“She—” I started to say, and then closed my mouth. I’d almost said that she was fine when I talked to her last night. The words had been in my mouth trying to escape, ready to betray me. My heart was beating so fast it vibrated like a motor engine. I needed shut up. “S-s-she’s really gone?”
Jay nodded. “We’ve got a forensic team on the way out there now. They’ll establish manner of death and time. We’ve got some preliminary details, but we’re not at liberty to share them now.
I bit my tongue to keep from asking any of the questions piling up in my head. I had to know how she died. I had to be able to picture it.
“They’ll get evidence,” Chan said. “Anything that was left behind. Hair, tire tracks, DNA—”
“Good,” Mom said, cutting him off. “I understand that you’re upset. We are too. I had a feeling, but I didn’t want it to be true. There’s no point in being angry with us. We want whoever did this to be caught just as badly as you do. If there’s something we can do to help, we will.”
“You’ve helped plenty,” Chan said flatly.
Mom sighed. “I’m not sure there’s any point in us staying.” Her eyebrows arched. “Unless you’re saying we can’t leave.”
Detective Jay stood. “Of course not. You’re not suspects.”
“Not officially,” Chan added.
Jay rested his hand on Chan’s shoulder. “We need to go to the crime scene. We’ll want to talk to you again, but while we’re gone, I’m going to ask you both to give a statement to another one of the officers.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can add.”
“We’ll still need a record. From the start. When you first had a vision about Paige. Every vision since then. Any detail you can remember. Once we’ve had a chance to see the scene, we’ll be in touch with further questions.”
Mom stood and hugged Jay. He went stiff in her arms. She pulled back and looked into his eyes. “This isn’t your fault. I don’t think there was anything that could have been done to shift what happened to Paige. All you can do now is find who did it. Get justice for her.”
I shut my bedroom door behind me and slid to the floor. I could barely remember the rest of the morning. We each went over everything we’d ever said about Paige. The officer asked the same questions over and over in slightly different ways. Looking for inconsistences and mistakes. I hadn’t been able to stop shaking. Usually it was my mom who was the drama queen, but we’d swapped places, and she was calm and collected, answering each question patiently until they let us go.
What the hell had happened?
My mind raced in circles, but there were only three options. One, that Paige had faked her death. Two, that a random person just happened to come across her at the fruit stand and killed her. Three, someone else knew about Paige’s plan and killed her to keep her from returning.
There was a body. I shivered at the word. There were too many things the police could check out—?DNA, fingerprints, hair and skin samples. If Detective Jay said they’d found Paige’s body, it was hers. There was no way for her to fake that.
I know people look for patterns. It’s what makes faking psychic skills so easy. They see links between things that are random. The truth is, coincidences happen all the time. Not everything has a purpose. There are random crimes. People are murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I was certain that wasn’t what happened in this case. Paige ending up dead wasn’t a case of bad luck. No one just stumbled across her way out there.
That left only option three. Someone knew where to find Paige, and they killed her. And if they knew enough about her plans to know where she would be, it meant there was a good chance they knew I was involved too. Maybe I hadn’t been paranoid the day I’d been out there and thought I heard someone in the woods. She might not have hit herself to make things look real—?someone might have been trying to teach her a lesson. And if I had heard them, they would have seen me for certain.
I pushed myself up from the floor. I couldn’t afford to lie around feeling terrified. I had to make sure there was nothing to connect me to Paige in case the police searched the house. Detective Chan didn’t trust me, and with a dead rich girl on his hands, they were going to check out every possible lead. I crossed the room and dug the pay-as-you-go phone out from under my mattress, as well as all the notes we’d passed back and forth in the encyclopedia, and piled them all into the middle of the bed. I stuffed everything into my bag and headed out. As soon as I was outside the apartment building, I stopped to pretend to tie my shoes.
The late afternoon sun was hot, and a trickle of sweat made its way from my hairline down my neck and snaked under my shirt. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. The hair on my arms prickled like antennae trying to pick up a signal.
I walked toward the street as if headed to the bus stop. Traffic rushed past. I waited until I saw two semis coming in my direction and counted in my head trying to time them. When the trucks crossed in front of me, I turned and bolted down a narrow dirt path that led down to the creek behind the bus stop.
My feet slid on the dirt and pebbles, almost landing me on my ass. I caught myself by grabbing on to a tree. The bark ripped the skin off my palm. I jogged down the path, darting a glance over my shoulder every few steps. It was probable that no one was following me, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Especially while carrying a bag full of evidence that connected me to a murder.
Bile rose up in my throat while the word murder bounced around in my brain. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I had to focus. I could panic later.
The trail cut behind a mini-mall with a hair salon, a pawnshop, and a dollar store that had gone out of business last year. I came up behind the 7-Eleven and paused, catching my breath.
I walked down the street and ducked into the alley between the recreation center and the grocery store. I pulled the SIM card out of the phone, rubbed the card with the hem of my T-shirt to get rid of any fingerprints, and dropped it down the grate into the storm sewer. Trying to ignore the shaking of my hands, I wiped down the rest of the phone, and then stomped on it until the screen cracked and broke. With one last look around, I chucked it into the dumpster. I fished the notes out and tore them into tiny strips, then set them on fire with the lighter stuffed in my pocket. I used my sneaker to smear the ashes left into the asphalt. No one was putting those back together again.
So long, Pluto.