Chapter Three
THREE
Finn tucks the well-worn tarot card into his back pocket and climbs the stairs out of the basement and up to the main level. He’s up earlier than usual on a Sunday, but Jo Allard wanted to meet at six fifteen because she had a CorePower class at seven, so Finn agreed.
He really wants this job.
He needs to get inside the Allard house.
“Eggs? Toast?” Paula comes out of the kitchen with an orange in one hand and a paring knife in the other. “Fresh orange slices. Blood oranges. Last of the season.”
“Can’t have breakfast today. Thanks, though. I have that dog-walking interview at six fifteen.”
“So early on a Sunday?”
“I know, but that’s when she could meet.”
“The Allards already have you hopping to it.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Oh, don’t listen to me.”
He never would have believed when he first rented the walk-out basement two years ago that he and his elderly landlady would move beyond an occasional awkward hello to a genuine friendship.
He had tried to keep his distance from Paula the first few months, but one day he came home to find she had discovered the old Gatorade bottle he was using to contain his discarded needles.
He considered lying about why he had so many hypodermic needles, making up a story about allergy shots or diabetes, but instead he went with the truth.
He was done hiding. He told her the needles were for testosterone and that he was transgender. “Oh,” she said dryly. “How nice.”
The next day when he came home from the library, there was a red plastic medical waste container sitting outside his door with a bow on it and a note that read: Join me for dinner? I’m making pad thai.
Now she holds a knife skewered with an orange slice toward him, a concerned look on her face. “You work too much, that’s all,” she says. “Young people should be out enjoying themselves.”
“I need the money.” He plucks the orange slice off the tip of the knife and bites into the red flesh.
It isn’t a lie. His various gigs in the neighborhood—dog walking, pet-sitting, and running errands for a woman who’s immunocompromised—supplement his salary as a librarian’s assistant.
But his motives are not purely financial.
These jobs offer access into people’s homes and their lives, and he hopes, perhaps, clues to what happened to Autumn.
Like the house he is visiting this morning.
It’s one he has been trying to get inside for a year.
It backs up to the Prison House. That’s what he calls the cement gray box that Autumn was living in when she was killed.
Paula seems to accept his answer, and why not?
Who doesn’t need more money? That’s why she’s renting her basement after all.
Neither he nor Autumn wanted to live in the suburbs.
He made the move first, after graduating from American University and getting a job at the Little Falls Library.
He was the one who told Autumn about the nanny job in the neighborhood and convinced her to take it.
They could live a few blocks apart, and she could establish residency for graduate school just like he was doing—child psychology for her and library science for him.
The first few months were wonderful. They jokingly referred to themselves as basement dwellers, met regularly for coffee in Spring Valley, and walked into downtown Bethesda on the Capital Crescent Trail to buy cupcakes to eat in the dark at the artsy movie theater there.
On weekdays, Autumn would take her charge, Leo, to the library and visit Finn.
There, they would swap funny stories about their neighbors and bosses.
“At least take some coffee,” his landlady says. “You’ll save money if you don’t go to one of those overpriced shops.”
She passes him a travel mug, and Finn lifts the lid and peers inside.
“Black, one sugar. I know how you like it.”
Armed with his messenger bag, coffee, and earbuds, Finn heads to his potential client’s house and makes it there in less than five minutes. He gave himself way too much time. He’s fifteen minutes early with nothing to do.
His palms are already sweaty at the thought of this morning’s job interview.
Not because he thinks it will be hard to convince these people he’s the man to walk their dog.
He’s found that people in this upper-middle-class suburb are only too happy to delegate the annoyances of life to gig workers.
Every morning the neighborhood fills with folks that mow the inhabitants’ lawns, clean their houses, power wash their cars.
No, he’s sure they will like him and offer him the job.
It’s what he might discover in the house that gets his pulse racing.
He looks up and down the street, wondering how to kill those fifteen minutes.
It’s a nervous habit, showing up to places too early.
He’s had it since he was a kid, when he would make his mother drive him to the bus stop at the end of the long dirt road they lived on twenty minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive.
Showing up late, when everyone else was already settled, and having all those heads turn in your direction was unbearable for a kid who didn’t want to be seen at all.
He walks down the street to a utility pole and stops.
He’s not surprised to see that the flyer he put up is now crumpled into a ball in the gutter.
That’s how it goes. He puts them up, and people rip them down.
He takes a fresh one from his messenger bag.
He always carries a batch along with a small staple gun.
DO YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME?
Autumn smiles at him from the picture.
She’d probably find this whole endeavor overdramatic. She never liked that picture of herself, complaining that it made her look like Velma from Scooby-Doo with her thick-framed glasses and her bangs.
“They can rip you down, they can try to pretend it never happened. But I’ll keep reminding them,” Finn mumbles to himself as he staples a new flyer to the pole.
He looks at his watch. Thirteen minutes to go.
He decides to walk around the block and stops in front of the Prison House, staring up at the imposing gray box.
It doesn’t fit on a street of center-hall Colonials and brick ramblers.
Some of the neighbors have added on to the backs, but they’ve kept the facades the same, lending the street a uniform mid-century look. Except for this one house.
He steps onto the overgrown lawn. A FOR RENT sign announces the house’s vacancy as if the ankle-high grass doesn’t already do that. The sign has been here almost a year. No one wants to live in a murder house apparently.
He looks around to make sure no one is watching, then walks along the narrow concrete path that leads to the rear.
The house takes up most of the lot, and what little land is left for the backyard has been paved over.
Only a slender edge of garden bed around the perimeter of the property breaks up the concrete.
It’s the middle of June, and these beds lie fallow.
It must have seemed modern and fresh when it was staged with furniture and lights.
Otherwise, who would live in such a desolate house? He knows who.
Autumn’s boss, Tori Price. Whereabouts currently unknown.
He turns and looks at the back of the house—tall, gray, and imposing with shutterless windows. His eye travels to the second floor. Autumn was in one of those rooms, FaceTiming him, moments before her murder. He closes his eyes and urges the memories of the night to come back.
“You should come over.” Autumn drifted in and out of the camera’s frame as she moved about the room. Finn had his laptop open on his bed. On one tab he had practice GRE questions, on another he was FaceTiming with Autumn. “Keep me company. It’s weird being in this big house by myself.”
Finn noticed the background wasn’t Autumn’s usual basement room. “Are you in your boss’s bedroom?”
“Of course! You think I’m going to stay in the musty basement when I don’t have to?”
“Aren’t you afraid she’ll find out?”
Autumn’s face appeared on-screen, her eyes wide. “No way! I’ll wash the sheets and clean everything up before she comes home. She has such nice things.” Autumn pulled back from the camera and did a spin, modeling a pale pink robe with small flowers on it.
“Oh no, are you wearing her robe?”
“This old thing?” She twirled again, giggling. “This is not a robe. This is a kimono.” She articulated each syllable of the word in an exaggerated Southern drawl. They had bonded during their first year of college, two North Carolina kids from small towns in big-city Washington, DC.
“Well, it’s not yours.”
“It’s one hundred percent silk and I googled it and it’s made by some French brand, and they sell the same exact one at Saks Fifth Avenue for seven hundred dollars.”
“If you get nail polish on it, or salsa, you are good and truly—”
“So come over and stage an intervention,” she interrupted. “We can DoorDash and rewatch The Good Place. I’ll hang up the robe if you come over.”
“I can’t. I have to study.”
“On a Saturday? You’re such a nerd.”
“I am willing to watch one episode with you, but from the comfort of my own room.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshirt.”
He laughed. It was the last time he would laugh with Autumn, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t know that the loud chime in the background marked the beginning of the end.
“Wait, hold on.” He watched her rise and disappear from the camera. “Oh shoot.” Her voice was distant. Then Autumn’s head popped into view, startling him. “Sorry, I need to deal with a situation. One of the neighbors is at the door.”
It was the last thing she ever said to him.
The next sound he heard was a single gunshot, followed a few seconds later by another.
Finn froze in place. “Autumn?” he called, moving his face closer to his laptop. “Autumn, are you there?”
He heard someone come into the room, and then his screen went black. Someone had shut her laptop.
Finn keeps his eyes closed and slips his hand into his back pocket, rubbing the tarot card, begging the universe to reveal some new detail to him about that night.
Anything that might help him figure out who shot Autumn, who shut her laptop and took it.
But nothing comes. After a few moments he opens his eyes.
As usual, there is no recovered memory or newly excavated detail.
Nothing about standing right here in the shadow of the Prison House has jostled some repressed detail.
He isn’t going to solve her murder by ruminating over that night. He glances at his watch.
Time to meet Jo Allard.
He’s walking along the side of the house toward the front when he hears the door open.
Finn freezes, half-hidden among the arching branches of a large shrub.
It must be a Realtor, showing the house.
Or maybe someone doing repairs. He readies an excuse—I thought I saw my neighbor’s cat, Taki, back here.
He steps forward into the front yard in time to see a woman descend the steps and head down the path.
He can’t see her face from this angle, only that she is dressed up in a skirt and high heels.
But there’s something off about her. She’s weaving like a drunk. She pauses, then sways.
And before Finn can get to her, she collapses onto the wet grass.