Page 18

Jet pressed the doorbell, holding on just longer than was polite.

Jet reached for the bell again.

‘Give them a minute,’ Billy said, behind her on the steps.

‘I’m running out of minutes.’ She ignored him, pressed the bell again, three short bursts.

The door swung inward, Gerry Clay’s face appearing in the crack, his dark skin wrinkling as he blinked them in. Recognized them a second later, the wrinkles becoming smile lines.

‘Oh, hello Jet. Nice to see you so early. ’

‘Hi Gerry.’ She arranged a smile to match his. ‘Got your card. Really thoughtful , thanks.’

Gerry’s smile faltered, eyes trailing to the bandage at the side of her head.

‘Do they know who –’

‘– Not yet,’ Jet cut him off. ‘We’re working on it. Actually, that’s why we’re here. I remember your son was taking photos at the Halloween Fair. It would be really useful to see those. Is he in?’

Gerry stuttered, trying to take that all in. ‘Uh, y-yes, he’s here. In the yard, actually, flying his drone. He – he does that a lot.’

‘Better than meth.’ Jet took another step forward, forcing Gerry’s hand.

‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked, moving back, holding the door open.

Of course that’s what she wanted. ‘Thanks,’ she said instead, passing him, stepping down the hall, Billy on her heels.

‘Come through to the kitchen,’ Gerry’s voice sailed past them, the front door clicking shut.

A rectangular mirror was mounted on the far wall of the hallway.

Jet watched as their reflections approached, real people meeting mirror people: Jet too small that only the top half of her face showed, Billy too tall that his head was cut off at the top, only one swinging arm of Gerry visible behind.

Jet paused for one second, caught her eye. The right eye. She’d noticed it in the bathroom mirror when she woke up, and it hadn’t gone away. The pupil on this side was dilated, huge, a black hole, not much space for the orbit of hazel around it.

‘You OK?’ Billy asked, catching up. If he’d noticed it too, he hadn’t said anything yet.

‘Fine.’ Jet dropped her own gaze and turned, following the hall into the bright kitchen at the back, sage-green cabinets and white marble counters. There was a faint high-pitched whine coming from somewhere.

Gerry circled past them, headed for the glass doors into the backyard.

‘I need to get to work, but Owen will help you out with those photos.’ He rapped his knuckles on the glass.

A teenager was standing in the backyard, lost inside a baggy hoodie, some kind of remote clutched in his hands. He glanced up as Gerry knocked again, beckoning him in with a curt spin of his hand.

The sharp whining grew louder, angry and waspish, as the drone lowered into view, landing in the grass by Owen’s feet. He picked it up and hurried toward the door.

‘I’m off to work,’ Gerry announced as Owen shut the door behind him, placing the drone down carefully on the kitchen table. ‘This is Dianne Mason’s daughter. You help her out, OK?’

He didn’t give his son a chance to respond. ‘I’ll give my best to your mom, Jet,’ he said with a wave, heading back to the hallway and the front door. It thudded shut behind him.

Owen stood there, shrinking inside his hoodie, blinking at them.

‘I’m Jet,’ she said. ‘This is Billy. You’re Owen.’

He swallowed, studying his own feet. Painfully awkward – the kind you maybe didn’t grow out of.

Jet didn’t have time for awkward.

‘We’re here to see the photos you took at the Halloween Fair.’

Owen shuffled, one foot nuzzling the other. ‘They’re not fully edited yet.’

‘That’s really OK. We’re under a bit of time pressure.’

Owen glanced up from his feet, an unasked question on his face.

Jet exhaled. ‘On Halloween, someone hit me over the head, and now I’m going to die in five days, so it would be really great to look at those photos so we can figure out who killed me. Or we can all stare at our feet some more.’

‘Oh, that’s you,’ Owen said, a little more life in his voice.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’

Owen’s eyes shifted behind Jet, to Billy, trailing up all six feet, two inches of him, across those wide shoulders. He shrank inside his hoodie even more, like he had any reason to.

‘I’m just Billy,’ Billy said.

He forgot the poor and sweet.

‘OK, these are all the files. Six hundred and twenty-eight in total.’

They were in the teenager’s bedroom, Owen sitting at his desk in his spinning chair, two large curved monitors glaring over him, Jet and Billy hovering behind.

‘Did you get any drone footage that night too?’ Billy asked.

Owen shook his head. ‘Just photos. Didn’t take her out that night.’

Her. Urgh.

‘OK great, we’ll have a look through these, thank you so much.’ Jet gestured toward the door.

Owen didn’t budge, hand still cupped around the wireless mouse.

‘OK, Owen, that’s great,’ Jet said, harder. ‘We’ll have a look at these now. You can go back to playing with your girlfriend in the backyard.’

‘I don’t have a – Oh.’

‘Yeah,’ Jet said. ‘Up you get.’

Owen got reluctantly to his feet.

‘OK,’ he sniffed. ‘Well, don’t delete anything.’

‘Won’t, I promise.’ Jet took his chair, eyeballed him until he left his bedroom, disappearing down the stairs.

‘He’s definitely got some kind of weird porn downloaded on this computer,’ Jet said, turning to the monitor, fingers finding the mouse.

‘Stop traumatizing teenage boys.’ Billy leaned his elbows on the desk beside her.

‘I do not traumatize teenage boys.’

‘You did.’

She double-clicked on the first file, and the photo opened full screen.

A jack-o’-lantern, glowing eyes and an eerie too-human smile.

Jet pressed the arrow, through many more artsy overexposed shots of the pumpkin, until they reached the fair, the sun setting, early darkness, before Jet had even got there.

Kids at the face-painting stall, missing teeth and gummy smiles for the camera. A vampire carrying two pies in foil dishes. Gerry Clay in his full cat costume, holding up two furry peace signs for the camera.

A lot of knockoff superheroes at the costume contest, a shitty plastic gold medal for the winner: Spider-ish-Man.

Jet paused. A photo of Mom and Dad at their stall, grinning behind a huge pile of bagged-up candy corn. Mom’s smile was tight, and Dad’s was pained, his skin a little yellow in the flash, too shiny across the forehead.

‘Your dad doing OK?’ Billy asked, noticing it too.

Jet dipped her head. ‘His kidneys are starting to fail. It was always going to happen, once he reached sixty. Might have to think about dialysis or a transplant soon.’ She pressed her lips together and clicked on. ‘Shame my kidneys are no good either.’

‘There, stop!’ Billy leaned forward, his hand over hers on the mouse. ‘That’s JJ.’

Yes, it was. Hardly recognizable in his striped shirt and denim overalls, thick black scars painted across his face.

A brassy red wig on his head, the hairs static-straight, about five inches long.

He was standing with his arm slung around his little brother, Henry, matching smiles they’d both inherited from their Malaysian dad, but not much else because he’d skipped out when they were kids.

Henry was wearing a pirate hat, emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, a gold plastic hook for a hand.

JJ was resting his head on his brother’s shoulder: younger but taller.

‘Does that match the hair from the scene?’ Billy asked.

‘Think so. Same color, the right length.’

Jet dragged the photo across onto the second monitor, left it there waiting, the Lim brothers staring at them as they kept going.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Jet hissed as she clicked onto a zoomed-in picture of herself, a photo she didn’t know had been taken, clearly : her eyes glowing red from the flash, nose crisscrossed into a maze as she bit into a candy apple, caramel smears on her cheeks.

‘I’m deleting that one,’ she said, clicking on the icon, the photo shrinking down, dropping into the trash, where it belonged.

‘Jet,’ Billy scolded her.

‘I’m dying,’ she reminded him, a catch-all defense.

She skipped through more photos. A group shot: three witches, a skeleton, a werewolf, and Ghostface. The same kids from the doorbell cam, who stole all the Masons’ candy. That one witch was flipping off the camera, and Jet liked her even more now.

More photos.

‘That kid’s wearing a red wig.’ Billy pointed at the screen, a girl grinning with a creepy-doll smile, standing between two men, one of them dressed as a cop, because it was Lou Jankowski, Chief of Police. ‘Does actually look like the same wig.’ Billy looked back and forth, from JJ to the kid.

‘Yeah, it does,’ Jet said, sucking her teeth. ‘But an eleven-year-old girl is probably the one person who isn’t taller than me. Rules her out. Off the suspect list.’

‘Agreed.’ Billy smiled.

Jet clicked on.

‘Aw,’ Billy said as a photo of Luke and Sophia popped up, Luke holding baby Cameron in his pumpkin costume.

A puff of air out of Jet’s nose, before she could hold it in.

Billy knew what that meant.

‘You and Sophia used to be best friends,’ he said, tentatively.

‘ You and I used to be best friends too, Billy.’

‘ We were kids. You and Sophia were really close. What happened?’

Jet snorted. ‘Not me. She’s the one who never replied to my texts when I went to college. Dropped me and made a beeline for my brother instead. Luke’s too stupid.’

Billy nudged her. ‘You were maid of honor at their wedding.’

‘Yeah. Maybe Sophia thought that might make up for her abandoning me. It didn’t. Ugly dress too. Bet she did it on purpose.’

‘Well. Cameron’s cute.’

Jet shrugged. ‘Kinda boring.’

‘Jet, you can’t call babies boring.’

‘Babies are boring, and people who’ve just had babies are even more boring.’

‘Jet!’ But he was laughing too.

‘Wait,’ Jet hissed, eyes drawing her back to the screen, pulling at something in her head. Not Sophia, something about her brother.

Luke was holding the baby up for the camera, hands gripped around the rotund pumpkin costume – both hands, knuckles out, ridges in the thin skin. Jet reached for the screen, swiped her finger across Luke’s clean hands.

‘What?’ Billy asked.

‘Luke lied to me,’ Jet said, her finger coming away, Luke’s knuckles still unmarked, not a trick of the light. ‘The fucker.’

‘What?’

‘His hands. They’re all cut up, grazes on his knuckles.

They were like that when I woke up.’ Jet stared into her brother’s eyes, her own reflected back in the dark screen.

‘I asked him about it, and he said it happened at a work site, Friday morning. That he tripped. But this is Friday evening and …’

‘There’s nothing wrong with his hands.’ Billy finished the thought for her.

‘Something must have happened, after this,’ Jet said. ‘Why would he lie to me about it?’

‘Maybe he meant Saturday morning,’ Billy offered.

‘He was already with me at the hospital by then,’ Jet countered.

‘You’re not thinking that Luke could have anything to do with …’ Billy trailed off, unable to finish.

‘He and Sophia were together at the time of the attack.’ So they said. But if Luke had already lied once … Jet couldn’t finish the thought either. ‘Well, he’s not wearing a red wig, so …’

Jet moved on, spooling through more photos, searching for any flash of red hair, the reason they’d come. They hadn’t come for Luke.

‘Wait, stop!’ Billy said.

Jet clicked one back.

A photo of Gerry Clay, with his human head now, grinning, bookended by two cops, his cat arms looped around Chief Lou and Jack Finney. All smiles for the camera.

In the background, in the far left, Jet could see herself, face frozen mid-frown as she looked up at Billy.

But in the right side of the frame, behind Billy’s dad, was Andrew Smith, heading toward them, beer bottle paused on the way to his mouth.

Blurred in the background, in motion, but still clear enough.

A smear of red painted across his nose, black lines down his eyes, and on his head was a red wig.

Billy was right: straight hairs, static almost, fluffy, the same length as JJ’s.

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Billy watched as Jet dragged that photo to the second monitor too, lining the photos up side by side, zooming in. ‘They’re wearing the exact same wig, aren’t they?’

Same burnt-red color, same texture, same length. And both looked like a match for that singular hair dropped at the scene, by Jet’s killer.

Jet nodded. ‘Probably bought it from the same place.’

‘Amazon,’ they said, accidental unison.

‘So.’ Billy drew back to his full height. ‘JJ and Andrew Smith.’

‘JJ or Andrew Smith,’ Jet corrected.

‘You really think Andrew is a suspect?’

‘He was drunk that night. He was mad.’ Jet stared at the screen, at the stumbling clown. ‘You heard what he said at the fair. That he hates all the Masons, death to all Masons –’

‘– Not quite what he said,’ Billy cut her off. ‘So what do we do?’

Jet stood up, stumbling, one leg still asleep. Billy held her arm, steadied her.

‘Well, JJ isn’t here for us to talk to,’ she said. ‘But Andrew is.’

Billy nodded, lips disappearing in a grim line. ‘I think I know where to find him.’

‘Come on.’

Jet walked out of Owen’s bedroom and straight into Owen, who was hovering by the open door. He darted away with a yelp, pressing up against the wall, making himself as small as possible.

‘Hey.’ Jet’s eyes burned into him. ‘You better not have been eavesdropping.’

‘I wasn’t, I swear!’

‘Tell anyone, and I’ll let your dad know about your freaky little porn collection.’

Owen whimpered.

Outside, Jet marched across the street to where they’d parked her truck, powder-blue paint gleaming in the morning sun, not out of place on Pleasant Street. But something was out of place: a plastic sleeve, stuck to her windshield.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ Jet said, ripping it off, holding it up so Billy could see. ‘A ticket? We were only here for like forty-five minutes. These new parking meters, I swear …’

But she didn’t have to swear, and she didn’t have to do anything.

She’d be dead in five days, so this little ticket right here in her hands, it meant nothing.

Not a thing. Jet pulled the paper out from the sleeve, ripped it in half – Billy’s mouth dropped – ripped it in half again – Billy’s mouth dropped farther, almost twitching into a smile.

Jet let go, the shredded pieces fluttering to the ground like fallen moths, sticking in the mud.

‘I’m not fucking paying that.’