There was a muffled conversation once Graham reached the living room. A minute later, the front door shook Harry’s bedroom window.
He moved to sit beside me. The mattress gave at my back. “It’s okay. Graham will be focused on the rebellions by the time we go over there tonight.”
In my head I turned over the methodical way Graham had broken down the night of the crime and the killing itself. “I really shouldn’t have said he was stupid. All those notes were genius.”
“Going after a killer is dumb. Dumb and crazy,” Harry said, turning toward his records.
Two minutes before, I’d been dead set against Graham looking for Goldilocks’s killer. Letting his plan sink in emboldened me. Yes, Graham saw a challenge instead of danger. But so did I. I used to jump without looking right alongside him. I didn’t used to care about bandages any more than he did.
There was our escalating threshold for mischief. Perhaps there was also one for danger. I ran my finger along the ridge of the scar on my shoulder. Graham was just continuing what I’d started at twelve years old when I went looking in the tunnel.
“Do you think he could really hunt down who killed her?” I asked Harry. Before he answered, I thought, if anyone could solve a cold case, it would be Graham.
Harry returned a record to its sleeve. “Identifying the bad people in the world isn’t the same as busting them. Graham finds out who this guy is, then what? You heard him—we’re going after bad guys and we’d have the worst one.”
I sunk lower against the bed. Knowing would be dangerous. I ached to know, nonetheless.
24
We gathered at Graham’s that evening. He met Harry and me at the front door, took the pizza box from my hands, and smiled easily. But his gray eyes were as elusive as shadows. Viv was already there, lying on the sofa, her boots hooked over the sofa back, her hair tapering to the carpet.
“It’s about time,” she grumbled, hoisting herself up, teetering with a red face to take the pizza from Graham.
She led the way into the attic, the box ajar, a piece hanging from between her teeth.
Graham’s mother had a collection of artifacts that would have made a museum drool. In addition to her own acquisitions, Stepdads Two, Three, and Four were academics, and because their marriages with Graham’s mom had dissolved as spontaneously as they germinated, had left trunks and crates in the Averbach house.
I haven’t said much about Graham’s mother. This is mostly because she’s a puzzle to me. She was as majestically beautiful as the crowned crane on its dusty mount in her attic. She was the kind of college professor who taught students rarely and traveled on research sabbatical often. From the invitations sent by foreign governments, I had the impression that she was a big deal in her field of nearly extinct civilizations.
In her absence, Graham was curator of the attic museum, with special collections like wood carvings from Papua New Guinea, rare butterflies of the Amazon, and rudimentary agrarian tools from the Jordan River Basin. We weren’t searching the clutter for anything as humdrum as pinned insects.
Stepdad Number Three was a professor of evolutionary biology. Graham was sure he’d left one of his skeletons behind. It was ideal—untraceable to us. I remembered the skeleton as being kept in Graham’s study during Stepdad Number Three’s reign. I had dared Graham to stick his fingers in the eye sockets. He had dared me to kiss it.
Viv drew a smiley face in the snowy layer on a nearby wooden crate. “It’s romantic up here. All the old things.”
“I’m not going to kiss you again, Vivian, no matter how much you hit on me,” Graham said with an impish wink.
Viv pursed her lips at him. “If I want another kiss, I’ll take it. Open the window. It smells like cheese and dust.” Graham took a circuitous route around boxes toward the lone windowpane leaking sunset into the rafters. Its bronze chain allowed a few-inch gap to siphon fresh air inside. Graham whipped a white sheet off of a shrouded table like a magician snatching away a cloth.
“Massage table?” Viv called.
“Hospital gurney,” I guessed.
Graham hopped up on its center and swung his legs. “A Civil War–era autopsy table.”
Viv dropped the leather chest she was holding and yelped as it thudded to her feet, popped open, and freed a rush of jingling coins. Harry fumbled on the floor, trying to stop their rattling and ricocheting with Viv.
Graham leaped off the table. Rather than help he took a lock of my hair between his fingers and tugged. From the floor, I shoved his kneecaps. He was angry, immature, annoying. I wanted to get him alone. To tell him. It was dangerous for Graham to hunt for Goldilocks’s killer, but in the hours since he stormed from Harry’s bedroom, I’d come up with a solution.
Rather than hunt for Goldilocks’s killer, we would force her killer to reveal himself.
Amid the upheaval of boxes and crates, we finished segmenting the rebellions for our initiates.
“I found him—errrr—her?” Harry called from a dark corner of the attic. He lifted the skull from the box.
“Don’t touch it,” Viv said.
“We’ve got to wipe it free of prints anyway,” Graham said.
Viv muttered, “Because it’s gross.”
The skeleton had wires protruding from its bones, but his or her pieces were loose, an anatomical puzzle.
The outside light had dimmed by then and a single, dangling bulb from a rafter illuminated the macabre discovery. Viv nudged the skull with a finger. A minute later she was cradling it in her hand and peering into its eye sockets. “Do you think there’s another skull up here?” she asked. “Because this would be the greatest prop for my Hamlet audition next semester.”
“Ophelia didn’t have a scene with a skull,” Graham told her.
She raised her chin, preparing to be challenged. “I want to audition for Hamlet. A girl Hamlet.”
“That’s brilliant, Vivy,” Harry said.
Graham nodded approvingly. “We’ll find you another skull before then.”
We turned back to appraise the bones in the box.
“What if the initiates—if Amanda—open their first rite and say screw this?” Viv whispered. “They tell everyone everything and we spend the next eight months as pariahs. Doing community service to atone for vandalism.”
“We were outcasts up until a week ago,” I reminded her.
“Ouch,” Harry said teasingly, hands pressed over his heart.
“Kings and queens without a court,” Graham said.
Harry chuckled. “Worry about what’s more probable. Someone smuggled in their cell last night and we’re two minutes away from a video of Graham with the dead bird in his bloody hands going viral.”
He was met with horrified stares. “I’m joking.”
“It’s worth the risk,” I said. “For Goldilocks.”
“For revenge,” Viv murmured.