Instead, as the shelves tumbled around me, there was a warm feeling of awe, as if, with the tearing away of my life from its attachment to earth, fragile as the connection of a leaf to a twig, everything permanent, factual, real—everything I swore was true—became the opposite of what I’d always thought.
My last feeling wasn’t regret or pain. It was joy.
That was the most terrifying thing of all.
I get to see Jim now. That was all I was thinking before my life went out.
If I’m dead, I’ll get to see Jim.
“Really don’t feel like getting shot in the head today,” sang Kipling merrily as we filed into Wincroft at the start of the next wake. “How ’bout we take a page from Momma Greer’s Guide to the Good Life?”
“What’s that?” asked Cannon.
“Can’t beat your mortal enemy to a pulp?” He shrugged. “Throw him a party.”
That was how we came to arrive at the Warwick police station armed not with our usual guns, but with identical Barry the Clown costumes rented from Gobbledygook Halloween World.
“May I help you?” asked Frederica at the front desk.
“We’re from Big Apple Balloon-a-Gram,” I said, smiling. “Where would you like us to set up for the surprise party?”
“What surprise party?”
“Detective Art Calhoun’s surprise seventieth.”
Frederica was astonished. So were Officers Polk, McAndress, Cunningham, Leech, Ives, and Mapleton, as well as Art Calhoun himself, who emerged from his office with a distrustful scowl. But we had moved fast. The wireless speaker was already playing “Margaritaville.” Wit had already unveiled three dozen cupcakes, baskets of gummy worms, and party favors of gun Christmas tree ornaments. Cannon and Kip were standing on folding chairs, taping up the tinsel Happy Birthday sign. Martha tossed bottles of Harpoon IPA into a cooler.
“Hold up. Just wait one…” Calhoun fell silent, eyeing the beer.
“What’s happening here?” demanded Officer Polk.
I made an elaborate show of examining the phony invoice, which was really the receipt for our costume rentals.
“Elizabeth Calhoun hired us,” I said with a frown.
“Lizzy did this?” whispered Calhoun, wide-eyed.
Liz Calhoun was his estranged daughter who lived in San Diego. She hadn’t spoken to her father in three years, which meant there was little chance she’d take his call now, when he phoned to thank her for the unexpected party, even though his real seventieth birthday was over three weeks away.
That meant I had time to find Jim’s file.
“Nothing better than cupcakes,” said Officer Channing, grinning as she helped herself.
“And now, friends, let’s start the entertainment!” shouted Kipling with a bow so low his red clown nose fell off and rolled under a desk. “If you could all gather round and join hands? Don’t be shy.”
That was my cue.
I darted into the back stairwell. I raced down the steps to the basement, heaved open the wood doors, and sprinted into the shadowed rows of boxes.
I raced along the back wall, slipping past filing cabinets and a copy machine, and veered into the Gs, the Js, the Ls, zigzagging in and out, careful not to graze the shelves, my oversized clown shoes making loud quacking noises, my balloon pants making me trip.
Eighth row. Far left. At the very top. MASON, JIM LIVINGSTON.
It was there. My heart pounding, I had to jump up three times to shove it off the shelf without sending the entire thing toppling over. I set it carefully on the ground.
“You found it?”
I turned, startled, to see Martha hurrying toward me.
She’d never appeared down here before. The knowing, even anxious look on her face seemed to suggest she had come because she didn’t trust me, because she didn’t want me left alone with the box. Or was it that she’d hoped I would never actually find it?
I ripped off the tape and pulled open the lid.
I stared inside for an entire minute, unable to speak.
No. No. No. Impossible.
“Are you kidding me?” whispered Martha in apparent shock, looking over my shoulder. “After all that? Getting shot dead a million times?”
Shaking her head, a hand on her hip, she took down another box.
“Maybe Jim’s file got put somewhere else,” she muttered.
I couldn’t stop staring in, unable to breathe.
The box was empty.
There wasn’t a single paper left except a coupon: $5 off 1 bin of Honey Love Fried Chicken. Soul Mate Special!
Upstairs, more singing and clapping had broken out. “For he’s a jolly good fellow…”
Martha was madly thrusting more boxes to the floor, yanking off the lids. Every one was crammed full of papers, plastic evidence bags, black ink.
That ink was back, seeping through the corners again.
“How can anyone find anything in here? It’s a mess. There’s some kind of leak.”
Martha was examining the ink between her fingers, wrinkling her nose, though when she caught my eye, the knowing expression on her face chilled me.
We spent another ten minutes going through boxes, Martha saying, “It has to be here somewhere.”
The only empty box we came across was Jim’s.
Martha knew something. That was clear. What it was, I had no idea.
“Edgar Mason and Torchlight Security are behind it,” said Cannon when we were back at Wincroft, sprawled across the couches in the library. “Who else could make an entire case file just vanish?”
“They had everything destroyed,” said Kipling in agreement. “Which was why Calhoun and the other cops were always so touchy when we asked about the case. They’ve been paid off.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Don’t you see?” said Cannon. “Something in there was incriminating to Jim.”
“Right,” said Wit with a nod. “They didn’t want it made public. So they sent some Torchlight ex–Navy SEAL into the station and he stole it.”
“Which means the Masons know the truth,” said Kipling.
“And,” Cannon continued, “if they haven’t come forward to arrest anyone, if they’ve stayed silent, it means whatever they uncovered was damaging for the family.”
As everyone fell silent, considering all this, my eyes caught Martha’s.
She seemed skeptical, or her mind was somewhere else. I’d been unable to stop thinking about her sudden appearance in the basement and the look on her face when she’d spotted the ink. It made me wonder whether she suspected me somehow, whether she knew I’d received those texts from Jim asking me to meet him that night at the quarry.
“Out of all of us, Bee,” she said suddenly, “you spent the most time with the Masons. Did they ever tell you what they thought happened to their son?”
I shook my head, shrugging. “We completely fell out of touch.”
Countless times during the past year, I’d wondered how the Masons had handled Jim’s death. I never found out. I never even made it to Jim’s funeral. My parents, fretting about my mental well-being, begged me not to go. And while a few Darrow students—including Whitley, Cannon, and Kip—had gotten special permission to take the train to New York for the service, I decided to stay away. My absence, I knew, would come as a relief. His family had liked their modern art collection infinitely more than they’d ever liked me. Jim’s mom, Gloria—a champagne flute of a woman, all ice-blond hair and long limbs, with a low voice—always surveyed me as if I were a window with an airshaft view. Jim’s father had to be introduced to me three times before he recalled who I was. And even then he called me Barbara.
“I say we pay a surprise visit to the Masons,” said Whitley.
“We’ll probably have to waterboard ’em to get ’em to talk, child,” said Kipling. “But count me in.”
“There’s a problem,” I said.
“What?” asked Martha.
“The wake.”
“What about it?”
“It’s only eleven point two hours. That’s not enough time.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kip, frowning. “We fly to East Hampton. We’ll be outside the Masons’ Water Mill estate in less than two hours.”
“They’re not in Water Mill. The Masons spend every summer on Amorgos, an island in the Aegean Sea. It takes eleven hours by plane. Plus a three-hour boat ride. Then you have to hike up a mountain to reach the house.”
They seemed skeptical, so I dialed the Masons’ Fifth Avenue apartment. The housekeeper who answered confirmed the family was away.