WHILE I WAS inside Pear Magic, Chris had spent his time idly searching for Heriberto Abana on his cell phone. He had come up with nothing much. I remembered sitting in his office before the hit-and-run. Heriberto’s name had been searched and searched on his work computer, but, other than some addresses, nothing had really come up. I told him I’d do some poking around when I got home, which, for some reason, pissed him off. I got hit by a car, but I’m not dumb, he’d said. I didn’t point out to him that I never called him dumb. He was being sensitive. I guessed I couldn’t blame him. If I’d lost a big chunk of my memory, I would be sensitive too.
I made a sandwich and poured myself a glass of iced tea, dumping so much sugar in it, you could see a layer of white on the bottom quarter of the glass. I rummaged in the pantry until I found an old, likely stale bag of chips, and took it all up to my room.
I sat at my desk, the food spread out next to my open laptop, and wolfed down half my sandwich while checking the IMDb page for Celeste’s movie. Of course, the director was still listed as TBA—it couldn’t be that easy. So instead I pulled up my email. I’d been neglecting it since the night at Tesori Antico, only popping in every week or so to weed out my in-box. Most of the time, it was crammed with junk, but every so often there was a legit email that I wanted to ignore. This time there was an email from my grandma—pictures from my graduation. I looked sweaty and irritated. My shoulders were bunched up and tense, as if I was waiting for something bad to happen. And Peyton’s chair shrine was in the background, turning the edges of every photo crimson. I closed the email and dragged it into the trash. Dad would be pissed that I didn’t share the pictures with him, but he was a photographer, so I knew he had more than enough of his own. So many he wouldn’t know what to do with them. Probably stuff them away somewhere and never look at them again.
I scrolled down, picking off emails and sending them to the trash, one by one. A sale ad for a boutique. A postgrad questionnaire from the school. A reminder from our former class president to join some stupid classmate website so they could find us come reunion time. Uh, no thanks. Junk, junk, and more junk.
I drained my tea, pushed my empty plate over by the chips, and brushed off my hands. I didn’t have time for pictures and questionnaires and websites. I had searching to do.
It took no time for me to learn that Chris had been right. Heriberto Abana didn’t have much of an online footprint. In fact, if the internet was any indication, there didn’t seem to be any existing person with that name at all. It was like he was a ghost. Maybe I had the name wrong. Maybe Albany came to me in eggplant for an entirely different reason. Maybe that was just the color of the word Albany and there was no connection behind it at all and I was totally giving my synesthesia too much credit. But no, I felt strongly that wasn’t it. Because even if Albany was eggplant all on its own, so was Abana. I could see that clearly.
I also remembered some numbers. A five and two threes. An address that I’d seen when I’d been snooping in Chris’s office. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember anything else. Just the colors, flashing at me like an OPEN sign. Ugh, was it possible to have amnesia by proxy?
Nothing in my life was adding up, even though it seemed like everything was so close. I remembered Heriberto’s name, but he didn’t exist. I got to search Jones’s truck, but there was nothing in it. I found Celeste Day, but not Luna. So frustrating to be this close on so many levels, but continue to come up just short.
I dug the Angry Elephant matchbook out of my front pocket and turned it in my hand, studying it. I half expected to feel something—some sort of cosmic current that would link me with my mother. Maybe hear her voice, guiding me. But it just wasn’t there. She was gone, and it was just a coincidence that I’d found something belonging to the studio where she used to work. Not really all that outside of reason, when I thought about it, for an actress to own something with a studio label on it. Especially an unknown actress and a small, independent studio. She probably owned loads of stuff from small studios. It would be much stranger for her to have something from a big studio, probably.
There was a knock on my door frame and I jumped, dropping the matchbook on my desk.
Dad was standing just inside my room.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. You looked pretty deep in thought there.” He gestured toward the matchbook. “Anything important?”
Because I couldn’t trust him, I didn’t want Dad to know about what I’d found or where I’d found it. If I told him I’d lifted it from an actress, he would undoubtedly want to know what I was doing at Pear Magic. And the truthful answer—trying to find the girl who’d twice tried to kill me—would not be a popular one.
“Nothing,” I said, sliding it off the corner of my desk so that it fell into the trash can below. “Just some trash I found in my pocket. Been a while since I wore these jeans, I guess.”
“Were those matches? I thought you were quitting smoking.”
Just hearing the words made my jaw ache for a cigarette. I didn’t know why I was still on the wagon if I wasn’t planning to go to the academy. Because Chris may not remember telling you to stop, but he doesn’t like it, and you may not want to admit it, but you care. I pressed my lips together, a sad attempt at a grin. “Like I said, it’s been a while.”
He looked unconvinced but apparently decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. He scratched his chest, right next to his armpit, his shirt bunching up beneath his fingers. “You still thinking about joining me on a shoot?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Sure. When?”
“Tomorrow? Taking Marisol downtown. You said you wanted to go on an urban shoot, yes?”
No. I didn’t particularly want to go on any shoot, urban or ocean or out in the middle of a fucking cow field. I didn’t have time to be “trying to find myself” in Dad’s footsteps. Not to mention, I didn’t want anything to do with him. Just looking at him made my heart ache.
But there was only one way to get him off my back.
“Yep. I’ll be ready.”
THE WORST THING about being a photographer is that you’re a slave to the light. Photographers could work for themselves all they wanted, but that didn’t mean they could mosey on out for a shoot anytime they felt like it. They had to be up before the sun, so they could get their things together, meet their model, find the perfect spot, and set up before the sun got to its best position in the sky.
I hated being up early for any reason, but especially for standing around while my dad fiddled with lenses and Marisol paced in stilettos with one arm pressed into her concave gut while her other hand held cigarette after chain-smoked cigarette.
Models weren’t always as healthy as they looked.
Every so often, Dad would order me to kick some rocks away from a doorway or hold the reflector disc higher, no, not that high, a little lower, no, you’ve gone too low. You know what? You should be standing on the other side of her. . . .
Photography was some mind-numbing shit.
After what seemed like a lifetime, but had only been about four hours, and a miserably few photos, my stomach started growling.
“Can I get a coffee or something?” I asked.
“Good idea,” Marisol said. “I swear I’m going to pass out if you have me jump in the air one more time, Milo.”
“We’re just getting something done,” Dad said, not even bothering to look up from behind the camera, which he’d spent the past twenty minutes painstakingly screwing onto a tripod and adjusting to whatever constituted the perfect height. “If we stop now, we’ll lose the good light.”
Jesus. The light.
Marisol cocked her hip to one side, her hand on it, and pouted, actually whimpering a little. Dad responded by snapping a picture. She probably looked amazing in it. Life was unfair that way.
“How about I’ll get something for everyone and bring it back?” I asked. “I’ll get sandwiches.”
“Bread. I don’t eat white food,” Marisol said at the same time that Dad barked, “Don’t move! You’re in perfect position!”
“Then I’ll bring you a salad,” I said.
“I don’t do lettuce or dressing.”
I gave her an are you fucking kidding me look, but she was too busy posing to notice.
“I’ll be back,” I called to Dad. He gave me a sigh when I tossed the reflector disc on the ground, but simply went back to clicking the shutter on Marisol.
Starvation wasn’t the only reason I was dead set on getting some food right away. The other reason was that the alleyway Dad had chosen for Marisol’s backdrop by happenstance was across the street from Morning Glory, a peace-and-love-style café. I had seen two people who I was pretty sure were Vee and Gibson, two members of Peyton’s band, haul all their crap inside. I hadn’t seen them for months, but I would recognize Vee anywhere. She kind of stood out.
I jogged across the street and into Morning Glory.
“Can I help you?” a woman behind the counter asked the second I stepped foot in the door.
“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled. “Three coffees and three turkeys on rye. To go.” Screw Marisol and her white food. My eyes landed on a display of cookies the size of cake plates. I grabbed three of them and placed them on the counter. “And these.” Hopefully—and likely—Marisol didn’t eat sugar, either, and I would be forced to eat hers and mine both.
The woman rang up my order, and then slipped on some gloves and turned to make the sandwiches.
I took the opportunity to mosey over to the back corner, where Vee and Gib were setting up. Gib was tuning his guitar, sitting on a stool with his ear bent so close it was practically touching the wood, and Vee was plugging in a microphone. Her hair had been cut—shaved on one side and left long on the other, coming to a point at her chin. Not for the first time, I wished I could pull off the looks that Vee rocked. That was the kind of person she was, though. Not me. I didn’t actually know what kind of person I was. Which was maybe why I had no look.
“No bass?” I asked. Her head whipped up. It seemed to take a second for her to place me, but then she smiled.
“Nikki, long time no see.” Ever since Peyton died, Vee had tried to forge some sort of bond with me. I was the only one who cared about Peyton as much as she did, which was weird since Peyton and I never actually spoke to each other out loud in her lifetime. And sometimes I wondered if Vee ever gave any thought to why I cared so much about Peyton. But somehow she just seemed to get it. I think she figured keeping me around was one way to keep Peyton alive.
But there was Shelby Gray to consider. She’d replaced Peyton as Viral Fanfare’s lead singer. And she was friends with Luna. Last I talked to Shelby, she’d been hanging out with Luna, even as Luna was plotting to kill me. Tangling with Shelby Gray was about as fun—and about as productive—as beating my forehead against a wall. With Luna still out there, I had zero desire to bring Shelby back into my life. With Shelby came suspicions. With suspicions came trouble. I wasn’t looking for trouble; I was looking for resolution.
Vee gestured to the mic. “Nah, acoustic bass is kind of outside my price range. Plus, somebody has to sing. That’s the problem with your lead singer still being in high school.”
“You sing?” I couldn’t picture it.
She shrugged. “When I have to.”
We both stood there awkwardly for a beat. A couple wound past us toward a table, holding plastic baskets heaped with salad, and I shuffled to the side to let them by. “So, regular gig? In a sandwich shop.”
Vee laughed. “Wouldn’t Peyton just die?” Her face flushed. “You know what I mean.”
I chuckled. “She totally would. This place hardly screams glamour. Where are the rhinestones and fur?”
“Those are on my other shirt,” she said. “I didn’t want to start out too Hollywood, you know?” She stuck her fingers through a gaping hole near the bottom of her shirt.
“Order’s ready,” the woman behind the counter hollered. I turned. She was setting a paper sack and three paper cups on the counter.
“That’s mine,” I said to Vee. “I’m sort of working with my dad. Otherwise, I’d stay.”
“That’s cool. You can buy the album when it comes out.” She winked. “So are you, like, working for your dad now? Everything’s good?”
I shook my head. “Just for today. Helping out. But, yeah, I guess everything’s good. Shelby say anything about Luna these days?”
“She wouldn’t dare. Maybe to Gib, but not me. She knows how I feel about the whole thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Luna was somehow behind what happened to Peyton.”
This time it was my turn to blush; my cheeks felt hot. She had no idea. But it was probably best kept that way.
“She hasn’t talked about her at all, though,” she continued. “For some reason, I was under the impression that Luna was gone. Like, left California completely.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.” Too bad I couldn’t be as convinced as Vee was.
“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. I don’t think she’d be dumb enough to come around.”
“No, Luna is definitely not dumb.” Sometimes I wished she was dumber. She would have been a lot easier to defeat if she was.
Gibson cleared his throat, staring at me pointedly. Vee ducked her chin, going back to fiddling with the microphone stand.
“Well, my coffee’s getting cold, I guess,” I said.
“Yeah. Okay. You’ll come back sometime? When you can stay, I mean.”
“Definitely.”
I grabbed my food and stacked the three coffee cups, balancing them by using my chin for support. Vee called my name. I turned.
“I just realized. Shelby’s been hanging around at igNight a lot.” She slid the microphone into the stand, glanced at Gibson, and came to me. “She has been for a few weeks. Acting really weird. Like she’s going to quit the band or something. It may be nothing. Shelby’s kind of a flake. She might have met another guy, or who knows what. But it’s just weird that right when you’re looking for Luna again, Shelby’s . . . being like she was. Before.”
“igNight?” I asked. The bottom cup was starting to burn my hand through the cardboard.
“Hookah dance club in the city. Full of dopeheads, mostly. But also rich girls like Shelby who think smoking orange-flavored tobacco makes them look sophisticated. Not really my kind of scene. She goes, like, every night.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “And she broke up with Gibson, so things are totally awkward right now. I’m not complaining when she doesn’t show up to practice. She is constant drama. It’s kind of nice not having her around, you know?”
“Vee,” Gibson barked.
She checked the clock behind the counter. “I should get going.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know about igNight. I’ll check it out.”
She grinned, letting her hair point flop forward over her face. “Have fun with that.”
She went back to their little nook and turned on the mic. There were a few muffled whumps as she tapped it to see if it was on. Gibson turned knobs on a small amplifier and then gave her a nod. He sat back on a stool and strummed out a few soft chords. Vee began to sing. Her voice was low and sultry, and while not exactly smooth, it was still coarse in the way waves are coarse crashing onto shore.
I recognized the opening lines of the song.
She was singing “Black Daisy.”
“GOD, FINALLY,” MARISOL breathed when she saw me with the food. She grabbed a coffee and pulled the lid off the top. “Ew, black?”
“Seriously?” I said, ready to punch her no-white-food-no-dressing-no-black-coffee face.
She rolled her eyes and sat on a box, hunkered over her coffee as if it was twenty below zero outside. Which it most definitely wasn’t. The back of my neck was damp with sweat. I was kind of wishing I’d opted for soda. Though I wasn’t sure a place like Morning Glory would be the kind of place to sell soda. Organic unsweetened fruit juices, yes. Pepsi, not so much.
I pulled out a sandwich and handed the bag to Dad, then opted to sit on the ground at the opposite end of the alley. That way I didn’t have to listen to Princess Marisol bitch about the cheese being too cheesy or not eating mayo. Bonus: from where I was sitting, I could very faintly hear Vee’s singing. She’d moved on to something even more mournful. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a song to sound more mournful than “Black Daisy.”
After a few minutes, there was a scuffling of shoes. Dad was coming toward me. He held out my coffee. I took it and set it next to me. I really, really wanted that soda now.
“Can I join you?” he asked.
I scooted over to make the slightest amount of room and kept eating wordlessly. All morning I’d been watching and listening for numbers. Anything that might tip Dad’s hand as to what the code for that locked box might be. I noted the exact time that we got started, in case he started at the same time every session, or some weird superstition like that. I noted the serial numbers on his cameras and his tripod. I even noted the model number on the back of his car. Nothing seemed like it would be the one, but it was all I had.
“So what do you think?” he asked, groaning out the last couple of words as he lowered himself to the ground.
“Think about what?” I asked around a mouthful of sandwich.
“About this. You think you might want to follow in your parents’ footsteps?”
I almost choked. Which footsteps would those be? The ones where my mother hid her prostitution-borne baby, or the ones where he lied and hid whatever it was he had to do with it? I chewed extra slowly to give me time to measure my words. “I don’t know. I’m not very artistic.”
“You can learn that.”
“I don’t like to get up early.”
“Well, you’ll have to get over that, no matter what you choose.”
“I don’t like Marisol,” I said. I swallowed and ran my tongue over my front teeth, where a gummy piece of bread was stuck.
Dad glanced over his shoulder and then back at me. “Neither do I,” he said, and laughed. “You don’t have to be her best friend to take good pictures of her. Why don’t you try snapping a few when we’re done with lunch?”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re going to let me use your cameras? Those are your babies.”
“No, you’re my baby.” He shrugged. “I let your mother use them.”
“Mom was a photographer, too. She knew what she was doing.”
He chewed, swallowed, pushed his glasses up on his nose. In this light, I could see his hair was beginning to thin. Before I knew it, Dad would be old and would still be alone. Why? Why, when his wife betrayed him, did he stay loyal to her, even after death?
Because he’s guilty, Nikki, and he knows it.
I pushed the thought away.
“Mom was more of a director. She was good at telling people what to do.”
Except for Bill Hollis. Nobody told Bill Hollis what to do. But Dad knew that already. He just didn’t want me to know that he knew.
There was a long pause while we finished our sandwiches. I didn’t have a choice but to wash mine down with the coffee, which had gotten cold. Marisol was right; it was gross without cream and sugar. I peeked over at her. She had her sandwich open and spread out on one thigh and was picking through its contents with her long nails. At her feet was a small pile of refused food.
That would have been what Peyton would have captured on film, I thought. Dirty, discarded food, next to a shiny stiletto heel. A perfect commentary about this town, this life.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Hmm?” He was poking around on his phone.
“Why did you give up?”
He glanced at me. “Give up on what?”
“On Mom. Why did you stop trying to find her killer?”
He opened his mouth, stopped, let his phone rest on his lap. “Why are you asking this, Nikki?”
“Because I’ve been almost killed twice in the past year. And it just seems really odd to me that Mom was killed, too. Like, what are the odds that two people from the same family are murdered? It’s almost like . . . like she had to know who it was. Like someone has a grudge against us.”
Dad’s face clouded over and he concentrated on tightening the laces of one shoe. I couldn’t tell if that was because he knew I was on to something about Mom, or if it was because he hated talking about what had happened to her, and what had almost happened to me. Maybe it was a little of both.
He straightened, softened, and pushed my hair behind my ear. “I didn’t give up. I just knew when it was hopeless. I couldn’t make the police find her killer. As much as I would have liked to.”
“But weren’t there any suspects?”
“No.”
“None at all? I find that really hard to believe, Dad.”
I saw his jaw stiffen. “The police weren’t motivated, I guess.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. His head whipped up.
“Nikki, you know I don’t like that kind of lang—”
I interrupted him. “And you know I don’t like being lied to. I think they had suspects and you knew about it. So why don’t you just tell me? What is there to hide? Who were the suspects and why weren’t they caught?”
His face turned red, starting with the tips of his ears and creeping all the way down his throat into the collar of his shirt. He stared hard at his hands, and I could practically feel the discomfort vibrating off him. “Okay, I suppose you’re old enough now.”
“You think?” I said.
“I didn’t want to burden you with it when you were young. You had enough to deal with, losing your mother like that. You didn’t need to know that they suspected . . .”
I was impatient and let him flounder for only a second. “Suspected who?”
He pressed the rim of his coffee cup in, fidgeting. “Me.”
I felt the world around me pulse green and gold. I had suspected Dad had something to do with Mom’s murder, but hearing him say it out loud was still a shock.
“They thought you did it?” My throat felt small and tight. Was this going to be the moment when I finally got honest answers? “Why?”
He shrugged. “They always suspect the husband first, right?” He shook his head at the ground and muttered, “Damn cops.”
“So what happened?” I asked, not wanting him to stop talking. But also definitely wanting him to stop talking. If my dad confessed to me, would I have to do something? Would I be able to turn him in? It seemed so cut-and-dry, so easy, when it was all theory. But now, sitting next to him—the man who’d brushed my hair and fixed my lunches and took care of me when I was sick—it seemed so much more complicated than that.
Still. It didn’t matter what he might have done to atone after the fact. If he was the one who had taken her from me, I would still hate him.
“They questioned me a few times and decided they had nothing on me. Then they let me go. And as far as I could tell, they closed the case. They were so certain that I’d done it and had just covered it up well enough that they couldn’t bust me, they didn’t even bother to really look at anyone else.”
“It’s getting hot,” we heard, and both turned to see Marisol clomping toward us on her impractical heels, fanning her face with her hands. The tension between Dad and me snapped away in an instant. Damn it.
Dad checked his watch. “Oops!” He hopped up on his feet. “We’re going to lose any semblance of good light if we keep sitting around. Nikki, you want to take the next few shots?”
That was it.
That was it?
He had been the one and only suspect in Mom’s case, and he just casually slipped it into a conversation before getting back to work? There had to be more to the story.
Vee’s voice floated across the street and into the alley. She’d moved on to a different song—one I’d never heard.
Seemed like everyone wanted to just move on.
Well, not me.
When was I ever like everyone else?
I stood and brushed the dirt off my butt. “Absolutely,” I said. I hooked my elbow through Marisol’s and marched her into position. “Let’s finish this.”