“Four hundred dollars?” Aubrey exclaims. “That’s so great. How’d you find tickets for that cheap?” When I don’t answer, she looks hard at my face. Then she tenses and begins fiddling with her cuff. I stare back, silently entreating her not to be angry. “You didn’t buy tickets back to Boston and Chicago,” she says slowly. “Because tickets back to the U.S. would be much more than that.” She waits for me to reply even though she knows the answer.
“Nope,” I tell her. Aubrey takes a deep breath, then brings her hands to her temples and massages them, pressing in hard with her thumbs. Her short black hair looks limp, greasy. We haven’t showered in days.
“Give me my credit card,” she demands.
“No,” I say again. “Not until you promise to go to Bangkok with me. It’s kind of too late anyway. I took care of your flight. Your credit card limit is too low to book a flight home. We’ll need it for Bangkok. Consider it, Aubrey. Just hear me out this time. You know I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Would Charlie really have planned to kill himself? Isn’t that a little over the top for someone who was such a coward, who talked about running away all the time? I think Anand was trying to tell us something. I think he’s alive. And I need you to consider it as a real possibility for a second.”
“You do.” Aubrey’s voice is dull, flat.
“Yeah,” I say in a rush. “And there’s more. I think Charlie buried a message for me in that suicide note. I’ve practically memorized it by now. I read it and reread it because something kept bugging me about the language he used. Especially the eight-eighteen and death. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I realized—some of the things he said were quotes from a crazy song we used to listen to. ‘Epizootics.’ By Scott Walker,” I clarify, seeing her blank look. “He said things right from the song: ‘all the people . . . pushing each other around’; ‘Sorry, I’m so clumsy’; ‘It’s dense. Tense.’ Suddenly it all started coming together. But I still couldn’t figure out why he’d do that. Then I remembered.” I pause, trying to catch my breath. “And maybe just in time. He practically spoon-fed it to me, like he knew I’d find that letter. Today is August sixteenth. In the letter, Charlie talked about death being like empty shoes at eight-eighteen. When I realized other parts of his letter were ‘Epizootics’ lyrics, I remembered the video. And the conversation we had about it.” I shudder. I can’t help it; the video was one of the most macabre I’d ever seen, full of insects crawling on skin and manic dancing and a series of bizarre images. Charlie had been fascinated by it.
“What was the conversation?” Aubrey asks, her eyes wide.
“Charlie thought the empty shoes meant someone died. Not just anyone. The woman in the video. The one dancing. I said it was ridiculous. The shoes appear a bunch of times, and the woman keeps appearing afterward. But Charlie kept saying, ‘No, when you see the shoes for the last time, you know she’s dead. See,’ he said, and then he flipped through the video and showed me all the times the shoes appeared. The last time was toward the end of the video. ‘Now it’s eight-eighteen and she’s gone forever,’ he told me. She was only on the road to death before. I’m almost positive it was eight-eighteen he said. I remember being creeped out, but then I figured he’d just read up on the meaning of the song on one of the music blogs he was always on—that Scott Walker had really intended it to be that way, and Charlie was just recounting his intentions.
“Now I’m wondering why he referenced it in the letter. Maybe what Charlie had planned for August eighteenth had more to do with us—or me—than with him. I think it’s a clue. I think he wants us to find him.”
“You’re crazy,” Aubrey says, shaking her head at me. Her blue eyes are brighter than usual. “If he meant anything at all by it—and he probably didn’t, since like you said, it seemed like he was out of his mind—I’m sure it had to do more with him than you or me.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, tightening my grip on the counter. “But I need to know for sure. And you still need your journal. Don’t you want to know where that address leads?”
Aubrey lifts her head and looks me straight in the eye. She straightens her shoulders. When she speaks, her voice is clear and confident. “I’m sick of this roller-coaster ride,” she starts. “I feel all over the place, totally out of whack. But I want to know what the hell is going on. So let’s go to Bangkok,” she says. “Plus . . .” She pauses here, and her lips curve up into a wicked smile. “If Charlie is alive, I’ve got some damn good ideas for making him wish he’d never messed with us.”
I grin back, biting my lip. I have to stop myself from leaping across the few feet that separate us and pulling her into a hug.
18
Aubrey