A midcentury lemonade glass and pitcher set. A new bracelet with a coyote on it. A faded heather t-shirt with a Goosebumps cover ironed onto the front. Melissa was adamant that Mara needed something, an amulet of some kind. The best way to find an amulet was by thrifting.
“Thrift stores are where the universe speaks most clearly,” Melissa said. “You’re not contributing to the consumption cycle, you’re repurposing a used thing. That lets you pick up different energy.”
Mara didn’t need any new shit at all. Still, she wanted out of the house, where she had to tiptoe and watch TV wearing headphones while her mom slept. So she met Melissa.
“You witnessed a murder,” Melissa insisted while they walked in the clear summer air. “You need protection.”
“Well. Witnessing means actually seeing death happen,” Mara said.
The rest of the walk, to her credit, Melissa was a whole church mouse. Didn’t even coo at the collie that crossed their path at an intersection.
Mara tried to quiet her thoughts in the hum of truck engines, the wind opening dumpsters then slamming them shut, the sound of a kid’s wagon tires against sidewalk. She slow-walked past blooming flowers. Let her eyes unfocus in the red ocean of a hibiscus.
As soon as they turned onto Clark, the noise became less ambient and more like signals that she needed to pay attention to. More people on the sidewalk. More cars, delivery trucks, cyclists. Stores had open doors and people were enjoying the warm weather.
Unfortunately, the excess noise seemed to give Melissa permission. She leaned her shoulder into Mara’s. “Have you talked to Parth lately?” she asked.
“We were just at a Crystal Lake Counselors show. Two nights ago. You and me.”
“Like that’s what I’m asking.”
“I’d rather talk about the murder, about which there’s nothing to tell. I got off the bus, all these cops were poking around. I saw the like, tarp or whatever covering the body. I saw some blood. I didn’t see the body, and I didn’t go inside Lilypad. I just turned around and got on another bus. There’s nothing to tell, really.”
The rapid subject change didn’t faze Melissa at all. “Okay, but, like how did the air feel? Evil sometimes has an echo. It sticks to the air, or maybe it sticks to a person.”
“How would I know the difference between a murderer’s evil and a dozen cops hanging around?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe a murderer’s echo would have a stronger presence? Like it would smell stronger?”
“Melissa. What are we talking about?”
“You had a brush with death! You were so close to someone’s life being taken! Aren’t you curious if, I don’t know, the universe is saying something to you? Like maybe this is a signal?”
“The universe is giving me a signal?” Mara stopped. There were racks of blouses next to tables of books and a goose dressed like it was ready to host a garden party. Hidden here, according to Melissa, was an amulet to protect her from murderers. “The signal was that I shouldn’t work at Lilypad!”
They walked into the thrift store. There was so much more depth than the outside suggested, but the ceilings felt shorter than they should be. Combined with the rows of secondhand clothes, the record players and cordial sets and boxes of Polaroids, tables of piled jewelry and clumped groupings of blast-from-the-past furniture and various other detritus, the effect was like walking into a different world. Not the grandest of fairy tale lands—more like another dimension’s garage.
Mara and Melissa studied gemstones and pinched fabrics. They drifted around in silence for a minute, until they were near the back. Mara was afraid she’d been harsh. “Okay I have to tell you something,” she said.
Melissa gave her raised eyebrows.
“I may have spent last couple nights reading every article I could find about Lilypad, the restaurant group that founded it, articles about the murder, how Chicago police murder investigations work, articles about clearance rates and why they’re so low, articles about how the police actually have no lawful obligation to help you if they happen to see you being murdered, articles about how police don’t really do much to prevent crime, articles about how police torture confessions out of people, articles about Jon Burge, articles about Laquan McDonald, articles about Adam Toledo, articles about how the prison system isn’t about helping people and doesn’t make us safer, articles about restorative community justice, and yeah, okay, I do find it weird that someone got stabbed to death not just in my neighborhood, but at the restaurant I was about to start working at, and I have no idea what to do with those feelings.”
Melissa nodded. None of this was new information to her, somehow. “So you do accept that the universe is talking to you.”
“No. I accept that I was around something fucked up.”
“Uh huh.”
“You’re the one bringing up the other shit.”
“Okay,” Melissa said with eyebrows that suggested she was biting her tongue.
They paced another row, then stopped. Mara held up a deep red faux leather jacket that wouldn’t stop a breeze but had six immediately visible pockets and probably more that she couldn’t see. It was somehow $30. It was a little too long, but in a way that felt cocoonish. There was a Bad Brains patch sewn into the left shoulder.
“Okay I’m kinda feeling this jacket,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Melissa said. “Right away, good energy coming off of that jacket.”
What she didn’t want to admit was that this jacket felt like a constant, guiding hand on her shoulder. That it somehow felt like butter on her skin. That somehow the jacket felt bulletproof.
“Okay, I admit it,” Mara said. “I haven’t stopped thinking about the murder since that day. I feel like I have to know everything about it.”
They drifted over to the vinyls. Melissa picked up a copy of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago.
“You and your sad-girl music,” Mara teased.
A white man appeared. A shock of reddish hair sticking out behind a red cap, which didn’t cover his ears, matched a wispy red beard. Admittedly, Mara thought, his hair complimented the baby blue shirt and faded cutoff jorts.
“Do you know about how he recorded that album?” the man said. “People always talk about the artist-in-the-woods trope, you know, man in the cabin, all that, but he actually did go into a cabin, by himself—”
“Did you know you’re dressed like you’re on Team Zissou?” Melissa snapped.
“Oh, you noticed,” the man said.
“I’m married,” Melissa said, grabbing Mara and heading toward the cash register. They sped-walked, turned and zig-zagged through another aisle, and were staring at a green-haired cashier in an oversized hoodie faster than Mara thought it was possible for a human to navigate the maze of a store.
“Good call,” the cashier said. They looked at Melissa with approval. “He hangs out back there, waiting to pounce on people with music facts. Not everyone’s as mean as you. I’ve seen some nice people get stuck talking to him for hours.”
“Listen, when my radar starts whirring, I get the hell out,” Melissa said. “A man that passionate about something to a complete stranger? You gotta watch out for men like that. They’re the ones that’ll kill you.”
Mara rolled her eyes. “God forbid people try to make connections over shared interests.”
“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I like talking to fellow music fans about records,” Mara’s thoughts drifted to one of the first times she and Parth had hung out, trawling through the racks at Reckless Records and talking with unsettling ease about bands they loved, genres that had soundtracked deep heartbreaks, or records that kicked anxieties.
“Okay, well, I want any man hitting on me to use some context,” Melissa said. “If I’m buying this depressing-ass record, does that give off a signal that I want to be approached? Think about it. That’s not a man who’s ever going to hear a word I say, but he might strangle me if I tell him that Darjeeling Limited made me uncomfortable.”
“She’s smart,” the cashier said. “Do you need a bag?”
—
Outside was breezy and the street was starting to buzz alive with night people. The June evening had enough of a chill that Mara felt justified wearing the jacket out of the store. Being around the Thursday night drinkers still wasn’t appealing, though, and Mara suggested they take one of the residential streets back west. After about a block, the noise had faded into nothing but the occasional car, dog, or backyard party.
“How’s your mom doing?” Melissa asked.
“Fine,” Mara said. “She sleeps a lot. Working again, though. Part-time at the Jewel.”
“Sucks she has to do that.”
“Yeah, but what’re you gonna do?”
When she got home, her mom was at work. In the fridge was a container of leftover grilled chicken and a bag of baby carrots. She took the cold dinner into her room and opened her laptop.
Mara searched the Sun-Times and Trib, searched Block Club and The Triibe, searched the Reader. She wasn’t quite sure how to find what she was looking for. Death. Murder. What exactly was it that she was looking for?
Rabbit holes started appearing, and she dove in them like the deep end. Chicago Police settling a brutality case took her to the Laquan McDonald Wikipedia took her to the Chicago Police Department Wikipedia took her to the Jon Burge Wikipedia took her to the Golden State Killer’s Wikipedia took her to Googling are there any active serial killers in Chicago which took her to websites that said a serial killer was killing Black women sex workers on the south and west sides and she read a few articles and then had to close her laptop and breathe in silence.
Stand up, she told herself. Get some blood flowing.
The chicken was gone. It was 10:20. Her mom would be home any minute. She put the carrot bag back in the fridge and chucked the chicken container in the sink. It would be nice to wait for her mom, but she felt like talking about as much as she felt like getting stuck in traffic on a bus with broken AC.
In bed, she pulled out her phone and trawled Chicago Reddit boards for murder news. When her mom knocked on her door, she chucked her phone under the pillow and played groggy. She’d found her board, though—a post on a neighborhood subreddit. The victim in the Lilypad murder was named John Miller. He was a systems administrator at some company Mara had never heard of, but had an address in the Loop. One Reddit post was from someone who said they were a neighbor, and that John fed his cats for him when he traveled. Another Reddit post said low-key John was kinda an asshole at work but he didn’t deserve to die. Cutting through everyone’s opinions about murder in the city was a slog, but it was worth it if she could find out just a little more about the victim. John Miller.
She couldn’t be sure when she fell asleep, but her last memory of the clock was at 2:33.