Tommy’s trailer was tidier than I’d expected. It was almost disarming how neatly everything was displayed. He didn’t appear to have much, but everything he did have—magazines, a few movies, a small bowl that cupped some change—seemed so meticulously placed that I feared what would happen if I accidentally disturbed something. Even the patch of laminate floorboards beneath his TV stand looked recently dusted, as if he’d known we were coming and had left no space untouched.
“Why do you think I killed Persephone?” Tommy asked.
He was rocking in a recliner that looked eerily similar to my mother’s, while Ben and I sat in the two remaining chairs in the room. I stared at him, my eyes growing wide. Her name in his mouth sounded wrong, misshapen. He lingered too long on the s, like his tongue was savoring the taste of each syllable. The sound paralyzed my vocal cords.
“You used to stalk her,” Ben jumped in, “and you just served a prison sentence for assault against a woman. It’s two plus two, Dent.”
Tommy crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “That girl was nothing,” he said.
A muscle in my eyelid spasmed. His flippancy jostled loose the words that had been crouching inside me.
“What did you do with my sister’s stuff?” I asked.
Tommy cocked his head. “What stuff?”
“Don’t play dumb,” I snapped. “My mother told me she gave you Persephone’s things. I want to know what you did with them.” Then, my voice wavering slightly, I added, “Do you still have them?”
He sucked in one of his cheeks and his eyes crept over my face.
“How is Annie?” he asked, practically purring my mother’s name, and as I flinched, another grin spread onto his face as greasily as butter in a hot pan.
“Answer the question, Dent,” Ben said.
Tommy looked at Ben, then back at me, and for a couple seconds, his head pivoted between the two of us. Then, with a sound that gurgled up from his stomach, he laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Ben asked.
Tommy’s body pitched forward, his arm clutching his stomach, and he wiped his hands over his eyes in a theatrical display of amusement. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “It’s just—” He paused to allow for an aftershock of chuckles. “You’re fucking the little O’Leary now, too?”
Something flashed in Ben’s eyes, as clearly as a blade glinting in the light. His hands balled into fists.
“Hey, man, I get it,” Tommy continued. “She’s a good stand-in for Persephone, isn’t she? I mean, they don’t look anything alike, but there’s still something kind of similar there, don’t you think? There’s definitely an essence.”
Even though he was speaking to Ben, Tommy’s eyes latched onto my skin like a pair of leeches. I could feel him trying to drag the blood from my veins, keep me troubled and tense.
Ben was sitting at least four feet away from me, but I sensed how tightly he was wound. It was calming, somehow, to see his jaw clench. It reminded me that we needed to keep our cool.
“Look,” I said, cutting Ben off just as he opened his mouth to speak. “Our . . .” I searched for the right word, but after several seconds, I was still unable to find one that fit. “It’s none of your business. I came here today because I’m willing to make a trade. I hear you like those.”
I picked up the package from my lap and shook it, the necklace and lotion bottle rattling around inside. “I have some of Persephone’s things right here. If you just let me look through the stuff you have of hers, maybe we could make an exchange. You could have these new things, and I could have back some of the things that mean something to me.”
Tommy’s eyes swelled with interest.
“It’s just . . .” I softened my voice. “My sister and I were really close, and I never got to keep anything of hers. There are certain things that would be nice to have. Things I really loved.”
I could see him getting reeled in, his lips parting, just like a fish on a line. “Like what?” he asked.
“Like this necklace she had. It was gold and had a starfish pendant. It meant so much to her, and I’d do anything to have it as a way to remember my sister. Please. If you have it, just—at least let me see it.”
I looked away from him as desperation crept into my voice. When I glanced at Ben, I saw that he was already looking at me, nodding his head a little, a wince of pain in his eyes. He seemed to be trying to tell me something—that he knew that necklace, too, maybe, and that the thought of it was comforting and annihilating all at once, just as it was for me.
Tommy shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “I never got a fish necklace.”
“Not a fish,” I corrected. “A starfish.”
“Never got one of them either.”
Disappointment sank into my bones, but I wasn’t really surprised by his denial. He was playing with me, and I had to keep at it.
“Well,” I said, “can I just look through the stuff you do have?”
Half a smile wormed up his face. “Sorry,” he said again. “I don’t have it anymore.”
“Any of it?” The question barged out before I could balance my tone, and his eyes flickered with recognition of his power.
“Any of it,” he confirmed.
“Well, where did it go?” Ben asked.
Tommy glanced at Ben, but then snapped his eyes back to me. My skin grew cold beneath his stare.
“I gave it all away,” Tommy said.
“Where?” I asked, and I was surprised to hear Ben’s voice overlap my own with the same question.
Tommy’s smile grew wider, filling out both his cheeks. “I’m not at liberty to say,” he taunted.
“That’s bullshit,” Ben said.
“Is it?”
Tommy reached toward the coffee table. He placed his fingers on a shiny issue of Gun World and moved it a fraction of an inch. Apparently satisfied, he leaned back in his chair and resumed his amused watch of my face.
“Well, did you pawn it or something?” I prompted. “None of it was valuable.”
He chuckled. “Value’s in the eye of the buyer,” he said. “Don’t you think so, Ben?”
Tommy turned his head sharply to look at Ben, whose eyes widened like a kid called on in class. “Uh,” he said, stretching out the syllable as he returned Tommy’s gaze, “I wouldn’t know.”
Tommy nodded. “Sure you wouldn’t,” he said.
I looked between the two of them, watched them glare at each other like ancient rivals, and my stomach churned. There was a glimmer of history in that stare, as if this wasn’t the first time they’d shared it, and Ben’s nostrils flared as he breathed.
“What is he talking about?” I asked him. “Do you know something about this?”
Ben didn’t answer. He kept his eyes bolted to Tommy’s.
“Ben,” I tried again, a note of panic rising in my voice. “Do you know where Persephone’s things are?”
He broke the stare, the spell, whatever was passing unsaid between them, and he met my eyes with a squint in his own. “No,” he said, sounding offended by the question. “Of course not. He’s crazy.”
“Crazy man with all the answers,” Tommy said, and we turned to look at him. “According to you two, at least. Why else would you both come banging on my door today?”
His eyes flicked toward the box. “What’s in there anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, drawing the package closer. “What did you want with her stuff in the first place? Or was it always your plan to sell it?”
Tommy rolled his eyes—bored, it seemed, to be back on that topic. “Your sister and me were the same.” He leaned forward, raked his eyes across my face. “I deserved to have some reminders of her. And your mother agreed.”
My pulse thrummed against my wrist, but I focused on keeping my muscles as stiff and unyielding as possible. I was unwilling to give him the reaction he wanted—not even a twitch, not even a shaky inhalation.
Finally, he added, “I didn’t sell it until the money ran out.”
“What money?” Ben asked. “Your family didn’t have any money.”
“No, you’re right,” Tommy said. “My family wasn’t rich. Not like yours, Benji. Not like Daddy Emory in the big fancy house on the hill. Must be nice, huh?” He slid his hands over the armrests of his chair, petting them as if they were animals. “But I had ways of getting what I needed.”
I thought of the drugs he’d given to Mom, how her cupped hands were probably not the only ones he’d dropped some pills into. What other exchanges had he made? How much had he profited off of other people’s suffering?
“Okay,” I said, letting him hear my impatience as I tapped the box with my finger. “So your money ran out, and then what happened?”
He continued stroking the chair, tilting his head while he looked at me. “Like I said, I sold it all. To someone who needed it more than I did.”
Ben and I glanced at each other.
“To someone?” I asked. “Who? Who else could have possibly wanted her stuff?”
“Not wanted,” Tommy said. “Needed.” Then he slammed his eyes toward Ben. “You wouldn’t know about need—would you, Emory? Sylvie, though.” His gaze slinked back to my face. “She knows. She and Persephone both knew. Persephone needed more than you could ever give her, Benji. She didn’t need a joyride every other night behind her mother’s back. She needed companionship.”
“And that was you, huh?” Ben said. “A real companion?”
Tommy shrugged. “I let her know what she needed to know. I let her know that somebody saw her.”
“You let her know you stalked her,” Ben said. “She showed me all those notes, you know. She thought you were pathetic.”
Tommy continued, unfazed by Ben’s words. “I see you, too, Sylvie,” he said. “And—I have to tell you—you’re not going to make it.”
My lips parted, the breath between them unraveling. “What?”
Tommy nodded. “If you keep going like this,” he said, “you’re not going to make it. There’s so much pain inside you, I can see it clear as day. Your inner feng shui—it’s all fucked up.”
He chuckled then. “I mean, Jesus,” he went on. “Just look at your eyes. It’s like you’re already half dead.”
Ben moved forward in his chair. “Are you threatening her, Dent?”
“Hey, man,” Tommy said, holding up his hands. “It’s not me she has to worry about. I’m not the one whose girlfriend ended up dead.”
Ben stood up, the movement so sudden that it made me jump, distracting me from the chill threading through my veins.
“I think we should go, Sylvie,” he said.
“Go?” My voice sounded hollow as I looked up at him. “But we haven’t even . . . he hasn’t even told us anything yet.”
“Yeah, Ben,” Tommy chimed in, “I haven’t even told you anything yet.”
Ben’s fingers contracted into a fist, but he kept his eyes on me. “Come on,” he urged. “I was wrong, okay? We’re not going to get any answers from him. He’s spewing nonsense. He just wants to mess with us.”
He tried to pull me up, but when his hand circled my arm, I jerked away from him. “No,” I said. “I’m not—I can’t go yet. He has to tell—” I leaned forward, searching Tommy’s face for some weakness, some fragility, something that would let me speak to him on a level we could both understand. “You have to tell me what you know.”
The corners of Tommy’s lips curled up. “What about your mother?” he asked. “Did she tell you what she knows?”
I straightened up, my spine like an elastic snapping into place. “What are you talking about?”
Talk to the mother—that’s what Tommy had told the detectives—and now, here he was, making the same ridiculous insinuation that Mom knew something about what happened to Persephone.
“It’s really not my place to say,” Tommy answered, his grin nothing but teeth, a film of saliva glazing his lower lip.
“Then why bring it up at all?” Ben challenged. “See, Sylvie? It’s nonsense.”
Tommy looked up at Ben, who towered above him. “Let’s just say,” he started, “that Annie lied to the police. I was the one who told them to talk to her. I was the one who knew they should. But she didn’t exactly tell them the truth.”
“How would you even know that?” I asked. “How would you know what she did or did not tell them, and how would you know if what she told them was the truth?”
Tommy shrugged. “I have my ways,” he said. “A person on the inside.”
“You have a person on the inside,” I scoffed. “On the inside of what—the police?”
He didn’t answer, but a low, reverberating chuckle emanated from his throat.
“You’re lying,” I said. “You don’t know a thing about my mother.”
“Oh, I don’t? I guess I just imagined it, then—all those long, intimate chats we had.”
He chewed on the word intimate as if it were a delicious bite of food.
“I guess I don’t know anything about what kind of pills she prefers, huh?” he continued. “Or how long it takes for her to just—”
“Stop!” Anger ballooned inside me, squeezing out the fear and hesitation. I leaned forward as far as I could, the package on my lap thudding to the floor as I stared him in the eyes.
“Don’t say another word about my mother,” I said. “I know what you’re doing. I know you’re just trying to distract me from figuring out what you did and what you know.”
“Is that so?” Tommy said.
“Yep.”
“Well—please, Sylvie—tell me what else I’m doing. This is so informative.”
He leaned forward, too, his face coming so close to mine that I could see the web of veins pulsing through his eyelids.
“Dent . . .” Ben warned, taking a step closer to Tommy.
“For one thing,” I said, “you’re lying about Persephone’s stuff. You didn’t sell it to anyone, that’s ridiculous—no one in their right mind would want it. So it’s here, isn’t it? I know it is. And I’m going to give you one more chance to come clean about everything.”
Tommy smiled as he inched even closer to me, the excitement on his face dripping with vulgarity. “Or what?” he asked.
I saw pockmarks on his cheeks—ghosts of old acne and the scrawny teenage boy he’d once been. I saw strands of gray in the wiry hair of his goatee.
“Or this.”
I stood up, marched through the kitchen, and entered the hallway beyond it. It was dim back there, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust enough to make out the bathroom to my left, the shaded bedroom to my right.
“Sylvie,” Ben said, and I could feel him following just behind me.
“Not now,” I snapped. I walked into Tommy’s room, flicking on the light switch by the door, which illuminated a space as tidy and spare as his living room had been. There was a twin bed, its comforter pulled taut toward the headboard, a dresser with a watch and a comb on it, and a couple of plastic bins stacked in the corner.
“What is she doing?” Tommy asked as I rushed toward the bins. His laughter bubbled up in pitch.
“Sylvie, come on.” I felt Ben’s hand on my arm, but I pulled away and tore off the lid on the highest bin in the stack.
“It’s in here,” I mumbled, rifling through shirts and blankets, tossing each item on the floor as soon as I confirmed that it hadn’t belonged to Persephone. When I reached the bottom of the bin, I picked it up and threw it over Tommy’s bed.
“She’s insane!” he said, his voice dancing with delight as I looked inside the bottom bin. A stack of blank paper, a couple magazines, journals packed with indecipherable handwriting—but nothing I recognized. I held up the bin and shook out the rest of its contents, Tommy’s laughter in the background only spurring me on.
“Sylvie,” Ben said again, his voice a little firmer this time.
“No,” I said. “Not until . . .”
There was a closet door on the opposite side of the room. I waded through bins and papers to rip it open. The shallow space was barely big enough for a person to stand in comfortably, and lined up inside was a vacuum cleaner, a broom, and a mop. The only thing hanging from the pole at the top was a gray button-down. As I slammed the door, I grunted.
Ben was making his way around the bed, Tommy covering his cackling mouth as he watched me, and I dropped to the floor, lying with my stomach flat against the carpet. Reaching underneath the bed, my hand flailed around in empty space until it bumped against something hard and rigid, wrapped in cloth.
Ben knelt down beside me, rested his hand on my back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“No!” I said. “There’s something . . .”
My fingers hooked around it and yanked it out from under the bed. I used my other hand to push myself up off the floor and didn’t look at what I was holding until I was kneeling in front of Ben. We stared at it, Tommy’s laughter cutting off like a needle jerked from a record, and after taking in the shiny pink satin, the waves of blonde hair, the unblinking gray eyes framed by lifelike lashes, Ben and I looked at each other.
“Is that hers?” he asked.
“No,” I breathed, remembering what Falley told me she once saw in Tommy’s bedroom. “It’s his.”
“Don’t you fucking touch her,” Tommy shouted, lunging forward and pouncing on the bed to snatch the doll from my hand. The mattress groaned as he landed on it, and after pulling the doll away from me, he clutched it to his chest. He stroked its hair, smoothed a wrinkle from its dress, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained.
“Get out,” he said.
“Sylvie, let’s go.” Ben took my hand and pulled me up as he stood. He started leading me toward the bedroom door, but I resisted, watching what looked like tears gather in Tommy’s eyes.
“No, wait,” I said, and I took a step back toward the bed. “Tommy, I’m sorry I upset you. I’m sorry I . . . touched your doll. Please, just—tell me what you did with Persephone’s things. Tell me what you know, and then we’ll leave, I swear.”
Tommy narrowed his eyes, squeezing out a single tear that slithered down his skin. “My doll?” he said, his voice pinched. “Are you fucking serious right now? You think she’s just a doll? Just a fucking doll?”
He jumped off the bed, the doll slipping from his grasp and landing facedown on the comforter. When he started to charge at me, I drew in a quick gulp of air, but then he fell, tripping over one of the many things I’d thrown around the room.
Ben grabbed me by the arm—much more tightly now—and pulled me out into the hallway, back through the kitchen, and toward the living room.
“No,” I protested. “No, stop, Ben. I didn’t even get to check the dresser, I have to—stop!”
He dragged me toward the trailer door, and when he opened it and pulled me through it, the cold air lashed my face, his fingers digging so deep into my arm I could already picture the bruises they’d leave. Then he slammed the door behind us, finally letting go of me at the top of the stairs, but the momentum sent me sputtering down the steps, and my feet landed hard on the slush that coated the sidewalk.
“What the hell?” I demanded. “Why did you do that?”
He walked down the steps, shaking his head. “He’s insane, Sylvie,” he said. “He was coming after you.”
“That?” I asked, gesturing toward the trailer. “He tripped! He’s a clumsy idiot. He couldn’t have hurt me. And I still had the dresser drawers to check. I could have found something!”
My chest heaved through my words; my throat tightened with missed opportunity. I felt tears burrowing in the corners of my eyes.
“You weren’t going to find anything,” Ben yelled. “There’s nothing to find in there.”
I opened my mouth to respond, then quickly closed it. There was so much certainty in the way he spoke, as if it wasn’t even possible that a single item of Persephone’s could still be with Tommy. But I hadn’t even checked the dresser or kitchen cabinets before Ben had hauled me from the trailer, his hands and arms constricting as a straightjacket.
“How do you know there’s nothing?” My heart was beating hot and wild. “What was going on between you two in there? He seemed to think you knew a lot more than you’ve said.”
“What? I have no idea what he meant by any of that. He’s just crazy. He’s completely unhinged. Didn’t you hear what he said about that doll? It’s like he thinks it’s a person or something. And did you get a good look at the thing? It looked like . . .”
He trailed off, but it didn’t matter. I knew what he was going to say. It looked like Persephone.
“He seemed to know something about you,” I persisted, pushing the doll out of my mind. It didn’t matter right then; Ben was only deflecting. “And what was with the way you two were glaring at each other? Have you spoken to him before—before today, I mean?”
Ben shivered against the cold.
“Damn it,” he said, ignoring me as he looked back toward the door. “I left my coat in there. Oh, whatever, it doesn’t matter. We have to get out of here, Sylvie.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you answer me!” I didn’t care how loudly I yelled it. Let there be witnesses, I thought. Let there finally be people who see and know the truth. “Are you in cahoots with Tommy?”
“Cahoots?” Ben repeated. “No! Before today, I hadn’t even seen the guy since I was, like, nineteen.”
“But you’ve spoken with him,” I said. “Haven’t you?”
The tears welling in my eyes were hot as my heart. I wiped them away as soon as they spilled onto my cheeks. I couldn’t let Ben think I was breaking, or that these were tears of fragility. They were angry tears, furious tears; they were how-could-I-be-so-stupid tears.
“No,” Ben said, looking at me now with a careful blend of curiosity and concern. “I haven’t spoken to him, either.”
“Then what was he talking about?” I spit out the question, my voice thick and warped.
“I honestly don’t know,” Ben said. “He was messing with me. He was messing with both of us. He’s just crazy, Sylvie. That’s all.”
“Maybe,” I said, brushing my cheek with the back of my hand. “Or maybe I’m the crazy one for thinking for one second that anyone but you killed my sister.”
“What?” Ben fired. “Sylvie—”
Something inside me spurred me forward, and I pushed him, watching with satisfaction as he stumbled backward.
“Hey,” he protested, but I pushed him again—only, this time, I slipped on the slushy ground, and I nearly fell. He grabbed me by the elbows then, as if trying to stabilize me, and I punched at him instead, my fists landing on his chest with feeble, impotent thumps.
“You did it!” I cried. “Just admit it! Just tell me the truth!”
I could hear myself sobbing, could feel my arms growing weaker and weaker the harder I swung them.
“You know I didn’t kill her, Sylvie,” Ben said, his voice quiet and gentle, like someone trying to lure an animal into a trap. “I loved her. God, I—I loved her so much.”
“If that’s true, then why did you hurt her?” My fists bumped against his chest while he held me. “Why did you abuse her all the time?”
Ben let go of my arms and took a step back. I wobbled, trying to regain my balance, and when I looked at him, my breath coming out in uneven gasps, I saw that he seemed stunned.
“Abuse her?” he asked.
“The bruises!” I pointed to my wrist, my neck, my ribs. “She had them everywhere. All the time.”
“No,” Ben said, slowly shaking his head.
“Yes! She showed me every single one. She made me—she asked me to paint over them, so nobody would know. You must have seen that. You must have known that I knew.”
“No,” Ben said again. “You don’t understand. She . . .”
“She what? Deserved it? Provoked you? Don’t even think of saying that.”
“No. No, of course not. She . . .”
“She what, Ben? What?”
“She asked me to bruise her!”
I took a step back, the tears on my face seeming to freeze.
“What?” I said. “No—no, she didn’t. That’s insane. Stop lying to me!”
Ben’s head drooped, his eyes staring at the ground. “It’s true,” he said, and he sounded so defeated, like he’d lost something just now and knew that he’d never get it back. “It—the bruises—the whole thing—it’s not what you’ve been thinking.”
My eyes widened. The familiarity of that phrase, the gnawing ache of those words—night after night, It’s not what you’re thinking, Sylvie—made my throat sting and swell.
“She asked me to bruise her,” he said again. Then, his eyes lifting tentatively toward my face, he straightened his posture, shuffled his feet.
“I have proof,” he added. He took a step toward me, his black-hole eyes, with all their gravitational pull and imprisoned light, looking deeply, imploringly, into mine.
“Proof?” I heard myself ask.
“Yes,” he said, inching toward me again. “But you’re going to have to trust me, okay? It’s at my house. Will you come with me please, so I can show you?”