Positively Morbid, page 7
Parker checked out the lobby over her shoulder. No one on the other side of the thick glass paid them any attention. She took a deep breath. “Okay, you got this note. You thought it was an inside joke or a secret admirer or something harmless. And you were glad to be included. So, again, why did you wait until the night someone was murdered to break into my room?”
Calli pulled her green ponytail around to hide her face. “It had nothing to do with that!” she insisted. “It just took me a while to figure out how to get in. I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, so I had to get a blank keycard that wouldn’t leave a trail in the system. I stole one of the cleaner’s cards and she thought she misplaced it, so she borrowed a master to use temporarily. Then I snatched the master from her apron after she went home for the day.”
“Won’t she get in more trouble for losing a master than for losing her own card? If I was the boss, I’d be pretty suspicious.”
“I returned it! I hid it under some towels on a cart. Someone probably found it already, and they’ll think it was just an innocent mistake.”
Except it wasn’t. Parker gritted her teeth. “Okay. Go on.”
“So, I was all ready to go in yesterday morning, but I had second thoughts. You seemed a little on edge when I talked to you, remember? I thought you might yell at me if you caught me.” She stole a look at Parker, whose cheeks heated. Was that how she seemed to people? Edgy? It was true that Jess’s call had thrown her for a loop. Maybe Calli was especially observant.
“Go on,” Parker said.
“Not like you were going to explode,” Calli said hurriedly. “More like you were trying to make everyone happy, and you might, you know…think it was childish and annoying? So I wasn’t going to do it at all, and then I got another note in my pocket yesterday.”
She reached into the pocket of her tunic and pulled out a triangle of paper, folded in a way Parker remembered from high school.
Parker unfolded it slowly. On the inside, in block letters written in faded pencil, it said: HURRY! DO IT NOW! OR ELSE…
“Or else what?” Parker asked.
“I don’t know. I thought, or else the right moment will be lost, or something like that. So what, right? And then that guy died. And I got scared. It can’t have anything to do with me, right? He probably pissed someone off. Obviously. But. I grabbed my chance when you were talking to the police.” Calli was talking so quickly she tripped over her tongue, trying not to come out and say that she felt threatened by a vague and anonymous note.
“Yeah,” Parker exhaled. “I guess I would have been scared too. But Calli, are you sure this isn’t some friend of yours messing with you? Who else would have been able to get close enough to put something in your pocket?”
“I don’t have any friends here. I mean, not kids. It’s got to be a friend of yours, someone on the staff. A tennis coach or one of the cute waiters or something. Satoru.”
Satoru was an extremely ripped waiter, whose hotness level even Parker had noticed. “A: Satoru is barely twenty-one years old. He’s way too young for me. But too old for you! And B: I don’t know anyone very well yet, either.”
“But someone might want to get to know you.”
Parker considered. Was it possible? “Wait, Calli. The first note—did it say lavender flowers?”
“Yeah. Lavender means serenity, it said. I thought, because you’re like, Miss Meditation. I just couldn’t find any good ones, so I pulled them out of this wreath my mom has.”
Parker looked at her, shivering in the autumn breeze. If Calli were to be believed, Parker was as clueless as before. Lavender flowers for serenity. Funny, she didn’t feel serene.
“Okay,” Parker said finally. “It all sounds super weird, and I feel really uncomfortable about it, and I want you never, ever to go into my rooms or anyone else’s rooms without a specific invitation again. You totally abused your knowledge of the keycard system. I should tell your parents.”
Calli jerked back. “You can’t!”
“I can. I should.”
“I told you, I just…it was just for fun! I just wanted to be, you know…” She covered her face.
Parker resisted the urge to comfort her. “I was about to go tell the police about the intruder, because I was scared it had something to do with the murder.”
“It didn’t! I swear!”
“You don’t actually know that if you don’t know who gave you the notes or why,” Parker pointed out. It was still lavender. It was still a disturbing coincidence.
Calli shook, her hands covering her face. Great, now there was a sobbing teenager in the middle of everything.
Okay. What if, instead of someone wanting to remind Parker of her mother’s death, it really was someone with a crush on her? Someone with an adolescent level of social intelligence, one of the younger waiters or cleaners or fitness coaches, who saw her as an attractive older woman. Or even someone closer to her own age. The part-time trainer who oversaw the weights room seemed really awkward. Was he someone who might look up the meaning of flowers online and think it was clever? By that logic, anyone might pick lavender because meditation and lavender were both associated with calm. Maybe someone would come clean soon and ask her out, and all this anxiety would be for nothing.
Parker blew out her breath. “Calli, you just told me you were scared when the note said, ‘or else.’ If you felt threatened, it’s definitely a police matter.”
Calli shook her head again. A tear glimmered in her eyelashes but didn’t fall. “I was just being stupid. I don’t think it was supposed to scare me. Nobody could have known there would be a murder!”
“Calli, do you know who wrote the notes?”
“No!”
“I’m not sure I can believe you.”
“You should!” she said defiantly, and met Parker’s eyes. Calli’s were hazel, brown and green with a little fleck of gold in the left like a chip of mica.
Parker thought for a moment, then asked, “Did you keep the first note?”
“No. It said to destroy it. Like a spy movie.” Calli shrugged, and her earrings, little plastic hula girls, danced.
“Can you remember what it said?”
She considered. “Not exactly, but pretty close. It was something like, ‘You are the only one who can help me. Flowers for PJ—lavender for serenity. In her room, as a special surprise. Please help!’”
Then she added, “Down at the bottom, at the end, it said: ‘thank you this is important don’t mess up!’”
“Did it look like the same handwriting as the one you showed me? Block letters?”
Calli nodded.
Parker narrowed her eyes. Another coincidence had just occurred to her. Getting flowers in her room the same day she heard from Jess. He knew a lot of personal things about her that no one here knew. Could he have arranged for Calli to get the notes? Or could he secretly be here already? But unless Jess had changed a lot, he wouldn’t think this kind of thing was amusing.
Parker turned to Calli. “Okay, fine,” she said. “I won’t report it to the police, at least not yet.”
Hope lit up Calli’s face. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. I think you’re probably right. Someone has a crush and a weird way of showing it.” She didn’t add, or someone wants to scare me, and used you to do it. “But I don’t want to get you in trouble, and now that I know it was you that got into my room, I’m less scared.”
“I’m really sorry,” Calli said softly. She looked like such a kid. A busty, green-haired kid, but still a kid. Isolated in a backwater town, befriending the staff at her parents’ resort instead of hanging out with regular kids. Parker wondered if Seth and Marta had done anything to get her to mix with the locals. Sure, homeschooling was great, and Calli was obviously smart and sophisticated and mature in some ways, but she seemed awfully lonely.
“Do you like hiking?” Parker asked abruptly. “Mouse and I were going to drive down to Cape Perpetua and go for a hike in the woods.”
Calli’s face lit up. “Um, yeah. I would love that, but—”
“Oh, right, you’re grounded?”
“No, I mean, they’d probably let me go hiking. It’s all healthy and everything. It’s just, I’m not dressed for the outdoors.”
“That’s okay. I can wait a few minutes,” Parker said.
“Um, yeah! Thanks! I’ll be right back.”
Parker texted Krista as she waited.
—Not going to police. you’d never guess, break in was Calli—
Krista—Kali, destroyer of worlds. Should have guessed—
Parker—Ha, great nickname. Are u still in touch?—
Maybe she could get Krista to reiterate how stupid it was to do things anonymous notes told you to do.
Krista—Facebook friend I think? Can’t remember—
Parker—But you don’t talk?—
Krista—She’s, like, 8 years old. Why?—
Parker—17. As you know. Nevermind, long story—
Krista—You should still go to police—
Parker—Idk. Prob not—
Parker saw Calli through the glass and added a quick gtg, hit send, and stood. If she got to know Calli a little better, she could figure out if there was more to this story.
Calli had changed into jeans and switched the black fishnet sweater for a heavy purple poncho that hung almost to her knees, with a green knit hat and a fuzzy black scarf for added warmth. Fingerless gloves accented her green fingernails.
“Ta-da! Better?” she asked.
Her knitted hat had big froggy googly eyes, and ear flaps shaped like frog legs. Parker gave her a thumbs up, then noticed her new-looking hi-tops. “It might be a little muddy. You don’t mind if those get dirty?”
Calli looked dubiously at her spotless canvas high-tops. “Um, no…? I don’t have anything better.”
“They’ll work,” Parker assured her. “You can always hose them down. Okay, Mouse, finally, car!”
Mouse grinned.
****
Parker drove south with a sense of relief. Fluffy clouds had re-populated the sky, and the air felt moist and cool. Rain was in the forecast, but she thought it would hold off until evening, long after their hike was over.
She looked sideways at Calli. The girl stared out the passenger window as if she’d never seen the ocean before. Maybe she’d never come this far down the highway. Her preparation for the hike must have included reapplication of perfume, and a fug of patchouli mixed with the salty air blowing in. Parker rolled her eyes internally. What made the girl douse herself for a walk in the woods? At seventeen, Parker’s mind had been full of morbid preoccupations and the grim reality of Britt’s murder, but despite last night’s events, Calli was probably the picture of what ‘normal’ growing pains looked like.
It made Parker nostalgic for the adolescence she never had. Britt and Krista hadn’t either, which had drawn them together. Between the three of them, they had more than enough dysfunctional exposure to be teenaged cynics. Britt with her overbearing mother, cold and judgmental to the point of cruelty. Krista with her parents’ marriage imploding in torturous slow motion, even before her brother’s accident. Parker had been overexposed to death, but compared to either of their families, at least her dad had been dependable and loving. Funny how, at the time, she’d barely noticed.
Mouse bathed her nose in the airstream of the open window behind Calli, eyes bright. Nothing like seaweed and fish molecules from the beach mixed with exhaust fumes and roadside restaurant burgers to make a dog happy. Mouse basked in the present moment, and Parker envied that, but she couldn’t keep herself from continuing to shuffle and reshuffle Calli’s story.
Theory number one: the strongest theory. Calli was lying about pretty much everything, and had conveniently destroyed the most important piece of proof, the original detailed note, if it had ever existed. She was lonely, curious about Parker, and interested in Mouse, so she’d made up a reason to sneak into Parker’s apartment and have an excuse to connect. The notes were a lie—Calli wrote the second one herself. The lavender was a coincidence, the easiest flower to get her hands on because her mom had some in their apartment. And she could have looked up the serenity thing. Yes, it was a strange and even stalker-like thing to do, but she was a strange girl, prone to lurking in out of the way corners and scribbling in notebooks or tapping on screens at all hours. A shy and lonely girl, desperate for a dash of drama but mostly needing a friend before she got too caught up in her own obsessions.
Parker thought that sounded pretty solid. It only became a stretch when paired with Ryan’s death, and with Calli’s odd choice of timing. She could have broken into the apartment anytime, so why choose the night of the murder?
Parker had to consider other options.
Theory number two: Calli was telling the truth and nothing but the truth. The note-writer was real, and had a stalker-like crush on Parker, as Calli had suggested. Or, theory three: Calli was telling the truth, the note-writer was real, but Calli was wrong about their motives. They were trying for unknown reasons to torment Parker with pieces of her past, and Calli was a gullible tool. In both scenarios, Calli either knew who they were and was covering for them, or really didn’t know who they were, as she claimed.
A fourth theory occurred to Parker as she stole a glance at the back of Calli’s tangled hair and the curve of her pale cheek; this girl had somehow learned Parker’s birth name, uncovered details about her past, killed Ryan and defaced him with duct tape, then left Parker the lavender to further undermine her stability, for some motive known only to Calli. Parker was no psychiatrist, and she realized that there were sociopaths out there who were really good at seeming harmless—but still. Too ridiculous. Calli would have to be an award-winning actress to fake the awkward vulnerability which she constantly broadcasted. Plus, how could she have figured out Parker’s birth name? Why would she have thought to look? Calli made the most unlikely teenage psycho ever, and it was only the influence of too many horror movies that led Parker to consider it.
She strove to push away the irrational suspicions and hold on to her “shy and lonely girl making an excuse to connect” theory. Would Parker have to resist the feeling of paranoia until the police caught Ryan’s killer? Would she have to leave the Tyler Bettering Institute to escape her newly raised ghosts? Her heart ached at the thought. As recently as yesterday at lunch, she’d dared to believe things were working out, that she could pull this off and keep her new, upbeat, contented life.
A brown sign with a pictograph of hikers loomed up abruptly after a blind corner, and Parker swung off the road onto a gravel pull-out. “Look, we’re here!” she announced. She’d chosen a less well-known hike just south of Yachats instead of the popular Cape Perpetua, and there was only one other car parked there.
Calli looked around. “Where are we?”
“Just past Yachats. This is a beautiful hike. You’ll like it.”
Calli’s face was dubious. Parker got out of the car and clipped on Mouse’s leash, and Calli climbed out to join them. The head of the dirt trail looked narrow and dark amid a tangle of overgrown blackberry vines scattered with roadside trash, and cars continued to whiz by at sixty miles an hour on the highway.
“I promise,” Parker said. “When we’re twenty yards in, you’ll barely hear the cars, and the trees open up. We’ll have a bit of a climb, but when we get to the top, there’s a great view of the ocean.”
“You mean the ocean I see every day from my window?”
Parker narrowed her eyes at her. “You asked to come, remember?”
“Um, yeah, I just got a little carsick, sorry. I’m sure it’ll be great.” Calli flashed a smile.
Parker stuffed the leash into the girl’s hands, and Calli yelped in surprise as Mouse leaped forward, pulling her up the trail. Parker followed, and they hiked at a good pace for a while, their breath coming faster. The air was rich with the scents of damp soil and pine. Calli’s shoes slipped a few times on slick earth or tree roots, but she had good balance and Mouse kept her scrambling forward. She exclaimed over mushrooms on the side of the trail and the newts and slugs making their slow way across dirt and fallen spruce needles.
Eventually they came to a bench fashioned from a fallen tree, and Calli plopped down despite Mouse’s evident desire to continue. “How much farther?” Calli said breathlessly.
“Another twenty or thirty minutes until we get to the viewpoint. The rest won’t be as steep, though!” Parker added when her face fell.
“I’m not really used to hiking,” Calli said, rubbing her legs. “I thought I was in pretty good shape, but I guess not.”
“You’re doing fine. It’s okay to take a break whenever you want. We’re not in a rush.”
They sat for a few minutes, and Parker considered and rejected asking more questions about the lavender incident. She didn’t want to put Calli on the defensive again. Instead, Parker casually asked her about what online high school was like.
“It’s fine,” Calli shrugged. “I’m a year ahead of most kids my age.”
“That’s amazing. Good for you. Does that mean you’ll graduate early?”
Calli looked down at her lap, letting a swoop of loose hair fall across her face. “I guess. Maybe I’ll take some college classes for credit or something. Like, before I graduate.”
“What about sports teams? Or being part of the band? Do you play an instrument?”
Calli snorted and shot Parker a wry look. “Yeah, right. No, I’m completely non-athletic, as you can see. And non-musical. If I did a thing like that, I’d do theater. Last year I got a part in a community play. It was pretty cool, but kind of intense, and my mom got annoyed because practice would go past ten at night sometimes. She didn’t like having to be at the theater that late.”
“Wow, that’s great. I wish I had seen it,” Parker said. “I could never get up on a stage like that.”
Calli blushed and grinned. “Yeah. It was kind of a rush. Maybe Mom will let me try again. I’m old enough to go by myself and walk home alone. The theater is just a few blocks away.”
