The Towering Sky

Leda was very quiet and still. She tried to breathe silently, in and out through her nostrils, deliberate yoga breaths. She waited for the other shoe to drop.

Officer Kiles was the one who broke the silence. “You didn’t meet her in that context? As Eris’s girlfriend?”

“Eris didn’t exactly gush about her relationships with me.” That, at least, was true. “I didn’t know Mariel.”

“Didn’t know her?” Kiles repeated. “But apparently you know that she’s dead?”

God, what was wrong with her? “She’s dead?” Leda lifted her eyebrows, as if she couldn’t be bothered to know what had happened to Mariel. “I only used the past tense because Eris is dead. As you may be aware, I was actually on the roof of the Fullers’ apartment when it happened.” The worst day of my life.

Leda wondered, again, how Mariel had died. She hadn’t been able to find that information on the i-Net, and it wasn’t as if the obituary said what had happened; they never listed the cause of death. Presumably that was in poor taste.

Campbell leaned his elbows onto the table, trying to impress upon Leda how much sheer physical space he occupied. “Mariel drowned. Her body was found in the East River.”

Leda’s mind lurched violently to one side, as if yanked by a thin thread of memory, but it snapped off and floated away before she could be certain of it. She felt cold all over.

Mariel had ended up with the death she’d tried to give Leda. There was a dark irony there, as if this were some kind of poetic justice administered by the gods.

“What does this have to do with me?”

The two police officers glanced at Leda, then at each other, then at Leda again. They seemed to come to some unspoken understanding, because Kiles leaned forward with what she probably assumed was an encouraging expression. “You may not have known Mariel, but she certainly knew you. She was gathering information about you before she died. She had a file on you and your movements.”

Of course she did. Mariel had been planning her revenge on Leda, for what Leda had done to Eris. But the police didn’t know that—right? If they did, wouldn’t she have been brought here a long time ago?

Leda did her best to act afraid, which wasn’t difficult given that her nerves were stretching tighter and tighter over the empty pit of her panic. “Are you saying that Mariel was stalking me?” she demanded.

“That is what it looks like, yes.” There was a pause. “Do you have any idea why she might do that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She was grief-stricken over the loss of Eris and wanted to feel close to her. So she turned to Eris’s friends.”

It was a gamble, but it was the best Leda could come up with on the fly.

There was a silence heavy with meaning, as if all the air in the room had gone stale. Finally Campbell lifted his brows. “You see, until now, we thought Mariel’s death was accidental. But we recently uncovered new evidence that suggests it might have been the result of foul play. So we’ve reopened the case as a murder investigation.”

Mariel had been murdered? But who would do such a thing, and why? Leda blinked, panicked that the subject of her thoughts was somehow visible.

“We’re trying to understand what was going on with Mariel before she died. Especially since she had been dating Eris.” Officer Campbell lifted an eyebrow to underscore the strangeness of it, that two young women should die under unexpected circumstances, so soon after dating each other.

“What kind of new evidence?” Leda asked as innocently as she could.

“That’s classified.”

Leda’s mind echoed with a strange, unsettling silence. It was a silence that rang with chilly finality, like the weight of a gravestone, as if the entire current of the East River was pressing down on her chest, forcing the air from her lungs. They might find out.

If the police were investigating Mariel, they might somehow discover Leda’s relationship to Eris—and worse, the fact that Leda had accidentally pushed her. . . .

“Mariel was very fixated on you,” Kiles was saying. “I don’t think it’s just because you were friends with Eris. Do you know of any other reason she might have been watching you?”

“I don’t know,” Leda said defensively, wishing she could put her hands over her ears to block out the terrifying silence. Fear and alarm were swirling wildly through her.

“Perhaps you—”

“I don’t know!”

The words burst out of her like bullets and rebounded sharply around the room. Leda put her hands firmly on the surface of the table to hide their trembling and stood.

“I have made every effort to be cooperative,” she said clearly. “But this line of questioning is useless. I didn’t know this Mariel person and have no information about what happened to her. If you need to get in touch with me again, please do so through my family’s lawyer. Otherwise, I believe we’re done here.”

Leda stormed away, half expecting one of the detectives to stop her. But neither of them said a thing.

Outside the station, she leaned against a wall for support, her mind spinning through the implications of what had just happened.

The police were reinvestigating Mariel’s death. They had already discovered the connection between Mariel and Leda. How long would it take before they found out the reason Mariel was stalking her: that Leda had pushed Eris off the roof?