No One Knows Us Here(81)

The knife slipped from my fingers and clattered to the floor. The sound jarred me, and I snapped out of my trance. My mind went from blank to overloaded in the space of a second. I blinked my eyes and looked down at Leo Glass’s body, and I understood what I had done. I took in a breath and covered my mouth with my hand, stifling a scream.

Then I did scream. I screamed for help.

When the echoes of my screams faded, I closed my eyes, trying to think.

This didn’t look like any kind of accident I had ever heard of. It was too late for that. I would get caught—there was no question about that. They would find me. I’d be the first person any reasonable person would suspect. I had the three main criteria the police looked for in a killer. Motive, means, opportunity.

I couldn’t dispose of the body. It would be impossible. My DNA was all over this place. My golden hairs threaded through the fibers of his clothes. My skin cells in the dust. I’d met his mother. Alejandro, Teddy, even Margorie. Everyone in La Cuisine. Everyone knew about me.

Calling the police was how I got out of this. It was the only way. That was the plan, I reminded myself. I scrambled across the loft, searching for my bag. Usually I set it down as soon as I came in, right by the door. Yes—there it was, on a small table. My hands shook as I opened it. My hands were clean. This struck me as strange. I turned them over in front of my eyes, inspected each side carefully. Not a drop of blood. The diamond on my left hand glinted, even in this unlit corner of the loft.

The Mirror wasn’t there. I dropped my bag back on the table. Of course. I had destroyed it. Boiled it alive.

I would have to use Leo’s. I made a mad dash through the loft with the hope that he had set it down somewhere. He hadn’t. Back at the island of the kitchen, I positioned myself just right, so I could avoid looking at the body lying on the ground on the other side, wedged between the island and the stove. He kept the Mirror in his back pocket, usually. I could go over to the body, reach underneath him, dig it out.

You’re never supposed to move a body. It would tamper with the evidence. Police needed to see exactly how someone died in order to solve the crime. I closed my eyes and tried to think. I couldn’t think; I wasn’t thinking straight at all. What did I care if the police solved this crime? It was self-defense. I wanted it to look like self-defense. If I dug out his Mirror to make the call, that would only support my story. Right? Yes. It would play. I needed to retrieve his device from his corpse, from a pool of his cold, sticky blood—

There was just no way. I couldn’t bear to tiptoe around the island and look at him lying there, twisted up like a deer on the side of the road, a lump of bones and skin and blood that had moments before been alive, its heart beating madly, its lungs pumping air in and out, in and out.

I opened my eyes again. There was still a way to make this work, to call this in, to tell the story to the authorities, a story they might believe. There was still a chance.

“Hola, Consuela,” I said out loud, in a weak, trembling little voice. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hola, Consuela.” This time my voice was strong, like a captain issuing orders to her crew. “Dial 911.”

I stood still, listening. I waited to hear a dial tone, waited to hear someone at the other end of the line. It was silent, as silent as I’d ever heard it up here. Even the dishwasher made no sound. A blue light shone down from the machine onto the polished cement floors, refracted off the pool of blood.

I began to unravel. I lifted my hand to my face and felt my skin, broken and swollen. When I placed my hand in front of my eyes, I saw blood on my fingers and I reared back, afraid, for a moment believing that Leo’s blood had appeared there spontaneously, burst from my hands like the stigmata of Christ. Then I laughed out loud. It was my blood. I’d hit my head against the cabinets. I had done this; I’d done it to myself. For the first time I felt the pain in my face, the skin swelling from the smacks I’d delivered against the surface of the cabinets. My sinuses tingled when I took in a breath.

“Hola, Consuela,” I said again. When nothing happened, I yelled it into the apartment, over and over. “HOLA, CONSUELA! HOLA, CONSUELA! HOLA, please! Por favor! It’s an EMERGENCY!”

After that I stopped thinking altogether. I moved like a robot around the island and lifted the knife from the floor. I stepped over to the sink, careful not to set foot in Leo’s blood. It didn’t disgust me. It interested me, in that moment. It was like I wasn’t seeing it at all, but processing it in a clinical, dispassionate way.

I ran the knife under water and washed it with dish soap, using no sponge or cloth. I scrubbed the blade with my own fingers and then let the hot water rinse all the evidence down the drain. I dried the blade with the dishcloth and then, holding the blade with the cloth, hung it back on the magnetic rack. Every knife hung straight up and down, in descending order of size. The boning knife rested between the Santoku and a serrated utility knife. The sight of them assured me that everything was going to be okay. I stuffed the dishcloth down the front of my dress and went over to the table to collect my handbag. After surveying the loft one more time, I slipped my arms through the sleeves of my coat, and I walked out the door.



Out on the street, the air was cold and damp, but it wasn’t raining. I pulled my hood up over my head and put on my sunglasses, glancing up and down the street. No one had seen me exit the building. I stood there for what must have been several minutes before I heard voices in the distance. The Park Blocks, a moment before dark and empty, now teemed with people, talking and laughing. I walked toward them, into the crowd, and stopped to wait in the shadows at the trunk of a giant ash tree.