But the locks on the doors and windows have been replaced and there hasn’t been a news crew or amateur ghost hunter try to break in for weeks.”
“Wait a second, ghosts? You mean this place is haunted, too?”
“Of course not,” Marlie said in a silken voice. “Ghosts aren’t real. But the landlord knows he’s not going to have an easy time finding renters, not even in this economy. So he hired me, and he’s willing to let it go for a song. That’s where you come in.”
“Can we talk in the hall?” I asked. “I’m finding it hard to concentrate in here.” Walking back through the living room was a little like walking through a minefield. With alligators. And snipers. When I’d thought the brownish stains on the carpet were paint, I’d stepped on them all willy-nilly, but now that I knew they were bloodstains I tiptoed from one patch of clean carpet to the next as well as I could.
“Why don’t you two come back after the cleaners have done their thing?” Marlie suggested. “We can finish the tour then.”
“No thanks.”
No Memes of Escape Page 8
