This Is How It Ends (14 page)

CHAPTER 22

WE PARKED ABOUT A HALF
mile up the road from the Clearys'. It wasn't much of a hiding spot, but it seemed better than leaving my car in front like a neon sign, just in case Natalie drove by. Or Tannis or the cops. Or the killer.

Sarah and I walked back downhill to the trailer. Our breath came fast as we picked our way carefully through the front yard.

I dug my hand into my jeans for the ring of keys and then propped the screen door with my hip as I fit the key into the lock, my stomach feeling sour. I looked over my shoulder at Sarah. “You ready?”

She nodded, looking as jittery as I felt.

I opened the door, and a stale, tangy odor wafted toward me, tickling the back of my throat. Neither of us moved for a few seconds. Maybe she was having the same second thoughts I was, but if I questioned it, I had a feeling we'd wind up bolting for the car, so I stepped inside. Sarah followed, pushing the door gently closed behind her.

We stood there staring at the walls, splashed with dark droplets.

“It's just math. Right, Riley?” Sarah's voice sounded high and quavery.

“Right.” I let my bag slide to the floor, then knelt beside it.
Focus
, I thought, willing myself to breathe deeply, which might have been a mistake. There was an undercurrent of something rancid. Rotting food, probably. No one had taken out the trash here or cleaned the dishes. The power was probably shut off, with things moldering in the fridge.

“You okay?” Sarah asked.

I nodded, but I really didn't feel okay. She put her hand on my shoulder, and for once I didn't think about how it felt to have her close or touching me. I was too busy trying to stay conscious.

“We can do this,” I muttered.

“That's what you told me in physics,” she reminded me.

I took another deep breath, feeling the dizziness pass. I unzipped my bag. “Okay, let's get started.”

Once we got into the numbers, it was much better. Sarah took the tape measure, leaving me to record.

“This one look good?” she asked, standing just beside the blood-soaked couch.

I glanced over and nodded. She stuck a Post-it with an
A
on it beside a long splotch. It matched the other Post-its left by the police, but with Sarah's distinctive sharp handwriting. She took the measurements, calling them out to me, then started hunting for splatter
B
.

Beside the phone was an ashtray, empty but with the scattered dust of old cigarettes on the bottom. There were rings on the table, overlapping one another like a Spirograph design made by someone who hadn't quite been able to get the hang of it. I guess Mr. Cleary hadn't believed in coasters. Trip's mom would have had a fit. I snorted, the idea of her somewhere like this so ridiculous.

“What?” Sarah glanced over.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

We did the next three splatters the same way—Sarah marking and measuring, me note taking and scanning the Clearys' living room. They'd never bothered to put photos up or hang anything on the walls, except for a bizarre oil painting of a clown. It looked like it had been done with a paint-by-numbers kit, and sure enough, when I got closer, I saw
R. Cleary
scrawled at the bottom.

Opposite the sofa was an old TV on a stand, with books and a few games stacked on the shelves. None of it looked like it had been touched in about fifteen years. I wondered if it was stuff they'd bought for Natalie, maybe even played with her when she was a kid. Or if it had always sat there unused, little Nat left to manage for herself just the way she was now.

“What ever happened to Natalie's mom?” I asked Sarah.

She glanced over at me. “Nat said she left them. Years ago. When Natalie was seven or eight.”

“Where'd she go?”

“I don't think Nat knows.”

“She hasn't talked to her in all those years?”

Sarah shook her head.

“That's kind of crazy, don't you think?” I asked. “That her mom would just take off like that?”

“Why?” She gave me a funny look, then turned back to the wall. “Happens all the time, Ri.”

Oh, shit. I'd forgotten about her mom. “You don't talk to yours, either?” I asked gently.

“Not much. She checks in once a year or so,” Sarah said without turning around. “When she can squeeze it in between the five hundred other things she's doing. It's one of the reasons Nat and I clicked right away,” she said. “Just us and our crazy dads.”

“Your dad didn't seem crazy.”

“I'm not sure you would have noticed.” She smirked at me over her shoulder. “You seemed a bit . . . preoccupied.”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“He's not crazy, of course,” Sarah said. “Just eccentric. Absentminded. Shrinks are like that sometimes.”

“That's the word on the street.”

She shook her head sadly. “You hanging out on the streets again, Riley Larkin?”

“Fo' shiz.”

“Good grief,” she muttered, leaning in to read the measurement. “Sometimes I think my dad forgets I even live there with him. Like I ceased to exist when she left. Like everyone did.”

“He still misses her?”

“She was the life of our house,” she said. “Of our family. It broke his heart when she left.” Sarah said it simply, without any of the melodrama the words implied. But I could see her fighting for composure. Sarah took a shaky breath as she stepped back, assessing the wall. She set down the tape measure. “Anyway, enough of that. I think we're ready to map it,” she said. “You have string and tape?”

I pulled them out of the backpack. Sarah leaned over to turn on the table lamp. Nothing. She frowned.

“Power's probably off,” I said.

“It's going to get dark before we're done.”

I smiled and pulled a high-powered flashlight from the bag. “I figured.”

“You are such a Boy Scout.” A chill raced up my spine as I realized that was exactly what Nat's dad had called me. Sarah didn't notice, handing me the end of the string.

“Go that way.” She pointed toward the middle of the room.

It took almost two hours of painstaking work to get the strings taped across Nat's living room. When we were done, Sarah and I stood back, taking in the obvious impact point.

“It's kind of amazing how that works, isn't it?” she said.

“Yeah.” It was. Because looking at where the strings intersected, you could see exactly where Nat's dad had been when he'd been shot. Standing directly in front of the sofa.

“He must have fallen back onto it, then,” Sarah guessed.

I nodded, the huge pool of blood there making it obvious. Without mapping the scene, I'd have assumed he'd been shot sitting there, but the strings made it clear he'd been standing, and I could almost picture it happening, like the ghost of him was there before us.

“So what does it tell us about the perp?”

“‘The perp?'” Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Did we just walk onto the set of
Law & Order
?”

I grinned sheepishly. “Okay. The criminal? The shooter?”

Sarah backed up, looking at the strings, the splotches, and the measurements. “Well, if her dad was standing, the angle of spatter would tell us the perp”—she grinned at me—“was taller than him.”

I nodded, having come to the same conclusion. “Randall Cleary wasn't exactly a giant.”

“No,” she agreed. “Lots of people are probably taller than him.”

Except Moose
, I thought, feeling a huge relief. “Not Natalie,” I said aloud. “Unless she was standing on a chair.”

“Most people don't look for a podium when they're shooting their parents.”

“Yeah, even the police probably figured that out. Maybe that's why they cleared her,” I said.

“That and the ballistics tests that showed she hadn't fired a weapon.”

“Right.”

We stood there quietly, looking at our hours of work, until finally I said, “We have to take this all down, don't we?” I waved toward the string and tape.

She nodded. “For all we know Nat could be missing a piece of clothing or something else she needs. Or decide tomorrow that she really does want to come up here.”

I took out my phone. “Is it weird if I take a picture?”

“Yes.”

I snapped a few from different angles, then slipped the phone back into my pocket. I pulled down the first of the strings. “So much for all that work.”

“Well, you'll always have the photos to remember it by.”

It was near nine when we finally tucked everything away. Trip called as we were finishing up. “Do you mind double-checking to be sure we got everything?” she said, already stepping aside to talk to him. I tried not to listen or be jealous or notice the way she looked in her faded jeans.

I scanned the floor, looking for stray scraps of string or tape or anything else we might have left behind. Not that anyone would notice it amid the mess the cops had made, their small numbered cards still propped around the room and stuck on walls. I squatted down to look at them more closely, curious about how the police had numbered and laid them out. It wasn't every day you got to hang out at a real-life crime scene. I heard the jingle of change as everything in my jacket pocket spilled out onto the carpet.

“Shit.” I stopped a quarter from rolling away, scooping up a small cluster of nickels and pennies that had landed by my shoe. Then I knelt forward to grab a dime that had rolled toward the sofa and landed by the pleated skirt. In the beam of the flashlight, I noticed something else, mostly hidden behind the tweedy fabric.

I felt my breath catch as I carefully pushed aside the sofa's skirt to get a clear view. I nudged the object gently, and it spun a fraction, the shiny silver top coming out from under the sofa.

It was a lighter. With a silver skull and crossbones, one side of the skull worn away where his hand always gripped it.

It was Moose's.

I'd seen him light his cigarettes with it every weekend for three years. There was no question.

Behind me I could hear Sarah ending her conversation. Without giving it a second thought I pulled my T-shirt down and used it to carefully grip the lighter without having it touch my skin. I slid it into my pocket and stood.

“What were you doing down there?”

“I dropped some money.”

We locked up and walked back to the car. It was quiet in the woods, and I imagined the way it must have sounded to Mr. Johnson up the road the night it happened, sirens screeching. I'd have hauled myself out of bed and gone down there too.

Sarah and I talked about physics and Nat and school stuff most of the ride home. When I dropped her off, she paused for a second before getting out.

“Thanks, Riley. For not making it weird.”

“That wasn't weird?” I said. “How am I going to top taking you to the scene of a murder? Damn, you're a tough customer, McKenzie.”

She smiled. “You know what I mean.”

I did. Her. Me.

“See you at school,” she said.

I nodded, waved, and watched her walk up the path and slip inside her house. But I was thinking of Moose's lighter and the thing that stayed seared in my mind. How it had lain. Half-hidden by the sofa. On top of a blood spatter—not under.

It had fallen there after Mr. Cleary had been shot.

CHAPTER 23

I DROVE HOME, READY TO
flop into bed with a book that had nothing to do with school or murder. The house was dark when I drove up, which was odd. My mom should have been getting ready for work. My heart was pounding as I trotted up the walk, knowing something wasn't right.

As soon as I stepped through the door, I knew why. It was cold inside. My stomach sank as I flipped the light switch, already knowing what would happen: nothing.

The power was off. Which was what happened when you spent the bill money on SATs.

“Riley?” I heard her call from upstairs.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered. “Yeah, it's me.”

The beam of a flashlight bobbed on the wall as my mom came out of her bedroom and picked her way carefully downstairs. She stood at the bottom. “I tried to call you.”

“You did?” I pulled out my phone. Three messages. I'd had it off up at the trailer. “Sorry,” I said. “It was on mute from school. I guess I forgot to turn it on.”

“The power's off,” she said. “Do you know what happened?”

I nodded and took a deep breath. “I spent the money,” I said. “I'm sorry. I just . . . I was hoping they wouldn't get to us so quickly.”

“What did you spend it on, Riley?” she said. She didn't yell, but I could tell she was angry. I'd never done something like this before. It wasn't how we operated, both of us knowing that the only way to stay afloat was by working together.

“The SATs,” I said quietly. “I registered to take them.”

She didn't move, but everything shifted, her anger draining away. My mom looked sad and tired. The dim light threw shadows into the lines around her eyes and mouth, wrinkles that hadn't even begun back when we'd roasted marshmallows with the Joneses. This was the face I'd seen the last time I'd looked in those binoculars. The start of it, at least.

When she finally spoke, her voice was soft, “Why don't you build a fire, Riley.” She squeezed my shoulder. “It'll be okay.”

“How?”

“We can go without electricity for a day or so. It'll be like camping.” She smiled.

“But we won't be able to pay it until—”

She interrupted, “I'll get the money.”

I almost asked where, but I suddenly understood, feeling completely disgusted. Disgust
ing
, actually, since I was the one making her do it. “Mom—” But I couldn't say any of it. About how wrong it was to ask
him
for help, especially for money. Because we didn't talk about that, and this was my fault. I was the one who'd put her in that position.

“It's okay, Riley,” was all she said.

I watched her sneakers—less ripped up than mine only because she wore nurse shoes half her waking hours—turn and walk toward the stairs.

I did what she said, crumpling page after page of newspaper until flames lit the room. My eyes were dry by the time she came back down.

“There are candles in the linen closet by the bathroom in case the flashlight runs out of batteries,” she told me, pausing at the front door. “Just be careful, 'kay? Make sure they're out and let the fire die down before you go to bed tonight.”

“I won't burn the house down on top of this.”

“At least we could collect insurance money.”

“Mom . . .”

“I'm
joking
, Riley.” She stopped me before I could say anything serious, then gave me a peck on the cheek. “I'm worried about you. Don't burn
yourself
down, okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

After the door closed, I went up and scavenged some candles, planning to do my homework by the fire, since it was the only warm place in the house. I'd just gotten my calc book out and open to the assigned page when the doorbell rang.

I figured my mom had forgotten her house keys along with whatever she'd come back for, but when I swung the door open, my crack about senility faded, because it wasn't my mom.

It was Sarah.