I wanted to tell him that night all that I’d held back. More than once I parted my lips to explain about the photo, but he kept finding new places to kiss me, washing away anything that wasn’t a sigh, a caught breath, a breathless silence. I stared into his eyes, readied myself to tell about the symbols on Mum’s coin, on the fountain, but the heat of his hands on the bare skin of my back distracted me from my suspicions. His touches so gentle, always aware of my pain, made me believe it was possible to replace bad with good.
His bare skin against mine, and I could be someone else. Someone he’d still like once he knew what I’d been hiding. I could be us for as long as I needed and not remember anything at all. I could be lost, and forget, and pretend it would be right as rain in the morning.
So I did.
Chapter 14
I didn’t know how long I’d been staring at Sherlock’s string map of the crimes when I finally realized that he was right. Maybe it had been minutes. Maybe hours. It was so easy for me to get lost among the lines. To trace them over and over, even when I knew their outcomes so well, I could’ve re-created the diagram in all its complexities for myself. But lying in his bed tilted the string world just enough to make me see the whole.
I slipped from under the covers, pulled the closest piece of clothing I could find around me, which happened to be Lock’s crisp white uniform shirt, and watched the way the moonlight highlighted some paths and not others. I saw each piece slowly, the dates, the faces, the times, the geography, pins marking the places within the park that had become crime scenes. I watched as they came together into something I could see all at once—the shape the crimes made on the map, the dates the victims died as related to where they stood in the photo I still kept in the pocket of my jeans.
But there was something about the dates. Something familiar when I looked at them as a whole. I saw them in a line, the dates of the crimes. Then saw another line, the dates of my dad’s song. I could trace it so perfectly then, Lock’s deduction. It had to be a policeman, but probably not for the reasons he thought. It was because of the dates.
September 18. The day of my mother’s funeral. The day Todd White died at the planter.
November 23. My mother’s birthday. Our first without her. Grant Reeves’s—Mustache Man’s—last day alive.
February 10. When Mum and Dad met at the tea dance. When Francisco Torres died.
I could hear their song. In my mind, as I recalled the dates and added them to the spaghetti of clues on the wall, I could hear the trembling piano, the bleat of the trumpet. And standing in the dark of Lock’s room, far away in time and space from Dad’s turntable, I felt my heartbeat speed in my chest.
March 4. Not even my brother’s stupid ringtone could drown out the trumpet as it came in. Mr. Patel.
March 26. Stepdad? Blue-Haired Girl? I didn’t even know their names yet, didn’t know if either one was really dead. But there had been another murder last night. In the park. That meant there was only one left. One person left in the photo. One last chance to know anything at all about my mother and her secrets. Why this was all happening.
Somehow, I’d gotten dressed. Somehow, I’d made my way outside and down the block to where the song should have been playing. But wasn’t. Not anymore.
I paused at the front door, my hand trembling as it hovered over the knob.
The boys. I had to check on the boys.
I needed clothes for tomorrow.
Her things. They might still be sprawled out across the patio. Someone needed to rescue them.
I had so many reasons to be there, but the minute I opened the door and found my dad missing from his bed, I headed straight for his closet, where I knew the box would be—returned to its rightful place, though warped with water damage on one side, and ripped along the corner seam.
This time there was no careful method to my search. I -riffled through what remained in the box until my finger sliced open on a broken shard of glass. It was still there. I wrapped the sleeve of my shirt around my finger as best I could and kept searching until I had three broken pieces of glass and a metal frame. I pieced the glass together in the frame, then slid the photograph out of my back pocket and smoothed it out on top of the glass, smearing my blood through the shirt across the back.
I didn’t care. I was too close.
It took what felt like hours to bend those filthy little metal pieces down to secure the frame backing. But then it was done. I swiped my fingers across my forehead and stared at the back of the frame. At the useless thin metal triangle that made like it would hold the thing up on the wall. At the little easel stand that would hold it up on the table.
I might have stared for minutes before I realized there was a flick of white escaping from under the easel stand—a tiny wisp of a thing, but I pushed my fingernail under the stand to follow it and saw two words written in my mother’s perfect script: “Sorte Juntos.” I was sure I’d seen those words before, but they didn’t seem important enough to distract me from my true task—that thing I was afraid to know, but knew already.