Then worry takes over, crushing my chest with thoughts of my cousin. What the hell is Autumn thinking, turning herself in like this? Boney’s gone, and Charlie’s only seventeen, so she’ll wind up taking the fall for this entire mess.
I can’t just torture myself with what-ifs; I need to do something. There’s no point in trying to clean the house up anymore, but I can check out how bad the rest of it is. I make my way upstairs, steeling myself to survey the damage to our bedrooms. It’s as bad as downstairs, although at least our laptops look okay. Still, the idea of someone going through my personal stuff—tossing everything I own aside like it’s nothing—makes me want to put a fist through the wall. I can’t stand being in my room, so I go back into Autumn’s.
The bulletin board above her desk has been torn off, as if somebody thought it might be concealing a wall safe, and tossed to the floor on top of a pile of clothes. I pick it up and place it carefully on the desk, studying the collage of pictures that represent Autumn’s life.
Everything about that life will change after tonight. Autumn will probably be arrested, turned into a warning and an example for other Carlton kids, and people will say she deserved it. They won’t care about any of the reasons behind what she did.
She deserved it.
The biggest picture on Autumn’s bulletin board is of her mom and dad, the aunt and uncle I barely knew, holding my toddler cousin between them. The second-biggest is of me and Ma flanking Autumn at her high school graduation last spring. There’s one of Autumn and me at the New England Aquarium from the summer she first got here, posed stiffly next to an exhibit about the biggest and smallest fish in the world. I know the whale shark is the biggest, but I have to squint at the sign next to Autumn to remember what the smallest fish was called. Paedocypris progenetica, barely a third of an inch long.
That’s Autumn, I think, my eyes drifting to the twelve-year-old version of my cousin. She’s the small fish in this whole mess. There’s somebody a lot bigger involved, somebody who moves enough pills that they can store thousands of them in an abandoned shed. Somebody with the knowledge, the resources, and the cold-blooded will to kill Boney. If the police could find that person, Autumn wouldn’t matter anymore. They’d have their whale shark.
It makes me wish I’d never left Cal and Ivy. You can say what you will about Ivy—and God knows I did—but she doesn’t give up. And she has a knack for figuring things out. If Ivy believes there’s something important in Ms. Jamison’s classroom, she’s probably right.
As soon as I start thinking about Ivy, her face leaps out at me from Autumn’s bulletin board. The picture was taken in Carlton Middle School’s streamer-decorated gym, at the only dance I’d ever gone to there. We moved around all night as a group: me, Autumn, Ivy, Cal, and Daniel. In the photo our arms are slung across each other’s shoulders, our smiles wide and full of braces. Across from that picture is one of Autumn at last year’s senior bonfire in the woods, her face pressed close to Loser Gabe as Stefan St. Clair grins over their shoulders. Beneath that is my mother and father’s wedding picture, and I swear to God, Ma already looks like she knows she just signed up for taking care of an adult kid.
My eyes flick between the photos as my brain catalogs everything that happened today. Boney’s death. Dale Hawkins’s news coverage. Stealing Ms. Jamison’s day planner. Finding the kill list. Learning about Charlie’s involvement. Talking to Autumn in the murder van. Fighting with Ivy. There’s something running through it all—not a common thread, exactly, but a loose one. It keeps dangling right outside my line of vision, taunting me with the fact that if I only knew where to tug, I could start to unravel everything.
The thought enters my head before I have time to push it away: What would Ivy do? And I’m pretty sure I know.
I pull a phone from my pocket. Not mine, the one I tossed aside like a coward downstairs, but Boney’s. Maybe it’s his name, Ivy said when she was trying to guess his passcode at Crave Doughnuts. She’d entered B-O-N-E-Y, which hadn’t worked, so I type in B-R-I-A-N.
“Holy shit,” I mutter when the screen unlocks. My pulse accelerates as I pull up Boney’s messages; the last one is just a number. 5832. The code to Ms. Jamison’s studio. There’s no name attached to the phone number that sent it, but I hit audio and hold it to my ear, scanning Autumn’s bulletin board while it rings.
I zero in on one of the pictures and think, Maybe.
Then the call goes to voicemail, and I almost drop the phone as a familiar voice fills my ear. There’s no maybe about it. My heart starts to pound as my vision narrows to a pinprick, until I can’t see anything except the picture that caught my eye. I could kick myself for all the signs I missed, but at least I finally grabbed hold of the thread.
And for the first time all day, I know what I have to do.
YOUTUBE, CARLTON SPEAKS CHANNEL