The Row(76)

With a final shudder his body relaxes and his eyes become unfocused. By now the entire front of Mr. Masters’s shirt and jacket are red with blood, and there is a rapidly spreading damp spot on the ground beneath him.

I kneel beside his head, a slow numbness creeping over me like the ocean tide on the beach.

“Mr. Masters?” I whisper, but there’s no response. My own voice seems far away, and I move in a daze. On instinct, I do what I always see people do at crime scenes on TV. I press my fingers against his neck, trying to find a throbbing pulse—something to give us hope that he can be saved.

I feel nothing.

Jordan is covered in blood up to his elbows and his skin is deathly pale in contrast. He keeps putting pressure on Mr. Masters’s chest and repeating his name. Finally, I reach out and grab Jordan’s wrist.

“He’s gone,” I say, then I repeat it again until it sinks in for both of us. “He’s gone. He was trying to help Daddy. He was trying to help me, Jordan. He came here to meet us, and oh God … he’s gone.”

My voice cracks, and Jordan finally looks up at me. Neither of us speaks. There isn’t anything to say.

Suddenly there are flashlights and shouting people everywhere. Not people—police. I look for the phone Masters had pushed out of my hand. I didn’t call them. Jordan is yanked to his feet and I see Chief Vega behind him. He grabs Jordan’s face and looks hard at him. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

I glance in the direction Stacia ran and raise my shaking hand to point that way. “Stacia … she ran that way.”

Vega looks down at me, his face a mask. Then he nods, releases Jordan, and starts shouting orders.

She really killed Masters? How could this have happened? Nothing makes any sense. I squint into the darkness but I see no movement anywhere in sight. My entire body is quaking even though I don’t feel cold. In fact, I’m so hot I think I’m sweating. My brain and body don’t appear to be communicating, and I can’t figure out how to make them start talking to each other again.

I hear Jordan’s voice from a distance as I smooth Mr. Masters’s silver hair back off his forehead. “We didn’t get a chance to call you. How did you know to come?”

“Mr. Masters called me fifteen minutes ago and said I needed to come. He said he thought you were in danger at Mason Park, and then he hung up.” Another officer comes up, pulling Vega’s attention away.

Out of nowhere, one of the chess games I played with Daddy comes to mind. I’d thought I had him, and then he turned everything around on me in a completely unexpected move.

Always make your smartest possible move, and keep the endgame in sight.

Mr. Masters must’ve called the police just after he called me. Did he know Stacia was here then? Did he know how dangerous she is? He and Daddy are the smartest men I’ve ever known and somehow they’d both been cornered, trapped. We’re running out of options in an increasingly deadly game, and now I have to face it without either of them.

Jordan kneels beside me. He keeps trying to close Mr. Masters’s coat over the wound, but with the position of his body, it refuses to stay closed. I’m deeply grateful for the numbness that seems to be protecting me from feeling anything right now, because one of us has to function.

I smooth my hand over Mr. Masters’s face, closing his eyes before I climb up on my trembling legs. Chief Vega looks over at me and tells the person he has on the phone to hold on.

I turn and look him straight in the eye. “I w-want to help you. Tell me what you need to know.”





33

“WHY DID YOU COME HERE TONIGHT?” Chief Vega asks once he has me wrapped in a paramedic blanket and seated on the front of his car.

“M-Mr. Masters asked us to meet him here,” I answer, trying to ignore the worried way Jordan is watching me from his seat in the back of the ambulance. The paramedic keeps trying to clean the blood off his hands—Mr. Masters’s blood.

An intense wave of dizziness hits me, and I tilt on the car hood. Chief Vega reaches out to steady me, but I place my hands on the hood beside me and do it myself.

“Did he tell you why he wanted you to meet him?”

“Not exactly,” I answer, my throat feeling and sounding raw. “He said he had information about my dad’s case.”

I hesitate before continuing with a biting edge. “I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with that.”

Chief Vega acts as though I didn’t add the last part as he asks a few more questions about whether Stacia saw us and if Masters gave us any reason to think Stacia was involved.

“You said you saw two figures in the clearing before you heard the gunshot.” He squints down at his paper before looking at me again. “What were they doing?”

“I heard her yelling, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.” I think back on the image of the two figures fighting in the clearing. “They were struggling. Maybe fighting over the gun, I don’t know.”

Then I hear the gunshot again in my head and I flinch.

Chief Vega puts down his notebook. “Let’s take a break. I’ll get the rest of the answers at the station. Okay?”

“Okay.” I’m grateful. I need a minute to process this before talking more about the end of Mr. Masters’s life. It’s too much.