Kelsey

 

Kelsey was working late on the night Hannah died, scrambling to get a sudden new project in under the wire. She’d left her phone on silent in her bag, and so it wasn’t until almost eleven that she finally checked it and realized she had missed several calls from her mother. Somewhat reluctant, but feeling that it was just about quitting time anyway, Kelsey packed up her things and called her mom back on her way out of the building. For some reason, she always remembered that the phone rang four times before anyone answered.

 

Then her mother was there, half screaming, half sobbing into the receiver, inarticulate, frightening sounds.

 

“Mom?” Kelsey asked as the blood drained from her face. She didn’t have to be told that something was horribly wrong. An icy hand gripped her spine. “What is it? What happened?” Her mother tried to form words, but nothing intelligible came out. At last, someone took the phone from her and her crying faded into the background.

 

“Kelsey?” Aunt Marian, her mother’s sister. There was something peculiar about her tone. It took Kelsey a second to recognize that she had been crying. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

 

“What? What’s going on?” Kelsey made a beeline for her car in the office parking lot. Her heart beat in her throat.

 

Aunt Marian took a deep, shaky breath. “Your sister is dead,” she said softly. Behind her, a piercing wail broke through.

 

Kelsey froze with her hand on the car door handle. “What?” she whispered. The world began to waver around her, and she leaned on the door so that she wouldn’t faint. “What do you mean, she’s dead? I just talked to her this morning.” Nothing made sense. She was reeling.

 

“The police just left,” Marian said. “She was murdered.”

 

Kelsey’s knees buckled before she could get into the car. She struck the pavement hard, nearly fumbling her phone. The pain from impact was negligible compared to the searing ache in her chest. She could barely breathe.

 

“Murdered?” was what she tried to say, but it came out as only a whimpering gasp. She wanted to lay down on the asphalt and stay there until the nightmare was over, until things had returned to normal. Surely, this was some kind of horrific prank. Or maybe she was having a psychotic break, and none of it was real. “Are you at Mom’s house?” she finally managed, her voice a weak caricature of itself.

 

“Yes.” Marian hesitated. “You should come.”

 

“I am.” Neither woman spent the time to say goodbye—it was implicit. Kelsey clambered awkwardly to her feet, brushing invisible dirt off the hem of her jacket. Her legs still felt like Jell-O, but she was determined to reach her family. She barely remembered the drive, except that her windshield seemed to be streaked with misty rain.

 

“What time was this?” Detective Wilde’s voice, though gentle, jolted Kelsey out of her memories. “You left work at eleven, you said? How long did the phone call last?”

 

“Oh …” Kelsey thought back. “I’m not exactly sure, but it was probably less than a minute. My perception of time got kind of screwed up between that and driving, but I can tell you that it’s a fifteen-minute trip from the office to my mom’s house. So, I got there at about 11:20.”

 

“How fast were you driving?”

 

Kelsey shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know.” She laughed a little, wryly. “I was probably speeding. We’ll say it was 11:15.” Wilde nodded and marked something down on his yellow legal pad. He gestured for her to continue.

 

She told him how, when she entered the familiar house on Crescent Street, the one in which she and Hannah had grown up together side by side, she found her mother sprawled on the living room floor, sobbing inconsolably into one of the couch pillows. She’d been covered with a blanket, and Marian knelt helplessly at her side, clutching onto one of her hands as if for dear life. Marian glanced up at the sound of Kelsey’s entrance, and her eyes filled with a mix of relief and anguish.

 

“Kels,” she said, stretching out her free arm. “Come here, baby.”

 

So, Kelsey had gone to her aunt’s side, on her knees on the hardwood floor, and as she was enveloped in the warmest embrace Marian could muster with a single arm, she felt the shock begin to peel away. The tears came quicker than she expected, and the only thing she remembered about the pain was that it took her breath away.

 

“You didn’t know what happened then?” Wilde asked, in that same gentle voice.

 

Kelsey shook her head. Recounting the scene inside her mother’s house had caused a lump to grow in the back of her throat, and she had to pause to swallow it down again.

 

“All I knew,” she said, a little haltingly, “was that Hannah had been killed. At the time, that was enough for me, you know?”

 

Wilde nodded. He did know. He had seen families resist details for as long as they possibly could, often until the interviews began. Some truths, he had come to understand, were simply too terrible to be faced head-on.

 

“When did you learn about the incident?” he said now, as a means of carefully pushing Kelsey along. He had judged that she was often at risk of getting bound up in her feelings, and he was committed to making this interview as painless as possible for her. The girl’s eyes were haunted. She’d been through enough.

 

“Not until the next day,” Kelsey said. Her gaze wandered aimlessly around the room. “An officer called me and asked if I would come downtown to be interviewed about what I knew.” A tiny smile quirked the side of her mouth. “I said I wouldn’t unless he told me exactly what he knew.”

 

Wilde consulted the file. “This would have been … Officer Berkley?”

 

Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I think that was his name.” She made a face like she wanted to say something else, but balked at the last second.

 

“Go ahead,” Wilde prompted her, hiding his amusement. He had a feeling he knew what it was.

 

“I didn’t like him,” Kelsey admitted. He got the feeling that she was stating it mildly. He waited for her to continue, but that seemed to be the extent of her denouncement. He raised an eyebrow.

 

“No one did,” he said mildly. “That’s why he got transferred, and why the case fell in my lap.” In fact, Wilde had harbored personal suspicions that Berkley was corrupt, suspicions that only grew as his single murder case remained unsolved. But if that was true, Berkley had one hell of a cleanup crew; there had never been one shred of evidence against him, and in the end, Wilde had to let it go. He contented himself by jumping onto the abandoned cold case, vowing to finish what his colleague had so haphazardly started.

 

“Short guy?” he said to Kelsey by way of an identification. “Wide? Big, dark mustache?” She nodded. “Yeah, he’s been gone for a few months now. Didn’t leave me much to go on here.”

 

“I don’t think he cared,” Kelsey muttered bitterly. It still hurt to think of how much time had been wasted by Officer Berkley’s apathy. If he had only put in a little more effort, she and her family could have been spared so much pain. She tried valiantly not to go down that road of thought, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. How different her life could have been, if not for him. Suddenly, she became aware that Detective Wilde was speaking to her, and she immediately snapped back to full attention.

 

“Well, I do.” The detective was examining her closely. “It’s my job to care, Kelsey. And it’s my job to make sure that whoever did this to Hannah — to your sister — is ultimately held responsible.” He removed Hannah’s picture from the folder and slid it across the table. Kelsey picked it up gingerly by the edges, gazing almost reverently at her sister’s face. “We have to work together,” Wilde told her. “This is an old and frozen case. I need all the help I can get.” He stopped talking then, as he realized whatever words came out of his mouth would be momentarily lost on her. A few tears slid down Kelsey’s face, and then she returned the photo, wiping at them with her sleeve.

 

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll do whatever I can.”

 

The interview didn’t last too much longer. Soon, Kelsey found herself standing at the curb in front of the building, waiting for her cab home. On one hand, the meeting was a harsh reminder that after all this time, her understanding of the circumstances surrounding Hannah’s death was still as vague as ever. All she really knew was that somehow Hannah had gotten caught up in the crossfire between some street thugs and a roving band of Mongols. The one cold consolation was that the bullet that pierced her heart killed her instantly, so that she knew no suffering. Kelsey had clung to that knowledge to get her through the hardest days. But it wasn’t enough.

 

Now, at long last, the gears were moving. Kelsey believed in Detective Wilde. She couldn’t say exactly why, but she trusted him, and when she shook his hand, she’d given him her hope.

 

Even so, Chopper was on her mind. She still hadn’t told him about possibly cooperating with the police in any capacity, and she certainly hadn’t told him she’d be going for an interview at the station. In her heart, she knew it was none of his business, that he had no authority over whatever she chose to do regarding Hannah’s murder case, but she couldn’t help worrying about him. Was she endangering him by bringing the police so close to her own personal life? Would she come home one day to find their house raided and ransacked, Chopper stuck firmly behind bars?

 

No, she told herself. Chopper was too smart for that. He’d been in the business far too long to be slipped up by a couple of nosy cops. She liked to think, too, that he was able to appreciate her struggle, that he could understand the agony of never having answers.

 

But she couldn’t say for sure that he would get it, and that little bit of uncertainty nagged at her. He was still gone when she got out of the cab at their front door. Her thoughts flashed back to her hazy recollection of the night before. That kiss goodbye was the last interaction she had with him. Since then, radio silence. Kelsey hated it. She wanted to text or call, just to check up on him, but she knew the stakes were too high. What would she do if her moment of selfishness undid a perfect stakeout or provided a badly-timed distraction? She’d just have to sit and wait for news.

 

The hours crept slowly by. Kelsey’s phone was silent. She lay on the sofa with her feet propped up on the arm and watched muted commercials flickering across the screen. Late morning light brightened into a sunny afternoon, then dimmed to pleasant dusk. Kelsey made herself dinner. She acted like everything was normal. She even put on music and danced around the kitchen a little bit while she waited for her food to cook. It was mostly an act. What she wanted was news of some kind, any kind. She wanted to hear that they’d found Spike, and that the issue had been taken care of. Hell, she’d accept it if they never found the son of a bitch, as long as Chopper found his way back home.

 

By the time her dinner was ready, Kelsey had just barely convinced herself to push the encroaching negativity from her mind and focus on something else. She brought her plate into the den where her laptop was. It had occurred to her, somewhere between the police station and dinner, that she had left a very important task unfinished, and she figured that now was as good a time as any to see it through. Kelsey opened her computer and began to type in the address bar of her browser.

 

She was finally ready to name her baby.