After he leaves I’m not sure what I should do. Follow him? Call the police and tell them about the gun? I don’t know what the right thing is anymore. I keep getting deeper into this, and I’m not any closer to finding out the truth.
I turn over my phone, bracing myself to see what Rachel saw. The picture is just a drawing of a generic person, with red markings indicating wounds, a lot of wounds. I scan that first, examining the marks drawn on his chest, but I don’t see anything that looks like it could be a number. I read the report, picking out words like multiple lacerations, punctured aorta, and extensive bleeding. It all sounds so clinical and sterile, not like it was talking about a real person, not someone who died right here in this house.
I read through it again. I don’t understand a lot of the words and terminology, but I don’t read anything that indicates that Manny might have had a number carved on him anywhere. The report mentions other scars, “scar tissue on right shoulder and left thigh, consistent with previous lacerations,” but nothing about a scar on his chest at all. The picture I saw in the darkroom must not have been him.
I close the file, defeated. I feel like I’ve hit another dead end, and I’m running out of time. If I don’t find out who killed Manny and Rachel before Eduardo does, he’ll do something stupid and someone else is going to get hurt. I’m not sure what to do about him. Every time I think I’ve figured him out, something sets him off, he gets mad, and he runs.
I turn toward the stairs that stopped me before. The thought of going up there now is almost as terrifying as it was that night, but it’s the only place left for me to look.
The stairs creak under my weight, and my feet leave prints in the dust. It doesn’t look like Eduardo has ventured up here at all. At the top of the stairs is a long hall. There are two closed doors on my right. Light is streaming in through an open doorway at the end of the hall. I head there.
The room is empty except for a shattered mirror on one side of the room and bits of broken glass all over the floor. The floor is covered with a layer of dust, but in the far corner there are brown streaks on the wall and on the floor. This is where Manny died. I stand in the doorway and imagine Rachel coming up the stairs, thinking she was going to meet him here, instead finding him cut and bleeding. She must have gone to him, tried to help, and gotten covered in his blood. When she realized he was dead, she ran away, cutting her foot on pieces of glass.
I look around me at the walls covered in graffiti and imagine the scene she walked into. I would have been terrified too, terrified enough not to tell anyone, not the police, and not even my best friend.
I walk over to the Cempoalli symbols painted on the wall and study them, thinking about what Eduardo found downstairs. There aren’t any that are reversed, but there are a couple of places that look like someone started to paint something and then covered over it, like he made a mistake.
I walk to the window. Half the glass is missing and another tattered black curtain hangs beside it. I look out across the yard. From here, I can see Rachel’s front porch and her covered bedroom window. Someone standing where I am now could have seen everything that happened at Rachel’s house. If the curtains were open, he could see into her bedroom.
I lean forward and something catches my attention. Wedged into a crack in the windowsill is something yellow. I slip my fingers around it and work it out. I hold it up to the light and realize that it’s a film canister, like the one Skyler used the other night.
There’s one word written on the side in red pen.
“Cuts.”