12
Elliot was sitting cross-legged on the sofa in their apartment, with one of his bare feet on the pillow Stevie had her face
on the night before.
“These were high-quality holistic people with great numbers,” he was saying to Nate. “Oh . . . Stevie. Oh man. I heard the
ambulance people come in and they said Helen was dead, and you found her? Shit.”
This news should have come from Stevie. Elliot could only be here because this news was interesting gossip to share with someone.
There was plenty of room on the sofa, but it felt like it was contaminated by Elliot’s feet. She decided to go with the floor.
“She wasn’t okay,” Elliot said. “Looked really bad.”
“She had all these books on her bed,” Stevie heard herself say. It was both lonely and comforting the way Helen slept with
her books. “She had them where she needed them. If you get the books right, everything else will follow.”
“I like that!” Elliot said. “Can I have that?”
“Have it?”
“Write it down. Let me write that down. That’ll make a great piece of content.”
He grabbed his phone and made a note, mumbling the words back as he did so. Stevie wasn’t sure she wanted him to take her
words, but could she stop him? Can you stop a novelist?
She looked to Nate for guidance. He looked as confused as Stevie. Nate was self-stopping, so this had never come up. Could
you stop a novelist?
“I should let you two talk. But come by anytime, brother. We’ll get you through this. You’ll make it.”
There was a silence the moment after Elliot left. Before Stevie could say another word, Nate cut in.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked. “Get out of here for a minute?”
The diner next door wasn’t exactly what Stevie thought a New York diner would be. She had pictured massive red booths and
a long counter of stools. This was a restaurant that tried to do everything halfway—some booths, some off-kilter tables, condiments
already on the table but on the empty side, and small bottle vases with a single gerbera daisy each. They took a booth by
the window and had a look at the menu, which was as big as a wakeboard and eight pages long.
“So much cottage cheese,” Nate said. “What is cottage cheese? It looks like something a cartoon cat barfs up.”
Stevie wasn’t hungry, but it seemed important to eat. She got a grilled cheese because it was the cheapest thing that sounded okay. Nate went for a full burger platter and then held on to the menu for a few minutes, seemingly to read it for pleasure. He set it between the ketchup and the window.
“You . . . okay?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said. “It wasn’t . . . violent, you know. She was just . . .”
“I’m sorry I asked you to do something about the bird.”
“She seemed interested in me.” Stevie shook her head dismissively. “When she made me come over, she read my tarot cards and
there was one called the Tower that means, as she put it, ‘shit’s about to get real.’ ”
“What?”
“I would have told you,” Stevie said, “but you were out. I guess with your friend with the high-quality holistic people with
good numbers.”
Nate shrank into himself a bit and reached for the menu again for protection. Stevie put her hand on it.
“He was just on some retreat . . .” Nate said.
“At what? An influencer farm?”
“Kind of,” Nate said. Without the menu as a shield, he had to improvise and began plucking napkins out of the dispenser on
the table. “But the thing he learned to do, it helped.”
“So what, you stand with no shoes on and talk to yourself?”
“It’s called grounding,” Nate said. Unable to bear the shame, he fully turned to look out the window. “It’s just a way of
meditating. The idea is that the book is already in me and I just have to find it and get it out.”
“Like surgery?”
“Maybe?”
“That you do by being barefoot in a New York City park? Is that what you came here to do?”
“I came here to finish the book,” he said. The platters appeared, and he looked up at the server like he was an apparition
that had come from above. “That’s all.”
Stevie accepted her grilled cheese, which was enticingly brown, with visible edges of grease around the cheese and a long
pickle spear. Her time working the deli counter of her local grocery store the previous summer had taught her to appreciate
a good pickle.
Death is an opener of doors and conversations. Feelings start to move around the room like smoke, mingling together. It brings
conversations forward because of the swirl of feeling and the intimacy. That’s how Stevie felt, anyway. Nate felt closer to
her over this table than he had in weeks.
“David . . .” she began.
Nate looked up in defeat. He couldn’t deny Stevie now. She’d just found a body.
“. . . sent me a message. Well, not a message . . .” She pulled out her phone and used her cheese-greased fingers to pull
up the post. “I posted this picture the other today. And look what he said. Nice coat.”
Nate accepted the phone. He considered the post, shook his head, and went back to his burger.
“Well?” Stevie said. “Why are you shaking your head?”
“I’ll tell you what, asexuality is a really good bullshit eliminator.” Stevie and Nate hadn’t discussed his coming out as asexual in the last few weeks, mostly because Stevie had broken into tiny pieces and also because not discussing things was Nate’s favorite form of discussion.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I can avoid stuff like that. Talking around things. Playing games.”
“You think it’s a game?” she said.
“Of course it’s a game. If he didn’t want to talk to you, he wouldn’t talk to you. But he’s looking at your stuff and he’s
saying things, which means he wants to have some kind of communication. But it’s weird communication.”
“What do I do?” she said. She had gripped the edge of the table without realizing it and the underside was unpleasantly sticky.
“Do I call him?”
“Why are you asking me? All I know is that you’ve been really upset for weeks because he kind of dumped you out of nowhere.
I don’t know why or what happened, but it seems bad. Are you happy that he commented?”
Excited. Yes.
Nervous. Yes.
Alive again. Possibly.
Happy?
“What did Janelle say?” he asked. “Because you had to have told her and she understands this stuff.”
“That she hates him and wants to go and kill him in a new and exciting way. That he’s pathetic. And . . .”
Nate looked up, mid-bite into the burger.
“. . . she and Vi are coming.”
Nate removed his teeth and set the burger down.
“Coming?”
“Here. To New York. To stay with us over New Year’s. She asked and I thought you would be okay with it. Is that . . .”
Nate’s expression had glazed over. Stevie felt a bubble of alarm.
“They said they could get a hotel room or something, it was just expensive and they were hard to get and I said they should
just . . . or she was asking . . . because . . .”
“When are they coming?”
“New Year’s Eve. Is that . . .”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “Yeah. No. Yeah, it’s fine. It’s . . .”
It definitely wasn’t fine, but he also wasn’t going to tell her what it was. The connecting door that had opened between them
closed again.
They watched out the window where two uniformed people wheeled a gurney with a body bag out of the apartment building. They
collapsed the wheel section and lifted it into the back of a New York City Medical Examiner’s vehicle.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere,” Nate said quietly.
“Nice of you to say we,” Stevie replied.
It was a strange afternoon on the hall. Helen’s death brought people out at first—but now the doors were closed. Nate had
gone into his room to work, so she watched Knives Out and washed it down with two episodes of Poirot and tried not to think about Helen or the coat.
The day bled out and night took over. New York nights were far different from those at Ellingham, or anywhere else. It never
got fully dark or quiet. The city was draped in an ambient glow, and the constant sound of traffic and people echoed off buildings
and the street. And sirens—endless sirens, yawping, establishing a base level of disaster.
Why did so many people die when she was near? So many people spoke to her of murder and their fears and suspicions and then
things began to move in a fatal direction.
What would you do if you knew someone was going to commit a murder?
What a weird thing to ask right before you died. Why did Helen want to talk to Stevie that morning? Why go through all the
business with the tarot cards? Something had been going on there.
Helen’s death had looked natural, like she had simply slipped off the side of the bed and away to another place. She’d been very open about not being
well. But murder can look natural or accidental. What she needed, in order to put this out of mind, was someone who could
help her get concrete answers.
But there was someone who might be able to help. Stevie picked up her phone. Larry’s gruff voice came through, pushing back
some of the doubt and gloom.
“Stevie?” he said. “You all right?”
“Fine,” she said. “Good. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas. What’s going on?”
While she was on good terms with Security Larry, they didn’t talk on the phone for no reason.
“Do you know how to get death certificates in New York?” she asked.
“What?”
“It’s not like that,” Stevie said. “The woman in the apartment next to us died. She’s older. She died, probably a day or two
ago. The person here in the building who’s taking care of her stuff, she doesn’t know how to get a death certificate.”
“Is this person next of kin, or . . .”
“Just a friend,” Stevie said. “She’s really upset, that’s all. And she’s taking care of her bird. And she just wants to know
what happened. They think they know—she had a heart problem—but they just feel terrible and wish someone would tell them and
no one will.”
Larry was silent for a moment.
“I’m at my daughter’s house,” he said. “In New Jersey. For Christmas.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I heard you’re supposed to be studying about Watergate.”
“How do you know that?” Stevie said. There was no reason that Larry, head of Ellingham security, should know what exactly
Stevie had to work on. But she was asking the wrong question. Larry could easily find out something like that if he felt like
it.
“Why do you know that?” she asked.
Larry noted the change in question with an approving grunt.
“Because I take an interest in you,” he said.
“Staff at Ellingham are meant to guide students. I’m the only staff member at Ellingham who understands what you do.
And what you’ve been doing is walking around campus in strange circles.
Yes. We noticed. That’s our job. One of the new people has been calling
you the Walking Red.”
“They noticed that, huh?”
“Kind of the job to notice things like that.”
Red coat. Walking around like a zombie. It wasn’t the worst nickname. She had to give some credit for that, as much as she
didn’t like people watching her spiral on all the security cameras.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know anyone in New York City, but I’ll ask to see if anyone has a friend of a friend. It may take
a few days. You, study.”
“Me study.”
“And maybe there are better ways to spend your holiday than trying to get death certificates?” he added.
When he hung up, the dark descended a bit more over the room, but strangely, not her mood. She did not, in fact, have better
things to do with her holiday.
She took a second to finally approve @greymoonghoul, who had to be Luna, and stared at the words nice coat until the letters blew apart into meaningless dashes and dots.
Someone had died, and in those moments, people let their guard down.
Without fully thinking it through, she typed a reply: I know a guy with good taste.