Bury the Lead

by Mischa Thrace

  Applause thunders through the gym, and Henry rises from his spot at Ms. Larson’s feet to bark twice. The reporters watch it all, and when the assembly is dismissed, they converge on Ms. Larson like a swarm of fire ants.

  I don’t even bother checking in with my Directed Study teacher. I go straight to room 331 when the bell rings.

  Ravi is already letting himself in when I get there, and I tell him to lock it behind us. I doubt anyone is planning to sit for photos today anyway.

  We leave the lights off and sit with our backs against the cold cinder block wall where we’ll be hidden from anyone looking in, much like Ms. Larson had been yesterday in the auditorium.

  Ravi slings his bag into his lap and fishes around, extracting a pack of peanut butter cups. He tosses them to me and closes his bag. I open them, take one out, and hand the pack back to him. I finish the candy in three bites, but it doesn’t make me feel better.

  Ravi nibbles at his, the way he always does, biting the ridged edge off first and saving the middle for last. When the rim is gone, he breaks the remaining part—the best part—in two and holds half out. I open my mouth like a baby bird, and he sets it on my tongue. This bite makes me feel a fraction better.

  I close my eyes and lean into Ravi’s shoulder, heaving a frustrated sigh at my inability to set aside the emotions clogging up my thought process. He drops an arm around my shoulder, and I allow myself a full minute of self-indulgent burrowing, enjoying the warmth and solidity of his body next to mine. It’s a feeling I could wallow in for days, comfortable and comforting all at once, satisfying in a way I imagine sex must be to other people. But thoughts of Kylie crowd my brain like buzzing bees, and I shrug out from under him.

  “I fucking hate this,” I say. “Just to get that out of the way.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “I hate all of it. I hate that she’s fucking dead for no fucking reason. I hate that we didn’t stop this in time.”

  “Whoa. No. Don’t even.” He spins to face me, dark eyes serious. “Don’t. Even. This is not our fault. At all. There is literally nothing we could’ve done to prevent this.”

  “We could’ve caught whoever killed Emma before he got to Kylie.” My voice cracks, but I grit my teeth. “I could’ve caught him. I could’ve done that. I could’ve saved her. I could’ve figured it out.”

  Ravi grabs my hands and folds them into both of his, shaking his head. Frown lines bracket his full lips like parentheses. “No. God, no. Ken, you couldn’t have. Please, love, don’t do this to yourself. None of this was your fault.”

  His eyes are heavy with sadness, and for a disconcerting moment, I can’t tell whether it’s for me or Kylie. Either way, I close my eyes against the weight of it. That much sympathy, if there’s even a chance it was for me, is more than I can acknowledge.

  I refuse to break down.

  I have a job to do—now, more than ever.

  Ravi’s hands are warm around mine, his grip tight enough to be an anchor. I focus on that and set aside everything else.

  When I open my eyes, I’m steady. I slip my hands free and squeeze his in the quickest of thank-yous before pulling the red notebook from my bag. I flip to a blank page, write Kylie’s name at the top and underline it. I feel Ravi watching me but soldier on. I have to do this. “Okay, our biggest problem right now is lack of data. Can’t make bricks without clay and all that. With Emma, we had as much information as everyone else. We knew more, even. We had photographs; we had an organized missing person search. With Kylie, we have none of that.”

  “Which is information in itself, right?” he asks. “Why wasn’t she reported missing?”

  “Exactly. I’ve been trying to get ahold of her for days. Where was she? We need to find out. We also need to find out how she died.” I write Last seen when? then Manner/cause of death? a few lines below. “Ms. Larson is calling it suicide, but is that a fact? Was there an obvious method, or was it like Emma? That’s important to know.” I tap my pen against paper. “We need to get back into the auditorium, see if there are stains. That could be why the auditorium is still closed.”

  “Or just the general creep factor.”

  “Or that, but still, we need to check.”

  “Plan for getting in?”

  “To be determined.” I make a note, not wanting to get bogged down with details just yet. “We need to establish a timeline like we did for Emma. Social media will help, especially since Kylie posted every minute of her existence, including when she had to poop. We need to figure out when she stopped posting and see if anyone heard from her after that. And determine where she was physically seen last.”

  “I wonder if there’s a way we can check the cameras, see if any were working. If she was found in the school, maybe they picked something up.”

  I snort. “Yeah, like they were working.” But I write Cameras? down anyway. “Seems unlikely, but we can try.”

  Ravi opens his mouth to say something, stops, then says, “Not to sing the same old song, but are we going to entertain that it might actually have been a suicide?”

  “No.” I’m not even considering it. “Kylie wasn’t depressed. Kylie was a dramatic drama queen, but she had to be alive to enjoy the drama. Death would be too dull for her.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Ravi admits. “Just felt we had to put it out there.”

  “And we have. Moving on.” I flip back a few pages until I find the one labeled Suspects. “If we’re going off the assumption that it was the same guy who killed Emma, and I think we should, because even I can’t come up with a plausible scenario involving two separate killers targeting Maplefield students within weeks of each other, then we need to find the overlap between who might’ve wanted them both dead.”

  I dog-ear the page for easy locating, turn back to Kylie’s section, and write Suspects atop a fresh page. “Okay. Suspects for Kylie.”

  I write Owen at the top of the list. “She meddled in their relationship.”

  “Plus, she turned down his promposal last year before he got with Emma. But I don’t think that’s a murderous offense.”

  “But stacked on the meddling, maybe. Relationships make people stupid.”

  Ravi laughs. “You’re not wrong. But in that case, we better add Jacob too, since he was part of said relationship meddling.”

  I do, then tap the paper with the pen, thinking. “This list could get really long if we include everyone who’s been pissed off by her gossiping.”

  “Again with the not being wrong.”

  I’m tempted to list everyone who might be on that list anyway, just for the sake of thoroughness, but hold off. “I think starting with the people who overlap with Emma makes the most sense. If we don’t get anything there, we can add to the list. There might be a connection somewhere we aren’t aware of, but we might as well start with the obvious.”

  Ravi looks at the list, then flips back to Emma’s Suspects page and back again. “Which leaves us with Owen and Jacob, who we pretty much cleared the first time around.”

  “Then we missed something. It’s Occam’s razor. Hoofbeats mean horses, not centaurs. It’s got to be one of them.”

  “Or a genuine psycho. Someone who gets his kicks killing girls. It’s not like those don’t exist.”

  “Like Peter Vernon? Kylie’s seen him at her church, and I think Emma went there too. It’s loose, but it’s a connection. If we’re considering the possibility of a psycho, we might as well start with the one we know about.”

  Ravi shakes his head, worry creasing his forehead. “If it’s him—and I’m not saying I think it is—that means you’d be on his list. You’d have to be. If there was a girl in this school he’d want dead, it’s you.”

  “Not his type,” I counter. “Emma and Kylie are both blond—were both blond—and had long hair. They were both thin. They were both the same kind of pretty. I don’t fit that profile. Plus, I’m too stubborn to die.”

  “And Emma was too bitchy to die, and Kyli
e was too dramatic to die. Yet here we are.” He shoves his hair off his forehead. He starts to speak, then stops, the muscles along his jaw flexing. When he meets my gaze, his eyes are dark with imagined horror. He shakes his head, but it does nothing to dislodge the haunted look. “I couldn’t bear it. Not if it were you.”

  My first instinct is to make a joke, but I can’t find one, not when the tightness in my chest is back. In fact, I can’t speak at all under the realization that the look he’s giving me isn’t just fear. It’s love. And as much as I know love is a problem—an interference, a weakness among those for whom objectivity is of the highest importance—I want to fall into it. I want to tangle myself in it the way Sherlock and Moriarty tangled on the Reichenbach and throw myself over the edge in the same way, locked in its embrace.

  Instead, I hold a pinkie out and wait for him to hook it with his own. The place where our fingers meet is charged with everything I’m not ready to give into, but I keep my composure. I have to, if I’m going to solve this. I give him what I hope is a wry smile and pretend he’s not seeing straight through it. “I solemnly swear not to get ax-murdered.”

  In my head, I add a vow to stop anyone else from getting murdered too. Then, and only then, can I deal with the emotions swirling through me like rapids.

  Breaking into the auditorium is harder than either of us anticipated.

  The doors are locked, as we knew they would be, but I figured the key for 331 probably opened more than just that door, and indeed, it slipped into the lock like it had been made for it.

  But when I turned it, nothing happened.

  “You knew that would be too easy,” Ravi says.

  “Just once, I could stand for something to be too easy.”

  We have a limited window of time to get inside before any evidence gets erased by the janitors, and a quick perusal of YouTube convinces me lock-picking is a skill I desperately need to have in my arsenal, but not one that can be learned in a day.

  I consider and quickly dismiss the idea of simply asking Ms. Larson to let us in. She’s too unlikely to agree, and drawing that attention would only complicate the break-in.

  So we stalk the janitors.

  The school employs three people—two men and a woman who oversees them—to clean and maintain the building. Miss Caroline, the head, works regular school hours and hands things over to the men at the end of the day. They share a suite of rooms consisting of a cluttered office-break room—the door is always open so no one feels like they’re bothering Miss Caroline during the day—and storage areas for various pieces of maintenance equipment.

  Miss Caroline always says hi when she sees me in the halls, having been a subject of the Unsung Heroes series I ran in ninth grade about the custodians, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers that served Maplefield. Ravi had taken black-and-white portraits to go with each profile, and it ended up being a surprisingly popular piece.

  That doesn’t mean we have the kind of relationship that would convince the woman to let us into an unauthorized area, but I spent enough time with the head custodian during the shadowing portion of the interview to know where the spare keys live.

  Getting them will just be a matter of timing.

  The custodial suite is on the first floor, tucked in an alcove near the gym. Since we have no plausible reason to be in the gym, we park ourselves at the top of the stairs, which doesn’t give us a direct line of sight to the break room, but lets us watch the hallway leading up to it.

  If I remember correctly, the shift change happens at 3:30, and our best chance will be right when the second-shift guys leave to begin their rounds. We’ll be able to watch their progress in the hall and make our move.

  As expected, we hear Miss Caroline say hello and deliver instructions to her replacements at 3:25, then catch a glimpse of her walking down the hall shortly thereafter. Moments later, the rattle of laden carts indicates the night men are starting their rounds. One gets in the elevator near the base of the stairs, while the other disappears into the Health room. I’m ready to shoot down the stairs the instant his cart clears the door, but Ravi’s hand on my arm stays me.

  “Let him get a few down,” he says.

  It proves to be good advice, as the custodian is quicker than I expected he’d be, though I guess the sooner they finish, the sooner they can slack off for the rest of their shift in the break room. We wait until he finishes all the rooms we can see, which means he’s around the corner when I dart down the stairs. Ravi follows more slowly, prepared to be a distraction should the need arise.

  I slip into the office without issue and find the tall filing cabinet unlocked. Perfect. I search for the black cash box and find it in the second drawer. There’s still no lock on it, just as I remembered. I pop it open to reveal a ring of keys labeled M1, M2, M3, and I slide M1 off the ring. Master key, first floor. That’s what we need. I return the remaining keys to the box and the box to the drawer. I wave the key at Ravi, and we race to the auditorium, needing to beat the custodians there.

  The key fits into the lock as easily as the 331 key had, but this one turns easily. We duck inside and push the door shut behind us. I pocket the key and pull out my phone.

  “We don’t know where she was found,” I say, “so look everywhere.”

  Using our phones as flashlights, we scan the dim rows of seats and the aisles for any sign of violence, but I’m drawn to the stage. If someone died in the auditorium, whether by their own hand or that of a madman, chances are it happened there.

  We each take a side, searching the scarred floorboards for signs of violence, but find no bloodstains or anything out of the ordinary. When we meet in the center of the stage, we both look up to where the heavy velvet curtain is suspended from metal tracks as if the answers might be hiding in the rafters.

  I sigh. “So far, there’s nothing to indicate she died…messy.”

  “At least there’s that,” Ravi says grimly.

  “At least there’s that.”

  I head down the stairs, frustrated at the lack of clear evidence, then freeze when I spot a figure silhouetted against the door. “Shit.” I push Ravi back up the steps. “Go, go, go.”

  I shoot past him and pull him toward the velvet drapes along the rear of the stage. We find a gap and duck behind the curtains, stopping to peer out through a tiny slit to see who nearly caught us. If it’s one of our suspects, that could mean something.

  But it’s only Ms. Larson, striding down the center aisle with Henry at her heels.

  I let the curtain fall closed and lay a hand on Ravi’s arm, easing him back into the darkness. We move carefully, not wanting to knock into something that would inadvertently reveal our presence. I have a sudden flash of watching Emma and Jacob in a similar retreat, but I set the memory aside. After pushing through the second layer of curtains, thinner than the velvet ones that line the stage, I see a strip of light that can only be the edge of a door. Ravi gets there first, pushes the bar, and dumps us into the blinding light of the hall.

  “That was close,” he says.

  “Thank you, Captain States-the-Obvious.” It’s not him I’m frustrated with though; it’s myself. I know in my bones that we missed something important before Ms. Larson rushed us out, and if I were a better investigator—more observant, more astute—I would’ve seen it.

  Kylie’s funeral is set for Thursday, and although the school doesn’t officially shut down, Ms. Larson makes it clear that anyone wishing to attend will receive an excused absence. Judging by the number of people filing into the church, most of the school has taken advantage of that.

  I linger with Ravi on the church lawn as mourners arrive, surveying who’s there, who isn’t, and who might be acting strangely. That last factor is the hardest to judge, as even I’m acting strange. Or at least feeling strange.

  There’s a dreamlike surrealism as we stand here—Ravi clad in a black suit that pulls across his shoulders, and me in a similarly somber black-on-black outfit of pin-striped pants and cow
l-neck sweater. The air is crisp enough to make me wish I’d brought a jacket, but my bright red peacoat had seemed too festive.

  Cassidy, looking like she should be going to some kind of award ceremony in her sleek black cocktail dress, is here, along with Bryce and her morning crew. My brain renames them the Mourning Crew, but I don’t share that thought. I’m glad they have absorbed Priya into their pod, because the girl is abandoned by Mrs. B the moment the hearse arrives. Mrs. B’s face is swollen from crying, and she embraces Kylie’s mother as soon as she’s out of the limo. Mrs. B knows everyone in town, that’s true, but unlike Emma’s dad, whom she had been friends with only in high school, she and Kylie’s mom are one of those sets of lifelong friends that are so common in Maplefield. Sort of like me and Ravi would be if we didn’t have bigger goals than this small town.

  The pallbearers assemble at the rear of the hearse as the latecomers make their way inside. The funeral director opens the hatch of the black car and slides a gleaming white casket out onto a wheeled cart while I struggle to acknowledge and set aside a wave of sadness. The men and boys, including two I recognize from school, take hold of the gold handles and lift the casket as easily as if it were empty.

  Ravi and I slip into the church before the family procession, opting to stand along the back wall rather than search for seats. The air outside might be cold, but the church itself is stifling with the heat of too many bodies packed in one place.

  As the preacher begins the service, I scan the pews, searching for Owen’s unmistakable auburn buzz cut, but I don’t see it. Odd. I’d have thought he’d be there.

  Locating Jacob by the back of his head proves to be impossible. There are too many dark-haired males of similar build to pinpoint which one is him.

  As I search the room, the baby hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and when I scan the back rows, I see why. Peter Vernon is watching me as intently as I’m watching the pews.

  I stiffen but meet his gaze and hold it. I’m furious that he would dare show his face at a teenage girl’s memorial service. His lip curls in the slightest of sneers, then he turns away like I’m not worth his attention.