Riley sits in the narrow window seat, her back up against the light-colored brick. From his desk, Axel can see her eyes flicker as her gaze roams the bleak city. It looks miniature from here on the third floor of the lighthouse, and he likens it to one of those Dickensian Christmas villages, if it had been broken in a move and left to collect dust for a decade or however long it might take for someone to take pity on it and fix it up. Glue the shingles back on the rooftops, screw in new light bulbs.
She pauses her sweep of Black Harbor to stare at him. “You want to talk about it?”
Axel looks over his computer. All he can see of Fletcher are the tops of his shoulders; they’re hunched so high his head has disappeared. Aside from helping with Chloe’s case, he’s in the throes of working a triple-jurisdiction robbery and kidnapping, so Axel cuts him some slack for his terrible posture. Kole is in a meeting with the DA regarding an old case that’s finally gone to trial. On his way out, he ran through his checklist. “We still need to talk to a couple faculty members: Mark Cutler, Amelia Kazmaryck, and Eddie Taylor … I never trust a guy with two first names.”
“Nikolai Kole,” Riley recited slowly. “Isn’t that kinda two first names?”
Kole flashed a smile. “Just do as I say. Oh, and a couple more students. If Sari Simons thinks she’s skating away without talking to us after her two friends were—” He caught himself from speaking Axel’s worst nightmare into existence.
“Yes, boss.” Riley sent him off with a salute.
Now it’s just the three of them in the lighthouse where the Violent Crime Task Force has set up shop. Whiteboards covered in coordinates and crime scene photographs stand in front of each curved wall, boxing them in. Their desks are clustered together in the center. Axel works across from Riley, Kole across from Fletcher. Work space is limited, but it’s more room than they had in the bureau. They’ve been here for the past three months, since Kole convinced the City to let them use the watchtower as their hideout, instead of dumping a dime of taxpayer money into reconfiguring any part of the BHPD.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Riley asks.
“No.” Even to himself, his voice is barely audible over the waves that crash against the east side of the lighthouse. Whether the “it” Riley is asking him to talk about is in regards to what Reeves Singh mentioned earlier about Chloe wanting Madison Caldwell dead or the fact that his daughter’s absence is driving him crazy, he doesn’t want to put it on her. He’s never liked people who shoulder their grief onto someone else. And he damn well isn’t going to do it to Riley; he likes her too much. “I just want to find her.”
Riley nods. “I know,” she says quietly. “We will.”
A muscle spasm tugs on the left side of his mouth. The fact that she didn’t say they’ll find Chloe alive isn’t lost on him. In fairness, though, he hadn’t mentioned the word, either. Another rule of investigations: never make a promise you can’t keep.
Steam rises from Riley’s mug of Earl Grey, creating the deception that it’s a ribbon of smoke billowing from one of the factory stacks below. But the tannery is defunct now, and has been for thirty years. Perhaps not for too much longer, though. Anywhere else, a piece of real estate like that, as ramshackle as it might be, would go for a hefty amount. But in Black Harbor, a hardscrabble city that’s eroding more and more by the minute and where a bullet with your name on it might be right around the corner, they’re lucky to scrape up even bottom-dollar bidders. Whoever the anonymous new owner is, Axel hopes they’ve got half a mind to turn it into something that can transform the city.
He’s grateful for the window and the illusion that it creates of him looking at something, when in reality, the city below could be on fire and he wouldn’t even know it. He stares blankly, his mind sorting and turning the jagged pieces of the past two days, as though he’s gluing together a glass mosaic.
Chloe is still missing.
Madison Caldwell is still dead.
And of all the rocks they’ve turned over, there could be thousands more yet to go.
His phone rings. It’s May Peters, the bureau secretary. “Hello, May.”
“Investigator Winthorp, a young woman is here to see you.”
“Can you get her name for me, May?”
She hardly finishes saying it when Axel ends the call. He looks at Riley, who is already standing.
She tosses back the rest of her Earl Grey like it’s a shot of whiskey.
Sari Simons is at the bureau and she’s ready to talk.
The girl sits on the pebble-grey couch, knees together, white Vans bouncing so rapidly her heels are going to rub holes in the plinth base. Axel’s eyes are drawn to them, scanning for flecks of blood. At this point in the investigation, everyone is a person of interest.
Her face is tearstained, the whites of her eyes bloodshot. For the record, she was crying before she even entered Interview Room #3.
She wears her hair in an Afro with a blue velvet flower. Long, slender prisms hang from her earlobes, catching and reflecting the dim light from the window. They remind him of fishing lures.
He knows her fairly well. It’s been a while, but she used to come over to his house, always tagging along with Madison Caldwell. Sometimes he’d come home from work and the three of them would be on the couch eating pizza, or up in Chloe’s bedroom singing karaoke.
Riley and Axel sit perpendicular to Sari, a shared coffee table between them. Axel leans forward, feeling awkwardly slouched, swallowed by the secondhand armchair. “Thanks for coming in, Sari.”
For the first time, Sari makes eye contact with him. Her pupils are deep, dark wells of mystery. Her bottom lip quivers, offering a glimpse of braces.
“You know, you’re allowed to breathe,” says Axel, noticing the girl’s barely taken a breath since sitting down. She exhales and he watches her shoulders fall slightly. Shifting, she tugs on her drab army jacket and wraps it tightly around her, as though to keep herself from falling apart.
“So, are you a cat person or a dog person?” he asks.
Sari regards him quizzically, but answers: “Cat.”
“I can tell.” He points his chin at her jacket, and Sari’s cheeks flush.
“My cat, Pickles,” she says as she starts brushing off the white fluffy hairs. “He sheds like a mother—” she catches herself—“like crazy.”
“I feel your pain,” acknowledges Axel. “Fry always sheds like there’s no tomorrow.” He hooks a thumb at Riley. “Investigator Riley here can’t relate. She doesn’t have any pets.”
“I do enough shedding all on my own,” assures Riley, absentmindedly picking a long black hair off her button-down.
Sari almost smiles. She seems a bit looser now. Even her curls look less tightly wound. Axel takes an opportunity to study the backpack Sari brought in with her. He stares at it, as though doing so intensely enough will activate X-ray vision. It’s a JanSport with a cosmological print—a purple-and-blue ombré with dots of white. He’s seen it before, slouched on the bench in their entryway. Sari doesn’t seem to go anywhere without it. He and Rowan share the sense that she probably lives out of it more than a kid should have to.
“Your dad dropped you off?” he asks, though he knows the answer.
“He’s away at training. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
Axel frowns. “How’d you get here?”
“I took an Uber.”
An Uber. He forgets there’s such a thing in Black Harbor. Times have certainly changed. From little on we’re taught never to get in cars with strangers. Now there’s an app for it.
“What did you come to tell us, Sari?” Riley leans in a little. “Is it about what happened to your friends, Madison and Chloe?”
At the mention of their names, Sari’s eyes glisten. Tears shine on her long lashes, falling like raindrops as she nods.
“This is a safe space,” Riley says, her voice soft and soothing. “You can tell us anything.” She stands and remains crouched as she hands Sari the box of tissues.
Sari plucks two and crumples them in her fist. Her tongue darts out between her lips, then, priming them for what she came here to tell them. But for whatever reason, the words don’t come.
“Why don’t you start by telling us why you weren’t at school yesterday,” suggests Axel.
The girl stares at him, aghast. He might as well have just asked her to tell them her favorite way to skin a cat. A question Libby wouldn’t flinch at, he thinks. Rather, she’d probably start up a PowerPoint.
“My best friend was murdered,” says Sari. Her voice is thick with phlegm, and her tone suggests that one’s friend being murdered is the trump card to trump all trump cards.
“Right.” Axel clears his throat and swallows back some of his anger toward the girl. So far, what Reeves Singh alleged about her instigating problems between Madison and Chloe is hearsay. She wasn’t there to defend herself or point the finger back at him. Although he’s always thought Sari to be a bit of a brat, he realizes that while he is dealing with the tragedy of his daughter’s disappearance, she, concurrently, is dealing with the fact that another friend is gone indefinitely.
There is no hope for Madison Caldwell.
But there is still hope for Chloe. Though, he’s acutely aware of it waning as the seconds tick by. “I’m sorry. I’m sure this is extremely hard for you.”
Sari nods. Tears splash onto her jeans and darken the denim.
“So you stayed home yesterday? You didn’t go anywhere?”
She nods again.
“I just slept and … watched TV. I hoped that every time I woke up, it would all turn out to be a bad dream.” Her face crumples to mirror the tissues wadded in her hand. She sniffs and takes in a breath so deep, her shoulders rise toward her ears. The long silver earrings are prisms catching the grey light.
“Sari, how did you find out?” wonders Riley.
The girl shakes her head and stares at the edge of the coffee table, as though she needs an anchor point for her gaze but doesn’t want to look directly at either of them. “Everyone was talking about it.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“From school. Someone Snapchatted a video of the cops out in her neighborhood. Red and blue lights. Caution tape. You couldn’t see anything, but then I googled it and…” She traps her bottom lip between her teeth and drinks in another lungful of air. “… there it was. Something about a fifteen-year-old female found in the gully in Belgrave Circle. It didn’t say her name but I knew. I knew it was Madison.”
Axel wouldn’t have thought it was possible for her frown to deepen, but it does. Even the corners of her eyes are pulled toward the floor.
“How did you know it was her?” asks Riley.
“Because I texted her and she didn’t respond. Which was unlike her. She always texted me back immediately, unless she was with Reeves, and I knew she wasn’t because he was at soccer practice. We were supposed to meet up and walk to the play together, but … when she didn’t show I knew something was wrong. I mean … I thought something could be wrong … but then I also thought she might have met up with Reeves and maybe she texted me to let me know but her message didn’t go through or something.”
“Would her meeting up with Reeves have been a bad thing?” asks Axel. “Were you ever concerned for Madison’s well-being when she was with him?”
Sari purses her lips and stares even harder at the table’s edge. “No. I mean, they got into arguments sometimes, but … to be honest, Madison was the more aggressive one.”
“What do you mean by aggressive?” Riley’s pen is poised.
“Like … she’d always get her way.” Sari shrugs. “Even if Reeves disagreed at first, he would always come around to doing what she wanted in the end.”
“Can you give us some examples of that?”
Sari sniffs. Axel notices how she sits with her knees knocked together, toes pointed in toward each other, heels hovering three or four inches off the floor. She shares with them, then, about different times Madison convinced Reeves to pay for things even though her parents gave her an unlimited allowance and he spent his weekends bagging groceries, or to badger his uncle into letting him drive his Mustang convertible for Homecoming. “And the Snap,” she says, locking eyes with Axel for a fraction of a second before tearing away. “She got him to send it to the whole soccer team, which helped it go viral.”
Riley and Axel frown. “The Snap?” asks Riley.
“Snapchat,” clarifies Sari. “The one that…” Her voice falters. If she’d had any bit of an edge when she first sat down, she’s lost it now. Axel swears he can see her pulse quicken in her neck. “You know about the rumor, don’t you?” She pauses, waiting for them to fill in the rest.
But Axel cannot say it out loud. “Why don’t you tell us,” he suggests.
Incredibly, Sari looks disgusted. And a little haughty. If Chloe truly hated this girl, Axel can see why. He hears a soft razing sound as his fingernails scratch into the grooves of his jeans.
“Rumor has it that the only reason Chloe got the part in the musical was because she was, like, sleeping with Mr. Cutler.” She cringes as though waiting to take a punch.
Axel feels all the air go out of his lungs. Seeing the crude sketches labeled Chloe the Hoe-y and Mr. Cuddler in Chloe’s locker was one thing. Hearing Sari say their names in the same sentence is quite another. It leaves him hollow. After a few seconds, he unballs his fists and glances at his palms where his nails have pressed little crescents into his flesh. He looks up to meet Sari’s rueful stare. “Was it true?” he asks, dreading the answer.
To his immense relief, Sari shakes her head. “No. I don’t think so.”
He squints at her, thinking about what Reeves Singh had said in his interview yesterday morning. I don’t know why anyone would take it so hard if it wasn’t a little true. “How do you know?” he presses.
Sari’s face is a stone, at first, with delicate features etched into it: a tiny scoop of a nose, a pair of perfectly spaced almond-shaped eyes, and a chin with the shallowest cleft. A single teardrop slides down her cheek. “Because I started it.”
Axel and Riley wait and watch as Sari reaches for her backpack on the floor. The zipper makes a soft, high-pitched whine. Plunging her hand into the compartment, she withdraws a black long-sleeve T-shirt on the front of which are three rows of white letters that read STRAIGHT OUTTA REHEARSAL. Axel squints, processing the familiarity of it. He’s seen this shirt before, and he knows where as soon as he takes it from Sari. Down the sleeve, in the same white lettering, is the name WINTHORP.
“This is Chloe’s shirt,” Axel says, to no one in particular. “How did you get it?”
Sari begins to sob. She slouches and covers her face with her hands. “We stole it,” she says, her voice thickening again. “From her bedroom. We came over to do karaoke and … yeah.”
“Who stole it?” asks Axel. “You and who?”
“Madison.”
“Madison Caldwell?”
Sari nods.
Axel is shaking his head. “Because you were planning to do something with it?”
She begins to sob again. Finally, she straightens up, exhales. The severe frown returns. “I was trying to help Madison.” Dabbing at her eyes, Sari explains how Madison was upset by Chloe being cast as Lydia Deetz in the Beetlejuice play. “She came up with a million reasons why Chloe had been cast over her—”
“Baby teeth,” names Axel, unable to hold back. “She said Chloe looked young enough for the part because she still has her baby teeth.”
“Oh, yeah.” Sari throws up her right hand, a motion that suggests tossing the ridiculous criticism out there. “Which doesn’t even make sense because that Lydia character is, like, our age anyway.”
A switch has flipped in Sari. Suddenly, she seems less sad about Madison’s tragic death and more desperate to save her own skin. If Madison was truly manipulative with Reeves Singh, Axel wonders what resentful things she might have coerced Sari into doing throughout their friendship. “Whose idea was it to take the shirt?” he asks.
“Madison’s,” Sari blurts, and it’s clear the confession has been on the tip of her tongue for quite some time.
“What about the Snapchat? Whose idea was that?”
Shamefaced, Sari slowly raises her hand. “I was all in at that point. I figured … go big or go home, I guess. If we were going to start a rumor, we were going to start a rumor.” Her eyes bulge in cadence with the last three words.
When Axel and Riley are quiet, Sari takes the opportunity to add context. “Madison wanted that part so bad,” she emphasizes. “Beetlejuice was, like, her favorite movie of all time. She loved Halloween. And for Chloe to—” She catches herself so as to not speak ill of the dead, Axel suspects. Not that Chloe is dead, but perhaps Sari thinks she might be.
“Chloe did, too,” he says. He can’t stop himself. The chance to talk about his daughter—about something beyond the fact that she is missing—is too tempting to resist.
“What?” Sari pauses. She looks confused, as though she’d forgotten he was anything more than a sounding board.
“Loved Halloween.” He remembers making little ghosts with Chloe when she was young out of scraps of a white bedsheet and Styrofoam balls. They hung them from the sugar maple in the backyard, and Chloe named them all: Franklin, Jessica, Maria, Johnny, Davie, Moe. There had to be a dozen or more that she knew by heart because each one had a different face. And then one day a gust of wind came and blew them off the branches. They disappeared and Chloe made up a story about how they’d passed on, except for one that landed on the flat part of the roof by her bedroom window. Franklin. She took him inside and hung him from a hook in her ceiling. And so he became her guardian ghost, watching over her on nights when Axel and Rowan would get called away to investigate a crime scene. He’s probably still there, now, twirling lazily in the moonlight and dancing with dust particles, wondering where the girl who sleeps beneath him has gone.
Although he hears Sari’s confession, it doesn’t immediately register. A fictitious reel plays in his mind of Chloe being groped by some middle-aged man, someone she was supposed to be able to trust, and he can’t help but start to sort out which pieces are true and which are constructed solely out of jealousy and other petty emotions. Chloe wanted that role of Lydia Deetz more than anything in the world. It was being recorded for her reel, the one she would eventually show talent scouts and use for her admission to the Juilliard School in New York. To what ends would she have gone to attain it?
The unfortunate truth about rumors is there is always a sliver of truth to them.
“Hey.” Axel leans toward her. As much as it pains him to, he says: “No one hates you for what you did, Sari. You wanted to support your friend. So, you helped her facilitate a rumor about Chloe sleeping with the drama teacher to get the part. Is that right?”
Sari nods. Her tongue slips out to catch the tears that crest the cupid’s bow of her lips.
“High school stuff,” he adds dismissively. “You didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”
Sari shakes her head.
“Can we see it?” he asks. “The Snap?”
“They disappear in twenty-four hours,” Riley starts to explain, when Sari reaches into her jacket pocket and produces her cell phone.
“I have a screenshot,” she says. Axel watches as she thumbs through apps and scrolls through her camera roll to find a certain screenshot. She surrenders it to him and closes her eyes.
The photo shows a brown leather messenger bag with what he recognizes as Chloe’s shirt partially tucked inside. It looks staged, obviously the work of high school girls rather than seasoned con artists. The white letters of her last name are wrinkled but legible. A cartoonish stamp overlays the photo, like a sound effect in a comic book. Daddy Issues.
Axel’s stomach twists. He swallows, his mouth dry. He wants to speak, but all the air has gone out of him.
Riley seems to pick up on it, that this interview needs to end. “Thank you, Sari,” she says professionally. “Is there anything else you need to tell us?”
Sari bites her lip so hard it starts to bleed. She drags her head up and meets only Axel’s eyes. Her voice trembles when she says: “Mr. Winthorp … I’m afraid your daughter is going to kill me next.”