THE REPORT COMES with the noon news the week after the party, and so, once again, I see it first, before my mother, Hadley, or Mr. McCabe does. I’m knotted up in my bedsheets, which I’d carried out to the couch that morning, my vision shining with the fever that’s got me home sick, the walls of my throat aching like they want to press slick up against each other like two kids at a dance. Mom suspects strep. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I almost wish she’d stayed home with me like she did when I was little.
“There’s soup in the pantry,” she had said with a little wave as she trotted out the door.
So there I am, possibly streppy, flipping channels between the soap opera dames and the game show dicks when Zabet’s face winks out at me. At first, I think it’s just something that my imagination has spit up, like her face in my laundry or in the knot of a tree, but this face isn’t the bruised and beaten Zabet of Hadley’s description. The image from the television is still on the backs of my eyes: Zabet’s yearbook photo.
I’ve seen a lot of this photo lately, and it’s awful—not the photo itself, which is a fine one that shows Zabet smiling like she always smiled, her eyes lost in the puff of her cheeks. What’s awful is how the TV stations keep showing this picture. Yearbook photos are supposed to catch an instant in your life while you’re growing up, but flashing Zabet’s photo like they do just reminds everyone that she won’t be growing up any more than she was already able to.
I flip back to the channel where I saw Zabet’s picture. Actually, I’m not sure it’s the right channel, because the picture isn’t up there anymore; it’s a waitress instead. She’s got sharp eyes and a thick, gloss-tinged lower lip that, together, make her look like she’s plotting and pouting both at the same time. She’s wearing a requisition polo shirt, and her hair is done in two complicated braids that rest like badges on each side of her chest.
“. . . didn’t think they would find the body so soon,” she’s saying, nodding with each word. “I wrote it down here.” She holds up her order pad. “But I would remember it even if I hadn’t.”
The scene switches to the news reporter standing at the edge of the parking lot with the diner where the waitress works squatting behind her. The reporter’s eye shadow matches her jacket. She says some phrases that sound like they belong in the script of a cop show—“ongoing investigation” and “crucial break.” She raises her eyebrows every few seconds to make sure we all understand how important she is. Then it’s back to the desk anchors, who put on their concerned faces and announce that they’ll report more about all this on the five-o’clock news.
Fever-dazed, I punch through the channels looking for a repeat of Zabet’s face; instead I find the same polo, pout, and braids. The waitress is on one of the other news stations. At the bottom of the screen, next to the stamp of the news station are the words Laura Grossman—Eyewitness?
“. . . whispering,” Laura Grossman says. “I’m not a suspicious sort of person, but they were down there hunkered over the table going back and forth about something.” She inhales noisily, like each sentence takes a full breath to get out. “Then when I went over to refill, I heard one of them say, ‘I didn’t think they’d find the body so soon.’”
“Are those words exact?” the off-screen reporter asks. I can see only the swing of her bob, the dark bulb of her microphone.
“I wrote it down,” Laura Grossman says. She holds up her order pad. “But I would’ve remembered it anyway.”
I squint at the order pad, but the words are blotted out by the light of the camera.
The station switches to a pretty reporter with a scarf knotted neatly under her chin. From the shot of the restaurant behind her, I can tell that she’s on the other side of the parking lot from where the first reporter was standing. From this angle, I recognize the diner—it’s the twenty-four-hour place where Hadley and I were last weekend, which gives me a little chill. What if the killers were there that night? Two among the guys from the party? What if I’d asked one of them to meet me in the parking lot? To take me upstairs? What if it was Chad, that guy from the party who’d attacked Hadley? What if it was him and Tony? Not that I could imagine Tony killing anyone.
The new reporter explains what the other reporter must have revealed at the beginning of the segment—waitress Laura Grossman believes that she overheard two men discussing the murder of local teenager Elizabeth McCabe. I wait to see if they’ve caught the men, if they have descriptions or sketches, but the segment ends there, with a promise to report more later.
I click the TV off and wrap my sheets tighter around myself. It feels like there’s something I should be doing. Since I saw the body bag in Hokepe Woods, it’s always felt like there’s something I should be doing. I consider calling Hadley, Mr. McCabe, someone. Jonah? Hadley’s in school, though, and Mr. McCabe is at work. And I have neither the phone number nor the nerve to call Jonah. Besides, I figure, if the story’s on the news, they’ll hear about it eventually. In fact, I tell myself, they might already know now, might be thinking right this minute, Should I call Evie?
I consider the waitress, Laura Grossman. I admire the presence of mind it took to write down the men’s words on her order pad. I’m certain that I, too, given the opportunity, would have noticed the men’s suspicious behavior, would have found a way to draw close to their conversation. I imagine myself pouring them coffee, trying to keep my hand from shaking.
I fall asleep and wake up with my throat pulsing and my tongue mucus-stuck to the roof of my mouth. The light in the room has changed, and the shadows drip longer over my legs. Instead of feeling like a different hour, it feels like a different season. Beneath all of this is a ticking . . . no, a rapping. Someone is hitting the door with such evenly spaced knocks that they’ve become background noise—the pendulum of a clock, the drip of a faucet. I gather my bedsheets around me—being sick makes me feel that they should go where I go—and look through the peephole. Hadley stands on the porch, swinging her fist in rhythm. I unlock and open.
“Jesus,” she says, taking a look at me; then she marches in. “I was going to ask you to cough on me so I could miss school, but, Jesus. I don’t know if I want whatever”—she waves a hand at me—“that is.”
“I’m sick,” I offer.
“You’re gross.”
“Thanks.” I shuffle back to the couch.
She sits carefully on a chair, first pulling a sweater from it with a thumb and forefinger.
“How was school?”
“Ugh,” she says.
She sticks out her lower lip and blows upward so that her bangs rise and fall. The light from the window or maybe the muzziness of my fever blurs her hair, making it shine up off of her head like a nimbus. I don’t know if she’s seen the news report, don’t know if I should bring it up.
“Did you—”
“Yes,” she says. “About a hundred and seventeen people told me.”
“Yeah?”
“They kept saying the exact same thing: They found Zabet’s killer. They found Zabet’s killer.”
“They didn’t actually find—”
“I know that.”
Hadley is in one of her dangerous moods, her eyes shiny and her fingers working at the zipper of her hooded sweatshirt. I sit a little farther back in my nest, pulling the sheets up near my chin.
“Are you going to get dressed?” she says, like I’ve agreed to do so hours ago and she’s been sitting here this entire time, waiting.
“I’m sick.”
Hadley gets up and sits next to me. She lifts a hand, and I flinch, though it’s just a reflex; obviously she isn’t going to hit me. Hadley presses the back of her hand to my forehead. She considers for a minute and then pulls her hand away, wiping it on her jeans.
“You know what would make you feel great?” she asks. She reaches forward and gathers my hair in her hands, twisting it up off the back of my neck. “I’m going to pour you a glass of orange juice while you get dressed.”
“I’m wearing my pajamas. I’m sick.”
“You’ll feel better when you’re dressed.” She smiles and nods encouragingly.
I sigh. “Where do you want me to go?”
“Come on. I’ll help you get up.”
“That diner, right? Where the waitress is?”
“Come on, Evie. Up and at ’em.”
She offers me her hands.
The drive out to the diner is an uncomfortable one. Hadley blasts the heater in my face, promising that the air will heal me. Really, it’s too warm outside for a heater, and the hot, dry air just makes my throat want to turn inside out. I cough into my hand and lean my head against the window.
“This is silly,” I say. “I should be in bed.” “I know,” Hadley says, soothing me. “I know.”
The fields outside are flat and muddy with shoots of spring grass, the gray-green of the ground a dark band under the gray of the sky. It’s a line, I tell myself of the gray horizon. It’s a path. Birds rise and fall in the distance like someone is pulling on their strings.
The diner is in the crotch of the highway entrance, the parking lot half full, no news vans, no police cars. Maybe they’re there anyway, undercover. The blinds in the diner are pulled down to keep out the afternoon sun. We sit in the car for a while. Hadley smokes a cigarette, and I dial around the radio band until she bats my hand away. She offers me the end of her cigarette, and I take it, pulling the smoke, hot and terrible, into my ruined throat. Though I know it’s bad, it feels good, like I’m purging something, some ancient medical remedy—bitter tinctures, leeches, herbs inhaled over a fire.
“Well,” Hadley says finally, yanking the keys out and setting off across the parking lot. I hurry after her, the cigarette butt still in my hand. I drop it on the ground and stop, stomping a few times to grind it out. By the time I’m done, Hadley’s already in the restaurant, the blinds swaying behind her. I jog to the door, picturing Hadley storming the place, shouting for Laura Grossman, taking a handful of the waitress’s polo shirt and shoving her against the wall like in an old cowboy movie. When I get in there, though, Hadley is pressed against the wall herself, near the plastic ferns, looking like she’s lost all her nerve.
She yanks me next to her and nods toward the host stand. “You go.”
I look at the host, a youngish guy with his polo shirt undone an extra button so that the stone of his Adam’s apple can slide up and down his neck with ease. “You’ll come with me?” I ask.
All of Hadley’s previous purpose has been sloughed off. She looks nervous, shy. And it’s strange—surreal even—to see someone as formi dable as Hadley look so vulnerable. I feel suddenly protective, that I will do what I can to take care of her, that I can take care of this for her. I loop my arm through hers and take a tottering step toward the host stand. My feet are as heavy as my head and hands. I can feel my pulse points throbbing in concert with my throat. The host guy is concerned with something hidden by the lip of the stand. He makes marks on it. After a few more jots of the pen, he looks up at me and suits up his grin.
“Hello there!” he says. “Just one today, then?”
“No, uh, two.” I gesture at Hadley, who’s edged herself around behind me. When he glances at her, she dips her head behind my shoulder.
“Sorry ’bout that. Two, then! Table for two!” he calls out, to whom, I don’t know.
He picks out a couple of menus from the slot at the side of the stand. I look around for the woman with the braids from the news, and Hadley shifts so that she’s directly behind me, her chemical breath sweeping along my right cheek.
“But . . . ,” I say.
He looks up, and I catch a flash of annoyance before he fits the grin back on.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Well, we had a really good waitress in here last time. I think her name was Laura?”
I glance at Hadley, like I’m verifying this with her. She doesn’t nod like I’m hoping she will but stares back at the ferns by the door, her hair falling in front of her face. I want to pinch her. The air in the diner smells like syrup, and all of a sudden I can feel it, thick and sweet, oozing in the cracks of my itching throat.
“Yeah, Laura,” I say with more certainty. “Can we have her again?”
“Aw, I’m sorry.” He tilts his head. “Laura’s off for the afternoon, but another of our waitresses will be happy to help you.”
We follow him to a booth, and we each slide into a side.
“She’s not even here,” I say. “Maybe we should go.”
Hadley picks at the thread that binds her menu and darts a look at the host stand.
“Were you hiding from that guy?”
“Someone else will know something,” she says, and then softly adds, “You’ll ask them, won’t you, Evie?”
“Who would I ask?”
“Our waitress. You could ask her.” She slides her hands toward mine. “You will, right?”
I sigh. My head is foggy. I blink, like that will clear the fog in my head; it does nothing, of course. “And then we’ll go?”
“I’ll drive you home, I’ll turn down your covers, I’ll make you soup and sing you lullabies. Don’t you love me, Evie? Aren’t I your best friend?”
I squeak my hands against the vinyl of the booth and wonder if it’s the same booth the murderers sat in this morning, if they’ve thumbed through these sugar packets, if the French fries dropped on the floor came from one of their plates.
Our waitress is Vanessa. She has rings on all her fingers, some silver, some gold, some with jewels as big as beetles, some plain. She twists on them—from thumb to pinkie on one hand, then pinkie to thumb on the other—and doesn’t even write down our order.
When she comes back with the drinks, I say, “So the TV news was here today,” which is what Hadley and I have decided I should say.
Vanessa flips a look at me while still pouring my water. “Saw that, did ya?”
“Were you here?”
“Before my shift,” she says tidily, pulling up on the pitcher just before the glass overflows. She scoots away.
“Try again when she comes back,” Hadley says. “Once more and then we’ll go. Please.”
When Vanessa brings the food, I waste no time and blurt out, “So do you know the waitress who saw those guys?”
“Guys?” she says, sliding a plate in front of me.
“The ones the news came about.”
She leans in to set down Hadley’s plate. “Not supposed to talk about it, sweetie. Police orders.”
She brushes her glittery hands on her apron and is about to go. Hadley’s attempting to kick at me under the table, but only getting the post. And even though her legs are trying to hurt me, her face is giving me the most pathetic look that says please all over again—please, Evie.
I draw in a breath and let my mouth start going. “It’s just that we knew the girl they maybe talked about, Zabet McCabe. She was her best friend.” I gesture at Hadley who grants me the nod I want this time. “And I was, well—”
“Sister,” Hadley cuts in.
I glare at her, but her eyes are set on Vanessa, who’s wiping her hands on her apron more slowly now.
“Sister,” Vanessa repeats. “Well, you do,” she says to me. “You look just like her.” And then she’s sliding into the booth next to me, her rings hard through my shirt as she rubs my arms up and down like I need to be warmed up. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s just the worst thing anyone could imagine.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I mean, I appreciate that.” “How are your parents?”
“They’re okay. Sad, of course.” “Of course.” She stops rubbing and scoots back a bit to look at me. She waits until I look up into her crayon-lined eyes. When she’s got my gaze, she nods once. “My favorite aunt was shot in a parking garage. Someone wanted her purse. Shot her—I shouldn’t tell you girls—right in the face.”
“That’s terrible,” I say. “No more terrible than what happened to your sister.” She starts playing with her rings again. Her eyes follow her fingers, flitting from one shiny band to the next. “I don’t know what people in this world . . . I don’t know who could . . . why someone would . . .”
Vanessa tells us that she knows Laura Grossman only a little bit, but that she seems like a “good girl.” She doesn’t know any more about what happened, except that the police were mad the news got here first and so they’d ordered all the diner employees not to say anything. Not that she knows anything, she adds.
“Two young men,” she says with a sigh. “To think that there could possibly be more than one of them.”
Before she goes, she rests her hand for a minute on the crook of my neck, the place where you support a baby’s head so it doesn’t loll backward. “Maybe your sister is somewhere with my aunt. I think that sometimes, that maybe they get sorted to a particular heaven depending on the way they went. Then they’d be together. Think about it: Them together, and me, I’m here with you.”
She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. Her hair smells like diner food, but in a good way, like it could nourish you. I make Hadley leave right after that, without us even eating anything. We leave money on the table, as much as we think the bill works out to.