11
As Stevie looked down at the dead body on the floor, her first thought was, There is no way I can tell Nate about this.
This, she realized, was a protective mechanism. Her brain was trying to keep everything normal. Probably.
That Helen was dead wasn’t much of a question. There was no movement at all, no breathing, no sound. Stevie gently reached
down and touched the sole of one foot. The skin was cold. Her body was stiff. The hand that clutched the fistful of blanket
that was pulling down on the corner was frozen in position.
“What’s on the floor?” Arthur asked. Before she could stop him, he was by her side, and then he let out a scream.
Stevie guided him as far back as she could as she dialed 911 and explained to the dispatcher that she’d just found a body.
Her description must have convinced them, because they didn’t tell her to try to get Helen out and try CPR. They told her
not to touch anything and move away.
Arthur was in hysterics, so Stevie awkwardly put her arm around his cardiganed shoulders and took him out into the hall. She knocked on Imogen and Sophie’s door. Sophie answered right away and looked at the sobbing man.
“Helen,” Stevie managed to say. “She’s . . . not okay.”
“Not okay? She’s ill?”
“She’s gone,” Arthur said.
“Could you take him inside your place?” Stevie said quietly. “I called the ambulance. They’re coming.”
“Of course,” Sophie said, her eyes wide. “Come in, Arthur. Come in. What about you?”
“I’ll wait for the ambulance and show them where to go.”
“Are you all right doing that?”
“I’ve done it before,” Stevie said. “It’s okay.”
Arthur was more than happy to accept the invitation into Sophie and Imogen’s. Stevie stood by Helen’s door, took a deep inhale,
exhaled twice as long, and went back into the apartment.
Murph was waiting on the back of a kitchen chair, swaying side to side. He had known Helen was in trouble. He had been calling
for help for a day.
Murph is always right, Helen had said.
“I’m sorry, Murph,” Stevie told him.
She crept toward the bedroom. There was no reason to move so carefully. Helen couldn’t hear her. But being around death made
things slow down. Reality adjusted itself. Someone had gone, and the living had jobs to do, jobs they had to carefully assess.
Stevie had been around dead bodies before, but this was different. Those had been murders. And this was . . .
Well, there was no blood on the bed, the walls, anywhere. No signs of a struggle. Nothing overturned. Just a blanket slightly tugged out of place.
She moved back toward Helen, her steps slow. Deep breath. Slow exhale. What did she see?
Helen was wearing the same things she had been wearing when Stevie had last seen her on Christmas Eve. Murph had been making
loud noises for a day. Helen was cold. There was an air purifier purring away in the corner of the room—it must have helped
diminish any smell that was developing. The bed was still made, so she hadn’t been in it. Helen wasn’t completely flat—she
was more hunched over, like she had been sitting and had fallen toward the wall. She was still in her day clothes. Conclusion:
Helen had likely died sometime between Stevie’s visit and the evening.
“This way, down here!” someone out in the hall yelled.
Stevie opened the door to let paramedics in. Murph flew up to the top of one of the bookcases and began screaming at the strangers
in their blue uniforms with the strange rolling object.
“Where is she?” one asked, with the resolved but dispassionate expression of someone who spent all day seeing terrible things
and had to remain neutral to function.
“The bedroom,” Stevie said, pointing to the doorway. “Between the bed and the wall.”
One paramedic went inside with a large orange kit.
“Can you do something about that bird?” the other asked, pulling on gloves. “We can’t have a loose bird flying around in here.”
Could she?
Pineapple. Murph would do anything for pineapple. Stevie went to the kitchen, where everything was astonishingly organized,
with labels and dates on every container. The line of items had a clear logic: cake flour, white flour, wheat flour, buckwheat
flour, white sugar, light brown sugar, dark brown sugar. There were nesting measuring cups and spoons and pans hanging on
a pegboard on the wall with labels so that every tool went back in the right place. The only thing even remotely messy was
a handful of crumbled fruitcake in the sink.
The cabinets were similarly well maintained, like items stored with like items. In the last cabinet she opened, there were
a dozen or more packs of plastic cups of pineapple in juice. She peeled off the foil on one and held it as far out as she
could, creeping toward Murph, as the paramedics moved the gurney into the bedroom. Murph stared down from the bookcase, blinking
furiously, extending his foot like he was trying to keep her back.
“Nice pineapple,” she said, sloshing it gingerly so he could smell it. (Could birds smell?) “Come in here. Nice pineapple.
Pineapple.”
She reached into the cage, ignoring the white crust of poop on every perch and toy, and set the pineapple on the bottom. Murph
bobbed his head forward a few times and fluttered down to the cage and went inside. Stevie shut him in.
One of the paramedics from the bedroom appeared and shook her head.
Helen was gone. Stevie answered the basic questions—when had Helen last been seen, why had they come into the apartment, was she sick?
They’d found her medication on the bedside stand.
When they’d gotten what they needed from Stevie, they asked her to step outside.
Luna was standing by the elevator waiting for her, teetering in her platform boots. She had made a concession to the holiday
by wearing a sweatshirt covered in tiny skulls with Santa hats on and a red tulle tutu skirt with buckled straps hanging from
it.
“Come with me,” she said. “You may be in shock right now.”
Stevie had trained herself to investigate murders. Luna had been studying videos on how to help people when they dealt with
death, and Stevie could feel a kind of excited compassion as Luna plied her trade for the first time. She found herself following
Luna into her apartment, where the acrid sting of a grapefruit candle danced uneasily with another that pumped out woodsmoke
scent. Half the apartment was a boho daydream—a big, slouchy tan couch, rattan and woven pieces. The other half was sports—just
sports. Of all kinds. Framed jerseys. Signed balls. Prints of teams.
Margo had a setup in the corner, in a well-lit and tidy space with a white table in front of her and a papered feature wall
behind. She was in front of a ring light, speaking earnestly into her computer. All around her was the debris of social media
life—wires, tripods, lights, open makeup palettes, clothes, boxes, bags, mirrors.
“. . . and what we need to emphasize is the spirit of renewal, because New Year’s resolution time is the best time for us to find our authentic . . .”
“She’s doing a live,” Luna said, not lowering her voice as they crossed the room. She took Stevie into her bedroom and sat
her down on the bed.
“I’m going to get you some water,” she said. “Here.”
She wrapped a gray-and-silver fake fur throw over Stevie’s shoulders and hurried off. Luna had artfully covered her walls
in posters of vampires and bands and sheets of quirky wrapping paper that had old anatomical drawings on them. There was spider
washi tape along the window frames. Everything that could be black, was. The blinds. The throw rug on the beige wall-to-wall
carpet. There were two long and perfectly organized bookshelves in front of her. Luna kept each author’s works together in
sets, hardback and paperback mixed together. There were two shelves devoted to Ivy Grey, including the special editions of
the Prince of Teeth series with the black-and-gold edges.
“Here,” Luna said, coming back in with a glass of water. “Have this. Do you want tea? We have all kinds of herbal teas and
stuff. Or a cookie? Because sugar can help.”
“I’m okay,” Stevie said. It seemed to be true, though the water was helpful.
Margo herself followed a moment later. Today, her hair was wound into a ballerina bun.
“Stevie!” she said. “I was hoping you’d come by. I’d love to . . .”
“Helen’s dead,” Luna said.
Margo’s smile fell from her face.
“What?”
“Stevie found her,” Luna went on.
“Oh my God. What happened?”
Stevie began to explain Murph’s screaming, her trip to Arthur’s, but Luna stood up and interrupted the story.
“Benny’s home,” Luna said suddenly. “I think she’s home. I have to tell her. . . .”
How Luna would have known this from the depths of her bedroom was unclear, but she was on the move. Stevie shook off the blanket
and followed. Luna’s timing guess had been weirdly serendipitous: Benny came out of the elevator as Stevie entered the hall.
Benny paused in confusion, looking at the activity around Helen’s door.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Is Helen . . . Oh God. Stevie. What happened? Is Helen . . .”
“We should go sit down,” Luna said.
They went into Benny’s dark little apartment. The bamboo blinds were down, the only glow coming from a terrarium and Benny’s
computer. There was a funk in the air—stale urine, dust, old food festering in the trash. Technically speaking, there was
furniture: a green sofa covered in animal hair, collapsing in on itself. Benny sat on this and pulled her knees up to her
chest and buried her head on them. Luna patted her back. Stevie continued looking around the room, because that is what she
did when she needed to displace some emotion. Observe. Detach. Go outside of herself and drink in the world like a dispassionate
lens.
There was a desk made of two filing cabinets with what appeared to be a door on top.
There were plastic bins all around, with dog food and wee-wee pads, large bags of rice, and towels.
Collapsed cardboard boxes leaned up against all the open wall space.
There were dozens of plants, over half of which appeared to be dead.
And then the books. Hundreds of them. Stevie noted several in a pile by her feet that were marked Advanced Reader Copy.
There was one mystery she would have liked to pick up, but it didn’t seem right to ask someone who was crying over their
dead neighbor if you could borrow one of their books.
“She’s been so sick,” Benny said, her voice thick. “She was worried about Murph. Birds live such a long time. Murph’s only
twenty. She asked me to take care of Murph when something finally happened to her. I have to go and get him. He’s got to be
traumatized.”
Benny sniffed loudly, then pushed herself up and turned to kneel, facing over the back of the sofa, to address the little
coiled pink snake in her terrarium.
“Cleo,” she said softly, “we’re going to have a visitor, okay? His name is Murph and he won’t hurt you.”
The snake did not seem to care.
Back out in the hall, Mitzi and Lance had taken custody of Arthur and were moving him down to their apartment. A police officer
had arrived and was on the phone. Margo was in her doorway, and as Luna emerged from Benny’s, she waved her back home.
“I have to help with Murph,” Luna pleaded. “We have to get him out of Helen’s.”
“You’re not going in there,” Margo said. “Come inside. Stevie, you’ll need this.”
She handed Stevie a small blue dropper bottle of something called Tranquil Waves.
“It’s ionic magnesium with fulvic acid,” she said. “The magnesium is for calm and the fulvic acid will help with detoxification,
to rebalance your stress hormone levels. Take five drops in some water—distilled is best.”
Stevie shoved it in her pocket. She and Benny walked down the hall and asked permission to remove Murph. This resulted in
a few minutes of discussion between the police and the paramedics, and it was decided that it would probably be a good thing
to get the large, distressed bird out of the way.
Benny hesitated before entering.
“I don’t think I can see her,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Is she . . .”
One of the paramedics shut the bedroom door from the inside. Stevie got a side view of the gurney just before it closed.
Asshole! Love you! Love you! Love you! Hello! Snack!
“It’s okay, Murph,” Benny said, keeping her voice soft and upbeat. “We got you, buddy.”
“Stevie,” Arthur called from the doorway, shielding his eyes, “can you grab her address book from her desk there? I’ll see
if there’s anyone I can contact. Maybe she had a lawyer.”
He pointed over to the table pushed up against the far wall where her laptop computer and landline were, along with a mass of papers and books.
Stevie went over to the desk and skimmed the many pieces of paper, the countless slips where Helen had written lists of ingredients, measurements, book titles .
. . so many little torn fragments. There was a small green book with the word ADDRESSES written on the front.
As she reached for it, her eye caught the word Ellingham on a piece of paper under the keyboard.
There was a small pile of printouts. Stevie shuffled through the top ones: STUDENT
DETECTIVE SOLVES HISTORICAL COLD CASE; SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD CRACKS ELLINGHAM PUZZLE; TRULY DEVIOUS CASE FINALLY SOLVED; WHO WAS
“TRULY DEVIOUS”? HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT CRACKS LEGENDARY CASE.
Helen had said she had read an article about Stevie. This was a lot more than one article. And she had gone to the trouble
of printing them out. Stevie got that her backstory was interesting, but this was . . . something else. Why had she wanted
to speak to Stevie so badly? What had she wanted to know?
“Did you find it?” Arthur called.
“Coming,” Stevie said. These were thoughts for later, when she wasn’t in the room next to Helen’s body and with two crying
friends and a distraught bird.
But she had a clear image in her head: She saw that horrible color Helen turned when she saw the Tower card.
Like it was for her.