It was a near miss, Sutton said. That Kennedy wasn’t home. That Kennedy was late. He knew her, he said, the girl who survived it. She was at her boyfriend’s house when it happened. Marco, I now know.
I’d seen the pictures in the paper, on the news: the two professors—the woman, with dark hair, smiling in her photo, with the sky and ocean behind her, and the rest of the photo cut away; and the man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard covering a square jaw.
But Elliot’s photo is the one that haunts me the most: the dark, hollow eyes; the expressionless face as he stared back through the lens of the police camera.
The next day, while the search parties were still out, Elliot suddenly appeared, walking up the driveway, like nothing at all had happened, seemingly with no memory of the event. He was allegedly in the same clothes, dirty, shaken, the blood still under his nails. Sutton said Elliot made it almost all the way to the crime scene tape across the front door, asking, “What happened?” before someone stopped him.
He had no idea there was a manhunt under way for him at that very moment.
There were a lot of rumors: that he was high; that he was furious, that it was a chaotic attack; that he was completely calm and collected and carried out the crimes with a chilling precision. No one knows what really happened, only that he did it. But his trial is starting next week, so I guess we’re about to find out.
I tap my fingers on the steering wheel in the silence. “Um, are you hungry?” The clock gives us more time. A few more hours until she needs to be back, and I can see she does need something else. Something not in that ranch house with her uncle and the overgrown yard.
“Yes, actually,” she says. She sighs, like she’s irritated at her own hunger.
“Pizza?” Right at that moment, there’s a sign just off the highway for the World’s Best Pizza, which I think is probably optimistic, considering we’re in the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, half a mile from a jail. But who am I to judge?
“Pizza,” she repeats, which I guess could be taken as either a Yes, pizza, please or a Pizza, are you serious? but I’m choosing to see it as the former, because I’m starving.
At the pizza place, we stand in line together, and she’s silent. I’m seriously the worst person for this. I’m terrible at knowing what to say, finding the right words in a crisis. Sorry your brother is in jail, but would you like extra cheese? She saves me from the awkwardness by ordering for both of us, only looking at me after the fact to make sure it’s okay. Well, I was right about one thing: she likes to be in charge.
I pull out my wallet. I have no cash, like seriously none. Like right now I have to decide between gas and dinner. I have a credit card for emergencies, though, and this suddenly feels like an emergency.
But she offers to pay instead. She insists, actually. “No, you drove, I’ll feed.”
I carry the drinks, and she takes our order number and props it on the table, where we wait for our pizza (pepperoni and sausage) to be delivered.
“So,” I say, waiting for her to continue. It may seem odd—I know it probably does to anyone else, to the me who existed before all this—that I have just accompanied a near stranger to the jail where her family member awaits trial for the death of another family member. It seems so much, so intimate.
But something happens after a big event like the ones we’ve both been through. Something we can both understand. A brother disappearing, followed by a thorough investigation into all of our lives. I’d imagine it’s the same sort of thing that must have happened to her. She was a witness to a crime that happened in her house, a death.
Sorry, I have trouble just saying it: a double homicide. A murder.
Anyway, this is what tends to happen to us: a recalibration of sorts. Of what embarrasses you, versus what you try to hide. I mean, I live in a house covered with the faces of other people’s missing children. Her house is a crime scene, her brother the alleged guilty party. There’s a reordering of what matters.
She needed a car, so she asked me; we needed answers, so we went to the jail.
“I was with Joe already,” she says, unprompted, “when they found Elliot. When he came back to the house. We never got a chance to…he didn’t tell me what happened. It doesn’t make sense.”
He’s been awaiting trial; the evidence, according to the papers, was pretty cut-and-dry. A witness who puts him at the scene when the crime occurred, his fingerprints on the weapon, the blood under his nails. He hasn’t denied it, not that I’ve heard.
But that can’t be true, because it’s going to trial. It’s going to trial, to prove he’s guilty, because he hasn’t admitted to it, either. And Kennedy is the only witness.
Oh, I think.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because what else is there, really, to say? Sorry your brother is in jail for killing your family. Sorry you have no one else. Sorry he won’t see you, still.
“My mom and Will used to go out every weekend. Started out as once a week, then turned into twice, after Will convinced her we were too old to need her around all the time. It was just…routine,” she says, like she’s trying to get me to understand. “That night, it was the same as every other time. Nothing was different. There was no reason. It doesn’t make sense.”
I sit back and listen, trying to picture it—the faces I’ve seen in the paper, all in the same room, with Kennedy. Talking to one another, maybe laughing. She’s right, it doesn’t make sense. None of this does. It doesn’t make sense that, at a house one county over, my brother was here one day and gone the next, with no reason.
She sighs. “Elliot is seriously the most patient person. The most logical. Meticulous.” She shakes her head, as if because he’s logical and meticulous, he could not do such a thing.
“There was nothing logical or meticulous about it,” she whispers. I see her eyes widen and wonder what she’s imagining. The staircase, the lightbulb changed, the scent of paint. Chaos. Now I’m imagining it, too. The staircase. The horror of it. I wonder how a person can recover from that. From the knowing.
I’m not sure which is worse anymore: the not knowing, or the knowing. Her hand trembles as she reaches for her cup, and she moves the ice around absently with the straw before taking a drink.
“My brother,” I say, “was perfect.”
She’s got the straw in her mouth, but she stops drinking, just freezes.
“Not the perfect brother. Not that. Just how everyone else saw him.”
She nods, like she knows. Then moves the ice around with her straw again.
The pizza is finally delivered, the scent practically intoxicating. While waiting for my slice to cool, I decide to map with my phone how long it will take to get home. “Oh crap,” I say, my cell in my hand. My phone has been off since we arrived at the jail. Since we turned them off and left them in the locker before walking through security.
I turn the phone on, holding my breath. Three new messages. I groan, holding the phone to my ear. The first is from my father, asking me where exactly I am, because they need to talk to me. The second is my father again, this time agitated, telling me to call him as soon as I get this. As soon as, he repeats. And the third message is static—nothing there. Time for my parents to get a new line. I can only imagine the state of my father during that call, though. How things might have escalated when I didn’t respond.
Sorry, I mouth to Kennedy, hitting the call-back button for my dad’s cell.
“Nolan?” he asks right away, as if my number hadn’t just shown up on his display.
“Sorry, Dad, I didn’t realize my phone had lost charge.”
Kennedy makes a face at my lie. Like I didn’t just see her do the same to her uncle, coming up with an excuse about who I was and where we were going.
My dad talks so fast I can’t keep up. “What? Dad, calm down. What?”
“The picture,” my dad says, and I can hear his breath, the restraint in his words. “You need to come home and look at the picture, Nolan.”
Kennedy raises her eyes to mine. His voice is so loud that she must’ve heard.
“You need to go?” she says, the pizza slice inches from her mouth, propped up in both hands.
“Sorry, I do,” I say. I grab a box from the counter behind us so she can take it to go. “There’s something happening at my house. My brother’s case.”
She holds up one finger, takes a bite, closing her eyes. As if the fate of the universe can hold on for just one moment. One simple moment where the only thing either of us is thinking about is the state of the world’s best pizza.
She starts to laugh then. “Nolan,” she says as I’m gathering my things. “I don’t know how to say this, but I think it is.”
“What?” I’m already mapping the course home. She pushes the half-eaten slice my way.