Chapter Sixteen
SIXTEEN
The dog park is mostly empty this morning, just a woman with a jittery white Yorkie and an older man chucking a slobbery tennis ball for a golden retriever.
Finn stands near the gate, hoodie tugged over his ears, hands in his pockets as the Williamses’ French bulldog, Rosie, burrows deeper into a bush, whipping her teeny tail like a mini windshield wiper.
“Rosie needs socialization,” Kenya said when she hired him.
“She’s a pandemic puppy and she’s never gotten used to other dogs.
” So he is at the park every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday with Rosie trying to get her used to other dogs.
He might be able to combine walking Rosie and Muffinhead at some point, but Rosie is too skittish at the moment.
As Finn leans back against the chain-link fence that separates the park from a small stream, he goes over what he learned about Crimson Edge on his computer last night.
There was no website, but thanks to a subreddit, he learned that the company on the back of the fancy envelope he found at the Allards’ was the DC area’s premier luxury educational consultancy that helped wealthy kids with mediocre grades and scores polish up their admissions package.
Their motto was: Where ambition meets acceptance.
It all but guaranteed entry to a top twenty school, but according to his research it could cost a lot of money.
Like hundreds of thousands. Pretty gross, but he didn’t see what it could have to do with Autumn’s death.
Not that he hadn’t spent an hour in bed before he could fall asleep last night trying to think of a connection.
He needs her death to be a puzzle that can be worked through if he tries hard enough.
It’s too horrible to think that he might never find out what really happened. That it might have been random.
Finn’s eyes scan the edge of the park, having momentarily lost Rosie.
He can’t see the neighborhood pool a few blocks away, but he can hear the sounds of the swim team’s morning practice.
Then he spots the dog, rolling in something questionable near the edge of a stand of trees, groaning in ecstasy.
Finn crouches and whistles at her, trying to get her attention, but she ignores him.
He got lost in his thoughts and now Rosie is covered in mud.
He pulls out a treat from his bag and calls out: “Treat! Rosie!”
The dog’s ears perk up and she runs back, dirt-streaked and panting.
Finn clicks the leash onto her collar. He can’t just take her home and leave her in this condition—she’ll need a bath now.
Which means they must leave this minute if he plans to swing by the Allards’ and walk Muffinhead and still get to work on time.
On the brisk walk back to the Williamses’ house, his phone rings and he takes it only when he sees it’s his mom.
If he doesn’t answer, she’ll spiral with worry.
“Hi, honey. I had a bad feeling. Are you okay?” Her words are rushed and frantic, and he can hear the sounds of the diner in the background. The clank of pans, the shouts of the sous-chef.
“I’m perfectly fine. I’m walking one of the dogs.”
“I saw a trans woman was attacked on the street and beaten.”
“You saw that? Where?”
“Well, I didn’t see it.” Her voice has a note of concession. “I read about it on Facebook.”
He sighs. She spends way too much time on Facebook, a place where her every fear can be exploited. “Where did this happen?”
“In Oklahoma City, right in the middle of the day. Someone posted it in my Mama Bears group. And I started thinking, are you safe?”
As he turns onto the Williamses’ street, he girds himself for a conversation he has had with her dozens of times since he moved to Washington. “I don’t live in Oklahoma City. I live in the DC area, one of the most queer-friendly cities in the country.”
“But what about those two gay men who were harassed at the MacDonald’s?” She emphasizes the Mac in McDonald’s.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says as he unlocks the door to Kenya’s house. He actually did hear about that incident, which happened last year in downtown DC, but he doesn’t want to encourage her.
“I can send the link to you.”
“Please don’t.” He lets himself into the Williamses’ foyer but doesn’t let Rosie off the leash, worried she’ll muddy the pristine floors.
He scoops her up and heads straight to the bathroom.
His mother is on all kinds of Facebook groups.
As soon as he came out his junior year of high school, she joined about a half dozen different groups like TransParent, Sandhills PRIDE, and the Trevor Project.
He was happy she had found community—there were not a lot of families with trans kids in the town he grew up in, where she still lived.
But too much time on those pages could turbocharge her anxiety and send it spinning into the stratosphere.
She goes through phases where she will spend every waking minute online, encountering clip after clip of horrible things that are happening to trans people all over the world, and spiral even further.
He knows he is lucky. He does appreciate her concerns. Except when she calls him to dump her anxiety on him. “Mom, I’m fine. I’m about to wash a muddy dog inside a million-dollar home.”
“Promise? You’re not still looking into what happened with Autumn, right? You promised you’d stop.”
“I promise. Take a Xanax.”
He shuts the bathroom door and puts Rosie in the bath. She scrambles to get out, her little claws scratching at the porcelain, but he holds on to her leash. “It’s okay, baby,” he coos quietly before turning the water on. “I got to go, Mama. I got a dirty dog to wash.”
“All right. Be careful out there, baby.”
“You be careful too,” Finn says. “Love you.”
“Love you more.”
As he soaps up Rosie, the guilt about deceiving his mom begins to make him feel queasy.
She would have a full-blown panic attack that no amount of Xanax would help if she had any clue that he is actively investigating Autumn’s death.
It was everything he could do to convince her it was safe to stay in Bethesda after Autumn was murdered.
In her mind, Washington, DC, and its leafy suburbs are crawling with bloodthirsty criminals.
She even threatened to drive up here and get him.
Finn rinses off Rosie, whose wet hair makes her look like an alien cat, her pink skin shining through. The dog finally breaks free of his grip and escapes the confines of the bath. Shivering in the center of the bathroom, Rosie shakes, spraying water everywhere.
Finn towels her off and then, using another towel, cleans the bathroom as best he can.
He takes a trembling Rosie into the living room and deposits her on the dog bed by a large-leafed plant that’s almost as tall as he is. Traumatized by the whole event, she curls up and begins grooming herself.
“You’ll be okay,” Finn says as he takes the towels to the small laundry room off the kitchen. He decides to leave them in the washing machine, worried that if he washes them, they might get moldy if no one is home to put them in the dryer until much later.
When he goes back to the living room to check on Rosie one more time, he is struck anew at how pristine this house is.
The sofas are cream velvet, the rug a faded pattern of gold and soft yellow.
The quiet luxury on display in the Williamses’ living room is eerily similar to the Allards’ and the other Eastbrook houses he’s been inside.
Here, the only notable difference is that the beautiful people inside the gold-framed photos on the mantel, dressed impeccably and celebrating life’s milestones, are African American.
That and the large colorful painting above the fireplace of two young Black men on a beach hoisting two girls on their shoulders.
He squints at the signature: Amy Sherald.
A quick check on his phone tells him this is the same artist who painted Michelle Obama’s portrait that hangs in the Smithsonian.
And that her paintings run in the thousands, some even into the millions.
Behind him something pings, the familiar sound of a text notification on an iPhone. Finn spins around, momentarily panicked that someone else is in the room. But it’s empty—just him and Rosie.
When he hears the ping again, he realizes it must be coming from a nearby device. It takes him a few seconds of digging in the sofa to locate an iPad stuck between the deep cushions.
The incoming message is from Miguel Costa.
Got it and dropped it off. We’re all good.
He frowns. Miguel Costa. That was the man he met last Sunday when he helped his wife, Caren, get home.
The strange memory of watching that woman walk out the front door of that house, disoriented, and then slip and fall in the mud comes back to him.
He’s thought of her more than once since then.
Something about the whole scene still feels off, and he has been meaning to circle back to her and make sure she is all right.
Another message appears, this one not from Miguel.
No problems with C?
She doesn’t suspect a thing.
Finn stares at the text conversation, the skin on the back of his neck tingling. Doesn’t suspect a thing. Kenya or her husband, Shawn, or someone else who lives here, must be texting Miguel from their cell phone, which is linked to the iPad.
He uses his own phone to take a photo of the conversation. “C” probably refers to Caren, but what is the “it” that was dropped off? And what didn’t she suspect?
It could be something perfectly innocuous, he tells himself. It could be Caren’s birthday and they’re discussing a cake or balloons.
But somehow he doubts it.
Seconds after he takes the photo, the entire conversation vanishes. Gone into the ether. Whoever was texting with Miguel deleted it. He looks at the iPad. It’s as if the conversation never took place.
I wasn’t supposed to see that.
A thought pops into his head. Kenya and Shawn both know he is in their house. Maybe they forgot that the iPad was left on the sofa, until they started texting. As the screen fades to black, Finn can’t help but feel that the disappearance of the conversation is some kind of message directed at him.
No, not a message.
A warning.