38
ANSON
When I couldn’t find Stash in the market or anywhere in the Quick, I knocked on his office door and found that room empty, too.
His desk lamp was on. A steaming cup of coffee sat next to his laptop.
The air held the tingle of someone gone, but not long ago.
As if the dust had been disturbed by their exit and had yet to settle.
It’s not right to pry.
Father had taught me that.
I had no intention of prying.
But the laptop was on his desk, and I caught a glimpse of the screen from the open doorway.
Had the image on that screen been anything other than what it was, I would have turned and walked away.
Maybe I would have waited out in the hallway, because how far could he have gone?
In my fifteen years on the planet, I had yet to see an adult abandon a perfectly good cup of coffee.
It was the image, though.
That’s what grabbed me.
Because it was an image of me.
Before I could consider just how wrong it was to do so, I stepped into his office, went right up to his desk, and turned the screen to get a better look.
A paused video.
Best I could tell, a camera was mounted in some high corner of the cafeteria.
It captured most of the room, including the memorial wall, and on the screen, that’s where I stood.
More accurately, I stood on a chair facing the memorial wall, a ball of red yarn in one hand while my other hand fastened the yarn to a photograph near the center.
My face was turned away from the camera, not visible, and I was grateful for that, because I had no memory of getting up on that chair or placing the string, and I’m not sure I could stomach seeing my face as I did it.
When I woke in the cafeteria, the tableau had been complete—red string intertwined through all the images, newspaper articles, and memorabilia on the wall, following some kind of order my waking brain did not understand, but somehow, my subconscious had.
A puzzled-out history of the disappearances from the Quick dating back decades.
Looking upon it now, seeing myself standing there, brought the same shiver down my spine I had felt when I woke there looking up at it with no memory of completing the work and no grasp of the amount of time I had lost in doing so.
“I’ve watched it four times now,” Stash said from behind me. “And I still can’t make heads or tails of how you did it. Half of those have no dates or anything else to signify order. Yet, somehow, best I can tell, you got it right.”
I hadn’t heard him return, and given the chance, I’m sure Father would have scolded me for not paying better attention to my surroundings, but he didn’t get the chance. My mind was ablaze with noise, with thoughts; there simply was no room for him to shout at me from his milk crate.
I tried not to look surprised as I faced Stash, and I’m sure I failed miserably. “I didn’t . . .”
The words simply trailed off because there was no proper ending to that sentence.
I didn’t do it.
I didn’t mean to intrude.
I didn’t overstep, did I?
I didn’t tell anyone.
I didn’t kill them.
It was that last one that stuck in my head.
Because there was no way I could have killed them.
I didn’t know any of those people, and I’d never been to the Quick before.
Until the fire at my home and the loss of Mother and Father, I had never left Simpsonville.
I couldn’t have killed them, but that was it, wasn’t it?
In my mind’s eye, when I’d gone to that dark place and something else took over and hung that string, that was how I came upon the order.
I didn’t see the things on that wall through my own eyes—I saw them through the eyes of a killer, and the killer remembered exactly what order the victims belonged in.
“I should go,” I said softly. And I wanted to, but Stash was standing in the middle of the door and didn’t look like he had any intention of letting me out just yet. His eyes remained fixed on me.
“As best I can tell, your string followed the timeline of the killings. Yet, you skipped many of the people up on that wall.”
“They weren’t all murdered,” I told him. “Most of the people up there left on their own.”
I had no idea how I could possibly know that, but I did. I knew it with the same certainty I knew my own name.
Stash stepped from the doorway with hesitancy, like he knew I might run and didn’t want to give me an opening.
He cautiously went to his desk and twisted the laptop around.
He pointed at a newspaper article near the top left corner of the wall.
“That’s Leonard Brill. He was found stabbed behind the Market four years ago.
Clearly murdered. Yet you skipped him with your string. ”
“Because he wasn’t killed by the same person who killed Andy, Emily, and the others. He was killed by someone else.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
I had no answer. I simply knew it, and that wasn’t an answer.
I pointed at one of the other ones bypassed by the red string.
“Just like that one was a mugging gone wrong, or this poor girl, she was raped and strangled, but that was a crime of opportunity; it’s not part of these others, either. Probably killed by some drunk tourist.”
“That’s Kendall Swinton,” Stash said. “They never caught the person responsible.”
He clicked play on the laptop, and the video came to life. If there was sound, the volume was off. I was surprised by how quickly I moved. There was no hesitancy as I placed the string. I simply moved from one person to the next, connecting the invisible dots.
“You have some kind of gift, Anson. I’m not sure how else to describe it.
” He sat on the corner of his desk. “You see it, don’t you?
Some kind of pattern. I don’t believe in the supernatural.
I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at.
What I do believe is that you’re able to somehow identify with the killer.
Relate? Maybe that’s the right word. You see his last victim up on that wall, and somehow, you can tell who comes next.
Who he’d choose next? Is that it? What does that say about you?
” Stash pondered. “Does that mean that’s who you would choose next? ”
I didn’t answer that question. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t because Stash had asked the question; it was because I didn’t want to know the answer. I suspected he was right, and that frightened me. Saying such out loud, admitting it. That would be too much.
I think you missed something, Champ. You glossed right over it with all this pitter-patter introspection.
When it comes to the order of the murders, you were raised to understand.
You were trained to understand. Honestly, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t see the pattern.
I spotted it right away. But that’s not what you should be focused on right now; that’s the B story.
You and I know why you see the pattern. Shouldn’t you be asking yourself how Stash knows the correct pattern?
With that, my breath caught in my throat. I swallowed it back down and hoped Stash didn’t notice. His eyes hadn’t left me. His mind was no doubt still caught on what he asked me. Then Father voiced the question hanging by a thread at the corner of my consciousness.
Do you think Stash knows who is next? I think he does, and I’m not sure I like the way he’s looking at you.
I backed up, and my legs bumped the seat of the chair behind me.
I didn’t mean to do it. Showing fear of any kind was the sort of thing Father would scold me for, but I couldn’t help it.
The videotape nearly dropped from my hand, and an image flashed behind my eyes—the man on the tape dressed in dark clothes, the man who dumped a body and smacked that girl’s head against the frame of the vehicle before abducting her.
He was about Stash’s size, right? They were the exact same size.
“I need to go.”
I pushed past him and shot out the door before he could stop me.
I half expected him to shout out my name, grab me, haul me back, but he did none of those things.
I felt his eyes on me, though. Even as I left the Quick, I felt his eyes on me.
Outside the market, too. And I couldn’t help but wonder—where else did he have cameras?