“I know that feeling.”
Once I’m safely inside, the door locked behind me, he takes off back to Denver, to check in with Finney and then fly back east. I’m not ignorant of how far he’s stretched allowable limits for my sake, and maybe for his own. I was only ever supposed to be part of a case, not a part of his life, but here I am, five years later, closer family than blood in many ways, and I don’t regret it.
I don’t think he does either, even when it forces him into some difficult decisions.
I give a few hours over to getting ahead on schoolwork, because it seems like the responsible thing to do, quibble with Mum via text over what to do for dinner (she wins, but only because we haven’t actually had curry since Birmingham), and then pull out Inara’s letter.
I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned it to Eddison. He knows her, even if he doesn’t know whether or not he likes her (he gives away a lot more than he realizes). It’s nice, though, keeping it to myself. Keeping it for myself, maybe.
Setting the letter on top of my current journal, I grab the first of the Washington, D.C. journals from the stack on my floor. All the rest are still downstairs, but San Diego is where things changed and D.C. is where I realized how much things changed, and I can’t help but read back through them looking for clues.
Two years ago, I made a friend in San Diego. Her name was Aimée Browder, and she was in love with all things French. Despite my intention to keep myself to myself, she was there; just all the time there, without being pushy or nosy. I let her talk me into French Club and movies and hanging out, and some afternoons I’d sit by the door in the ballet studio where she took classes and do my homework to the sounds of classical music, murmured instructions, and the thumps of successfully landed jumps.
In spite of everything, she was my friend, so when Mum and I were about to move to D.C., I asked Aimée if we could keep in touch. And we did, actually, for about a week and a half. I wasn’t worried for the first few days of silence; we were both busy. She’d respond when she got the chance.
Then I got a call from her mother, who was sobbing so hard she had to hand the phone to her husband so he could tell me Aimée was dead. Their daughter, my friend, had been murdered, and as soon as he said church and flowers, I knew it was connected to Chavi in some way. It didn’t seem possible that it could be coincidence.
That night wasn’t the first time I ate myself sick. Far from, really; it had been almost three years by that point. I think it was the worst, though. I stuffed myself so overfull I couldn’t even cry it hurt so badly, gasping for breath and feeling like I was about to split down my sides. Mum was two seconds from hauling me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped, but somehow that was the thing that tipped me into full-blown hysterics.
I didn’t want Eddison to know it was that bad. Didn’t want Vic and Mercedes to know at all.
They called from San Diego with questions about Aimée, things they had to ask for the investigation even if they really didn’t want to. I could hear how worried they were, and though I was still sick as shit, I craved more, just because it hurt so badly.
It took days before I could eat again. Even then, Mum had to make me. I couldn’t look at food without my stomach cramping painfully.
To distract myself, I started researching the other murders, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that my ignorance had gotten Aimée killed. Mum pretended she wasn’t clinging as she looked over my shoulder. She was the one to notice that the flowers surrounding the murdered girls matched the bouquets that had shown up on our doorstep in San Diego.
Yellow and white jonquils for Darla Jean Carmichael, dead as long as I’d been alive.
Purple-throated calla lilies for Zoraida Bourret, found in her family’s Methodist church on Easter Sunday.
Clumps of baby’s breath for Leigh Clark, a preacher’s daughter in Eugene, Oregon.
A crown of honeysuckle for Sasha Wolfson, whose cousin told stories of a girl who plucked blossoms out of her hair to touch their sweetness to her tongue.
Colorful sprays of freesia for Mandy Perkins, who built fairy villages in nursing home gardens around Jacksonville, Florida.
White carnations for Libba Laughran, veined and tipped and red so they looked like they were bleeding. She was only fourteen when she was raped and killed outside of Phoenix.
No flowers came to D.C., though, nor to Atlanta after we moved that November. There were none in Omaha or Birmingham, aside from the ones sent by the idiot coworker in Nebraska. No mystery flowers, then, so it never seemed worth telling my agents.
If we hadn’t left San Diego when we did, it would have been columbines at our door next, for Emily Adams, seventeen years old, from St. Paul, Minnesota, and no relation to later victim Meaghan Adams. She was a musician, according to the articles and tribute pages we read. She sang like an angel, especially with folk songs, and played every instrument she could get her hands on. A few days before she was murdered, she organized a rally in response to a school shooting in Connecticut; she clipped a couple blue columbines to the end of her guitar, to honor decades of victims as she played.
When the bastard killed Emily, he draped a ribbon of flowers over her throat, to hide the gaping wound. It was mentioned in a couple of articles about the killing, but there were pictures, too, on true crime websites that somehow managed to get crime scene photos from most of the murders.
Impressive, considering the FBI wasn’t brought in until the tenth victim, Kiersten Knowles.
Even with all the research Mum and I did, we don’t have half the information the FBI does, but I’d guess we’re no further from the answer. All these facts to be found but nothing that leads anywhere. If I get a name someday, the identity of the man who murdered Chavi and the others, will that bring peace? If he goes to trial and is found guilty, is that justice?
I look at the folded pages of Inara’s letter, then reach for a pen and loose paper.
Dear Inara,
My mum has said on occasion that it’s a shame people can only die once; one of her dearest wishes is to find our nightmare and kill him again and again and again, once for each person he killed and once again just for us.
I don’t know that it’s any more or less just than imprisonment or formal execution.
I used to think it would mean something. I’d dream about being in a courtroom when a jury foreman read out guilty, and the unknown man with the blurred-out face behind the defense table would start weeping. Noisily, messily, the kind of crying that leaves you mortified because there are just globs of snot dripping everywhere. He’d be broken, and Mum and I would laugh, giddy and bright, and fall into each other’s arms.
We’d be happy.
We wouldn’t hurt anymore.
At some point, I realized that it wouldn’t bring Chavi back. Nothing would.
Suddenly I couldn’t stand the thought of any resolution that left the asshole alive, weeping or not.
I have no answers.
I have no wisdom.
What I have is a healthy sense of spite and a determination that someday I’m going to learn how to do this thing called living. Maybe that’s as far as justice can stretch.
There’s no actual reason to switch his destination from D.C. to New York, but Eddison does it anyway, thumb rubbing against the dark screen of his phone where the message from Vic sleeps. At the moment, still a little raw from worry and frustration, he doesn’t want to look into his motivations all that deeply. Not when there’s something itching at him about how the Sravastis took the news about the stalker, and he can’t put his finger on what it is or why it’s bothering him.