All Unquiet Things (18 page)

“And the fact that I’m having dreams tells you that?”

“No. The dreams are none of my business,” I said.

“Now it’s none of your business? You steal my cell phone and read my psychiatric file, but you’re not going to weigh in on anything that really matters?”

“You don’t even care what I think!” I shouted, throwing up my hands. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you at all.”

“I do care. I know I might act like I don’t, but I do, because you’re the only person I know who isn’t trying to feed me a line.”

I paused. “Well, I don’t know what it means. But I have a theory.”

“Okay.”

“That bit about the dreams made me realize that I could come to you. I took it to mean that, whatever you might have convinced yourself of, you weren’t wholly certain that Carly’s murder was solved, that you had doubts too.”

“I do have doubts. And I’m willing to do this with you, but I need you to be straight. No lies, no tricks, no secrets. I need you to promise that this is going to be an equal partnership.”

“No lies, no tricks, no secrets,” I said, holding out my hand. He shook it. “I promise.”

He held fast to my hand. “Do you realize,” he said slowly, “that by doing this we are putting ourselves in a lot of danger? Somebody killed Carly—the same thing could happen to us if we’re not careful.”

I stared at him for a moment, completely at a loss. I couldn’t disagree with him, because he was right, and to pretend that such a thought didn’t run through my mind a thousand times a day would be ridiculous. “We’ll just have to be careful, then,” I said.

As Neily let go of my hand, we heard a loud crash coming from the lawn.

“Neily, I think there’s someone out there,” I said.

“Let’s go see who it is.”

We ran out the side door and around to the front. A ceramic planter near the door had been knocked over and smashed, geraniums and dirt spilling out all over the brick.

“Hey!” We turned to see a tall, broad man coming from the direction of the garage and carrying some kind of stick. When he walked into the light, I could see that the stick was a broom and the man was wearing a white collared shirt with a name tag. “What are you kids doing here?” he asked.

“My name is Audrey Ribelli,” I told him. “Paul Ribelli is my uncle. He knows we’re here.”

“Oh.” The man switched the broom to his left hand and held out his right for me to shake. “Frank Gordon, private security.”

“You’re a security guard?” Neily asked.

“Did Paul hire you to watch the place?” I asked.

“On nights he’s on call, yeah,” Frank said.

“I wonder why he didn’t mention it,” Neily said.

“Maybe he forgot,” I said. “How long have you been working here, Frank?”

He thought for a moment. “Almost a year, I guess.”

“Why were you hired?” I asked.

Frank shrugged. “When I started, Mr. Ribelli said something about a break-in. I figure he’s trying to keep it from happening again. These Castlewood homes got a lot of expensive shit in them.”

“A break-in? When?”

Frank hesitated.

“You’re right,” I said, smiling at him reassuringly. “I really should be asking Paul these questions, shouldn’t I? I’ll just go inside and give him a call—would you like me to warn him about all this while I’m at it?” I gestured to the broken planter. “What happened here, anyway?”

“Saw the light in the foyer, but Mr. Ribelli didn’t warn me that anyone was going to be in the house, so I stood on the planter to get a look.” Frank pointed to a small half-circle window over the door; all the other windows had their shades drawn. “But when I was getting down, it tipped over and broke. Was it expensive?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But his wife bought that planter in
Carmel on one of their anniversaries, right before she died. He’ll be upset, understandably.”

“Upset enough to fire me?” Frank asked, his eyes widening.

“Not sure. I guess I could tell him it was a raccoon or something.” I gave Frank a pointed look.

“You’re a manipulative little thing, aren’t you?” He glanced at Neily, and we both shrugged.

“The break-in happened about a week after his daughter got shot.” Frank sighed. “Whoever it was climbed up the drainpipe and got in through an unlocked window. They went through her room, but I don’t think anything was taken. At least, nothing I heard about.”

“Why didn’t Paul report this to the police?” I asked.

“Don’t think he wanted to get them involved. All that red tape. Plus, like I said, nothing was stolen. What would be the point?”

Neily shot me a meaningful look; we were having the same thought. Not reporting a break-in that happened the week
after
Carly died served to keep the case against my dad airtight—since there was no way
he
could’ve broken into the house from jail, Paul chose not to alert the police. Maybe Paul thought it was a coincidence, but I didn’t believe in them. One reason for the break-in could’ve been that the real killer had left something in Carly’s possession, some piece of evidence that could prove my dad’s innocence and move the investigation in a different direction.

We took our leave of Frank, with me promising to back him up when he said an animal knocked over the planter (though, really, the planter had no sentimental value to Paul that I knew of), and returned to the house. Back in Carly’s room, Neily
asked, “You think Paul kept this from the police because he didn’t want anyone to suspect somebody besides your dad?”

I nodded.

“Why would he do that to his own brother?”

“Maybe
he
killed her.”

“You really think that’s possible?” Neily asked.

I sighed. “No, I don’t. He couldn’t have—he was at the hospital all night; he has witnesses for practically every minute of his shift. But my dad and Paul have hated each other my entire life. Maybe he was so certain that my dad killed Carly that he didn’t want anything derailing the investigation.”

“If that’s true, he may have helped Carly’s real killer get off scot-free,” Neily said darkly.

“May
have? Oh, I can pretty much guarantee it.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

I
started going through Carly’s closet, which was, of course, very messy. I have to admit, I was much more uptight about the state of my own bedroom, and had been arranging the clothes in my closet by color since I was seven. Carly had always taken sort of an English-garden approach to her life; instead of everything having a place, she believed that things would come to her when she needed them.

My phone began to ring, breaking apart the silence into which Neily and I had lapsed since getting back to work. He was still concentrating on her desk and nightstand, though he didn’t seem to be getting much accomplished.

“You going to get that?” Neily asked.

“No need,” I told him, shoving a bunch of the school papers that were littering the closet floor into a trash bag. “I know who it is.”

“Who?”

“Cass.” It had to be. He had his own ringtone. “Third time today.”

“Oh.” Neily raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t talking to him.”

“I’m not. I ran into him outside Harriet’s office the other day and we spoke for, like, two seconds. It’s really no big deal.” I tried to sound nonchalant, but it wasn’t an accident that today I was wearing my cutest outfit: a pair of tight, ridiculously expensive jeans I had picked up in San Francisco over the summer, a black and white striped tube top with a black sash and white buckle under the bust—made appropriate for school with a lightweight black cotton cardigan—and a pair of black patent-leather flats. Back when things were different, when Carly was alive and I was dating one of the most popular guys in school, I had dedicated a lot of energy—maybe too much—to maintaining my appearance. But since she died and Dad went to prison I had been too distracted and too depressed to make much of an effort. Even though I questioned my own motives in dressing as nicely as possible and making certain my hair and makeup were perfect today, I did feel much more like myself than I had in a long time.

“And he’s been calling you? That doesn’t sound like no big deal.”

“Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.” I wanted so badly for that to be true, and I was trying so hard to make it so. There was this wall inside of me—I could feel it in my chest—and it hid all the vulnerable parts that had been damaged in the past year. I had
put my feelings for Cass back there so that he couldn’t hurt me again. Maybe that was what was so comforting about Neily’s presence, the sense that he was hiding stuff behind a wall too.

“Why do you think he’s suddenly so chatty?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe he’s regretting what happened,” Neily suggested. “Maybe he wants to kiss and make up.”

“And you think that’s a good idea?”

“No,” Neily said. “But you’re the one who just gave me the speech about forgiveness. If you expect me to work through my issues, you should think about working through yours.”

“Hey! Don’t psychoanalyze me, Freud. I don’t expect you to work through anything. Your issues are your business.”

Neily rolled his eyes. “Are you going to call him back?”

“Not a chance. He abandoned me,” I said, taking a deep breath. “You know how that feels.”

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right choice.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“But,” he continued, “just because you hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t still love them.” He gestured to himself. “Case in point.”

“Okay, let’s just stop talking about it.” I held up a piece of paper. “Look. Carly’s first article for the
Brighton Public Address.
”

He took it from me and read it. “An exposé about the parking permit lottery?”

“Don’t you remember? She found out that the varsity athletes were getting preferential treatment and flipped her shit. I thought her head was going to explode.”

“She was just mad that she didn’t get a permit.”

“If you asked her, she’d tell you that she was fighting for justice,” I said. I pulled the rest of the papers out of Carly’s desk. Inside the mound of clippings, catalogs, and receipts there was a manila envelope with
IMPORTANT
scrawled in bold across the front.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a letter authorizing Carly to access her parents’ safe-deposit box. It’s signed by Paul.”

“Why would she need that?” Neily asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe she put something in it, something too valuable to keep in the house.”

“Like what?”

“Mams’s jewelry?”

“You know we’re going to have to get into that safe-deposit box,” Neily pointed out.

“Why?”

“Because even if your grandmother’s jewelry is in the box, Carly might’ve put something else in there for safekeeping.”

“Okay, but how am
I
supposed to get access to it? Legally I have no claim on it, remember?”

“Carly apparently did.”

“Yeah, but I’m not Carly.”

“We’ll figure out a way,” he said assuredly.

I put my hands on my hips and surveyed the scene. “We’re never going to get through all this.”

“Yeah we are. Is there a box in that back corner over there?”

I reached past a few empty suitcases and a stack of old fashion magazines and grabbed the edge of a small cardboard box. Inside was a scratchy orange wool sweater that had probably been an unfortunate Christmas or birthday gift from a
distant relative. I lifted the sweater out to show it to Neily, and when I unfolded it something fell to the ground with a thud. I picked it up—it was a book, but it had no binding, no spine. It was just the guts of the book.

“What’s that?” Neily asked.

“Edgar Allan Poe,” I read from the flyleaf.
“The Purloined Letter and Other Stories.”

“I know that book,” Neily said, as if from far off. “Carly was reading it the first time we—No.” He shook his head.
“The Purloined Letter …”
He stood up and went over to examine Carly’s bookshelf. After a moment, his face lit up like a slot machine that was about to pay out. He pried a hardcover book off the shelf and held it in his hands as if it were some sort of artifact, an ancient chest he was afraid to open. “She wasn’t reading
The Purloined Letter
, she was
writing
in it. Do you know what ‘The Purloined Letter’ is about?”

I shrugged. “No.”

“It’s a mystery set in Paris. Somebody is using a stolen letter to blackmail an influential person and the police can’t find it. Eventually, a private detective figures out where the blackmailer hid it—with all the other mail in the room,
in plain sight
.” He handed me the book and I opened it up to the first page, where Carly had scrawled her name. “Tell me that’s not a journal glued into the binding.”

I nodded. “Looks like it.”

Neily came to look over my shoulder.

“I had no idea she kept a diary,” I said. “I sometimes saw her writing things down, but I always thought it was ideas for newspaper stories.” I flipped through the pages carefully. Carly’s handwriting was messy and not easily legible, but I had gotten used to copying her class notes and was pretty good at
deciphering it. “It doesn’t look like she wrote in here very often. Maybe once a month, if that. She started it when she was twelve, but stopped after a few entries. She didn’t pick it up again until just after her mom died. Look.” I pointed to the date on the left-hand corner.

“Let me see,” Neily said, reaching for it.

I turned quickly to the last page. “I think we should read the end. Maybe she wrote something that will help us.”

Neily narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing?”

“You’ll get distracted,” I said. “I know what you’re looking for.”

His expression clouded. “Okay, let’s read the end.”

My breath hitched. “The last entry reads: ‘Now I know that whatever happened to Laura Brandt was because of me. I’m a monster for what I did to her, and I can’t rest until I make things right.’”

“Who’s Laura Brandt?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should read the whole thing,” Neily said, taking the journal. “Maybe she says something more.”