Burn Our Bodies Down(19)

“I know,” Connors says wearily.

“My dad will want to speak to your captain, and I’m sure they’ll sort it out. After all, we’d probably have to cancel that fundraiser we’re hosting for you if this goes on too long.” She bats her eyelashes, shoots me a grin, and there’s the girl I met this morning, sharp and bored and better than you. It’s who I might’ve been, I think, if I’d grown up here. But that’s not true, is it? It means something else to be a Nielsen. I’d have been that girl in the field. The body in the burn.

“For the love of God,” Connors says, pointing to his desk next to Anderson’s, “sit down, and please, just for a minute, stop talking.”

He edges around Eli, whose hands are shoved in his pockets, his eyes empty. I wonder if the memory of the body is picking him apart the way it’s doing to me.

“Where are you going?” Tess calls as Connors heads for the conference room. “Don’t you want to separate us? Make sure we can’t get our stories straight?”

The door slams behind him. Through the broad window I watch him toss his hat down on the table and say something to Anderson, who rolls his eyes.

“One day, you’re going to annoy someone into murdering you,” Eli says, sitting heavily in the chair like mine that’s pulled up to Connors’s desk.

Tess smiles brightly. “What a way to go.” The glitter of it fades as she turns to me, taking in what I’m sure must be a sight. My hair coated in ash. My skin pink, blisters waiting underneath. I got too close for too long.

“Shit,” she says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I clear my throat, nervous. “Thank you both. For sticking up for me.”

“We were just telling the truth,” Eli says. He’s watching me the way the police did. Wary. Suspicious. “We were, right?”

“Yes,” I say in a hurry. “I know how it looks, but—”

“Lay off, Eli,” Tess cuts in. “She was just in a fire.”

His hand cracks down on Connors’s desk. “Yeah, so was I. I know you think this is a great story, but you have to be serious, okay, Tess? We could get in a lot of trouble.”

“For what?”

I stay quiet as Tess steps between me and Eli. She’s defending me. I don’t know why, but she is. I’m not about to stop her.

“I believe Margot,” she keeps on. “She said she came here alone, so she came here alone.”

Eli shakes his head, pushes to his feet. “You’re being naive.”

“I’m being a nice fucking person, actually.”

This feels like a fight they’ve had before. I watch as the two of them eye each other, tense and defensive, and I wait for it to spark into something worse like it would with me and Mom. Instead, Eli goes soft.

“Yeah,” he says. “That too.”

Tess glitters with triumph, her face shining as she grins over her shoulder at me. “He’s all right sometimes,” she stage-whispers. “I mean, it’s rare, but it does happen.” Eli sighs, long-suffering, as she faces him again. “Can you ask about a first-aid kit? Now?”

“Anything else I can get you?” he says flatly.

“Iced coffee. New car. World peace.”

“We’re friends why, exactly?”

“Phalene’s got limited inventory.”

“Oh, very nice.” He flips Tess off with a smile, and she does the same before he’s off across the bullpen, heading for the conference room door.

“Sorry about that,” she says, sitting in Anderson’s chair behind the desk. “We just get like that sometimes.”

She doesn’t seem worried, doesn’t seem to care that she’s in the station, being held for questioning. It’s probably easy to brush off when the world belongs to you. When you know that no matter what, you can’t be touched by something like this. Tess is in no danger. She never has been, but she certainly isn’t now, not when it was me the police kept pinned between them. Me, with a matching body out on the road.

“You really do believe me, then?” I ask.

“You saw that girl and you threw up. I feel like that’s hard to fake.” Tess turns serious for a moment, keeping her voice low even though the officers are behind a closed door. “But you get how it looks, right? She must be related to you or something. Whether you know her or not.”

I understand, I do. I’d be asking the same thing if I were Tess. And I wish I had a better answer for her, something harder to snap in half.

Somebody must know her. Somebody must have that answer. She was there, in that field. She had to have come from somewhere. “You said you live near Vera, right?” I ask. “If you’ve never seen her before, do you think she could’ve been hiding that girl at her house?”

Tess leans back, her glance flicking to the conference room, where Eli is waiting for one of the cops to answer the door. “That’s a big secret to keep. And she looked our age. Could you really hide a whole person for, like, eighteen years?”

I’d like to ask my mom the same thing, but I don’t say so.

She shrugs. “Then again, Vera doesn’t exactly invite people over. I’ve never even been there.”

“Seriously? Not even once?” I find that hard to believe. This is a small town. Isn’t it supposed to be friendly?