Nearly Gone (24 page)

Respite in a box . . .
Dead or alive when you find him?
“Reece!” I dragged the box, leveraging my weight and

heaving it out from under the shelf until I could reach the seam. Breathless, I grabbed a box cutter from a supply cabinet and dragged it across the tape, ripping the flaps open and plunging my hand inside. I dropped to my knees, dug to the bottom. Crumpled newspaper spilled onto the floor, exposing rows of heavy microscopes underneath.

With an angry shout, I pitched the cutter across the room. I slumped into the pile of news filler and pressed my head into my hands.

The killer wanted me to find Reece, or he wouldn’t have led me this far. There had always been a clue. A bread crumb. A message somewhere to point me in the right direction. Why not now? Or had I missed it?

I dragged my sleeve across my forehead, clearing the sweat from my eyes. Then I scooped up an armful of mashedup newspaper and began stuffing it back in the box. One piece of newsprint stuck flat against the floor. I scraped up the only piece that hadn’t been crushed into a ball of stuffing. This one was smooth, torn at the taped corners where I’d ripped it from the inside flap in my hurry to open the box. An obituary.

Catherine Schrödinger. Dead of a heart attack at eightyeight in Alexandria, VA, in 2007. I skimmed the memorial and viewing information. Funeral services had been held at the family mausoleum . . . in Respite Meadows.

That was it. The clue from the ad that morning.
Respite in a box, a toxic paradox.
Dead or alive when you find him?

Reece was at Respite Meadows Cemetery. I stuffed the obituary into my pocket. Then piled the filling back in the box, rotated it so the writing faced the wall, and shoved it under the shelf. If the police managed to get this far from the ad, I didn’t need them arresting me before I could find Reece. I turned off the lights and shut the closet door, grabbed my backpack, and righted my stool.

The room was pink with twilight shadows.
Found a stray cat.
Think he belongs to you.
Tonight @9. The answer’s in the box.
I checked the clock and pulled out my phone.
Less than one hour to find him.

The sun dipped under the horizon and the headstones glowed white against an indigo sky. In the cemetery directory I thumbed through last names beginning with
S
. The Schrödinger family mausoleum was located in a private section of the grounds, set far back from the highway. I crunched over a gravel trail through sculpture gardens and dark roundabouts until I recognized the grove from the directory map.

I stepped off the gravel path to the first stone structure, checking the nameplate before moving on to the next. Every trace of sunlight was gone. Monuments were lit by upturned bulbs hidden in the landscape, illuminating angels and crosses that cast creeping shadows across the mausoleum gates.

A branch crackled in a grove of trees behind me. I turned, and my heart jumped into my throat.
“What are you doing here?” I breathed as the figure came closer.
Jeremy stood in a low beam of light. It cut across a shimmering blue cummerbund over a crisp tuxedo shirt. His expression was murderous as he swiped twigs from his lapels.
“I followed you,” he growled. “I saw you get off the bus outside the gates. But the damn parking lot was roped off.” He kicked grass clippings off the toes of his high-gloss shoes.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. “Why aren’t you at prom?”
“I got stood up!” Jeremy’s hands clenched at his sides. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? Anh was supposed to meet me at the dance. I waited. She never showed up. I called her brother from a pay phone. He said she got a phone call from you. That she went to meet you! Then you came running out of school and I followed your bus here. So where is she? Why isn’t she here? What did you say to her, Leigh?”
My mind raced. Someone called Anh posing as me. And now Anh was missing. I might already be too late . . .
He shook his head, his voice loud and tremulous. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. Because I didn’t want to go to the dance with Anh. I wanted to go with you!” Jeremy was shouting now, pacing and agitated. “I’ve been chasing you since eighth grade, Leigh! Chasing you and you didn’t even care! You’re too busy falling for criminals to notice!” Jeremy turned to me, dropping his voice low and pleading. His face was streaked with tears. “Do I have to kill someone to make you chase after me like you chase after Reece?”
I backed away at the mention of Reece’s name. I was running out of time.
“Jeremy, you have to leave. You can’t be here . . .”
He stepped toward me. I stumbled, my heel connecting with a low stone bench and my momentum throwing me backward and over it. My elbows dug in the ground, breaking my fall, and I struggled to get my feet under me. I looked up into Jeremy’s face as he advanced, one hand outstretched toward me. A shadow passed behind him.
“Jeremy, watch out!”
There was a muffled thud and he crumpled to the ground. Oleksa stood behind him, breathing hard, the butt of his gun turned outward. I scrambled backward, hands and shoes slipping in the mulch.
Oleksa swiped his sleeve across his forehead and rested his hands on his knees, straining to catch his breath. He nudged Jeremy’s shoulder with his foot. Jeremy didn’t move. Oleksa rotated the gun, righting it in his palm as he straightened to look at me.
“I told you to be careful. Your friends are dangerous.”
“You’re the one with the gun.” Doubt needled me. Lonny’s warning rippled through my head.
You can’t trust criminals or cops. You can never be sure whose side they’re on.
I hadn’t called Oleksa. He wasn’t supposed to be here. I inched away from him on my elbows and heels.
“Where’s Reece?” he said.
“Where’s Lonny?” I fisted a handful of dry dirt like Mona and Butch had taught me, but Oleksa was too far and the wind wasn’t right. “He doesn’t know who you are, does he?”
Oleksa’s face screwed up with a confused expression I’d never seen him wear before. His spine straightened, his body stilled, and his eyes grew wide and alert. I heard the soft click as he flipped off the safety.
A gunshot pierced the silence and a jolt ripped through Oleksa.
I screamed and Oleksa dropped to his knees. His head connected with the stone bench as he collapsed facedown in the grass. I scrambled toward him, but a hand wrapped over my mouth and yanked me violently off my feet.
I choked on the bitter smell of latex, pungent and powdery, sticky against my lips. The rubber grabbed at my cheeks and I struggled to breathe, unable to hear my own screams.
I kicked out and thrashed wildly. Clawed at the arms around my neck, losing my footing as they dragged me out of the dirt. It shouldn’t have been so easy. He should have been stumbling. But he pulled me like a rag doll through the shadows, away from Oleksa and Jeremy, toward a gleaming stone mausoleum. Their still bodies grew smaller until they disappeared in the dark.
We stopped moving at a set of iron gates.
In the grass lay an empty leg brace. He turned my head with a painful jerk of my chin, drawing my attention past it. A fresh surge of terror shot through me.
I was too late.
Two bodies stretched across the ground before the gates of the stone crypt. Anh lay crumpled in the grass, her forearm marked in blue ink. Not with a number. There was no element on the table with the abbreviation L, so he’d used the letter instead. But Reece’s body lay beside her, the pale skin of his left forearm marked
74
. Seventy-four, the atomic weight of Tungsten. The symbol for Tungsten was W.
Ne + Ar + Li + B + Os + W + L
Indelible ink fumes mixed with the smell of latex. I struggled, breath rushing in and out past the hand over my face. Twinkling lights sparkled around the edge of my consciousness.
“No one would hear you,” said TJ’s voice through the buzzing in my ears. “It won’t do you any good to scream.” His glove dropped from my mouth to my throat, and I sucked in a deep ragged breath.
The cool kiss of a gun’s muzzle pressed against my temple. I shut my eyes.
“Get inside,” he commanded.
I planted my feet. Once I stepped through the gate, it was all over. Butch’s lessons came back, a flash of a memory.
Never let them take you without a fight.
I made my body rigid, imagined my shoes anchored to the ground.
“Get the note,” he growled, not to me.
“I don’t want to,” came a tearful reply. “I can’t do this. Please don’t make me do this.”
The girl stepped toward me, until her face became clear. Emily Reinnert stood in front of me, fastening an envelope to my shirt with a safety pin. Her fingers trembled over my skin and I knew without a doubt I’d been right. She was terrified and remorseful. She didn’t want any part of this.
Her face was streaked with tears. “I’m sorry. No one was supposed to get hurt,” she said. “He said the joke under the bleachers was on Vince. That he only wanted to get back at Vince for kissing me. He said if I was sorry and I wanted him to take me back, I’d help. All I had to do was take a roofie and tell the police I didn’t know anything. It was supposed to be a prank. No one was supposed to get hurt. I’d get a few weeks off school and we’d get back together, it would be no big deal, right?” She choked on a hysterical laugh. “I didn’t know what he was really doing. I had no idea it had anything to do with you, or the scholarship, or anything. I swear. The police wouldn’t let me talk to anyone. My parents wouldn’t let me take calls or see anyone from school except TJ.” She shook her head. “No one told me about the others. When I read about them in the paper, I told him I didn’t want any part of this.”
“Shut up!”
Emily clutched her bruised arm to her side. “But then he told me I was already part of it. He said it was too late to change my mind, and if I didn’t keep quiet, he would kill me too.”
“Listen and do what I tell you!” he snapped. Emily cried into her sleeve and nodded tightly.
He held a blue lab marker in one hand, bit off the cap, and spit it onto the ground. He tossed the marker to Emily. “Mark her. Just like we talked about.” Emily’s hand was shaking as she drew up my sleeve. The point was wet and cold where she marked me with the letter
L,
upside down, as if I’d drawn it myself.
TJ jerked his chin toward Jeremy and Oleksa. “Now go get your car and bring it to the closest lot you can find. I’ve got to get those other two out of here. Leigh will take care of Whelan and Anh for us.”
I sucked in a shocked breath and looked down at their bodies. They were still alive. And TJ was going to make me kill them.
I struggled against the arm still wrapped around my neck. TJ’s breath was hot and ragged against my cheek.
“When they open the box and find you, will you be dead or alive? In the end, you can’t be both.” He cupped my chin in his gloved hands, bringing my head back hard against his chest and pressing the gun to my temple, his cheek against mine.
His jealousy and hatred surged through me, putrid and thick and choking. There was a gut-turning sweetness to it, a self-satisfied delight as he drew the barrel over my skin.
“It was your father,” I said, trying to calm the tremors in my voice. “Your father went to prison because of mine. That’s why you moved to Sunny View five years ago, isn’t it? My father set him up, let him take the fall. And mine got away with the money. You blame him for what happened to your dad. And to your mom. You think it’s his fault that you have to live in Sunny View. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Revenge.”
TJ dragged the barrel down my cheek. “Do you know why my mother killed herself ?”
My tongue felt thick and I swallowed hard. “Why?”
“Because she was afraid. Because she was terrified of being alone. She locked herself in her fucking Saab two weeks after my dad went to prison. Slugged down a fifth and took the easy way out. She was a goddamn quitter.” He laughed, cold and low in my ear. “But the game isn’t over yet. Not for me.”
“So you’re going to kill me? Do you seriously think you’ll get away with it? That anyone would believe I could do something like this?”
TJ laughed low in his throat. “Couldn’t you, though? Mommy’s a stripper. Daddy’s a felon. Money’s tight. Best friend’s a head case. Nobody sees you. Nobody cares. And all this time you’re giving a leg up to a bunch of losers who can’t even count change in the lunch line. Who
wouldn’t
believe you could snap? That you’d want the recognition? The attention? The power? Then all these bodies start piling up . . .”
I felt TJ swallow, felt the sweat bead down his cheeks as he went on. “You know the cops are coming for you, so you freak out. Shoot yourself. And it’s all so cut-and-dry, who’s going to bother looking at anyone else.” He plucked the envelope on my chest. “They’ll read your suicide note and think you killed Anh for the scholarship. What other options did you have? Community college? Student loans for the next twenty years? Don’t tell me you never thought about it. Never wanted to get out so bad you could taste it. Never thought about pushing sweet little Anh under a fucking school bus so you could take that money and run.”
“Never.”
“Well, I did!” he shouted. “I thought about it every day! I’ve
hated
you every day since I moved into that goddamned trailer! My uncle told me to let it go. That it wasn’t your fault. That nothing would bring her back. He told me to take it all out on the game, to play hard and focus on my scholarship. That was the only way out. But then I got benched, and by the time I got out of that damn brace, I’d missed my one shot. Even if I come back next fall, I’ve lost my ranking with the scouts. Recruiters don’t care if it’s healed. No one’s giving a scholarship to a kid with a knee injury.” He kicked the back of my knee, making me falter, and dragged me up again by the hair.
“And then a couple months ago, I find out Emily’s messing around with my best friend, sneaking around the golf course at night and giving it up in the back of his fiftythousand-dollar car. And that’s when it all sinks in. I’ve got nothing left. Your family took it from me. That should have been
my
car.
My
girl.
My
life!” he shouted, shaking me. “But your father made me just like you! Every time I look at you, it’s like a vial of acid breaking. I refuse to rot in a goddamn box alone!”
His chest heaved. “You made it so easy, Boswell.” He laughed, high and nervous. “I watched you read those stupid ads every Friday morning. So pathetic. So I figure, what better way to get your attention than put the bait where I know you’ll see it? Then it was just a matter of pointing it all back to you.”
“Here’s news for you,” I said, stiffening against him. “The cops have a new list of suspects, and I’m not on it.”
TJ shifted his weight. Adjusted his grip in my hair. “What do you mean? What list?”
I felt him turn toward the shadows where Emily had disappeared.
“A list of buyers who bought ketamine.”
TJ’s laughter echoed through the graveyard. “Lonny’s list? Guess what? I’m not on it either. But I bet Vince is. I stole the ketamine from Vince’s locker. He’s been buying roofies for months. How else do you think an asshole like Vince gets laid so much? He’s got so much shit stashed in his locker, he never noticed anything was missing. The cops can have Vince. They’ve got nothing on me.”
He fidgeted, searching the dark.
“Where’s Emily?” I asked.
“Emily does what I tell her.” It sounded like a mantra, like if he said it enough, it might be true.
“It was her, wasn’t it?” I needled, to keep him talking. “You made her help you. She was the one who called the hospital pretending to be me. The one who bailed Reece out of jail. She was the one who gave him the roofies and stole his apartment key when he passed out. That’s how you got into his apartment and took his phone.”
“She’ll never say a word. She’s in too deep. She was the one who put Reece’s phone in your backpack this morning at school. She cleared out the girls’ bathroom at the amusement park and watched the door while I marked Posie. She signed in to the hospital, pretending to be you. When this is over, the scholarship will be mine. Twenty-five thousand dollars. I can pay Emily back the bail money, and still have twenty grand. Not as much as your dad stole from us, but it’s a start. And the bonus is that it gets your boyfriend out of the picture before he can go to the cops.”
A knife twisted inside me. Gruesome images of Kylie and Marcia and Posie flashed in my head. “What are you going to do to him?”
“Me? I don’t plan to do anything. But you’re going to kill him,” he laughed. “Anh too.”
It was over. My name had been spelled out in symbols from the periodic table. The set-up was in place. Emily would be back any minute and put the next play in motion. I had to do it now, before anyone else got hurt, including her.
“TJ,” I said, fighting the quake in my voice. “Emily’s probably gone. You saw how freaked out she was. She probably called the cops. She’s probably already told them everything. She’s scared. They’ll know the truth.”
I could taste the conflict inside him. The doubt as he looked back in Emily’s direction. She wasn’t there. The gun dug into my temple.
“You don’t have to kill anyone else,” I said as steady as I could. “Take my backpack. There’s five thousand cash in it. It’s yours. Plus a ticket to California. You can leave. Run before the cops get here.” I jerked my backpack off my shoulder, ignoring his faltering hand and unzipping the pouch. I tossed it, green rolls spilling to the ground. The gun wavered.