One #2
When we were kids, we used to hide our Halloween candy stash there, away from Dad.
Now I was sad to see the secret compartment filled with a couple of cleaning bottles and a roll of paper towels.
She pulled out a small spray bottle of stain remover and spritzed me with it.
It was a sad commentary on the fact we were both baby adults now.
DMs popped up in my feed.
Sucks to suck!
Who’s canceled now?
We’ve been trying to reach you. Please call us back.
Ack. That one was from Jared Gatta’s attorney, Peter Neufeld.
“I’m going to be sued,” I announced to Olivia as I showed her the message.
She peered at it. “By Jared? He can’t do that. You didn’t arrest him.”
“No, I only implied he was the main suspect, that’s all.
He’s suing the Chicago Police Department.
It’s only a matter of time…” Which was why I was currently avoiding all contact with his attorney.
I deleted the DM. I should just deactivate my account.
My finger hovered over the button when a new DM appeared.
One lemon.
Huh. Odd.
At the Canceled Killer’s first crime scene, near the bathtub, he’d left a single lemon on the green bathroom tiles, and then he continued to leave a single lemon with a green leaf attached at every other murder scene.
Nobody knew what they meant, especially not Detective Russo, who’d let that detail slip to me and then made me promise never to include it in any broadcast. No one but the killer, the detectives, and me knew about the single lemon.
I clicked on the message. It belonged to CanceledKill. No profile picture. No public posts. Just a bot with a blank picture, I guessed, probably based in Russia and designed to drain bank accounts.
I remembered how the Canceled Killer used various accounts to taunt his victims. Authorities could never quite pin the user down, as each account was set up through a variety of dummy email accounts and untraceable VPNs.
A hard knock at the Airstream made me jump. Mom didn’t wait two seconds before she swung open the door.
“There are my little babies!” she said, even though I was twenty-seven and Olivia was twenty-four.
Mom never seemed to age, and she looked every bit the regal model she used to be when people knew her as Jenny Leong, when she graced the pages of fashion magazines and perfume ads in the 1990s, before ageism retired her at age thirty.
She was born in Hawaii but moved around a lot—California, Arizona, Wisconsin.
She had a nowhere/everywhere accent. Today she wore a red cashmere sweater and her signature matte red lipstick that offset her jet-black hair, which cascaded down her back in thick waves.
She never went anywhere without a full lip and heels, and she almost always wore red.
“I made muffins!” Mom declared, and both Olivia and I stared at the tray of mostly burnt black balls of banana nut horrible.
Mom was fantastic at modeling. Not so good at baking.
Though she kept on trying, mostly because she had a supreme kind of confidence that only came from walking the runway at Fashion Week.
I often envied that confidence. Mom never second-guessed herself.
“Oh, uh. Thanks?” Olivia eyed the tray.
Mom set down the black lumps of banana coal near the small sink. “I can’t have my daughters going hungry!”
Given the strong smell of burnt bananas, we definitely were going to go hungry. Olivia, who was too sweet to ever hurt anyone’s feelings even with the truth, reached for a charred hockey puck and gently nibbled the edge.
“Mmmm—good,” she said, lying straight to Mom’s face.
Mom offered me one. “Go on, then!” she demanded.
“They’re burnt,” I told Mom, because I wasn’t going to lie to save her feelings. I never did. It was why, more often than not, I was the problem child.
“They’re well done,” Mom clarified. When I didn’t take one, she shrugged and put the muffin tray down again on the tabletop. She flashed me a smile. “I’m just so glad you’re home.”
Mom hated every second I lived away. When I’d first left to go to college, she’d burst into tears at Northwestern’s iron gate and hugged me for a good ten minutes straight, loudly imploring me to avoid muggers and dealers of the sex trade.
She was convinced Chicago was 100 percent criminals, human traffickers, and graffiti.
I glanced out the Airstream’s window and could see just over the waist-high bamboo fencing that lined the Zen garden with sandy patches and pebbled walkways Dad had created in the backyard for the family’s Koi Inn, so named for the heated koi pond at the center of the Japanese garden Mom designed and helped Dad install.
A small wooden footbridge spanned the kidney-shaped pond in the middle.
They’d used the last of Mom’s modeling money to buy the inn and lived here happily hosting tourists for the last thirty years. From this window, I could see Lake Sanguis’s Main Street, which was pretty empty now that the tourist season was over.
“I forgot how quiet it is here,” I said.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Mom gushed.
No, it wasn’t. I missed the hustle and bustle of Chicago.
The traffic. The profanity. Hell, even the rats.
It felt unfair that I was missing autumn there, my favorite time of year.
A few tourists would return to Lake Sanguis for hayrides in nearby apple orchards and then, of course, ice fishing in January, but most would stay gone until Memorial Day.
The only shop with any customers now was Gordon’s Frozen Custard, which, despite the cool temperatures outside, boasted several customers waiting patiently for their turn to eat a double chocolate custard waffle cone.
Or, more likely, a famous mudpack: the blended chocolate, vanilla, fudge, and walnut delight too thick to be sucked through a straw.
“Lake Sanguis is right out of a Hallmark movie, minus the hot owner of a Christmas tree farm,” Mom quipped.
“That’s why I hate it so much, then,” I retorted. “I don’t believe in meeting dates at tree farms. That’s why I use my Spark app,” I said.
“No!” Mom cried, looking horrified. “You can’t use Spark.”
I used Spark all the time. It was the dating hookup—emphasis on hookup—app. Since I ran from anything looking remotely like a commitment beyond a coffee date, it was perfect for me.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because there are strangers on there,” Mom said.
“That’s kind of the idea, Mom. I wouldn’t want to sleep with relatives.”
“Ophelia!” Mom scolded. “The Spark app is how women get kidnapped and murdered. I know for a fact that Spark is filled with degenerates and serial killers.”
“Mom, you’ve got to stop watching Dateline,” Olivia said.
“I just saw an episode last week where a woman met someone on Spark, and he drugged her and zip-tied her in the back seat…” Mom paused. “And, well, it was very bad.”
And you wonder why I was a tad bit obsessed with true crime. At least I came by it honestly.
“And I can’t believe you’d even think about using Spark in Chicago.” Mom shuddered. “Who knows what kind of monster you’d meet.”
“Mostly just cannibals,” I said dryly.
Mom gawked at me.
“I’m kidding, Mom!”
“No more Spark,” Mom said firmly.
“I like Spark,” I said. “Also, you can’t actually tell me what to do.”
“You don’t mean that,” Mom said, as she always did when I disagreed with her. She’d been doing it since I was five. It felt like gaslighting. “Olivia’s not on Spark.”
“I am on there, but I never get any matches,” Olivia pointed out. “Everyone is either straight or deep in the closet.”
Poor Olivia. Her dating pool was even smaller than mine in Lake Sanguis.
“If you’re really dying to date someone,” Mom told me, “I’ll set you up.”
I barked a laugh. “With who?”
Mom thought for a minute. Then she glanced out the window, and her face lit up. “How about Jude?”
I glanced out the window and saw the man himself, known legally as Percy Julian, but Jude to his friends, gingerly backing his white Volvo SUV into a parking spot outside Koi.
“The cheese scientist?” I sputtered a laugh.
He spent his afternoons peering at cheese curds under a microscope to ensure customer quality, and if you ever had the misfortune of standing next to him at a party, he’d bore you to death with talk about the dangers of listeria.
Since he and Oscar had been besties since kindergarten, I was already obligated to see good old Jude at holidays and also, randomly, in Chicago when he went for his annual cheese symposium.
“Jude finished his PhD. He’s a doctor now,” Mom said.
“In cheese?” I snorted as I watched him manage the tight parallel spot on the first try. “What was his thesis on? Mozzarella sticks?”
“Be nice!” Mom chided. “You know that my psychic said you two would get together.” I watched as Jude slipped out of the car, the autumn sunlight making his poreless and bronzed umber skin look flawless.
I rolled my eyes. “By psychic, you mean Octavia?”
Octavia was one of her regular makeup artists during her modeling days.
She famously told Mom she’d get her biggest modeling contract ever in her mid-sixties, and also told her that her children would only be successful if she gave them names starting with the letter O.
I’m sure Octavia’s own name had nothing to do with her advice.
“Yes, and she’s right most of the time.”
“Except for the time she predicted you’d be on the cover of Vogue.”
“I haven’t been on the cover of Vogue—yet,” Mom said. “There’s still time.”
Jude flipped a button on his remote to secure his car and then made sure it was locked by pulling the handle because that’s the kind of worrywart he was. Jude looked surprisingly put together in his half-zip gray sweater and pristine white sneakers.
He looked buffer than I remembered. Leaner. He exuded a level of sexy nerd energy I’d failed to notice before. Also, was he headed this way? “Why is he coming toward us?” I asked.