“But why?”
“I told you before, I think someone’s unhappy you’re still alive.” Marcus’s face twists. “Did you hear what they did to the memorial?”
It’d be a shame if someone came back to finish off the second.
I shudder, looking at the card . . . maybe it could have been Reva. “You think it was the same person?”
“That, or there are two sick assholes in this town. Maybe they like baiting you before they pounce. Maybe they did the same thing to Gretchen.”
I close my eyes.
“Sonia, has anything come back to you? It would help if you could remem—”
“I didn’t see anything.” I struggle to keep the panic out of my voice. “If they think I did, they’re wasting their time.”
He looks at me pointedly. “Is there anything else you have that someone might want?”
Bile rises in my throat. The SD card. All the videos and pictures on it. Gretchen was a collector of people’s worst moments. I guess anybody might kill for that. I lean heavily on the counter. How could anyone know I have it?
Marcus watches me closely. “Sonia, if you do—”
“No. There’s nothing else.”
He frowns. “We need to be honest with each other . . .”
He’s one to talk. I glare at him, but his dark hair falls into his eyes and his expression softens. I think of Marcus before he hooked up with Gretchen. The cute guy with the shy smile who always held the door for me walking into homeroom. My traitorous heart skips. This was so much easier when he would just glare back.
But maybe that’s tactical on his part.
“Speaking of honesty, have you been meeting with someone else?”
His eyebrows draw together. “Huh?”
I study the soap dispensers, trying to play his bluff. “Reva had some interesting things to say about you meeting with people in secret.”
His voice cools. “I thought you weren’t friends with her.”
“I’m not.”
He clears his throat. “Okay, yeah. Sometimes I meet with people in secret, if that’s what you want to call it. It’s kind of a business arrangement.”
I stare at him. “A business arrangement?”
He frowns, looking down at his clean-scrubbed hands. “Occasionally, I get art commissions. It’s not really my thing, but it brings in extra cash. Usually it’s a portrait of someone’s pet or a person they love. Sometimes it’s more personal. I had a fifty-year-old woman commission a nude of herself to give to her husband. . . . I don’t ask questions.”
I blink, imagining Marcus infusing some nervous Chihuahua or middle-aged woman with a burst of color and beauty. Of course they would want that. He could probably make anything seem beautiful.
“Have you done this for anyone I know?”
Marcus exhales, leaning against the puke-yellow tile. “Tyrone Wallace asked me to do a painting of Gretchen.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“It was right after she dumped him. He knew it was over, but he wanted something . . . to remember her, I guess. We’d been in an art class together and he’d seen my work. That’s the whole of it. I did the painting, he paid me, we haven’t really spoken since.”
I think back, trying to place this transaction in last year’s timeline. “So he must’ve approached you in the spring, and you gave him the painting when . . . ?”
“Right before he left for college.”
“Right before you started dating Gretchen.”
He straightens. “She showed up at my house. Said she’d seen the portrait and she liked it.”
I bet she did. Gretchen could be vain like that, but I guess I can’t really blame her. To my knowledge none of the other guys she dumped responded by immortalizing her in art. And I can only imagine what Marcus could do with a subject like her—with her flawless skin, high cheekbones, and sparkling eyes, she was the definition of a muse.
“I don’t need the details of how you hooked up,” I say, trying to force the thought out of my mind. I turn the postcard over between my fingers. “I just want to know if Tyrone’s involved.”
“You think he had something to do with that?”
“It seems unlikely, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a possibility.” I clear my throat and meet his eyes. “Tyrone used to climb in Gretchen’s window all the time.”
A sharp tone pings through the air, followed by a secretary’s voice crackling over a speaker in the ceiling: “Sonia Feldman, please report to the office, Sonia Feldman.”
My body goes rigid. I didn’t think Ms. Dixon would have an answer from Penn this soon. I pick up the postcard with a shaking hand, wondering how every part of my future could crumble so fast.
Marcus pushes off from the wall and picks up his bag.
“Wait. One more thing,” I say. I haven’t forgotten my conversation with Kirsten about Marcus cheating on Gretchen. I shove the postcard and its menacing script deep between the pages of my history book. “Were you seeing someone else when you and Gretchen broke up?”