Scarlett Undercover

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For Sean, Zoë, and Sophie

Because my own story wouldn’t be worth
telling if it wasn’t for you.

T
he kid was cute. Her bare, knobbly legs swung back and forth like pendulums between the chipped legs of my client chair. Plastic safety goggles rested on her forehead, held tight by an elastic band that circled her head and pooched her bobbed brown hair up at the crown. She was thin. Delicate, even. But her eyes were clear and blue and smart.

“I think my brother killed someone.”

It was a hell of a thing to say, especially for someone who’d just walked into my office wearing a pale pink jumper only a mother could love. I waited for her to keep talking. She didn’t.

“How about you tell me your name before we get into that?” I said.

“Gemma Archer. My brother’s Oliver.” Her hands twisted the strap of her bag.

“Nice to meet you, Gemma. I’m Scarlett.”

She nodded like she already knew that. Which, of course, she did.

“Okay. Now, exactly who do you think your brother killed?”

“His friend Quinn Johnson,” she said in a voice flat as truck stop pancakes.

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“He’s the boy they pulled out of Las Almas Bay yesterday. The one who jumped off the Baker Street Bridge,” she said quietly.

Things clicked into place. I’d just read about Quinn Johnson’s death in the paper that morning. The thing was, it hadn’t been murder; it’d been a suicide. I looked over at the half-eaten bagel on my desk. My stomach grumbled.

“Well, kid,” I said, “I don’t think you need me. Two witnesses saw your brother’s friend jump off that bridge all on his own. It’s an awful mess, and I’m sorry for him and his family and anyone who knew him. But your brother wasn’t even there.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Oliver might not have been with Quinn when he died, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t responsible.”

It had happened before—me being wrong, that is. So I shrugged and played along.

“How old’s your brother?”

“Fifteen.”

“And what makes you think he had anything to do with the Johnson kid’s death?”

She chewed her lip, looked around like she wished she could disappear into the walls.

“He’s all dark, like a light went out inside him.”

I told her she’d have to be a little more specific than that.

“I don’t know. He’s just…
dark!
And he doesn’t talk to me or see me or play his guitar anymore. He cleans his room now, too, and mostly only comes home to eat. Then, when he
is
home, he won’t put his phone down. I thought he was on it a lot before, but it’s crazy lately.”

She got quiet again.

“Look, kid,” I said. “I’m not one to turn down a job, but it doesn’t sound like there’s much I can do for you. Have you talked to your parents about all this?”

Her shoulders slumped, and a soft little hiccup hitched in her throat.

“I tried.” She didn’t bother to wipe away the tear slipping down her cheek. “They won’t listen. No one will.”

I dug deep and found my patient voice. “Don’t you think your parents would have noticed if your brother was in trouble?”

“My parents don’t notice anything,” she whispered.

That got me. Right in the gut.

“People change, kid,” I said, softening. “And your brother must be pretty messed up after what happened to his friend.”

She looked lost. Her mouth trembled. Her head shook back and forth.

“But he’s not! Not even a little! That’s the problem. Plus I saw him and Quinn together in the courtyard after school last week and…”

Her voice faded to nothing. Her shoulders shook.

“And what? What happened?”

She paused. Gathered herself.

“I was up by the gate and only heard a little. Quinn said, ‘We can’t let them,’ and Oliver said something I couldn’t hear. Then Quinn…”

She looked up at me like she wasn’t sure she should go on. I gave her my best encouraging smile. She took a deep breath.

“He said, ‘Eff you and eff the rest of them, too. You’re all crazy.’ ”

“Only he didn’t say
eff
, right? He said the
F
word?”

She nodded.

“What did your brother do then?”

She looked at her hands. Sniffled.

“Gemma?”

“He said, ‘Tell us where he is, or we’ll kill you and Sam both.’ ”

“And you don’t know who
he
is?”

“No.”

“Who’s Sam?”

“Quinn’s little brother.”

“What happened next?”

“Quinn punched him.”

“They fought?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Oliver just smiled. And even though his mouth was bleeding, he pulled his finger across his throat real slow, like he was threatening to kill Quinn. Then he walked away.”

“Where was Oliver when Quinn went to the bridge?”

“At home. But it’s like I said, for the last few weeks he’s been all dead inside. I know he didn’t actually
push
Quinn, but if it weren’t for Oliver, I don’t think Quinn would have jumped.”

I sat back in my chair and laced my fingers together behind my head.

“You know, there’s no guarantee I’ll find anything if I take the case. And even if I do, you might not like it.”

“I’ve got money.” She pulled a wad of cash the size of a melon out of her backpack. “What else am I supposed to spend this on?”

A long list of things came to mind, but I kept them to myself. That’s me. Always thinking.

I leaned forward and folded my hands on the desk. “How about I chew on this awhile and get back to you?”

Gemma’s lips quivered, but she kept it together.

“I just want my real brother back,” she said. Then she gave me her number and walked herself to the door.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

She didn’t stop. Just dropped her chin and kept on walking.

A couple of hours later, my breakfast was long gone, and Gemma was still on my mind. Rain pattered against the window behind me. Tires swished on Carroll Street’s wet pavement two stories below. On any given weekday it would have been busy down there, full of people with places to go. But at eleven o’clock on a gray Saturday morning, the only soul out was the General, peeing against a Dumpster in the alley across the street. He was the cheerful kind of neighborhood drunk who’d tip his hat and say, “Thank ye, guv’nor,” when people gave him sandwiches or coffee or spare change. He looked up, saw me in the window, and waved with his free hand. I waved back, shifted my focus to the water stain on the ceiling for modesty’s sake, and pondered what Gemma had told me.

She was sincere. I’d give her that. And underneath the layer of cute she wore like camouflage, there was a toughness to her—a kind of grit—that I liked. Maybe my first impression had been wrong, and she wasn’t just some hysterical kid making up fairy tales. Maybe there actually was something to what she’d said. Besides, who was I to argue when there was cash on the table?

At the very least, I could nose around and see what the brother was up to, figure out what the fight between
him and his friend had been about, and give Gemma a better story to tell herself about the whole deal. I could help a sad little girl feel like someone cared.

I drank a glass of water at the sink in the corner and pushed back my hair. It was black, kinky-curled, and stuck out from my head every which way. My hair had a mind of its own, and just then it was asking for a fight.

“Wear the
hijab
like
Ummi
did,” Reem would say, “and you’ll never have to worry about bad hair days.”

But headscarves weren’t my thing. Never had been. Not even before cancer swallowed my mother whole.

I dialed Gemma’s cell.

“It’s Scarlett,” I said when she picked up. “I’ll take the case.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was small. Relieved. I asked if it was a good time to come over. She said it was and gave me her address. “I really mean it,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“Thank me after I’ve done something, kid,” I said, and hung up.

I grabbed my favorite purple tam from the coat hook and put it on. A raincoat would have been nice, too, but all I had was the fly’s eye–green umbrella Mook
had given me from the Laundromat’s lost and found a few months back.

I put the umbrella in my backpack and gave my Goodwill jeans, white T-shirt, and secondhand men’s houndstooth coat a once-over. If I smiled nice and behaved, the outfit would do for a visit to the Archers’. I didn’t look like a private detective. I didn’t look like an orphan. And that was just the way I liked it.

G
emma’s apartment was in a strip of converted warehouses off Daly Street, on the north end of Las Almas Bay. They were trendy, expensive, and full of people who never took time to look out their own windows and enjoy the view.

By the time I got there, the morning rain had lifted, and people with cloth shopping bags and expensive baby strollers were out and about. Farther south, Daly was nothing but pawnshops, liquor stores, and grimy little joints that would cash your paycheck for half of what it was worth. This far north, it was all organic grocers and coffee shops.

Ten minutes and six nail salons later, I was standing in front of Gemma’s building. The place was flat-roofed and long, boring as a nun’s underwear, and full of blank-looking picture windows. Gemma was an Archer. The Archers lived on the top floor. I pressed their intercom button, smiled for the camera, and wondered how many freckled, sixteen-year-old brown girls showed up on their video monitor any given day. The door buzzed. I went in and took the freight-sized elevator up.

Gemma opened the door in her goggles and stepped back to let me in. Her movements were quick. Unhappy.

“Hi,” she said.

“Your folks home?”

“They’re at work. Dad owns Archer Construction. It’s a big deal. Mom does interior design.”

“What about Oliver?”

She gave me a somber look. “He’s here.”

“How about an introduction?”

“Come on,” she said, and led me down a hall lined with framed black-and-white photos of skyscrapers. The carpet under our feet was thick enough to lose an ankle in. Spotlights lit the pictures like Rembrandts.

“Those are my dad’s.” She motioned toward the frames. I gave them a closer look.

“He owns all those buildings?” I asked.

“No. He built them.”

I was impressed.

We passed an archway leading to a white-walled room with white leather furniture, floor-length white curtains, and white rugs over bleached hardwoods. Lionfish roamed an enormous saltwater aquarium.

“Fish were Dad’s hobby last year,” Gemma said when she saw me looking. “They were supposed to help him with stress. Now he just pays a guy to clean the tank.”

“Maybe he should have tried goldfish first,” I said. She shrugged and kept walking until the hall dead-ended at a closed door.

“Ollllivvvverrrr!” She hammered on the wood with a pale fist. There was shuffling behind the door before it opened.

Oliver was easy on the eyes. Handsome, even, in a boy band kind of way. He looked like he worked out, and the zit fairy had only paid a courtesy call instead of an extended visit.

“What?” He scanned me with his blue eyes like a cashier scans frozen peas.

“Oliver, this is my friend Scarlett. I wanted you to meet her.”

“Hello, Scarlett. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

He didn’t sound like he meant it.

“The pleasure’s all mine.”

I didn’t sound like I meant it, either.

I stuck out my hand, meaning for it to feel like a challenge. Oliver hesitated, his top lip curling into a sneer before he gave in and took hold of my fingers with a grip three notches too tight. As he did, the sleeve of his rugby shirt pulled back, exposing a line of angry red scabs along the inside of his wrist. He noticed that I noticed, jerked his hand back, jammed his fists into his pockets.

“Aren’t you a little… mature to be hanging out with a nine-year-old?” His voice had gone hard.

“It’s a Big Sister kind of thing,” I said.

He looked at Gemma. Gemma looked worried.

“Funny,” he said. “She’s hardly underprivileged. And she has a
real
big brother.”

“Yet she still came to me.…” The sweetness in my voice was anything but.

Oliver scowled. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got things to do.”

He grabbed the messenger bag leaning against his
bookshelves and pushed past us, slamming the bedroom door as he went. A few seconds later, the front door slammed, too.

Gemma slipped her palm into mine. I wasn’t much of a hand-holder, but just then I didn’t mind the touch of someone warm and good.

The kid was all right.

Her brother was not.

I never could stand a closed door, and Oliver’s was no exception.

“I’m going in,” I said.

“So you believe me that something’s wrong?” Gemma asked.

“I believe I agreed to take the case,” I said, turning the knob.

At first glance, the room was nothing special. Sports posters on the walls. Body spray and locker room funk in the air. It was clean, though. Neat. No clothes piled on the floor, no clutter.

“This isn’t normal,” Gemma said.

“You mentioned he’s not the organized type.”

“Yeah. He and Mom used to fight over the mess all the time. He’d say it was his space; she’d say no it wasn’t unless he started paying rent. Now that he cleans it, though, she doesn’t even come down to this end of the apartment. She thinks she won.” Gemma snorted at the last bit.

“Good to know,” I said. “Now stay put.”

The first thing I did inside the room was walk its perimeter. Next, I memorized the positions of everything I might move or misplace. This had to be a clean sweep. Oliver couldn’t know I’d been there.

Once I had the lay of the place, I looked under the bed, mattress, and pillows. Opened desk and bureau drawers all the way to the back. Sifted through anything siftable. Then I hit the closet, reaching between stacks of sweatshirts and sweaters, making sure nothing was hidden behind the perfectly spaced hanging clothes. That’s when my hand hit something pinned to a jacket.

“This new?” I held up the small baggie of dried leaves.

“No. He’s smoked that stuff since he was thirteen,” Gemma said.

I put the baggie back and inspected the rest of the room, right down to fanning the pages of each book
on the shelves. Other than Oliver’s weed, the place was clean.

It didn’t surprise me. Real detective work wasn’t anything like what they showed on TV. On TV, clues sat around like giant Easter eggs waiting to be found. In real life, they dressed up like normal things, so that half the time you didn’t even know it when they were staring you right in the face.

I wiggled my eyebrows up and down at Gemma to make her smile. She didn’t. Then I gave the room another quick once-over and, because I’m a thorough kind of girl, swung the door around to make sure nothing was hiding behind it.

Something was: a clue. And it hadn’t bothered to dress up at all.

“This new?” I asked.

Gemma came to my side and pulled the goggles down over her eyes.

“Mom’s gonna kill him,” she whispered.

Every inch, every single bit of wood on that door, had been carved with different versions of the same interlocking ring design. Some of the rings were ovals, some were shaped like cats’ eyes. A few were rectangles with rounded edges. Each had a square at the center
with its four corners formed by the overlapping points of the lines.

“Go get a dark crayon and some paper. Quick,” I said.

Gemma stared for a few seconds longer and ran out. I studied the door, knowing from the fresh wood smell that the marks hadn’t been there long, wondering if maybe the design had something to do with the cuts on Oliver’s wrist. A deep, dusty part of my brain told me I’d seen it before. But the kid came back faster than I could clear out the cobwebs and remember where.

“Thanks,” I said, tearing the wrapper off her purple crayon. I tucked the shreds into my jeans pocket, flattened a piece of paper over one of the biggest sets of rings, and rubbed the side of the crayon back and forth until the whole image appeared. I did the same thing to a second, more squared-off knot. Then a third. And a fourth. Gemma watched, still as a cat about to pounce. “Let’s get out of here,” I said when the fifth was done.

As she led me to her room, I put the crayon in my coat, reminding myself to ditch it in a trash can somewhere far away from the Archers’ apartment. Maybe I was being too careful, since the chances of Oliver finding a peeled crayon and figuring out it had been used
to make rubbings of his artwork were slim to none. But for someone who’d written Gemma off just a few hours earlier as a wound-up kid with an overactive imagination, I was starting to wonder if maybe she was on to something.

“I’ve got a few more questions,” I said once she’d stashed the unused paper in a desk drawer.

“I thought you might.” She pushed the goggles onto her forehead and smiled the first real smile I’d seen on her Kewpie doll face.

“I’m going to figure this out, kid,” I said, which made her smile even bigger.

Just like I’d hoped it would.