The morning they found the body—blood dried on his throat, up the sides of his too-high collar, red spill down white shirt, slumped in the alley to suggest a mugging gone wrong—the bus was quiet. Mara liked this about Sunday mornings. A quiet, empty bus and the dewy gray of seven a.m. put her in such a meditative state that she could sail through a brunch shift. Today was her first day at Lilypad, but the commute felt similar enough to old jobs that she found herself in an uneasy state of been-there-before comfort. She knew better than to trust this calm, but welcomed it anyway.
If she was thinking about money, and her mom’s medical bills, it would be nice to be back in the whirling rush of Friday and Saturday nights. If she was thinking about how she got to spend last night with Melissa, catching the Crystal Lake Counselors’ set at The Muse, followed by housing midnight hash browns at Golden Nugget with Melissa and Parth? Well, then subsisting on Sunday brunch tips was fine. Besides, no point in thinking too far ahead on your first day.
—
The morning they found the body—on top of some broken-down boxes that used to contain onions, next to a building with a mural of yellow and orange hibiscus flowers cascading all the way down the back, stuffed between the brown trash dumpster and the blue recycling dumpster—she had sad, thoughtful-yet-vibey hip-hop in her headphones.
Crystal Lake Counselors shows were like a rock quarry explosion, except all the bits of raining stones and sediment made a melody. Parth’s bass lines, in particular, had a way of echoing in her head long after the show.
Melissa would ask if it was his nearly unbuttoned shirt and tight black jeans that were echoing in her head. Why not both.
So sad-in-a-chill-way hip-hop on a Sunday morning while processing having an unrequited crush on a close friend was the move. Mara stared out the bus window, vaguely anxious about job training.
Spinning red and blue lights started to poke their way through bus windows, needling through her near-meditative state. These were insistent lights. She felt her stomach start to spill as they hurtled closer to her stop. The only other passenger asleep. The bus driver too seen-it-all to muster more than a hoarse ope.
Mara stepped onto the sidewalk. Reached to her phone and paused her music. There was no mistaking. Three cop cars—reason enough to call this the scariest first day she’d ever had—an ambulance, yellow caution tape, a bunch of schlubby guys in half-tucked shirts with various badges and lanyards pinning their ties to their bellies writing things in notepads, one crying girl in a green polo, and one rubbernecking woman who looked like she had somewhere to be eventually, but wherever that was wasn’t so urgent that she couldn’t drink in some crime scene drama first.
“What’s, uh,” Mara said to the woman.
“Dead body,” she said. Her voice was the kind of harsh gentle that suggested she’d seen something like this before. “Girl who was opening the restaurant went to take some trash out and found it. Said the guy was a regular.”
“He was a regular, like, customer at that restaurant? And got killed at that restaurant?”
The woman threw up her hands and made a raised-eyebrow face. “Well. Outside it.” Then she laughed, or more like a short and brassy HA escaped her before she could clamp her lips shut. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s a lot, right now. Like in my life. Whew. Do you work here?”
The world seemed to swell around Mara. She let her eyes unfocus on a crack in the curb, red and blue lights ambient around her, city noise gradually crescendoing as people started to wake up. This wasn’t quite her neighborhood. She only lived about six blocks west, though, and knew the area. Murder wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t something she thought about happening.
“No,” she said to the woman. “I don’t think I do work here.”
The woman looked at her.
“I mean, today was supposed to be my first day. But. I don’t. Think I’m going to work here?” Brunch tips weren’t worth this.
The woman leaned in to an almost whisper. “Probably a good idea, baby.”
—
The morning they found the body—a regular with his throat slit at what was supposed to be her new job, six blocks from her house—Mara turned away from Lilypad, pressed play on the sad hip-hop on her phone, and let the twinkling guitar and falling boulder synth bass completely dull her senses. Fully dissociated, she crossed the street, zombie-walked onto a westbound bus, and went home.
In her apartment, Mara took her shoes off, but left her headphones in. Sat on the couch and stared at the blank TV screen. Thought about texting Melissa, thought about texting Parth. Stayed still. Roused herself only when an album finished, scrolling to find any loud noise that would keep thoughts away.
By the time her mom got home from her own shift, though, a few hours later? It was like the universe had unlocked something in Mara, something that scared her. Try as she might, she couldn’t help it. Curled up with her laptop on an oversize pillow, working on a third cup of coffee, she had about a dozen tabs open on her browser, and by the time her mom asked “how was your first day?” her decision to quit without setting foot inside felt like the oldest news. Mara was in Research Mode, a state of mind usually reserved for things like “the history of Epitaph Records” or “Miles Davis in Japan”—not murder-of-the-week, case-of-the-missing-white-girl stuff. Yet here she was.
She had to know everything about this murder.
2 thoughts on “Chapter 1”