Maya woke with a shrieking headache and a sour, leathery tongue.
She didn’t know where she was at first. The moon shone through slats in the blinds, illuminating a room that looked like it belonged to a teenager. Sonic Youth and Blade Runner posters, comic books on the shelves. Glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. This had been Dan’s room. The night came rushing back. She had vomited. In front of Greta. On her birthday. Then she’d stood in the bathroom for twenty minutes, too embarrassed to return to the dinner table.
She had decided to tell them she had the flu.
Some kind of stomach bug, hopefully nothing contagious, she’d said to Greta, and Maya had certainly looked sick enough, hollow-eyed and pale. She’d watched the wariness on Dan’s face give way to concern. Carl had offered ginger ale for her stomach—but it was impossible to tell what Greta thought behind those all-knowing eyes, looking out, always, for her son’s best interest.
Maya didn’t blame her. She almost wished Dan hadn’t believed her, that he had called her out for drinking too much. But instead he had laid a hand on her forehead, checking for fever. He had brought her water and Pepto Bismol. He slept beside her now, his breath the only sound in the dark room.
She’d promised to be honest with him. Now she had to be honest with herself. She’d never been delusional, and the longer she went without pills, the clearer it seemed that she could have stopped Frank. But she hadn’t, so Cristina died. And no amount of drinking would make Maya feel okay about that.
If she had been the one to die, Aubrey would have proved that Frank killed her. The truth was that she was smarter than Maya. She might not have worked as hard in school, but Aubrey was perceptive beyond her years.
Most of the friends Maya had made since were like Wendy—friends who didn’t know her very well. People who went to the same parties but who she’d never sat with in silence. Now that she’d cut back on drinking, Maya hardly saw those friends, and it occurred to her that she didn’t miss them.
She missed Aubrey. She missed her laugh. Maya thought of her every time she read a good poem and wanted someone to share it with. Every time she had the urge to try something adventurous, like trapeze lessons. Aubrey had been fearless. She’d been quick. She never would have let Frank get away with killing her best friend.
Maya knelt beside Dan and whispered his name.
She had dressed and stuffed her clothes from last night into the backpack she wore over one shoulder. The light was thin and blue, the house quiet. Dan blinked a few times as he woke.
“Hey,” she said.
“. . . what’s going on?”
“I’m going home for a few days.”
“What?” he asked, half asleep.
“Pittsfield, I mean, my mom’s house.”
Dan rubbed his eyes. “Okay . . . why . . . ?”
“I want to take care of some things.” She wouldn’t lie. “I have my ticket. I’ll just walk to the Peter Pan station up the street. My bus leaves in forty-five minutes.”
Lying in the dark for five hours, thoughts spiraling, Maya had decided this was the easiest way. Better to slip out before everyone was awake than to continue her flu charade. She wasn’t going to fall back asleep anyway. It wasn’t just withdrawal keeping her awake now. How could she sleep knowing Frank had killed again?
She’d already bought the bus ticket on her phone and located a station close to Dan’s parents’ house.
He propped himself up on an elbow. “You haven’t been to see your mom in—what? A year?” He squinted at her. “What is this about?”
Tell the truth. She looked down. “The video.”
He hadn’t believed her yesterday and she didn’t expect him to believe her now. She expected him to be dismissive, frustrated with her, but instead he took her hand and held it to his chest. He looked at her with kindness, his eyes focusing on her as he got his bearings. “I get it, Maya. I get why you’re upset.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Two people have dropped dead around this guy. It’s creepy as hell. When you first told me about it, my instinct was to insist there was a logical explanation. Try to make it less scary.”
Her eyes stung with relief. He did believe her. “Thank you . . .” she whispered. She leaned her head against his, eyes closed. Grateful. She told him her plan: “I haven’t been able to find much online, so I thought I’d go to the diner. Talk to someone who was there when Cristina died—maybe the camera missed something. I could talk to her coworkers at the museum—they might know about her relationship with Frank.”
Maya could have gone on, but Dan’s eyebrows were halfway up his head. He wasn’t on board with this.
“If I don’t stop him,” she said, “he’s just going to keep doing it.”
“Doing what? I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand what you think he did.”
Maya deflated. She had misunderstood. Dan didn’t believe her; he was just being supportive. “I don’t know either,” she said. “That’s what I need to find out. I need to prove it so I can go to the police.”
“I’m worried, Maya.”
“What would you do,” she asked, “if someone killed Sean?” Sean was his closest friend, a hearty rock climber who it was impossible to imagine anyone killing.
“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do,” Dan said. “I wouldn’t go to the police, not based on anything you’ve told me, or anything we saw in the video.”
Maya’s head throbbed with wine and bitterness. “Okay, what do you think happened?”
Dan thought about it for a moment. When faced with an inexplicable death, everyone had a theory; no one was immune to the need to understand. He’d thought about it more since yesterday, when she told him, and his theory now was that Cristina had likely overdosed on something. The Berkshire Eagle article had said her death “wasn’t being treated as suspicious,” ruling out any evidence of foul play.
What hadn’t been ruled out—what seemed most likely, Dan said—was that Cristina had succumbed to the same fate that had claimed so many in towns like Pittsfield. OxyContin or heroin, maybe fentanyl. This would explain the look on her face. She wouldn’t be the first person to nod off in public: every gas station, bar, and public restroom in that part of the state posted signs for what to do if someone overdosed. The police carried Narcan.
What made it strange, he conceded, was the coincidence of both Cristina and Aubrey having died around Frank. Undeniably eerie—but then Aubrey’s death, though rare, hadn’t been suspicious either. Dan’s opinion—laid out, Maya thought, as if she were a jury—was that she should cancel her ticket, sleep on this plan for a few days, get over her stomach bug, take care of herself.
This would have been a good time for Maya to confess there was no stomach bug, that she had drunk too much to cope with running out of pills he hadn’t known she was on. But she had a bus to catch. And the last thing she needed was Dan questioning her mental health. “If Frank’s not dangerous,” she said, “what’s the harm in me going out there for a while? Seeing my mom? I’ll take a sick day at work. I haven’t taken one all year.”
Dan made a sad face.
And she remembered the dog. They had an appointment at a pet adoption center the day after Dan finished finals, and had been looking forward to it for weeks, spent hours talking about names. How could Maya have forgotten? Her shoulders sank. “I know the timing isn’t great,” she said, “but this is something I need to do. I should be back in time for our appointment.”
Dan sighed.
She glanced at the clock. 6:23 a.m.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, with a resigned quality to his voice that made her ache.
She held back tears just long enough to kiss him goodbye.
Maya’s boss was understanding when she said that she was sick. She’d been working at the garden center for three years, after all, and was good with both plants and customers. She would have liked her job if she was paid enough and had insurance, but as it was, her boss was the one person Maya felt okay about lying to. She checked her bank balance and saw that she could afford to miss three days of work, four if she was frugal.
She spent the two-hour bus ride on her phone, searching for Frank. She drank water from a bottle she’d splurged on at the station, hangover in full swing, stomach lurching each time the driver braked. A muscle beneath her left eye twitched. Frank had somehow avoided leaving any digital trail.
The last time she saw him was when Aubrey died. It was later that day, just as Maya was leaving the police station after having been questioned for four hours. Frank had been released from questioning before she was—she saw him in the parking lot as he was getting into his car. A free man. Maya had frozen in terror. Her mother, who was walking beside her, asked what was wrong, but Frank had driven off by the time Maya found her voice. And to this day, Brenda hadn’t seen him.
For her, he existed as the object of her daughter’s delusional obsession, the human version of Silver Lake. But for Maya, he was real. Her stomach clenched every time she saw someone who looked like him, which was often. Frank was average-looking, slight of build with a small chin, dark hair, and pale skin. It seemed half the men in Boston could pass for Frank. And it would be so easy for him to kill her—he wouldn’t have to show up at her house in the middle of the night or lock her in his trunk.
He could kill her in public, in daylight, and get away with it. What happened to Cristina was exactly the fate Maya had feared, which was why she had to protect herself. She had to figure out his secret. She was smarter than she’d been at seventeen. Less vulnerable. She would keep her distance until she knew how to keep herself safe.
The bus wound deeper into the woods. She suspected that Frank had tried to contact her over the years, but as with almost everything else about him, it was impossible to know for sure. She never once answered a phone number she didn’t recognize, never opened an email from someone she didn’t know, yet to this day, when she entered her name into Google, the first suggested search result to pop up was “Maya Edwards + Aubrey West.”
Hot air rushed from the vents. Still unable to find anything on Frank, she looked up Cristina Lewis. Like Frank, Cristina wasn’t on social media, and her name was common: Maya waded through pages of Google results before finding the right Cristina Lewis on a list of artists who had done residencies at MASS MoCA.
She clicked on her name and was brought to her site. The design was minimalist, a light blue page with one of Cristina’s paintings taking up a third. Maya held the phone close to her face. The painting was of a vast white desert beneath an empty sky. An alien planet, a place without life, cracks running through its parched surface, but the painting’s title—Bonneville Salt Flats—suggested that it was, in fact, planet Earth.
There was no denying Cristina’s talent. The cold, spare beauty of her work. It was all about the light, the way it speared down from a sun that wasn’t in the painting. Cristina’s name appeared, all lowercase, at the bottom of the website, along with her email address. Nothing else to click on.
Maya ran a reverse image search on the painting and found a public Facebook page dedicated to Cristina’s memory and to “keeping her art alive by sharing it with the world.” The group had eleven members, but the only one who’d posted was the administrator, a man named Steven Lang.
His profile picture showed a heavyset bald man in his thirties. Standing beside him on a snowy hiking trail was Cristina. She was a foot shorter than he was and looked even smaller in her puffy yellow coat. Anyone might mistake her for Maya at this distance.
Unlike Maya, Steven didn’t seem at all concerned about online privacy. She quickly learned that he had worked with Cristina at the Berkshire Museum, though she couldn’t tell what he did there. She tracked down his email address within minutes.
Hi, you don’t know me, but my name’s Maya and I saw the video of Cristina. I’m so sorry for your loss . . . I’m trying to get some info on the guy she was with when it happened, Frank Bellamy. Wondering if we could chat sometime? She hit send, then settled back into her seat and waited. She closed her eyes, hoping to fall asleep, but soon gave up and stared at the bare, frosted trees rushing by.