Maya walked headlong into the icy wind sweeping down North Street. Her face was numb beneath layers of makeup. She hadn’t fallen back asleep after the phone call, whoever it was from, and now it was ten a.m., but she still wasn’t tired. She felt, if anything, too awake, like she had to keep moving. She was sleep-deprived and wired yet somehow more clearheaded than she’d felt in years, and her mom’s suggestion that she’d imagined last night’s ringing only deepened Maya’s certainty that someone—Frank—had called.
Passing St. Joseph’s, she entered the downtown area and found it decked out for the holidays. Wreaths hung in the windows of shops and restaurants, and the giant Christmas tree was up at Park Square, covered in lights. The street was mostly empty, the cold wind blowing. She pulled up the collar of her coat.
She hadn’t told anyone about the hours she lost that night at Balance Rock. Not at first. At the time, she had chalked it up to the weed; Frank had said it was his father’s special stash. Between that and the deep connection she’d felt, it seemed reasonable enough to Maya that she’d simply lost track of time, and wasn’t that just how all the love songs said it would be? Like losing yourself completely? It’s not like she had ever been in love before. Two of the three boys she’d made out with were friends of guys who were after Aubrey. Guys who happened to be there.
Now she wished that she could reach back through the years and shake herself. Why had she trusted Frank so completely? And what had he done to her? She’d blacked out plenty of times in the past several years, usually on alcohol, sometimes on Klonopin, but never on weed. She would have thought that Frank had laced the joint with something, but that wouldn’t have explained the second night she lost time around him.
Or the third.
By the time she told an adult about this, Aubrey was dead, and the missing hours at Balance Rock were just one more thing Maya couldn’t prove. Neither could she explain why—if Frank really had done something to her—she hadn’t gone immediately to the police. Or why she had continued to see him afterward.
Part of her would prefer never to know what went on during those hours.
But if Frank knew she’d seen the video, she couldn’t afford to stay in the dark.
As she neared the museum, Maya spotted what appeared to be an elderly woman with stooped posture, frizzy gray hair, and an oversized coat making her way along the sidewalk. Only when she was a few feet away did Maya realize that this was Aubrey’s mom.
Elaine West wasn’t old—she was several years younger than Brenda—but her daughter’s death had aged her. She and Maya had seen each other only once since the funeral, in the frozen food aisle at Big Y, and the sight of Maya had seemed to pain Elaine.
Or maybe it was Maya who had made things awkward. The guilt she felt, her secret certainty that Aubrey would still be alive if Maya hadn’t brought Frank into their lives.
The encounter, an exchange of no more than two minutes, had felt interminable.
Maya braced herself as Elaine looked up and met her eyes, and for a moment, it seemed they would greet each other. But they didn’t. Each looked down at her feet as they passed each other on the sidewalk, and neither said anything.
What was there to say?
The Berkshire Museum was housed in a faded brick building with a stone walkway and a statue of a dinosaur out front. Maya hadn’t been here since middle school. She was here to see Steven Lang, who had yet to write back.
The lobby looked smaller, its marble floors less expansive. “Welcome,” said a man at the counter who wasn’t Steven Lang. This man was slim with a head full of dreadlocks pulled into a knot on top of his head.
“Hi,” she said. “Is Steven working today?”
“Security guard Steven?”
Maya nodded.
“Is he expecting you?”
“I was just hoping to talk to him for a minute.”
The man looked at her with suspicion, or maybe she was just feeling paranoid. “Yes, he’s here. Walked by not too long ago. I think he’s down in the aquarium.”
“Oh. So, can I . . .”
“You need a ticket.”
She thought of her job as she handed over her credit card and reminded herself to call out sick again. She couldn’t afford to mess things up with work. She took her ticket and walked down a wide flight of stairs to the aquarium. This had been her favorite part of the museum when she was little. A cavernous room with dozens of glass tanks built into deep blue walls. Maya walked from one end to the other. Orange clown fish peered out through the purple fingers of anemones. Baroque-looking seahorses bobbed alongside her as she passed. If Steven had been here, he must have moved on. He was probably the only guard at the museum.
Upstairs she found the annual exhibit of Christmas trees decorated by local schools and businesses. Maya walked through all three rooms of the exhibit, an indoor forest of bauble-laden pines. Hand-sewn garlands and painted ornaments, mostly the work of children.
She found Steven resting against the wall in the room of taxidermied birds, but when he saw her, he quickly stood up straight. He was heavier than in his profile picture, but she recognized the round, cherubic face and bald head. His eyes were sad, puffy from recent crying or too little sleep, but his uniform was crisply ironed.
“Hi,” she said, walking toward him.
“Hi?” He seemed shy, not thrilled about being approached. “Are you looking for the restroom?”
“No.” She gave him her friendliest smile. “I was looking for you. My name’s Maya. I messaged you yesterday, not sure if you saw it . . .”
Steven’s face flushed.
“I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”
“Do you realize you’re the fifth person who’s contacted me about that video? Apparently, I’m the only one of Cristina’s friends anyone can find online.”
Maya sagged. Of course random people had theories about Cristina’s death. She thought of the waitress.
“You’re the only one who’s tracked me down in person, though.”
“I’m so sorry.” Maya looked down at her feet. “I can see why that would be upsetting.”
He waited for her to leave.
She didn’t. “I lost a friend once too,” she said. “What happened to her was a lot like what happened to Cristina. That’s why I’m here. I just want to understand.”
Steven sighed. “Look,” he said, “I get that everyone deals with grief in their own way. Maybe you need to find someone to blame. But I want to remember Cristina as she was while she was alive. I’ll leave her death up to the police and the coroner, not to amateur sleuths who happened to see the video online.”
Maya opened her mouth, then closed it again. It was no small thing to accuse a man of murder. “I think,” she said, “that Frank had something to do with what happened to her. To both of them.”
“Such as?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure.”
He nodded slowly. “Right. I didn’t like Frank either. But Cristina was an adult. So was I. I saw the path she was following him down and didn’t do anything about it.” His eyes flashed with emotion. “Am I guilty too?”
Just then, a woman walked in with two young children. Steven adopted a professional pose while Maya studied a barn owl. Its ghostly white face stared back at her. She waited as the woman and her children perused the exhibit.
Maya caught Steven looking at her by his refection in a glass case and wondered what he saw. She had taken a shower, washed her hair, and assembled herself a mask of her mother’s concealer, but that wouldn’t have covered up the spun-out look in her eyes. The desperation and possible paranoia. “American tree sparrow,” said the smaller child. She pronounced the words slowly, as if learning how to read. “Raven.” When the woman and her kids drifted into the next room, Steven drifted after them. Away from Maya.
She followed. She walked alongside him past a wall of sparkling quartz specimens in the Rocks and Minerals Gallery.
“You look like her,” he said.
“Frank has a type.”
Steven nodded, piecing it together.
“We dated when I was seventeen.”
He stopped walking. Maya had him cornered beside a meteorite. He crossed his wide arms over his chest and peered down at her. He was twice her size but seemed fragile, unable to maintain eye contact.
“You didn’t like him either,” Maya said. “Why?”
“Because he was bad for her. I think part of what drew him to Cristina was that she was unattached. Her parents hadn’t talked to her since she left the church, and her only friends were a bunch of meth-heads back in Utah. And me.”
“You were close.”
His lips trembled. He let his arms fall to his sides. “Things were great before Frank came along. When Cristina started working here, she had just finished her residency at MASS MoCA. That was a huge deal for her. She was completely self-taught. She’d been clean for two years.”
“I’ve seen her work online,” Maya said. “She was talented.”
“She could’ve been famous. When I met her, she was living out of this little studio she rented. Painting every day. Then she met Frank and he was her new drug. She was obsessed. Started canceling on me all the time.”
Maya’s stomach tightened. He could have been talking about her seven years ago. “Did you ever see them together?”
“They always hung out alone, which I’m sure was his idea. I think he felt threatened by me. Wanted her all to himself. I only saw him the few times he picked Cristina up from work, and always from a distance. He never got out of his car.”
“Did she seem . . . different to you?”
Steven looked around the room as if for a museum patron who might need his help, but he and Maya were the only ones in the silent mineral gallery. She felt a twinge of guilt at making him so uncomfortable, but when he spoke again, the words tumbled from him as if they’d been pent up. They sounded like a confession. “Yes, she changed,” he said. “I saw it happen and it killed me, but I didn’t do anything. I was so afraid of pushing her away that by the time I confronted her . . .” He took a deep breath. “Two weeks ago, there was this day that she didn’t come to work. Didn’t call in or anything, and it was so unlike her—Cristina loved that she got to work at a museum. I drove by her studio that night, and her car was there, but she was gone, and I knew she had to be with Frank. She didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that, but then on Monday, I got to work and there she was. Like she never left. And she never said anything about all the frantic voicemails I had left.”
“Where had she been?”
He shook his head. “All she would say was that she and Frank had gone away for the weekend. She kept her job, so she must have had a better excuse for the boss. I still have no idea where she went, but wherever it was, she got herself a tattoo while she was there. Right here on the inside of her arm . . .” He ran his finger down the soft skin between his inner elbow and his wrist.
“What of?”
“A key.”
Maya’s blood ran cold. “A key?”
“Like a car key or something,” he said. “But with sharp edges. I don’t know what it meant, but I wish I’d asked. I should’ve asked more questions . . .” His voice was heavy. “Instead I got mad. I accused her of being back on drugs. When she denied it, I called her a liar.”
“Do you think she was on drugs?”
“Cristina had a close call two years ago, and it permanently damaged her heart. It’s what kept her clean—she knew that if she started using again, it would kill her. She never would have started again if it wasn’t for him.” Steven’s hands clenched at his sides, a vein throbbed in his neck, and Maya glimpsed how deeply he’d cared about Cristina. “That’s what I think happened,” he said. “I blame Frank for getting her back on meth, putting too much strain on her heart.”
Maya weighed this theory against her own and understood that his appeared to make more sense.
“I knew she was in trouble,” he said. Tears welled in his big brown eyes. “Cristina knew it too. I think she knew that she was going to die.”
Voices approached from a few rooms down, and Steven talked faster, as if he needed to get the words out. “The day before she died, she came over and said that she was sorry for the way she’d been acting. She gave me her newest painting. It was beautiful, different from her usual work. I asked her why she was giving it to me, and she said she was getting rid of some stuff. Cleaning out her place. I got the worst feeling when I heard that.”
The voices were almost in the room with them now, but Steven went on, needing to come clean. “She knew what would happen if she started using again. She knew, and I’m sure Frank did too.”
An elderly couple entered the mineral room. “And so did I,” Steven said, his voice cracking. “I could’ve stopped her from dying, but I didn’t. So yes, I blame him, and I blame her for falling for him, but most of all I blame myself.”