I STOOD RAMROD straight, my mind searching for a plan. Dru had gone white, the swagger zapped from him. He shook his head at me, a slight movement that might have actually been my imagination.
The police were looking for us? But why? We didn’t break in. We had a key. Dru was family. This was no crime.
“What the hell?” I whispered. Dru shrugged, at a loss, but the pale edges around his lips told me otherwise.
Maybe the police were only looking for clues here, just like we were. But they knew I was inside. Which could only mean . . .
I whipped open the door. “Oh my God, are you following me?”
Detective Martinez stood on the other side of the door, one hand pushed into his pants pocket, the other still raised to knock again. He edged past me into Peyton’s apartment, a uniformed officer trailing behind him. “Excuse me, Miss Kill,” he muttered.
I shut the door and whirled on him. “I mean it. Are you following me? You obviously knew I was here. How?”
He bowed his head and rubbed his top lip contemplatively. “No,” he said. “I’m not following you. Though I do find it pretty curious that you’re here. With the person I am following. Funny that you didn’t mention you were meeting up with him when I was just talking to you this morning.”
“It wasn’t planned yet,” I said. “What business is it of yours who I meet up with, anyway?”
“It’s my business when you’re meeting up with a suspect in an assault and battery case.”
It took me a minute to process what he was saying. I glanced up at Dru, who looked as surprised as I felt. “Dru’s officially a suspect now? Why?”
Detective Martinez turned toward Dru, pulling something out of his waistband. I caught a glimpse of shiny metal, and recognized the rattling sound of handcuffs. The silver rippled with bumpy gray and black. “Dru Hollis, you’re under arrest for the attack on Peyton Hollis.” The other officer took two steps toward us.
I gasped as the rest of the color left Dru’s face. “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “I didn’t touch her.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. When nobody responded, I shoved between Detective Martinez and Dru. Detective Martinez might have thought he was Scary Hero Officer, but I wasn’t frightened of him. I’d dealt with plenty of cops over the years, and I wanted answers. “Hello? Tell me what’s going on.”
The other officer made a beeline toward me, but Detective Martinez held out a hand to stop him. “Get out of the way, Miss Kill. You don’t want to get involved in this.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m already involved in this.” I flashed on my fingers trailing the bruises on Dru’s naked side and realized I was involved even deeper now than before. I’d managed to complicate things for everyone, especially me.
“I didn’t hurt her,” Dru repeated. “And I want my lawyer.”
Detective Martinez stepped toward me. “I don’t want to have to arrest you too, Miss Kill,” he said. “But if you don’t get out of the way, I will do it.” As if on cue, the other officer produced a pair of handcuffs as well.
“What do you have on him?” I asked, knowing I was pushing my luck. How brave was I, exactly? How far did I think I could push Detective Martinez? Was I willing to spend the night in jail? Was I willing to have to explain things to Dad?
“You have ten seconds to get out of the way,” he responded.
“They have nothing,” Dru said. “It’s not possible for them to have anything on me.”
“Eight . . . ,” Detective Martinez intoned.
“This is crazy,” I said, though I didn’t just mean Dru’s arrest. I meant all of it, from the phone call to the silver, brown, pink numbers leading me here to the violet and mint green of lust and suspicion to watching Dru get arrested just minutes after being in bed with him.
“Six . . .”
My mind swirled with color. Sunshine yellow, bumpy gray and black, the orangish-pink innocence I often saw when I was in the same room with a baby. It was too much. I didn’t know which colors to trust, and which were just my own wrong interpretation. I took a deep breath. “Fine,” I said, and stepped aside.
“Mr. Hollis, you have the right to remain silent,” Detective Martinez said, squeezing the handcuffs over his wrists. They made the clicking sound I’d heard a million times on TV and in movies, but never had it sounded so loud, so real, so final as it did in that moment. I didn’t hear anything else the detective said. My ears were ringing from the noise of the handcuffs. My mind was blinded by the rainbow.
None of this made sense, and for the first time since getting that phone call that night, I had a feeling of being in over my head. Who could I believe? Dru Hollis? Detective Martinez? Neither one? My own gut instinct that there was more to this than any of us knew?
Dru’s guard had dropped when we were in bed. I’d felt it. Yet he still had those bruises.
Detective Martinez seemed so up-and-up. But for ten years I’d been waiting for the cops to find my mom’s killer. And for ten years there had been nothing. No concrete evidence were words I practically lived my life by. I’d heard that phrase more times than I could count. Did that mean he had concrete evidence against Dru?
And what if there was concrete evidence against Gibson Talley instead? Would he even bother to look for it if he was so sure it was Dru?
I still didn’t know who was behind Peyton’s attack. But I knew that my intuition was telling me there was more to this case, and I was going to have to have more than a few vague Facebook threats to go off of.
Otherwise, I would never know the truth. Not so Detective Martinez could get his concrete evidence. I wanted to know the truth for myself.
“Nikki,” Dru said. I looked at him. Detective Martinez had opened up the door, but had paused. “What happened today . . . I wanted it to happen. I know you had nothing to do with this.”
I nodded, mute, while Detective Martinez walked Dru through the front door. I raced to the window and watched as they walked through the complex toward the parking lot. A few of Peyton’s neighbors had gathered on their balconies to watch. “Drama whores!” I shouted at the window, but none of them heard me.
The apartment seemed even emptier now that Dru was no longer in it. And since I had seen that Gibson Talley definitely didn’t live here, I didn’t really have any reason to keep searching. Going through Peyton’s designer clothes only made me feel like a creepy snoop. Not to mention it reminded me of all the reasons why someone could hate Peyton Hollis, including me.
I walked back to the bedroom to retrieve my boots, which lay unzipped and collapsed like a monster with its belly flayed, next to the bed. I could still smell Dru in here. I wondered if I would be another number on his list of conquests. I wondered if I’d see him again, and, if I did, what would happen. Most of all, I wondered if he was guilty.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stuffed my feet into my boots, then bent to zip them. My eye caught a flyer lying halfway under the bed. I pulled it out.
Junk. The kind of crap somebody handed you as you walked by a strip club. It was advertising someplace called Hollywood Dreams Ranch, an instant scandalous glittery, shimmery lilac connection. There was an expensive-looking, leggy blonde in a plunging neckline promising an evening with an escort to “rival even the most luxurious of dreams.” Gag.
I dropped it back on the floor and went back to zipping, but the flyer turned over as it fluttered to the carpet. I stopped, mid-zip. Peyton had written something on the other side.
I picked it up and studied her handwriting, trying to concentrate on just the words and numbers.
There was an address that I didn’t recognize, followed by a time—11:00.
And then, in the lower left-hand corner, a doodle. A simple drawing of a sun, just a circle with lines coming off it, sunglasses and a big smile plastered across it—the kind of picture a kid might draw. Or someone who was doodling while on the phone. Above the sun, she had written, in whimsical letters, Mr. Golden Sun. Golden was underlined three times.
I squinted at the word. I especially hated reading color words, because the color never matched the word, and it was confusing. Golden wasn’t golden to me. It was—
I sat up straight. I had had this thought before, not that long ago.
I racked my brain, trying to remember when. So much had happened recently, everything was starting to meld together.
Maybe it was something on Peyton’s Facebook page. Or something Martinez had said. Or maybe . . .
The photo. Yes, I had thought it while looking at Peyton’s photos on Aesthetishare. The ominous one, the one with her address graffitied above an ad for these apartments. She’d titled it.
Fear Is Golden.
And I’d had the thought that it wasn’t. Fear was bumpy gray and black, like asphalt, but the only person who would know that was me.
Forgetting my partially unzipped boot, I stood up, like someone had zapped me with electricity.
I avoided color words. I despised them. They were confusing and distracting, and I would never say something like “the sky is blue” because sky was definitely white, or “grass is green,” because green didn’t really describe the word grass specifically. No synesthete would ever utter a sentence like “Fear is golden,” because that lie would be so frustrating.
Unless, of course, to them, fear really was golden.
I stopped in my tracks and stared down at the flyer.
Mr. Golden Sun.
It was a message. Fear Is Golden; Mr. Golden Sun. Two sentences, using that same color word. My heart pounded in my chest like I was running a marathon. If I was reading this correctly, then whatever was going down at that address at eleven o’clock had Peyton afraid. But was I reading it correctly, or was I reading into it as a synesthete?
A synesthete would use a sentence like that if they were actually describing the color of a word. Sadness is brown. Cheating is turquoise. Fear is golden.
Live in Color. A neck tattoo, with a black-and-gray rainbow, and words, also inked in black and gray.
But they were beautiful, colorful words to someone like me.
Jesus.
Was Peyton Hollis a synesthete?
I paced through the apartment, looking for more clues. More words that might stand out. I found none. In fact, I found almost no words, no letters or numbers at all. Which was as much of a sign as anything.
If Peyton was a synesthete . . . was that why she had my number in her phone? Was she reaching out to me because she knew I suffered the same color issues she did? But how? Nobody knew about my synesthesia. Nobody.
Yet it made so much sense. And I couldn’t explain it any more than I could explain how I knew that the 412 graffiti meant Peyton lived in this apartment.
Peyton Hollis had synesthesia. Somehow she’d found out that I did, too. She must have known someone was trying to hurt her.
And she left me clues.
Peyton Hollis wanted me to find her attacker.