tyz7412: So you’re not actually serious. Typical woman, full of bullshit
mysterybkluv: wow okay thought we were just having a fun discussion here
archieandnero: seriously WTF dude back off
poirotsgirl: yeah that’s totally inappropriate
tyz7412: I want to know if that bitch can actually do what she says or if she’s all talk
mysterybkluv: jesus christ you can fuck right off
tyz7412: I wanna know if she can actually solve a mystery better than the police. I want to see you prove it.
mysterybkluv: I don’t have to prove anything to you, and this discussion is over
tyz7412: oh really
CELIA STUFFED HER PHONE in her pocket again, determined to ignore any further communication from Pete. She’d confirmed what she’d suspected—that he wasn’t her husband, that the kid wasn’t hers. She’d confirmed that there was a camera watching her. She still didn’t know why, though, and she was getting sick of the broken record in her brain asking the same question over and over.
She felt strangely calm as she returned to her work in the kitchen. She hadn’t planned to confront Pete, hadn’t planned to reveal that she knew what he was up to. It had just come out. But it felt like the right decision in the moment.
What happens now, though? I can’t go home, or rather, to the place that they told me was home.
Maybe at the end of the day she should just take all the money out of the till, get in her car and start driving. At least she would be safer in a different town, away from a man masquerading as her life partner and a police officer determined to frame her for murder.
Oh, yeah, and there’s a murderer around, too. And the murderer always tries for the heroine of the story.
Was she the heroine of the story, though? It seemed like she was. Why else would Pete have done this? Why else would there be a secret camera in her kitchen?
There’s probably one in your car, too. They’ll be able to track you.
“They.” Celia didn’t know why, but she was certain that there was a “they.” It wasn’t just about Pete. For a moment she felt like she couldn’t breathe, like her breath had seized in her lungs. Someone was out to get her—a lot of someones, maybe—and there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to it. What could she have done that was so horrible, so offensive, that this elaborate scheme would form around her? Had she hurt someone, killed someone?
No. Even with her faulty memories, she thought she’d remember doing something like that. And anyway, the idea didn’t feel right. She wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t deliberately harm another person. It was fundamentally not her, just like listening to true crime podcasts or running for fun was fundamentally not her.
Her body moved on autopilot, did the tasks required of her, answered Katherine’s questions and comments. The servers came in and out of the kitchen, many of them complaining that the deluge of customers did not seem to be translating into a deluge of tips because people were cheap jerks.
Even as she worked and commiserated with the servers, part of Celia’s brain was working, trying to solve the mystery that surrounded her, trying to figure out how she could get out of it.
The afternoon shift changed to the evening shift. Pete left twenty-two more voice mail messages on her phone, and Celia listened to none of them.
You can do this. You always figure out the solution before the end when you’re reading a mystery novel.
Her hands stopped their automatic motion. There was something there, something in that thought. She was a reader. She liked reading mystery novels, liked solving puzzles. She should be able to solve this one.
No, that’s not it. Somebody said I couldn’t do it or something? No, that’s not quite right. Somebody said . . .
Her thought trailed off, and she gritted her teeth. These half-formed memories were getting real old real fast.
Will came into the kitchen carrying a pile of dishes, just like he had the night before. He hummed as he stacked them in the sink to be washed later.
He was humming a tune that seemed very familiar to Celia, so familiar that she heard an echo of it inside her brain, the sound of someone else humming the same song.
She had a flash of someone standing in front of a canvas holding a paintbrush, and he was humming that very tune.
“Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” Celia said.
“Yup, it’s my favorite,” Will said.
“It’s someone else’s favorite, too,” Celia murmured, more to herself than to Will.
Will straightened up, wiping his hands on the dishcloth. Celia thought there was something in his eyes, some wariness that wasn’t there before. But perhaps she had imagined it. It was hard to know what was real and what was in her head anymore. “Whose favorite?”
“I don’t know,” Celia said. “Maybe Lyle Corrigan’s.”
Will made a pfffft noise. “Lyle Corrigan is a cretin. He’s probably never even heard of Mozart.”
“He might have heard Mozart’s name once, even if he doesn’t know what to attach it to,” Celia said. “Or maybe he’d surprise us. People often do.”
Will shook his head. “That’s not been my experience at all. My experience has been that people act in perfectly predictable ways, always based on the way they’ve acted before. People just aren’t that interesting, really.”
“I don’t know,” Celia said, looking toward the back door. She could almost see Mrs. Corrigan’s ridiculous pink house on the other side of the parking lot. She was thinking about Mrs. Corrigan, about the murder that might be pinned on her, about the mysteries that she liked to solve. “I think most people are plenty interesting.”
“Keep that sunshine-y optimism, okay? I think I can predict with all confidence that the family of five in my section will leave a 10 percent tip and that the kids will drop more spaghetti on the seats than ever makes it into their mouths.”
“Well, it’s an interesting result, isn’t it?” Celia said, laughing.
“But also a predictable one,” Will said, and went into the dining room.
Katherine had gone out for her dinner break to do some shopping before the stores closed. She returned through the back door, her hands loaded with bags.
“So many sales!” she said, swinging the bags around her waist. “I got a ton of great deals.”
“Cool,” Celia said, but Katherine’s words didn’t really register.
She wasn’t thinking about Katherine’s shopping. She was thinking about Mrs. Corrigan—a person she would have said she’d never seen before yesterday, a person who seemed to have hated Celia with the fiery light of a thousand suns. Hate that was, frankly, absurd on its face. There was no way someone could have that much built-up hostility for Celia just because of a supposed rat problem. And this whole thing with Mrs. Corrigan was tied, somehow, to Celia’s fake husband and her fake life, and the cameras filming her in her kitchen.
And Mrs. Corrigan is dead. Remember that. I don’t know how this is all tied together, but one woman is dead and I don’t want to be the body that pops up in the middle of the book.
Celia abruptly untied her apron and drew it over her head. “I’m going out for a little while. Can you handle things here for a half hour or so?”
Katherine gave Celia a startled look. “Sure, but where are you going?”
“Just to run an errand,” Celia said vaguely. She didn’t want to confide in Katherine. She wasn’t certain that she could confide in Katherine. Katherine might be a part of the conspiracy with Pete and Jennifer and whoever was watching Celia through the cameras.
Celia felt the expectant look that Katherine gave her, but she ignored it. She put on her jacket and went out the door with a little wave, saying, “Be back soon.”
Celia wondered what the person watching through the cameras in the kitchen was thinking now. Did they have cameras set up in the parking lot as well? Was there a camera in her car? She resisted the urge to look up and check the telephone poles around the lot. If there was an electronic eye following her progress through the lot, then there wasn’t anything she could do about it right now.
There was one safety light in the parking lot, close to the dumpster. The remainder of the light came from the streetlights, so there were large pools of shadow to pass through. As she walked, Celia was struck again by the unnatural quiet. No one was exiting the restaurant after their meal and coming back here to get their car. There were no cars in the lot other than her own, Will’s and Katherine’s. Nobody was driving up Cherry Lane. There was no sound of traffic coming from Main Street, either. No dogs barked and no music blared from the bedrooms of teenagers. There was none of the ambient murmur that came from places where people congregated, like the shops and restaurants that surrounded Celia’s own business. It was like no one actually lived in the town, or those that did were robots that powered down every night.
Celia stopped in front of the dumpster. The hastily wrapped crime scene tape now fluttered uselessly in front of it. Celia resisted the urge to open the dumpster again, to see if anyone else had been murdered and dropped in there for her to find.
That would be pushing credulity too far. Besides, in mystery novels there’s always a little stretch before the second body pops up. In fact, sometimes there’s no second body at all. Sometimes there’s just one murder that takes up everyone’s time and attention. And honestly, one murder is more than enough.
Celia turned on the flashlight on her phone and scanned it all around the dumpster. She wasn’t 100 percent sure what she was looking for, especially since several people had walked around the area the previous night. If there was any evidence to collect, then the police probably already collected it.
If Lyle Corrigan believes in evidence at all, that is. He might just try to railroad me—make up a case, plant evidence. It was what his aunt tried to do with the fake black eye.
There were lots of footprints in the dust, scraps of old garbage, leaves that had fallen off the bushes that lined the lot. But there was nothing that screamed “PREVIOUSLY UNDISCOVERED MURDER CLUE HERE.” Celia twisted her mouth. What had she expected? Real life wasn’t like a neatly plotted novel.
She walked around the dumpster, remembering that the previous night she’d thought she heard someone nearby. The only place the person could have hidden—if there was anybody—was in Mrs. Corrigan’s backyard. Celia figured that made sense, because whoever had killed Mrs. Corrigan would have had to bring the body from the old lady’s house to the restaurant’s dumpster.
And if someone was nearby, and the sound wasn’t in my imagination . . . that means the killer had probably just tossed Mrs. Corrigan’s body a few moments before I came out with the trash. Which means they could have killed me, too. Except it’s pretty clear—maybe?? Or maybe not—that what they want to do is set me up as a murderer.
But maybe it had all been in her head. Maybe there had been no noise at all, no lurking murderer confirming that his diabolical plan was at work. It was hard to know anymore. It was hard to know whether she was inventing memories whole cloth or if she was seeing things that weren’t really in front of her. Celia felt a strong sense of unreality, a sense that she was hardly a real person at all. She was just a character in someone else’s story, the product of someone else’s guiding hand.
It didn’t matter, she realized. It didn’t matter because she was here, in this moment, and if she wanted to take control of her life, then she needed more information. She needed to try to understand what had happened to her and who had done it and why. The only way she could do that was to find any clues about Mrs. Corrigan’s killer that the police had overlooked. She pushed through the bushes behind the dumpster and stepped into Mrs. Corrigan’s backyard.
Her heart slammed against her ribs, the pulse of blood thick in her mouth. Celia was not a natural rule-breaker, whatever Lyle Corrigan thought of her. Just the fact of standing in someone’s yard, in a place where she would certainly be considered a trespasser, made her a little sick.
And what if Lyle Corrigan is here? What if he’s hanging around the house hoping to catch me at exactly this sort of thing?
Automatically Celia looked up at the house. But the windows were dark, and there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. She glanced around nervously at the house across the street, but that was dark, too.
Again she noted the unnatural silence, the lack of ambient noise. There weren’t even any chirping crickets or twittering birds, no skitter of squirrels and chipmunks. It was so quiet in this town. It was almost as if no one actually lived there.
Celia paused, looking around then. Could that be true? Could she be in some kind of abandoned town?
Don’t be any more ridiculous than you already are. Isn’t it enough that your husband—or someone pretending to be your husband—wants to drug you? Isn’t it enough that someone is watching you at work?
She shone her cell phone flashlight around the area, looking for something, anything. Celia crouched down to the grass, frog-walking her way closer to the house. She felt vaguely stupid and not at all Holmes-like.
No distinct footprints or bits of cigarette ash, no conveniently characteristic candy wrapper (the killer only eats pink Starburst!) or wad of gum containing the killer’s DNA.
Celia glanced up at Mrs. Corrigan’s back porch, wondered if she dared go up there. Stepping on some part of the dead woman’s house seemed like a more significant violation, like she was actually trespassing in a way that she hadn’t before.
But the killer had to have offed Mrs. Corrigan in her own house, not in Celia’s parking lot. There had been no blood splattered anywhere around the dumpster. And the backyard didn’t show any signs of struggle or anything else that might indicate Mrs. Corrigan had died there. She had to have been murdered in her house. The killer would have been foolish to walk right out the front door under the streetlights, so he—
(so sexist of me, it might not be a “he” at all, but it’s true that I always think of killers as men because men can be dangerous, so very very dangerous to women)
—and as she thought this, something tore inside her brain, some seam ripped apart, and the pain was beyond terrible, beyond anything she’d ever felt before. Celia fell to her knees, felt her eyes water and blood leak from her nose. The phone slipped from her hand and into the grass, the flashlight face down so that just a thin frame of light was visible around the case.
Celia could hardly think, could hardly see beyond the pain, but there was something behind that ripped seam, some face that was just out of focus, and with it, the memory of a sneering voice.
“No one will ever believe you.”
She knew that voice. She’d heard it recently. She just couldn’t match it to a face, couldn’t make that last part tighten up so she could see it clearly.
Someone did this to me. Someone stripped my life away and I can’t remember who it was. If only . . . if only . . .
She put her face in her hands, hating how helpless she felt, how small.
He did this, whoever he is. He made me feel small.
A surge of rebellion rose within her, a feeling that drove her to her feet. No one was going to make her small. No one was going to make her a helpless, crying maiden. She was going to solve this murder and she was going to find the killer and she was going to find who had tampered with her brain and she was going to fix it goddamnit because this was her life.
Celia bent to pick up the phone, ignoring the wave of dizziness that accompanied this action. She marched toward Mrs. Corrigan’s porch with a determination she hadn’t had before.
There were two wooden steps leading up to the covered porch. Celia had enough wherewithal to realize she shouldn’t stomp up them and make a big racket. It might not seem that there was anybody around, but someone could be. A neighbor might suddenly decide to walk their dog, or someone might pull into the restaurant parking lot.
Why do I have that parking lot for the restaurant, anyway? Nobody parks in it except the staff. No matter how busy the place is, there never seems to be anyone needing the back lot.
It was ludicrous that her whole dispute with Mrs. Corrigan—or rather, Mrs. Corrigan’s dispute with her—was contingent on the dumpster in a lot that was barely used.
Celia tiptoed carefully around the porch, but nothing seemed out of place. She did note that the wooden slats appeared freshly sealed and stained, but not done-since-yesterday fresh. More like they’d been updated in the last couple of weeks. The siding of the house, too, appeared new. Maybe Mrs. Corrigan had decided to update her home recently.
Celia flashed her light across the back of the house, looking for a snagged thread on the door frame, anything that might help.
That’s when she noticed that the back door was open.
It wasn’t much, just a centimeter or two. But the door was not shut and locked as it should be.
Celia stared at the little gap between the door and the frame, and wondered if she dared.
There’s no one around to see you, and you won’t touch anything, won’t do anything stupid like leave your fingerprints behind, right? But presumably the police have been through the house already, have collected any forensic evidence that they might need. So it’s probably safe to enter and not worry about incriminating yourself.
Celia reached for the doorknob, then paused. There was no crime scene tape on the back door. Maybe that meant the police had not been through the house yet. If so, then she might be walking right into the killer’s trap. She might be doing exactly what he wanted. She might be making herself an easy target.
Just commit, she told herself. She wrapped her shirtsleeve around her hand and pushed the door open.
It opened into a kitchen. Celia scanned the flashlight through the room. The cabinets were painted pink, like the exterior of the house, and there was an old-fashioned dinette with silver piping and puffy leather seats, also pink. The woman had apparently loved pink beyond all reason.
Celia couldn’t see any obvious signs of a struggle or a murder in the kitchen. Everything was neatly arranged. There wasn’t a dirty coffee cup in the sink or a loaf of bread on the counter. It looked sort of like a show kitchen for a real estate open house.
She passed through the kitchen and into what seemed to be a living room. A small television—old-fashioned and bulky instead of a modern flat-screen—stood against the wall that connected to the kitchen. The rest of the room had the sort of overly fussy furnishings and knickknacks that Celia associated with the elderly—a couch covered in an uncomfortable-looking damask (more pink!), a matching pair of chairs, doilies on the highly polished end tables, dried flowers and ugly porcelain dolls everywhere. No books or magazines or a basket of knitting, no sign that an actual human had lived there. No sign of murder, or any evidence that the police had been through the house looking for such signs.
Celia frowned. The house appeared strangely untouched. She leaned over one of the tables, swiped her sleeve across the surface and examined the fabric with the cell phone flashlight. There were traces of dust there, like someone needed to give the house a good wipe down.
This whole exercise was starting to seem pointless, but Celia figured she might as well head upstairs and see if anything revealed itself to her there. As she climbed the stairs, she marveled at how easily the heroines of her favorite books stumbled across physical clues after a crime. Fiction really was easier than truth.
There was a hallway with five rooms leading off it. All the doors were closed.
Celia used her sleeve again to open the closest door. The room was empty.
That’s weird, she thought. Most people had so much stuff that they never left a room unused. They’d use a space like this as a sewing room or a place to stash their treadmill or to keep extra clothing. But then, Mrs. Corrigan did live alone. Celia supposed she didn’t have any hobbies.
She opened the next room. Also empty.
What the . . . ?
The next room. Empty.
A cold knot had formed in the pit of Celia’s stomach. She thought again of the way the living room and kitchen were so impersonal. Did Mrs. Corrigan actually live here?
Celia pushed open the fourth door, already certain of what she would see. Nothing. There was no furniture, no closet, just a big, bare, empty room. And now that she noticed it, the room smelled faintly of wood shavings, as if it had been built recently.
What is this place? Where am I? Celia thought, and now the terror was pumping through her, making her hands shake as she pushed open the final door. The room was empty, like all the others. No bed, not even for show, no end table with a glass for dentures and a neatly folded pair of reading glasses. Nothing at all.
Panic surged through her and she ran down the hall, down the stairs, through the empty house and into the yard. She stood there for a moment in the grass, out of breath, feeling the insane rush of blood in her body. What was she going to do now? She didn’t know where she was on the planet, but she knew she didn’t belong there. This wasn’t her home. These weren’t her people.
Celia started to run, not thinking about where she was going or what she would do when she got there. She just knew she had to go, go anywhere, and she didn’t trust her car not to be tracked. She tossed the cell phone aside—it had to be a plant, had to be another way to follow her.
She ran down Cherry and onto Main Street, not stopping to look inside the restaurant. There was no one she could trust, no one who could help her. She ran along the road, away from the town, in the opposite direction of her house. The last thing she needed was Pete finding her. He might grab her, throw her in the car, force her to return to that house with him—the house that she knew was not her own.
I don’t know where my home is, but I’m going to find it. I’m going to remember who I am and I am going to find my place.
She knew that anyone who saw her would think she looked crazy, but she didn’t care. She felt crazy in that moment, unmoored, but she was running toward something, something she was sure was out there even if she couldn’t remember it.
Celia reached the edge of the town. To the right, there were houses much like the one that Pete had claimed was her home—two-story, middle-class-type dwellings. To the left was an expanse of woods similar to the one she’d passed the last two mornings on her way to the restaurant. There was only one road, and it continued straight ahead.
Celia paused for a moment, glancing over her shoulder. What she saw there made her plunge into the woods with no clear plan except to get away.
Twenty or so men were lined up across the road and running slowly, methodically, after her.
She heard shouts and yells as she went into the trees. There were no clear paths, and she didn’t have a clear destination. She had no purpose except to get away.
Maybe I can climb a tree and hide, she thought, but one glance at the trees around her showed that none of the branches were low enough for her to grasp. Besides, one of the men chasing her would probably find her and have the tree chopped down with her in it.
She heard her own breath as she panted for air, felt the muscles under her right rib contract painfully. Her legs burned and she felt her body slowing involuntarily, wanting to stop and walk. She was not in ideal shape for running for her life.
I knew I wasn’t a runner. I knew it was a lie.
She risked a quick look over her shoulder, saw that several of the men were within sight.
I’ve got to stop running in a straight line.
Celia turned diagonally, sprinted between trees as best she could. The tree cover was getting sparser instead of thicker, which was odd. Normally the deeper one went into the woods, the harder it became to move through it, but the trees were gradually disappearing, leaving an almost open plain of dirt in front of her.
And then the dirt was gone, and her feet were pounding on a concrete pad, and there, miraculously before her, was something that she thought for a moment was an illusion.
A very tall white wall—perhaps thirty, forty feet, maybe more—and set within it, like something Alice might have found while chasing the white rabbit, a gray rectangular door with bright red letters over it.
An exit door.
Celia ran harder than she ever thought she possibly could, heard someone snarling far too close behind her, “No, you fucking bitch, you aren’t going to get away from us!”
She slammed into the door and pushed it open.