Sage had sat in the book-filled office of his academic advisor. The small, cramped room had smelled of dust and microwaved lunch. Professor Andrews shoved the plastic tray of tortellini into the last space available on his cluttered desk and fixed his attention on Sage.
“Do you want to be here, Sage?” Andrews asked. There were flecks of tomato and cheese in the professor’s scrubby beard.
“In your office?” Sage asked, confused.
“At the college,” Andrews clarified. “At school.”
“Yeah,” Sage said, “I guess.”
“You guess?”
Sage regretted adding those two words, but he honestly had no idea why this meeting had been scheduled. It was Wednesday afternoon, and Wednesday afternoons he usually hung out in Evan’s dorm room and played video games. This whole thing was messing with his schedule.
“You had a marketing class this morning,” Andrews said. “Were you there?”
If Andrews was asking this question, then Sage figured he already knew the answer. He hated when teachers did things like that. Did they think they were being clever?
“I overslept,” Sage said.
“What about on Monday?” Andrews asked. “Did you oversleep on Monday, too?”
“It’s just a couple of classes,” Sage said.
“But it’s not, is it?” Andrews asked. “Your academic performance has been below par, and you’ve been identified as at risk.”
“At risk,” Sage repeated. He was sure this was a case of a professor overreacting. He went to classes, not all of them, but most of them, a lot of them anyway. He may not have been some super-genius, but he felt pretty sure he was holding his own.
“At risk means you still have time to turn things around, but here’s the thing, Sage, you’ve got to start shaping up. Because if you don’t, they will kindly ask you to not return next semester.”
“Wait, what?” Sage said. “Just for missing a few classes?”
“Well, that’s where it begins, then your grades go into the toilet, and well, when your record gets reviewed, it just looks like you don’t really want to be here.”
Andrews folded his arms across his desk, and to Sage the professor’s expression looked smug.
“I don’t know what anyone even wants from me,” Sage protested.
“Well, lucky for you, your professors were kind enough to put together this list of the assignments you haven’t turned in.” Andrews picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Sage.
The number of items on the list surprised him. Could this possibly be right? Had he really missed this many assignments?
Sage skipped video games that day, went back to his own dorm room, and sat down with the admirable intention of catching up on all his missed assignments, but it was a long list, and the problem with long lists was where did one begin. Starting at the top of the list wasn’t an option. It was a five-page research paper. He couldn’t start there. What he would do was ease himself into things by starting with a less difficult assignment. He scrolled down the list and decided he could start with a one-page essay. That wouldn’t be that hard. That was doable. One page. He could do one page.
He opened up a document on his computer and sat there staring at the blank screen. Well, of course he couldn’t write. He had to decide on his topic first. What he needed was inspiration. He tried Google. Then somehow, five minutes later, he found himself watching a video of a guy recklessly weaving his motorcycle in and out of traffic on a congested roadway. The video led to another, and then another, and then his stomach rumbled and he decided there was no point trying to write on an empty stomach. He would be able to work better once he had a full belly.
Wednesday turned into Thursday, which turned into Friday, and by about noon on Friday, Sage was no further along and he had reached the conclusion that he was never going to complete all the missing assignments and so what was the point in even trying to tackle any of them? The stress of the whole thing was making him a little crazy, and so he decided he was going to spend his night completing a task that he was pretty sure he could handle: he was going to do his best to drink himself into oblivion. Getting drunk wouldn’t fix his problems, but it would, however briefly, help him forget about them, and that was all he wanted.
He spent the rest of the day preparing for his personal pity party and gathering all the supplies he needed. By the time eight p.m. rolled around and his sister had driven all the way to the college, he was only three or four drinks into his sad celebration, but it was enough.
He blinked in confusion at Melodie standing in the dorm hallway.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you supposed to be here?” He wondered if his assignments weren’t the only thing he had missed. Maybe Melodie had scheduled a visit and he had somehow missed that too, but then his alcohol-thickened brain attempted to use some logic, and he reached the only conclusion that made sense. The school must have informed his parents about his academic failures, and they had decided to send Melodie out here as some sort of emissary. They were sending her to do their dirty work. Typical. “Mom and Dad sent you, didn’t they?”
“What?” she said. “No.” But the fact that she had said “what” first instead of “no” bothered him. “Uh, can I come in, or what?” She was still standing in the dorm hallway.
Sage shrugged and pushed the door open a little wider so she could walk in. She wrinkled up her face in disgust at the messy room. Technically only half of the mess was his. The other half belonged to his roommate, who had gone out with his girlfriend.
“What’s with you?” Melodie asked.
“What’s with you?” he countered. It wasn’t exactly brilliant, but he was still trying to wrap his head around his sister being here and what exactly it meant for his evening’s plans.
“Are you drunk or something?”
“And what if I am?” He felt like this admission freed him from the need to pretend to be sober, and he went over to his desk where he had set up his stash and refilled the plastic tumbler he was drinking from.
“Sorry,” Melodie said. “I should have called first.” She watched him refill his drink and then take a long sip. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Look, you can’t just barge in here without notice. I got a life, you know.”
“Clearly,” she said. Her eyes went to the alcohol bottles lined up on his desk. “You expecting company, or are those all for you?”
Picking on him and his shitty life choices seemed to be the theme of the week. He was pissed off at Melodie. How dare she show up here unannounced? He wanted to drink enough to forget about all the things that were bothering him, and judging by how bothered he felt, he clearly had a long way to go.
“I’m willing to share,” he said, “but it’s BYOC. Bring your own cup.” This struck him as a killer line, and he laughed at it.
Melodie didn’t. She just glared at him. What right did she have to show up here and judge him? She had no right to judge him. This wasn’t how this worked.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“So talk.” He took another sip of his drink.
“Not like this.” She looked around at the sad, ugly dorm room. She might have been looking for a place to sit down. His desk chair was piled high with dirty laundry and other random stuff. His bed wasn’t much better, and the sheets were long overdue for washing. “Maybe we could go get coffee or something,” she suggested.
“Don’t want coffee,” he said. “I would think you would be sick of the stuff.” He took another sip from the tumbler and was surprised he had emptied it already.
He went over to the desk and started to refill his cup.
“Sage, stop it!” Melodie screamed. Her voice was loud and shrill in the little room.
It made him pause for a moment before he continued pouring his drink. He looked over at his sister, who paced back and forth in front of his bed. Her eyes looked glassy like she was about to cry.
He didn’t understand what she was doing here, and he still wasn’t convinced that this didn’t have something to do with his slipping grades. She hadn’t actually come out and said anything about that, but she hadn’t really said anything. If his parents were behind this visit, he was pissed at them, but he was disappointed in Melodie. She was old enough to know she didn’t have to do their bidding.
Suddenly Melodie stopped pacing. She reached out and knocked the nearly full cup from his hands. Vodka splashed down the front of his clothes and onto the floor. At least the clear liquid wouldn’t stain, but he couldn’t imagine it would do much for the already unpleasant odor in the room.
“What the hell?” he said to her. Before he knew what was happening, she grabbed all the bottles from his little makeshift bar. She cradled them in the crook of her arm, and with her free hand, she worked open the window. She glanced outside, then dropped all the bottles three stories to the concrete walkway below. They exploded with an epic crash.
“Hey!” he shouted at her. He wasn’t exactly awash in money, and his afternoon’s purchase had nearly drained him of his financial reserves. “You’ve got no right—”
“I need to talk to you about something.” She looked like she was about to cry, but in that moment he wasn’t thinking about her feelings. All he cared about was himself, all he cared about were his evening’s plans, which were now ruined. The last thing he wanted was to have some heart-to-heart chat with his sister. Not tonight. Another time, when he was in a better mood.
“I’m going out,” he said.
“But—”
“You can stay here,” he said. “You can use my bed if you want.”
“Sage—”
“You should have called first,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
He swapped his vodka-soaked T-shirt for a more or less clean hoodie and headed out the door. His plan, insomuch as he had one, was to find some party somewhere on campus where he could get wasted. It shouldn’t be hard. It was Friday night. Then maybe in the morning, or whenever, he would be more in the mood to sit down and shoot the shit with Melodie.
“Lock the door,” he said on the way out. “Don’t let anybody in.”
The rest of that night was an alcohol-soaked blur. He traded what could have been a nice evening with his sister for some worthless night of partying. He remembered that Melodie was asleep on his floor when he returned. It was the last time he would see her alive. He’d crawled into bed without waking her and promptly passed out. It was past noon when he awoke Saturday morning. Melodie was long gone. She hadn’t even left a note.
The police files spread out on every flat surface and the assortment of takeout containers now filling his apartment reminded him of his messy college dorm room. If he squinted in the dim early morning light, he could almost make out his sister sleeping on the floor in a corner of the room. Of course, it was nothing but a jacket he had tossed carelessly on the floor, but for a brief instant it filled him with a flicker of hope.
Why couldn’t he have just gone out and had some coffee with her that night? There was that funky place with the ratty couches just a block from the campus. They could have hung out in there all night while she told him whatever it was she wanted to tell him.
“What did you want to tell me?” he asked his empty apartment, but there was no reply.
A feeling of futility filled him as he surveyed the files spread about his apartment. He was wasting everyone’s time. What made him think he could find out the truth about the murder of a girl he’d never met in a town he didn’t know that had happened nineteen years ago, when he didn’t have the first clue about who had killed his own sister?
He began gathering up the folders and files, quickly shoving things back together as he worked to reclaim his apartment from his useless examination. He cleared off a spot on his table and began to stack everything related to the case there. A photo slipped out of one of the folders and landed at his feet. He bent down to pick it up but froze as he stared at the grisly image. Craig Walker’s body lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs, but lay was too gentle a word for the contorted way this man’s body had ended up.
Rod’s words came back to him, Why did I always think the guy had been pushed? Sage had read through the file. The conclusion had been that Craig Walker just took a bad tumble down the stairs. The wife had been out of town, and the guy was home alone with his five-year-old son.
Sage stared at the grim photo. The man had landed on his back, his feet closest to the stairs, which was a weird way to land if you fell while walking down the stairs. Could he have actually tumbled head over heels? It seemed unlikely.
Still holding the photo, Sage sat down on his couch and tried to visualize a man tumbling down his stairs. He had trouble wrapping his head around a way Walker could have landed on his back, unless he hadn’t been facing the stairs when he fell. And if he wasn’t facing the stairs, did that mean he had been pushed? The man was cold by the time the police arrived on the scene. That left plenty of time for a murderer to make a getaway.
Sage let out a rueful little laugh, which seemed completely inappropriate considering the photo he was staring at, but he was alone in his apartment, and he couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that not only was he no closer to finding Lily Esposito’s killer, but now he had added another murderer to track down to his to-do list.
Maybe he would get lucky and they would be the same guy. Yeah, like that was going to happen. He couldn’t think of any instance of a murderer who started out his killing career shoving men down stairs, who then moved on to bashing little girls over the head.
Craig Walker was killed seven years before Lily Esposito was. He double-checked the dates. She wouldn’t even have been born yet. He looked again. She wouldn’t have been born, but she would have been conceived. What if Craig had an affair with Honoree? What if he was Lily Esposito’s real father?
Rick Esposito could have found out about the affair. He shows up at Craig Walker’s house, confronts him, things get heated and he shoves the other man down the stairs. He might not have meant to kill Craig, but when he realized what he had done, he would have hightailed it out of there. Who knows? Maybe that was when he started drinking too much.
Then what? Seven years later, he realizes Lily wasn’t his real daughter? Maybe he recognized Craig in her features, maybe it drove him crazy seeing the face of the man he had killed in the girl, maybe that was why he did it. Jade was too young to be Craig’s kid. She might have been Rick’s real daughter, and that was why he hadn’t touched her.
Lily Esposito wouldn’t have been scared of Rick, she would have trusted him. And Jade? If Jade had seen her father murder her sister? What must that have done to the girl? No wonder she hadn’t been able to talk about it. But if he was right, she certainly would have been able to identify the killer. He wished so desperately that he could talk to her. It was like Melodie all over again. He wondered what it was that Melodie needed to tell him. Had she witnessed something like Jade had? Was that what had gotten her killed?
Why did she stop her car that night? Why had she gotten out of it? He tried to imagine the scene and what could have possibly made his safety-conscious sister pull off the road late at night and get out of her car. The car.
That was the whole thing that had led him to the Craig Walker file. It was Raquel’s description of the suspicious car. What was it Arlo said? It belonged to a friend or a relative. Well, Rick was a relative, wasn’t he?