Positively Morbid, page 10
Parker circled back to solid ground. “Where are they postmarked from? I’ve only been here for a couple months, not even that.”
He shook his head. “All over the country. I don’t think it means anything. There are online services that do that. You can get your stuff mailed from anywhere for a fee. There’s no rhyme or reason or pattern. One month it’s New York City, the next St. George, Utah.”
“Oh. Crap,” she said.
“Parker,” he said haltingly. “If it’s really not you—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for thinking that all this time. I just—I just don’t know who else would do that.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said with finality, touching his arm. They paused and she looked into his dark brown eyes. “I promise, I would tell you if it was. I’m not saying I’m totally over what happened, but I’ve moved on. I’m not harboring the kind of demons that would make me torment you.”
“I believe you,” he said. A line remained between his brows. “But now I’m even more disturbed because I can’t imagine who else it could be. And since I’m going to be away for a few months, all my mail is going to my mom’s house. I really didn’t want her to see that crap. I was going to ask you to stop, for her sake.”
Parker shook her head. “Sorry. I can’t even guess. Have you thought about hiring a private detective or something?”
“No. Because I was so sure it was you, I hadn’t considered anything else.” He shrugged and smiled weakly. “I’m glad, though. I didn’t like to think of you still being angry after all this time.”
The tide was coming in, and their steps meandered to avoid the line of surf. As they continued in silence, Parker wrestled with bringing up the interview he’d done before she ran away, the last straw where he cast doubt on her honesty. Rehashing that old pain didn’t sound appealing, especially after finding their way to this small peace. Finally, she said, “So, you contacted my dad and came all the way here just because of the letters?”
He sighed. “I’m going to work on the fishing boats in Alaska to save up for another year of school. It’s tough work, but it pays really well. This was sort of on my way, and like I said, I really hoped if you knew that you’d be stressing out my mom…”
“Yeah. I always liked your mom. If it were me, I’d totally stop. But like I said, the past is gone. I’m done with it.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” he said, with a ghost of a grin and a sidelong glance.
They walked on. She thought of Ryan, disfigured by duct tape, Adam, stabbed in the back, and grimaced. If only Jess knew how close the worst parts of the past seemed tonight.
“Well, it’s kind of nice to see you, anyway,” she offered. Strangely, it was true. With the tension broken, they fell into a comfortable silence. They hadn’t talked about their final fight…but it felt like they were even anyway. He’d publicly implied she knew something about Britt’s death—and Parker had deserted him without giving him a chance to explain. He hadn’t come after her, and it had felt like a betrayal of all they’d meant to each other.
Then. It felt like that, then. Now, it just seemed like one more fuckup in an enormous pile of fuckups, and it was time to let them all go.
Her stomach growled. They should eat dinner together, make peace, and wish each other well. Interview schminterview, she didn’t care anymore.
“Are you still in touch with Keith?” Jess said, out of nowhere.
“Keith Moore?” She barely remembered him, a redheaded kid who’d moved away after freshman year. The only reason she remembered him at all was because he sat next to her in algebra and tried to cheat off her paper.
“No. Krista’s little brother. Keith Murphy.”
“Oh. No.” Keith Murphy hadn’t even been in their grade. “I mean, Krista and I are still friends. She got me this job, actually. But I don’t think she talks to her brother much.” Parker tried to remember the last time Krista had mentioned him. “She said she saw him last Thanksgiving. Or it might have been the one before. Why? Are you thinking he would have sent the letters? That seems pretty unlikely.” Keith suffered brain damage in a bicycle accident during high school—one of several things that led to Krista’s Mom’s breakdown. He’d been living in a group home for years. Parker remembered Krista joking a few years back that Keith still had a genius IQ, but used his ‘so-called’ brain damage as an excuse not to get a job. Sometimes Krista’s humor was a little dark, even for Parker’s taste.
Jess was silent for a few steps. “You’re probably right. He was a weird kid, though. And he had a crush on Britt for a while. Well, what about Krista? Do you think Krista would have sent the letters?”
Parker snorted. “Okay, first, about Keith? There were probably seventeen guys who had a crush on Britt at any given time. Besides you and your best friend. And second, no. Absolutely not. Unlike most of the world, Krista remembers that you and Britt had broken up months before we started dating. She’s not your biggest fan, but she has no reason to torment you. Whoever’s doing it has to be someone who’s angry with you. Krista couldn’t care less what you and I got up to before or after Britt disappeared. Remember? She had her own shit going on.”
Jess frowned. “I don’t remember, actually. I wasn’t as close to her as you and Britt were.”
“Yeah. Well. She was having relationship issues.” Parker remembered very well. She’d gone to Planned Parenthood with Krista for moral support and driven her home afterward. “Everything piled on,” she said. “When people talk about how much they miss high school, I just look at them like, if only you knew. I mean, I guess things were okay into sophomore year. But we were all so stressed out, even before Britt got weird. Even before everything fell apart.”
Jess nodded. After a moment, he said, “Wait, who were all these guys who had a crush on Britt? Because I don’t remember you naming names to the police.”
“I’m exaggerating, probably. But all the guys thought she was hot. I couldn’t point a finger at someone obsessing about her, though.”
“Did you say Eric?” Jess persisted. “You said me and my best friend. And he did not. He was a good guy. He wouldn’t go after anyone I was dating.”
Parker mimed shock. “Oh my god, Jess, he totally crushed on her. The whole time you were dating! I can’t believe you didn’t see it. He was always talking to her, trying to sit next to her.”
Jess snorted. “Eric? Yeah, because he was avoiding talking to you and sitting next to you, that’s why he was awkward! Britt was a safe space for him. He had a crush on you, Parker.”
“He was a sarcastic jerk to me!”
“What I said.”
She shook her head, laughing. Jess must have been blind not to see how Eric looked at Britt. Plus, Parker had been single through most of high school. If Eric wanted to ask her out, there had been plenty of opportunities. Not that she would have said yes. Eric was kind of awkward all around.
Now it was Jess’s stomach that grumbled loud enough to hear over the surf. He made a face. “I think I need to get some dinner before I start digesting myself. Should we turn around?”
She checked their location. They’d come about a mile and a half, almost reaching the jetty, and fog was rolling in. It had that salty scent she loved, and she inhaled deeply and blinked away sudden tears.
“Hey, what is it?” Jess asked. He was always too observant for his own good.
“God, I don’t know,” she managed. “I actually—for a second there, I was feeling almost happy. Normal.”
He quirked up his lips. “Yeah, and—?”
“You’re just here as—I don’t know. As an errand, right? I mean, you came because of the letters. It’s not like you’re here as a friend. For a minute, it just felt different, like I was living a different life. Like all the bad things didn’t happen.”
“Corey. Parker. What things? You mean Britt?”
She almost nodded, not wanting to get into it. Not wanting to pretend Jess cared.
He seemed to read her mind. “I want to know,” he said. “You can tell me. I’m still a good listener.”
He had been a good listener back then. Their friendship had become closer as their other friends were swept up in their own lives. They’d talked a lot about Britt, even before she disappeared, but also about everything else. Life, the future, their parents.
Parker sniffled. “It’s not a big deal. I mean, it is a big deal, but it’s not about me.” They were heading north again, and he shot her an encouraging look. She hesitated, wondering if this would be the last straw. He knew she’d been exposed to three murders in the past. Her body-count was now up to five. Would he run screaming? He should.
She took a deep breath. “I’ve found two bodies in the last, oh, twenty-four hours. One last night, one this afternoon. Dead bodies. Murdered people. That I knew.”
“Oh my god, Parker, I’m so sorry. That’s crazy!” He showed no signs of running away. His face in the dark was shadowed and solemn.
“Yeah, tell me about it. Like one wasn’t enough.”
“So, they weren’t connected?”
She described finding Ryan, including the duct tape and the hat lying there as if intended to catch her attention. Jess knew the story of her mother, knew how much that one event had warped her life, and he shook his head.
When she talked about Adam, tears choked her up again. “It was like finding my neighbor, my babysitter, when I was eleven. She was stabbed, too, during a robbery. I told you about that, right?”
“I don’t remember all the details, but I remember it happened. This is seriously messed up,” Jess said.
“It really is.”
“I don’t know what to say. It’s horrible, and it’s unfair.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I mean, there’s nothing to say. It just is.”
They fell quiet as they climbed the steps back up the cliff. The dogs panted happily. Jess paused at the landing and turned to look over the ocean, and Parker broke the silence. “So, what kind of food do you want?”
He threw her a sideways glance. “Oh, you’re going to eat with me now?”
“I guess so.” She shot him a small smile.
“Well, is there anything good nearby?”
“Yeah, there’s good Mexican, or good pizza, or decent Thai, but it’s all the way across town. We could get it delivered, though.”
“You know, I get it if you want to be alone. You don’t have to—”
She raised her eyebrows. “I’m hungry too. And I was kind of being a bitch before. I’m sorry. Now that we got some of the weird shit out of the way, can we try the old friend thing a little more? Honestly, I don’t even mind if you sleep on my couch. Although, full disclosure, it’s actually a loveseat and kind of short.”
He hesitated. “Really? I’d like to keep talking. But I don’t want to put you out.”
“You won’t. And maybe we can talk about something besides murder and death.”
“Here’s hoping,” he said.
Chapter Nine
They brought the dogs upstairs and settled for frozen burritos and snacks from the grocery store. Parker felt disturbingly comfortable with him, like years and bad feelings had just fallen away, but she kept reminding herself that this was a temporary thing. Tomorrow, he would continue to Alaska, and she’d be on her own, still dealing with two murders. Still trying to keep the momentum going in her new, fake life, even as she was drowning in death. Jess’s appearance was a minor footnote in all this. She probably wouldn’t see or hear from him again for years.
But it had been a long time since she’d been around anyone but Krista who knew her so well, and it astounded her how easily they fell into old patterns. She kept doing a double take, because he had days of stubble on his face, and his shoulders had filled out, his hands roughened. What changes had happened below the surface? He seemed more thoughtful, slower to react. Less likely to drop f-bombs every other sentence.
They ate at the kitchen table under the too-bright glow of the overhead light. Jess was down to the last of his four burritos. Parker had long ago finished hers, and they dipped veggies into salad dressing to balance out the grease and salt. “So, what have you been doing?” she asked. “A while ago, my dad said you went away to college.”
Jess shrugged. “Yeah, after you left I dropped out too, but I took my GED that fall after our class graduated, and then applied to school. My idea was the farther away the better, but I ended up at the University of Maine for spring term. I was interested in marine biology. Anyway, that didn’t stick. Even in a place where no one really knew me, I was still reeling from the fact that Britt was actually dead. I mean, we’d been so sure that she was living it up somewhere, laughing at all the fuss. It was like that imaginary Britt kept going inside my head even though I knew it wasn’t true. On top of that, I kept thinking I saw you around campus. I thought you’d come back, and just, you know. Show up in my life. It was driving me nuts.”
Parker had imagined that Jess would do the same. Each had been waiting for the other to come and find them.
“So you dropped out?” she said.
“I dropped out. I stayed with my mom for a while, but she kicked me out after a few months. I guess I was kind of hard to live with. I got a construction job, and then another one, and then, I don’t know, months and years were going by and other people were graduating and getting real jobs and getting married and having kids, and I was spinning my wheels, working really hard but living in shitty apartments, partying it up on weekends.
“So, I decided to try school again. But I didn’t want to take out loans, so I saved up, and did a couple years, and now I’m going to save up again.”
“What are you going to school for?”
He grimaced. “It’s going to sound stupid.”
“Really? Now I definitely need to know.”
“Architecture.”
“What!” That was so far from anything she would have guessed. She remembered his doodles from high school. He’d been artistic in a cartoony way, but had never taken an art class. On the other hand, he’d always been in Honors level math classes.
“Yeah, crazy, right?”
“No, it doesn’t seem crazy. It’s unexpected, but it seems right somehow. I approve. You’ll have to show me one of your designs.”
“I will. Thank you.” He grinned.
After they finished, she flipped off the kitchen light, and they moved out to the balcony, where they sat on plastic chairs watching the distant waves, close enough to each other that she could feel the warmth radiating from his body. She wondered if he still felt the old attraction, and if he also recognized it was probably a bad idea. But she was hungry for connection. Jess was the past, but he was one of the few good things about the past, even though he was all tangled up with the worst thing.
Mouse and Pepper relaxed at their feet. Jess asked what Parker wanted to be when she grew up, and she told him her own GED and spotty schooling story. “I couldn’t figure out anything I could focus on. I couldn’t believe I would succeed at anything. I was working at bars, drinking too much…dating guys I didn’t even like. No health insurance, or long-term housing, or anything stable. Anyway, I was getting lower and lower, and I reached a point where I had to change or resign myself to the fact that my life was going to be all crap.”
“So what happened?”
“Mouse.”
“Mouse?”
“Yeah. This older lady that always came to my bar was a complete alcoholic. She would bring Mouse inside, and I’d let her smuggle Mouse under the table if it was pretty empty. She slept at her daughter’s house sometimes, but sometimes she just lived on the streets. So, she finally collapsed and had to move into a nursing home, and she told her daughter to give me Mouse.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think she knew how miserable I was, and that I was going downhill. Which is pathetic, that this random old lady who was half out of her mind could see that.” Parker laughed uncomfortably, but internally apologized to Franny, whose kindness and insight had been much more important than her altered states.
“Jeez, Parker.”
“Yeah. Well, she was right, though. I straightened out when I had Mouse to take care of. And when I realized I could end up where she was.” Thank you, Franny, Parker added silently.
“So—Mouse and I started walking and then running, which ended up being really good for me. I realized I could choose not to hang out in sleazy bars for the rest of my life, which Krista and my dad had both been trying to tell me for a while, to be fair. I started a program at the community college…and eventually I got this job.” Parker shrugged, feeling self-conscious about the massive hole in the middle of her story. False starts, money struggles, and more self-sabotage—not the stuff she wanted to share. The negative, cynical person she’d been for so many years hadn’t believed she could really change.
She took a deep breath. Her existence as Parker still felt like a miracle. “I think I’m doing the right thing. For me. For right now.”
“This?” he said. Somehow, he was looking into her eyes, and his arm was around her, familiar and novel at the same time.
Parker’s heart skipped a beat, and she kissed him.
****
Out of habit, Parker blinked blearily awake at six, although she and Jess had stayed up until almost two. With his warm back against hers, his even breathing tempting her back toward sleep, she marveled at how comfortable she felt. She should be panicking. But the tough times they’d gone through in the past were long over, and they were older and wiser now. No regrets, she thought, and almost believed it.
She slipped into the still-dark living-room, wondering if she could take the dogs out quickly and crawl back into bed. Her phone flashed on the coffee table. It was set to “Do Not Disturb,” so there was no sound, no vibration, and she wouldn’t have noticed the call if she weren’t standing right there, but since she was, she had to look. There weren’t too many casual reasons to call this early in the morning. What if it had something to do with the police investigations?
