Come Find Me(34)

I feel my jaw clenching. “He doesn’t have email. He doesn’t use the phone. I don’t know if my letters get to him.” I used to send them, but eventually they were returned, unopened. I didn’t understand. I don’t understand.

The lawyers, Joe, none of them would let me see him. I thought it was because of them. Or because I’m working with the district attorney. For the facts. Just the facts. That’s what I told them. When his lawyer starts in on cross-examination, I’ll be able to tell them there must be another explanation. Elliot, who had never hurt anyone in his life, not even me. Elliot, who once tried to help me clean a cut on my knee (a slip off the railing, the first time I tried to sneak out), and who almost got sick just from looking at it. Mom called me her wild one, which made Elliot the stable one, the reliable one.

Elliot with his prints on the gun; Elliot, covered in blood. Elliot, running from the house, running away.

My nails dig into my palms.

“Maybe there’s someone else who would understand…,” Nolan says.

But I shake my head. “When Lydia looked at the program, she said something about the date,” I explain. “The date the program began.”

    “What date?” Nolan asks.

“December fourth,” I say, and I stare at him until I see the information process.

December fourth. Before. After. The split in my life, in the universe.

Something happened then. Elliot Jones was not himself.

“Don’t you see? This signal has to be some sort of warning. Something happened that night,” I explain. “Something dangerous.”

He’s shaking his head, but then he stops. He looks me over carefully.

“You see, don’t you?” I ask, but he seems to be somewhere else. I can tell from his expression, though—he does. He must.





December fourth. The day, according to the papers, that Elliot Jones killed his mother and his mother’s boyfriend, and then ran; schools remained closed in both their county and ours, for safety, until he was found the next day.

The story was this: Elliot’s mother and her boyfriend, Will Sterling, another professor at the college, were at some holiday event. Something happened when they came back to the house after midnight. The daughter—Kennedy, arriving home, sneaking back inside—saw Elliot running from the house. And then she found the bodies on the stairs.

It was a near miss, Sutton said. That Kennedy wasn’t home. That Kennedy was late. He knew her, he said, the girl who survived it. She was at her boyfriend’s house when it happened. Marco, I now know.

I’d seen the pictures in the paper, on the news: the two professors—the woman, with dark hair, smiling in her photo, with the sky and ocean behind her, and the rest of the photo cut away; and the man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard covering a square jaw.

    But Elliot’s photo is the one that haunts me the most: the dark, hollow eyes; the expressionless face as he stared back through the lens of the police camera.

The next day, while the search parties were still out, Elliot suddenly appeared, walking up the driveway, like nothing at all had happened, seemingly with no memory of the event. He was allegedly in the same clothes, dirty, shaken, the blood still under his nails. Sutton said Elliot made it almost all the way to the crime scene tape across the front door, asking, “What happened?” before someone stopped him.

He had no idea there was a manhunt under way for him at that very moment.

There were a lot of rumors: that he was high; that he was furious, that it was a chaotic attack; that he was completely calm and collected and carried out the crimes with a chilling precision. No one knows what really happened, only that he did it. But his trial is starting next week, so I guess we’re about to find out.

I tap my fingers on the steering wheel in the silence. “Um, are you hungry?” The clock gives us more time. A few more hours until she needs to be back, and I can see she does need something else. Something not in that ranch house with her uncle and the overgrown yard.

“Yes, actually,” she says. She sighs, like she’s irritated at her own hunger.

“Pizza?” Right at that moment, there’s a sign just off the highway for the World’s Best Pizza, which I think is probably optimistic, considering we’re in the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, half a mile from a jail. But who am I to judge?

    “Pizza,” she repeats, which I guess could be taken as either a Yes, pizza, please or a Pizza, are you serious? but I’m choosing to see it as the former, because I’m starving.

At the pizza place, we stand in line together, and she’s silent. I’m seriously the worst person for this. I’m terrible at knowing what to say, finding the right words in a crisis. Sorry your brother is in jail, but would you like extra cheese? She saves me from the awkwardness by ordering for both of us, only looking at me after the fact to make sure it’s okay. Well, I was right about one thing: she likes to be in charge.

I pull out my wallet. I have no cash, like seriously none. Like right now I have to decide between gas and dinner. I have a credit card for emergencies, though, and this suddenly feels like an emergency.

But she offers to pay instead. She insists, actually. “No, you drove, I’ll feed.”

I carry the drinks, and she takes our order number and props it on the table, where we wait for our pizza (pepperoni and sausage) to be delivered.