Lies We Bury(68)

Another patch of white reflects the camera’s flash. A business card.

I inch closer to the body, ready to recoil at the slightest movement. Nudging the rectangular paper out from under the arm with my shoe, being careful not to touch it directly, I bring my cell phone’s flashlight down low and read the two lines of text I spent hours crafting: CL PHOTOGRAPHY. HEADSHOTS. SENIOR PORTRAITS. GRADUATIONS. The business card that I used for all of three weeks before I regretted creating the paper trail.

Scratching reaches my ears. Shuffling. Footsteps.

I grab the card, then turn and sprint to the cellar opening, panic pushing me harder and faster away from the dark. Launching myself up the stairs and into the restaurant, I pause to listen for whether anyone is pursuing me, and my heartbeat fills my ear canals. I cast an eye for the rat, but it’s nowhere in sight. Long gone, as I should be.

Topher’s voice sounds from somewhere deeper within the restaurant. Instead of seeking him out, I walk toward the front entry as if I were simply a customer who’s finished downing my evening beer. A figure blocks the exit. Oz.

“Claire. I thought you were going home.”

I stare at him, unsure of how this conversation is supposed to go. Unsure of anything after what I just discovered. There’s a fourth body, a business card I made and scattered around a college town—accessible to anyone who visited coffee shops and student dining halls—wedged underneath. The killer has always been one step ahead of me. Returning to a former location, without notifying me, to leave another item from my past.

Oz’s features blur in my vision. He waves a hand in front of my face, peers at me with more than concern after I ditched him to return to this crime scene. “What is going on? I received an anonymous tweet telling me to come here.”

My muscles clench, preparing to run. Whoever tweeted Oz wanted him to find me here, emerging from below—or simply to find the body and my card together. It’s Oz’s job to sniff out the truth and alert the public, the authorities, about it.

“I got to go. I just remembered, I have to—” I push past him, then slip on the tile and land hard on my shoulder. The breath gets knocked out of me, and my world becomes the rotating ceiling fan above.

“Whoa, are you okay? Claire? You all right? Man, the floor is all wet. Where the hell is a caution sign?”

Animal noises struggle from my throat. I gasp for air but can’t move, can’t breathe.

“Oh, hell. Claire, you’re okay. Listen, you’re going to be fine. The wind. You had the wind knocked out of you. Breathe.”

Thanks, genius. I’ll try that. The fan’s blades rotate in quick turns, mesmerizing to watch from the cold tile that Topher warned me about. Where is Topher?

But I didn’t yell—didn’t scream. I only fell like deadweight. Like the dead body down in the cellar.

I struggle to my elbows, and a sharp pain shoots down my right side where I landed, sending spots through my vision all over again. Fuck. The inhale I manage to take feels like sucking air through a straw. After another meager effort, the animal noises subside and I’m able to breathe.

“Uh. Claire? Your stuff scattered everywhere. I tried to wipe your things off.” Oz’s voice is flat, strained, and I lift my eyes to his frightened expression. In his right hand, he holds my driver’s license and a dish towel. In his left, he holds my camera. Panic tightens my chest—terror—separate from the spill I just took.

“Your ID says ‘Marissa Claire Lou,’” he continues. “You’ve been using your middle name. That much I can understand if you don’t like Marissa. But what is this?” He holds up my camera, turning the square display to face me. The last photo I took glows on the screen: a pale, prostrate body lying beneath a plastic tarp.

“What the hell is this?” he whispers.

I grab my camera and my ID from him. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“What does it look like, Claire—or Marissa? I’m curious to know.”

I sling the camera strap around my neck, avoiding his eyes while I hoist my messenger bag onto my good shoulder. But the engraved label—MCM—catches his eye.

Understanding blanches his skin. “Marissa Claire Mo. You’re Chet Granger’s daughter. Each of the details from the Granger incident report—the penguin . . . the bracelet you were wearing . . . the baby blanket—showed up near these victims. You’re the murderer.” He takes a step backward. “Our killer is a woman, after all.”

I reach out a hand. “No, Oz, that’s not—”

“Stay away from me!” he yells.

A pair of men at a table stops their conversation and turns toward the noise. Topher raises his head from behind the bar.

I run.

Bursting through the front doors, I don’t slow down until I’m a block away at the corner. Fear strangles my breath, pulsating from every pore, as I look behind me. Oz stands outside the brewery entrance, a hundred yards off. Instead of shock knitting his features, his face is calm, relaxed. Determined. As if he’s already decided what he must do next.





Twenty-Seven

In the fifth grade, I was surprised to learn no one really knows why we dream. We theorize that dreams help us work through problems from our waking hours and that dreams help us to store memories—but as my teacher then said, science doesn’t yet know. I left school that day feeling certain that I did. Dreams were meant to store memories. It was for that reason that I embarked on a sleep strike. Every six months or so, I would dream for several nights in a row that I was back in the basement. I thought if I could stop sleeping, I would interrupt that storage cycle and hopefully remove those memories altogether.