The moment I breathe the still, warm air of the house I know we shouldn’t be here. The drone of the heater, the alien weight of the unseen people overhead, the lingering smell of their dinner, it’s too familiar and foreign at the same time, my skin crawls with alarm.
“Erik this is crazy!” I whisper as he gives me an assist down. “What if someone wakes up? What if they call the police? What if they have a gun?!”
“What if they just stay asleep?” Erik is completely untroubled. “I know what this is about: you don’t want anyone to catch you in that outfit. Can’t blame you there. But we can only stay about twenty minutes, so let’s just focus on getting what we need and getting out without exposing those pants to any innocent bystanders.” His flashlight sweeps one side of the room, then he coolly pulls a kids’ chunky plastic playhouse from the corner and positions it directly under the window, a makeshift ladder if we need to climb out quickly.
The bright flashlight beam moves deeper into the room, throwing the furniture into sharp relief, and lands on a couch with a laptop on its arm. I gasp, but the circle of light keeps moving until he finds a tablet in a kid’s chunky pink case.
“Here we go,” he says, snatching it up.
“Don’t you want to use the real one?”
“You can try it, but it’ll probably have a password, whereas the kid’s stuff …” He taps the tablet, and an unprotected home screen glows in answer. He hands it to me. “Have at it.”
“I should still be Facebook friends with Mike from like, back in elementary school. I still want to know where he went, Nice Guy or not,” I say, navigating to my scarcely used account. Tapping over to Mike’s profile, there’s a video posted in the last couple of weeks with at least five thousand likes.
“That’s like, the population of our entire town,” I mutter.
Erik leans in as I press play:
Mike’s face, glistening with a day’s worth of blond stubble, stares back at us somberly. His hair is swept to the side and it’s clear he’s in an urban apartment from the sounds bouncing up from the street.
“Hey guys.” Mike sounds nervous. “I know since me and Vaughn left Ledmonton there’s been a lot of talk. Then with that newspaper piece coming out, we’ve heard from a lot of friends and family and we decided it’s time to be open. So here it is. Vaughn and I have moved to New York City. And we’re boyfriends. We’ve been boyfriends for a long time.”
“Wait—what?!” I cry, and Erik shushes me.
“For years I had to hide this aspect of myself. I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with being gay …,” Mike continues, his eyes edging with tears. “But there was something very wrong with me being gay. That was impressed on me by my family, my parents, my church. The pressure only went away when Rose and I started ‘dating.’” He makes air quotes when he says it. “Rose helped shield me during the hardest time in my life. And it wasn’t until we lost her that I decided to stop lying and living in fear. And to start being who I am.”
Now I’m going to cry. “I had no idea. That must have been so hard for him—”
Mike goes on: “Signal Deere, a Class A, is now in jail for Rose’s murder. And I believe with everything in my heart that she will burn in hell for what she did.”
Erik nods along in mock agreement. “Finally, someone talking some sense.”
“It’s not his fault. He thinks I’m guilty.” I blot at my eyes. “And if I thought he did that to Rose, I’d probably say the same thing about him.”
“Is that what empathy is?” Erik says, one eyebrow up. “Thanks but no thanks.”
“At least,” I go on, “this explains Rose’s weird rivalry with Vaughn. Vaughn must’ve been so jealous, with Mike all over Rose at school … And why Mike lied about getting high: it was easier than telling his parents the truth, that he and Vaughn wanted to be alone together …”
“There’s a site I want you to see.” Erik snatches the tablet and navigates to a message board called Armchair.org, then taps “Girl From Hell” into the search bar.
“One of my mom’s tactics was to channel my more morbid impulses toward ‘being a helper,’” Erik says, his voice low. “She encouraged me to try and solve true crime cases. This board is pretty reputable, lots of freelance crime journalists and retired cops … Anything catch your eye?”
I scan the short list of thread subjects:
>GIRL FROM HELL: THE ROSE ROWAN MURDER:
>>MIKE & VAUGHN: Mike Comes Out in Facebook Video!!
>>Tom & Janeane RECENT PHOTOS// Award Ceremony for Rose Rowan Memorial Scholarship
>>$$$The Windward Connection$$$: Rose’s Murder Not First Brush with Teen Tragedy in Famous Family’s Past
>>MUH ALIENS: UFO Spotted Over Park Woods the Night Of!
>>NECKLACE THEORY: Complete Breakdown of Why Signal Murdered Rose Over a Necklace.
“What’s all this about a necklace?” I tap on the last thread.
>>NECKLACE THEORY: Why Signal Murdered Rose Over a Necklace
According to local sleuth/armchair contributor CC_CUBA, Tom Rowan told members of his Bible Study group that Janeane had found a pentagram pendant in Rose’s room days before that fateful night. Tom confronted Rose with it the day of her murder. She had explained the necklace belonged to Signal Deere, and Tom prohibited Rose from inviting her to the house again. Tom put the necklace in a bedside table drawer.
Flash forward to that night. Signal somehow gets Rose to meet her in the shed, and Rose tells her their friendship is over. As Sherpop&lock89 pointed out in a previous thread several elements of a traditional pagan altar were found at the crime scene: burnt down candles, a bowl of salt scattered on the floor, part of a cupcake wrapper (food, especially sweet cakes, is a common pagan offering), and of course the 10-inch mini utility saw found under Signal’s hand (likely shoplifted from Ledmonton Hardware Supply) would have stood in for a pagan atheme, or ritualistic dagger.
Lets_Get_Em has theorized that when Rose ended their friendship, she triggered some kind of emotional meltdown in Signal, who was possibly high as well (as RETIREDPHD points out, the drug tests administered to Signal when she was first processed did not include specific assays needed to identify a variety of opiates).
Signal strangled Rose, then incorporated her friend’s body into an occult ritual.
The necklace was not listed in discovery, suggesting Rose returned it to Signal, who alone knows its location. Tom finding Signal’s necklace lines up perfectly with explaining the “table of junk” (the altar) the mutilation of Rose’s body (a magic ritual) and a compelling motive for why things came to a head that night.
!!UPDATE!! Check out Signal’s meltdown in AP Biology, the day of the murder, in Katie Williams’ Instagram!!
I click on the hyperlink to Katie Williams’ Instagram. She has a clip of me, beet red in AP Biology: I’d forgotten a worksheet packet at home and had a small panic attack. I totally forgot about that, but apparently it’s one of many reasons everyone back home thinks I should burn in hell for eternity.
“We should go,” Erik urges.
But I can’t stop scrolling the comments on Katie’s post. Everyone talking about how they could always tell I was a Class A, how I “always creeped them out.”
The only comment that has anything even slightly positive to say is … Jaw Itznicki’s?!
JawsItz: aw she’s not so bad is it for sure she did it?
I click over to Jaw’s Instagram feed. The square that pops up is all blue sky and hot pink bougainvillea. And his location is now Oxnard, in Southern California.
“Erik, look!!” He’s half risen out of his seat, but he gets back down beside me.
“We should go.”
“I know but look, Erik, Jaw’s in California now—”
I scroll through picture after picture until I see one of him leaned up against a front door with the numbers 1227 in frame. All I need now is the street.
“Come on.” Erik takes my hand and almost drags me to my feet, but I can’t put down the tablet.
“Wait, just one more thing—”
At last, a picture with a location attached, a taco shop which Jaw describes as being “Just down the block” on Silver Strand Ave—
SNAP!
The room bursts into color around me, and in the doorway two little blue eyes connect with mine. My heart jerks in my chest at the little boy’s face, peeping around the doorway.
But he’s way more scared than me.
His freckled face goes white as a sheet and he disappears with a gasp, his steps scrambling up the carpeted stairs.
“Time to go!” Erik rushes me toward the playhouse, and gets neatly through the window. I step up onto the playhouse roof, and it buckles under my weight. I let out a cry just as Erik’s hand shoots through the window and grabs mine, so I’m hanging from the basement window.
“Mom! Dad! There’s people downstairs!” the little voice cries as my sneakers rake the wall. Erik grabs my other arm and pulls me until my torso is through the low window. From there I crawl on my elbows onto the cold dirt at the side of the house, frantically wriggling my hips through the small window, all too aware my butt currently says “CHEER.”
I squeeze through just as a sleepy dad’s voice floats out the window above us:
“Garvey, have you been up watching scary movies again?”
We run through the backyard, then up the steep incline into the shelter of the trees. I want to slow down, but Erik keeps sprinting, his flashlight’s circle getting smaller and smaller in front of me.
“Erik!”
He doubles back and links his iron arm through mine, and suddenly I’m pressed tight to his muscled side like we’re in a three-legged race, scrambling and sliding as we thread through the densely packed trees.
I’ve never run this hard, this long, in my life. But it’s a release: all I can think of is how to clear the next obstacle before we meet it headlong, my body burning with the animal joy of escape.
At last the trees open up and I recognize the playground, we’re past the fence, we’re safe. Erik breaks away from me, his grin taking over his entire face as he jumps up and grazes a high branch with his fingertips.
I bend over double, gulping down air, sides burning and cramping.
“You have zero stamina,” Erik says. “That was three quarters of a mile, not even, and I carried you for most of it.”
“I never had … a pentagram … necklace,” I pant. “But Jaw … you were … right, Jaw … was Mr. Moody … after all.” I hang my head for a moment. “Only thing that fits.”
“But you said he had no motive,” Erik reminds me, the sky above us almost lavender. “So what’s his motive?”
“Like what your website said. Some kind of ritualistic murder.”
“If there was going to be a sacrifice that night, why wouldn’t it be you? And not just because you’re the virgin—”
“Obviously, it should have been me,” I say, exasperated. “The only person who would’ve missed me is my mom! And even my mom would’ve been better off with me dead—”
“You never say that again. Ever.” Erik’s voice is so hard it frightens me, his hands gripping my shoulders. “Listen to me, Signal. We’re going to clear your name and get you out of camp, I promise you—”
But his words are drowned out by rhythmic thunder overhead. We look up to see a helicopter pass above us. We watch it descend, the trajectory leading just past the trees to the field in front of the main cabin.
“This isn’t good,” Erik says, tense. “Can you handle more running?”
“Try to keep up,” I gasp, and slip my arm through his.
But by the time we get to the obstacle course field I’m flailing with exhaustion; my foot catches under the edge of the staked-down tarp and I go sprawling into the middle of the sleeping bags with a wild cry.
Nobody leaps up, poised to attack, Troy and Jada’s sleeping bags jerk apart, and Dennis is scrambling for his glasses as I roll onto my side, panting.
Javier sits up, his puzzled gaze going from me to Erik, and before I can say anything, everyone else gets in the way.
“Where were you guys?”
“Did you hear the helicopter?”
“Kate and Dave weren’t here so this whole time Troy and Jada’ve been making ou—”
“Shut UP, Kurt!” Troy pounces on his brother, who laughs hysterically.
The talk cuts off as we all hear it: a car engine. Driving up to the field.
“Everybody get back in bed!” Javier bellows. “Lay down, lay down!”
I race over to the bedroll next to him, but Javier doesn’t look at me. I start to speak but he turns away on his side. I freeze, curled up next to him, bathed in cold sweat from running arm in arm with Erik, the headlights arcing over us as the car chugs to a stop.
What’s going on? Did Kate and Dave see me and Erik cross the fence? Did that family call the police, and they’ve tracked us down? Is Javier upset? Is he going to break up with me?
The tarp is flooded with light as the driver switches on the high beams; a car door slams and we try to see who’s rushing toward us, but we’re blinded by the glare.
“GET UP! ALL OF YOU, GET UP!” a strange male voice yells.
“I’m sorry, who are you? You work with Dave and Kate?” Javier calls, shielding his face with one hand.
“I said GET UP!” the stranger yells, and kicks the nearest sleeping bag. Jada yelps in pain.
“What the hell, man?!” Troy moves to shield her.
The stranger holds up a fob and clicks it at Troy.
“NO!” Kurt screams.
But Troy is already on his knees, frozen in the beam of the headlights. His skin turns a neon red, like the worst sort of sunburn, burning him from the inside out. Within seconds it’s deepened to purple, bruises blooming out across his skin as corrosive acid dissolves his veins. His eyes, fixed on the man, go crimson and then he collapses forward onto the cold blue tarp.
He didn’t even get a last breath.