I’d never seen him before in my life.
To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t owe anyone any money, so he wasn’t a bill collector. He didn’t live in my aunt’s building and he wasn’t one of the dozens of friends Izzy had introduced me to. I hadn’t waited on him before—I would have remembered him—but he could have been at one of the other tables and escaped my attention if it had been busy, and he could have seen my hand-lettered stick-on name tag. Part of my brain screamed, Stranger, danger! but my curiosity was piqued.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
He pointed to himself. “Raleigh.”
“Nice to meetcha, Raleigh, but my friend’s waiting for me.” I was half tempted to stick around and get to know this Raleigh fellow a little better, but I had things to do. “I’m off this morning, but you should go ask the cook for an order of breakfast chili. Trust me.” I caught a glimpse of Izzy’s silhouette outside the door, and continued, “Sorry, but I gotta go.” I hurried out the front door onto the sunny sidewalk.
“Morning,” Izzy said as soon as I stepped outside. “We need to dash or we’ll be late.” Her hair was still aquamarine, but now there was a bold white streak that ran from the middle of one eyebrow to the back of her head.
Izzy started walking. I let her lead the way because, as usual, I had no idea where we were going. I could find my way around, and I’d gotten pretty good at navigating subway lines and city streets, but I didn’t even know what neighborhood we were heading into, much less Amanda’s address.
“I texted you to let you know I was on my way.”
“My phone’s out of minutes.”
“That explains why you didn’t pick up the phone last night when Castillo tried calling you from my phone, but you should still get texts.”
She shrugged. “I’m out of data, too.”
I pulled my phone out and checked my account balance. I had exactly $21.32. I used PayPal to send her $20. “I’ve got a little extra this week, so I contributed to recharge-Izzy’s-phone fund.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” she insisted. “Save your money. We’ll need it for our new apartment.”
“About that, I talked to Aunt Melanie last night and she doesn’t want me sticking around.”
“Did she say that?” Izzy asked.
“Not in so many words, but she offered to buy me a bus ticket back home as long as I leave by Wednesday.”
Izzy frowned. “That’s not very long from now.”
“I know,” I agreed.
She flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with something.”
“In three days?” I asked skeptically.
“Have I ever let you down? I’ve got this. And seriously, keep your money.”
“Too late,” I told her. “And I know you won’t transfer it back, because you don’t want it getting eaten up in fees. Use it to buy more minutes for your phone and then you can call Vincent.”
“Maybe I don’t want to call Vince,” she said.
“He’s worried about you. What’s going on with you two?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. But what was he doing calling me from your phone?”
I shouldn’t push. It was none of my business. Well, it was sorta my business, in a roundabout fashion. They were my friends. Plus, Castillo was a good guy. I didn’t want to let the subject drop, and was glad that she’d finally opened the door a crack by asking about him. “I bumped into him last night.”
“Oh, you did?” Her tone of voice sounded bored, but I could tell by the way her shoulders stiffened and her pace slowed by a hair that I had her attention.
“He was moonlighting as a security guard at an art gallery that my aunt took me to.”
“Yeah, he does that sometimes.” She slowed down enough that I could almost keep up with her.
With the difference in our heights, Izzy had a longer stride than I did. I usually had to jog to stick close to her heels whenever we walked anywhere. It was good exercise, I grudgingly admitted, but I was enjoying the brief respite. “He asked about you.”
“Uh-huh. And what did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I hadn’t seen you since work, and I have no idea where you’re staying.” I paused, but she didn’t take the bait and offer any new information. “I told him maybe your phone was dead, and that’s why you weren’t picking up.”
“Good thinking.”
“Except he’s a cop, Izzy. He’s nosy. You’d liked something on Twitter a few minutes earlier, so he knew you were online.”
“Oh.” She chewed her bottom lip.
“Just call him.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not? What’s going on? Was he brusque to you when he was questioning us after the escape room? Because that’s his job. He did it to me, too. He can’t give you special treatment. He probably has to show the powers that be that he’s impartial or they’ll pull him off the case and whoever they replace him with would undoubtably be worse.”
“I know that,” Izzy said. “Being impartial isn’t the problem. He’s not calling to ask me out. He wants to talk with me. Like talk, talk. At the station.” She turned to me. The soft tissue around her bloodshot eyes was puffy and pink. A tear sparkled in the corner of her eye. “He wants to bring me in for further questioning, Odessa. And he told me to get a lawyer.”
“What?”
She nodded. “He thinks I had something to do with Vickie’s murder.”
I stood there flabbergasted in the middle of the crosswalk until a car honked at me. I sidled out of the way, but continued to stare at Izzy. “That’s just silly. Vincent knows you’re innocent.”
“Sure, Vince does. But Detective Castillo isn’t convinced.” She grabbed my elbow and propelled me back onto the sidewalk. “Doesn’t help that the last thing I said to Vickie was ‘Knock yourself out’ and then someone bashed her over the head with our trophy. It looks bad.”
“I can talk to him.”
“And say what? Remind him that it’s impolite to accuse your girlfriend of murder, even if her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon?”
To be completely honest, I wished we’d never won that silly trophy. So much had happened in the last few days, it felt like the cornhole tournament was a lifetime ago. “Well, I know I didn’t kill Vickie and I know that you didn’t kill her . . .”
Izzy interrupted me. “Oh yeah? How do you know?”
“First and foremost, you might be capable of killing someone, in like a life-or-death situation, but you wouldn’t murder anyone. Besides, even if you hated Vicki Marsh with every fiber of your being—and you’re not a hateful person—you had no idea we were going to bump into her on Friday. It was my idea that we invite ourselves along to the escape room, not yours. And practically the whole time we were inside, we were together.”
Although, to be completely honest, I couldn’t be 1,000 percent sure about that last bit. I’d been paying attention to the room, not the people around me. Could Izzy have slipped back into the library when no one was looking to kill Vickie? Maybe. Would she have? No way.
“And you told Vince that?”
“When he questioned me, I had no idea he considered you a suspect. I’ll talk to him. And you should, too. Dodging his phone calls and refusing to come in doesn’t exactly scream ‘innocent.’ ”
She glowered at me. “It’s hard to have faith in the system when even my own boyfriend treats me like a criminal. The only way I’m voluntarily stepping foot in that station is with hard evidence that I’m innocent.”
I nodded. No wonder Izzy was pushing so hard to get me to look into Vickie’s murder. She wasn’t just a concerned friend or a bored busybody. She was a suspect, a prime one if Castillo thought she needed a lawyer. “So how do we get proof?” I asked.
“You tell me. You so
lved Bethany’s murder, even before anyone else believed that she was murdered. The way I see it, that makes you more qualified to solve Vickie’s death than anyone at the NYPD. And that includes Vince.”
I had a bad feeling about this.
“My money’s on Marlie, but I think we should talk to Amanda to cover all our bases,” she continued.
“You just want Marlie to be guilty because you hate apartment brokers,” I said.
“True, but to be fair, everybody hates apartment brokers.”
15
Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ July 14
do kindness
hydrate
practice self-care
hydrate
wash your hands
hydrate
don’t EVER feed the trolls
hydrate (craft beer counts as water, right?)
#cleanliving
Twenty minutes and two trains later, we arrived at our destination. To pass the time, I popped in my earbuds and listened to a podcast and people-watched while Izzy played a game on her phone. For the record, people-watching on the New York City subway was better than scripted television most days, almost as good as my favorite YouTube channel.
Amanda’s apartment was in an older building. None of that alternating colors of brick with steel and glass with staggered pop-out balconies and freshly painted trim here, just a solid multifamily-style building with bars on the windows and a broken buzzer on the front door. The front door was propped open with a rock. Inside, all but one of the lights was busted out, leaving the dingy lobby in deep shadow. Cubbies lined one wall. Once upon a time, they’d probably had locking doors but now the residents picked up their mail on the honor system.
Someone had left their bicycle, the kind with a huge rack on the back for deliveries, propped up against the wall. The front wheel and seat were both missing.
There was an elevator straight ahead, which surprised me. Elevator buildings in New York were few and far between, outside of giant high-rises. Having one in the relatively short five-story building my aunt lived in was a luxury.
This elevator looked like it had been installed around the time that Calvin Coolidge was president. It was an ornate metal cage with a smaller cage tucked inside. There was a chain holding the door closed, and the top U-shaped bar of a padlock looped through the chain. The padlock itself was nowhere to be seen. The message was clear. Out of order, and for some time, if the dust on the chain was any indication.
“Take the stairs?” I suggested.
“Hundred percent,” Izzy said.
By the time we reached the seventh floor, I was dripping with sweat. Between all the stairs and the complete lack of air-conditioning, I’d felt like I’d just run a marathon. Izzy looked better but she was also out of breath. “And to think some people waste good money on a gym membership,” I quipped between gulps of air.
“Suckers,” Izzy agreed.
She knocked, and Amanda opened the door. After studying her Instagram feed, I would have been hard pressed not to recognize her again. Although, in her own home with barely any makeup on and poor lighting, she wasn’t the best, most picturesque version of Amanda. That much was certain. It gave me hope that with the right eyeshadow, I, too, could be a ten.
Yeah, right.
I wasn’t perfect, but I was perfectly content with the person I saw in the mirror every day, even if I didn’t have enormous eyes, glossy hair, and a flawless complexion like Amanda. She had one of those completely symmetrical faces that no amount of makeup could replicate. It was no wonder that she was an Instagram sensation.
“Come in,” she said, inviting us inside. “Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks,” I said, glancing around. Amanda’s studio apartment was small but neat. My room back home was decorated with secondhand furniture and old photos from high school. Amanda’s was decorated like a catalog with coordinating throw pillows on the daybed—which was made up like a sofa—and a vase of fresh flowers on the window ledge. Even the books on her shelves were organized by the color on their spines.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”
“No thanks,” Izzy said for both of us.
“You guys had a question about the escape room we did on Friday?” Amanda moved a fuzzy pink blanket so she could sit on the narrow armchair by the bookshelf, leaving the daybed for us. “Is it okay to call you two ‘guys’ or is there something else you would prefer?”
“ ‘Guys’ is fine,” Izzy said. While everyone up north liked to make fun of my accent, I had one major advantage over them. I’d been using the gender-neutral “y’all” as long as I could remember, and didn’t have to worry about offending anyone by using the wrong plural pronoun. As a bonus, “y’all” could be used in a pinch as a singular pronoun if I wasn’t certain what pronouns someone preferred but didn’t feel comfortable asking.
Who would have guessed that the South—backward as it could be on delicate social issues—would hold the answer to gender-fluid language?
“You have a killer Instagram feed,” I said as I sat.
“Aww, thank you,” Amanda said, raising her chin slightly, as if a camera was pointed in her direction.
“I noticed that you were taking a ton of pictures in the escape room, but you only posted a few.”
“Sure. I mean, you only post the best, right?”
“Yeah, but I was wondering if I could peek at the other pictures? The ones you didn’t post?”
“Why would you want to do that?” Amanda asked.
“Because you might have captured something we missed,” I said.
“Don’t you mean something that the cops missed? I mean, why are you so interested? You didn’t even know Vickie.”
“No, but I think it’s horrible what happened to her.” It wasn’t a straight answer, but it was a lot better than My best friend is on the suspect short list and I want to clear her name.
“Further evidence that you didn’t know her very well. Am I right?” she asked Izzy.
“Big mood,” Izzy agreed. “To be fair, I hadn’t seen Vickie in ages. Not since high school, and even back then, we weren’t exactly besties.”
“I gotta ask, what was she like in high school?” Amanda asked.
“That was a different time. We were young. She was the entitled, stuck-up cheerleader, and I was the drama nerd.”
I could picture Izzy onstage. I bet she’d been great at it.
“So, nothing much has changed. Look, when I saw the invite on Facebook I clicked Maybe as a lark. I’m not really into escape rooms and Vickie and I haven’t been in touch since NYU except for an occasional like on each other’s posts. Then the day came and I thought why not? Now I’m wishing I’d stayed home.”
“I get it,” I said. “I really do. I wish Izzy and I hadn’t come along, too. But since we did, we’re all suspects. Maybe if I could have a look at the pictures on your phone, I might be able to figure out what really happened.”
“You’re too late,” she replied.
“Oh. Did you give your phone to the police already?” I gave Izzy a sideways glance. If Castillo had the pictures, then surely he was able to build an accurate timeline and prove whether or not Izzy was anywhere near Vickie at the time of her death.
“Nope. They didn’t ask. But I deleted the pictures already. My phone is always running out of space. Sorry, I’d love to be of more help.”
“Do you mind if I took a look?” I asked, holding out my hand.
Her hand tightened around her phone. “Like I said, I deleted them.”
“Yeah, but it’s real easy to undelete photos, especially if it’s only been a few days.”
“Whatevs.” She unlocked the phone, rose so she could reach the daybed, and handed her phone to me.
I went into her photo gallery and navigated to the dele
ted photos option. Hundreds of pictures popped up, many of them from yesterday. Amanda really did put a lot of effort into her Instagram. At best, I would take two or three pictures and post the one that was the least blurry. I put a little more effort into what I posted on the Untapped Books & Café accounts, but not by much. Amanda took dozens of pictures of everything, each from a slightly different angle and sifted through them all, removing every possible imperfection.
It took a minute to scroll back to Friday afternoon. When I started seeing pictures inside the now-familiar Brooklyn police station, I slowed down. There were way too many pictures for me to email or text to myself. “Do you have a cloud account?” I asked. There were lots of free services that made it easy to back up, store, and share files on the cloud.
“Yeah, but it’s full,” she said.
“That’s all right, I’ve got space on mine.” I opened her file-sharing app, logged in as myself, and started transferring pictures. This was gonna take forever. I handed the phone back to her. “The pics are still uploading.”
I wasn’t entirely comfortable leaving while Amanda was still logged in to my account. I didn’t have anything of value saved there, no embarrassing pictures or anything like that, but still, it was mine. I’d rather stick around until the transfer was complete, so I needed to keep her talking. “You and Vickie went to college together?” I asked.
“Yeah, she was a business major and I was into art, but we were in a few clubs together. Save the Planet and something else I don’t remember.”
“Save the Planet?” I hadn’t pictured Vickie as an environmental crusader, but then again, I didn’t know her very well.
“I think she only joined clubs to meet boys. That’s how she met my boyfriend freshman year.”
“Sounds like Vickie,” Izzy muttered.
“Yeah, she could be a real piece of work,” Amanda agreed. “Although, college, you know? He ended up dropping out and that’s the last I heard from him.”
“I don’t get it. If you and Vickie had bad blood between you, why spend the day celebrating her big award with her?”
No Memes of Escape Page 14
