Henry One Week before Kennedy Russo’s Murder
Henry
One Week before Kennedy Russo’s Murder
“At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde.”
—The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Henry had been back at school only two weeks when Kennedy Russo asked if he’d tutor her in math. “You’re the smartest kid in this school,” she said. “And I’ll pay you.”
Henry didn’t need the money, and he was pretty sure Kennedy knew that. He wondered what game she was playing—if she even needed help in math.
“Maybe we could meet at your house for an hour or so after school? Please.” She made a pouty face and batted her eyelashes like a movie vixen.
It sort of worked on Henry, who saw no reason to say no.
Kennedy Russo had been Henry’s first crush, back when they were in grade school and she let him borrow her blue crayon.
She’d never traveled in his circle, though, existing only in his periphery.
A beautiful yet alien-like, elusive being.
But now she was standing in front of him, asking to come to his house.
Henry thought of Hayden then, his best friend whom he loved more than anything.
Their friendship had started to feel different lately, and he wasn’t quite sure about this new trajectory.
Plus, Hayden had never expressed any of this, so it remained merely a feeling.
If anything, Henry suspected Hayden felt a certain way about Bram, which wouldn’t be surprising; every girl Henry had ever been interested in only seemed to notice Bram.
And Henry sometimes wondered if he himself was actually interested in Hayden that way at all, or if he was simply fearful of Bram taking her away from him.
Either way, Henry wouldn’t be doing anything wrong by tutoring Kennedy. He was allowed to have other friends. And Kennedy had as much sway around school as her father had around town. If she and Henry became friends—or more than friends—maybe the school would finally accept the brothers again.
“I guess,” he said, fiddling with his glasses to give his fingers something to do.
“Okay, great!” She smiled and clasped her hands together. “Will your brother be there?”
“Brother?” Henry felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner: Kennedy probably wanted to avoid Adam.
After the school board fallout, Dr. Russo had essentially dropped Adam as a patient, and Henry was sure his brother didn’t want anything to do with the doctor’s daughter, either.
“Maybe we should meet somewhere else,” he said.
He watched Kennedy’s face fall. Maybe this girl only wanted to see the inside of his house, he thought. It wouldn’t be the first time a schoolmate befriended him just so they could brag to everyone else that they got inside the “castle.”
Just then he remembered that Adam had a physical therapy appointment after school. “You know what? My house is fine.”
“Thanks so much, Henry. You’re the best.” This surprised him; as of a moment ago, he wasn’t aware she even knew his name.
She hugged him, which surprised him even more—especially because he liked it, the feel of her arms wrapped around him, her hair brushing the side of his face.
But what surprised him the most was how her scent tugged at his memory.
It was cloyingly sweet, like brown sugar and blackberries.
There was a hint of vanilla that made her smell almost like one of the berry crisp desserts Hayden sometimes made, freshly removed from the oven. Only that wasn’t quite it.
She pulled back, and the scent picked and pulled at the strings wound deep in Henry’s memory, giving him an unsettling sense of déjà vu. He felt frustrated that he couldn’t pinpoint it.
“Just, uh, don’t mention it to your brother, okay?” Kennedy said.
Henry nodded, knowing she was right. They had to keep this tutoring session to themselves. Maybe he could take her to his room, or they could work under the gazebo. It was a nice day outside after all.
As Kennedy waved goodbye and headed off to class, Bram made his way down the hall. “What was that about?”
“Nothing.” For some reason, Henry didn’t want Bram to know about Kennedy. Maybe because he knew it was a betrayal in a way, considering Adam’s feelings about the Russos.
“Nothing,” Bram repeated, clearly unconvinced.
As he eyed Henry suspiciously, the scent memory finally came to him.
Mariana had worn this same perfume. Henry had once smelled that scent on Bram in the car the year before; he remembered teasing Bram about how good he smelled after spending time with her.
He got a silly sense of relief now that he’d put it together.
“Be careful with her,” Bram said in his annoying older-brother voice. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Yeah,” Henry said, though irritation needled at him. Of course no girl could pay anyone but Bram the time of day.
***
Henry instructed Kennedy to meet him at the gate. He waited for her and, when she arrived, offered to carry her backpack. “You’re such a gentleman,” she said, and for the first time in his life, it sounded like a compliment. It wasn’t like when his brothers said the same thing to tease him.
She handed the backpack to him, smiling with red-painted lips. “I’ve never been inside your house before.”
Henry’s heart sank; maybe she really did only want the castle tour. “I was actually thinking we’d hang out in the backyard.” He waited for the look of disappointment.
“That sounds perfect,” she said, her arm brushing his as they ambled side by side on the walkway.
They wove through the gardens, pushing aside the massive overgrown branches of the magnolia tree that no one ever bothered to trim.
As their feet crunched over the once-pink blooms, now withered brown and scattered over the path, Henry half expected Kennedy to start snapping photos, the way Adam’s middle school girlfriend had.
But she simply took in her surroundings, periodically looking back over her shoulder at the mansion, almost like she was overwhelmed or nervous.
“Adam isn’t here,” Henry assured her.
“Oh, I know.” She smiled, and he helped her get settled at the gazebo table.
“I’ll grab some snacks. What can I get you to drink?”
She smiled at him like he was a cute little puppy dog. “You’re just the sweetest thing, aren’t you?” Henry wasn’t sure how he felt about this. “Water would be great.”
“Be right back.” Henry strode back to the house to gather refreshments, still going over her words.
But when he returned to the gazebo, Kennedy wasn’t there. Her backpack was on the seat, math textbook spread open on the table, its pages flapping in the wind. A red spiral notebook and pencil lay there too, and Henry wondered if she’d gotten bored and decided to wander the gardens.
He didn’t want to call out her name in case it drew Bram from his dark cave of a room. Instead, he set out the snacks and water bottles, and sat down in the seat adjacent to hers. Another gentlemanly move; he wouldn’t sit directly beside her unless she asked.
When he reached for a chip from the bowl, Henry spotted a tube of lipstick wedged in between the textbook and the notebook. The tube looked familiar, and this time, Henry didn’t have to rack his brain for where he’d seen it before.
The day of Mariana’s accident, Henry had found this same tube of Raving Red on the oil-slicked ground of the garage where the boys had been working on her car.
He’d been in a state of shock when the ambulance and the fire department finally left.
He found the tube of lipstick and assumed it had fallen from the car or from Mariana’s purse when she came to check on it.
She was chronically disorganized, always forgetting something in the boys’ car or up at the house.
Plus, no other women had been in the shop in months.
Still in a daze, Henry picked up the tube and shoved it to the back of the workstation, planning on returning it to Mariana whenever she returned from the hospital.
Only Mariana never returned. That tube of lipstick was probably still sitting in the exact same spot on the workstation.
And now, here was the same brand of lipstick in the same shade with Kennedy’s things.
Henry knew it wasn’t a huge coincidence for two high school girls to own the same lipstick, or to own the same perfume. But it was strange that Kennedy had this particular tube of lipstick and a particular perfume, and that Mariana had owned both.
Something wasn’t adding up. He popped off the tube’s lid, revealing the vibrant red waxy stick within. He’d seen Kennedy’s lips today, this same vibrant shade of red.
Henry didn’t know much about makeup, but he knew Mariana didn’t wear a lot and that her lips never looked like Kennedy’s.
The conclusion seemed glaringly obvious then: Mariana had never worn this lipstick.
A sense of unease flooded Henry. He got up and searched the gardens, but there was no sign of Kennedy.
Thinking she may’ve gone in search of a bathroom, he started in the direction of the house.
He found it odd that they’d never crossed paths, but he’d taken a while in the kitchen, trying to make everything perfect.
Inside, finding the guest bathroom unoccupied, Henry wandered from room to room. He still didn’t dare call out her name. If he hadn’t seen her belongings outside, he would’ve assumed she’d ditched him.
When he heard voices coming from upstairs, he followed the sound to Bram’s room. Unable to fight off his curiosity, Henry tiptoed closer and pressed his ear up against the door to listen.
“You don’t have a girlfriend anymore,” Kennedy said. “Why can’t we—”
“Because I want nothing to do with you,” his brother’s low voice cut in. “When are you going to get that through your head?”
“Never, Bram. I love you.”
All the blood rushed to Henry’s face. Kennedy was in love with Bram?
He felt like a fool. She had never been worried about Adam spotting her here with Henry. She’d never wanted to tour the mansion. She’d been hoping to see Bram.
“And I’ve been telling you for over a year that this is not going to happen,” Bram said. “Nothing has changed.”
“Everything has changed,” she argued. “You’re single; you’re back at school. When I see you, I can’t think about anything but us together.”
“You need to get out of here. And if you show up at my house again,” Bram said, voice cool yet bladed, “I’m calling the cops. Stop messing with Henry to get to me.”
“You’ll change your mind,” she said, sniffling.
“No, I won’t.”
“Is there someone else?”
“Kennedy, get out of my house. Tell Henry you’re feeling sick and go home.”
“Please, Bram,” she begged.
“Let go of me,” he said, firmly. “You’re—I don’t want to have to—”
The voices were moving closer to the door.
Henry hurried down the hall and descended the stairs.
He couldn’t face Kennedy as she made up some excuse to leave, not with the apparent trouble he went to with the snacks on the table, the drinks.
Instead, he fled out the front door and raced to the garage.
Apart from investigators, no one had really been in the shop in a year. Henry had taken to hiding his invention in here, stopping in from time to time to borrow tools. This time, he was looking for something else. That tube of lipstick he’d stashed on top of the workstation.
At first, he didn’t see it. Dust had collected. Parts had continued to arrive before the boys had a chance to cancel the orders, and they were now stacked high on the workstation.
But Henry moved everything aside, and there it was, covered in a thin layer of soot: the lipstick tube in the same shade as the one with Kennedy’s school things.
He doubted very much that the lipstick had been Mariana’s. So then, had it been Kennedy’s? Was the tube Henry found with her things a replacement for the one she’d lost?
Bram said Kennedy had been chasing him for over a year.
He said he’d rejected the girl’s advances, and yet somehow, he smelled like her.
That sickly sweet perfume scent. She’d clearly been throwing herself at him, enough that Henry had picked up her scent on him.
Despite the fact that Bram had been dating Mariana, Kennedy had been obsessed.
And Henry had found Kennedy’s lipstick in this garage the day Mariana was killed.