The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  It isn’t until they’re caught—her mother comes home several hours earlier than expected, when they’re still naked and involved with each other in the backyard—that you realize just how young she is.

  Fourteen years old, and already a harlot.

  Her mother is weeping as she chases the half-dressed boy through the yard and away from their property, ignoring her daughter crying behind her. You lean against the other side of the fence and listen to the mother’s lecture, all the ways she and her husband taught their daughter better than this.

  You’re not surprised when Libba sneaks out of the house that night to go find the boy she loves.

  You’re not surprised when she fights you, because she’s clearly a girl who goes after what she wants, and she wants that boy, she wants to live.

  You just can’t let that happen.

  This boy may treat her gently, but she’s too young to know what men will do, so you have to show her.

  You have to show her all she’ll ever be to men when she stops being a good girl. It’s not something she can get back, after all.

  You start to leave her there, on the church floor, but she’s only fourteen. So you drape her rags back around her, enough to cover the important bits, and lay the carnations over the cloth.

  White, tipped in red that bleeds down through the petal veins into the heart.

  You remember.

  Mum shoos me up to bed around one. I sit on my bed, shadows dancing across the walls from the flickering light of the electric tea candle in front of Chavi’s picture. It’s the same one we have downstairs, though this frame is made out of chips of colored glass and sweeps of metal. It’s the same ring of yellow silk chrysanthemums.

  My current journal is in the nightstand drawer, a pen hooked to the front cover. It’s decorated with what is, quite frankly, a profoundly disturbing collage of battered stone president heads, all but one pictures from the day trip Mum and I took with Eddison back when we lived in D.C. The exception is tiny, almost invisible in the gap between Kennedy and Taft, a little blue lizard with a placard gripped in its mouth, roman numerals on the little grey square. That lizard appears on all my journals, somewhere. Sometimes on the outside of a cover, sometimes on the inside, sometimes just tucked into a margin on one of the pages.

  Chavi’s journals would be easy to put in order, because she was more consistent. The bottom left corner of the inside front cover always had a drawing of me, holding a date. It might be a picture of a page-a-day calendar, or a monthly calendar with one box circled, or a representative doodle for holidays. Each notebook started with the next day of the year. All you have to do to put them in order is look inside the front cover at the calendar.

  Chavi was almost to August.

  I am never going to fall asleep.

  I wait until Mum is probably—hopefully—sleeping across the hall, then ease down the stairs. There’s one three-quarters of the way down that will creak unless you step just to the left of center, but the next one you have to step all the way to the right or it’ll groan. I grab hold of the railing and skip both.

  The candle in front of Chavi is dark. The last one to bed blows it out so we don’t accidentally burn the house down. I want to—maybe need to—relight it. I don’t, though. There’s enough light bleeding in through the glass in the front door to make the picture visible, even if not clear. The streetlight, pale and somewhat yellowed, stretches up the walls and along the side of the stairs. It breaks at the hall ceiling, arcing up at strange angles to play along the banister for the landing.

  A car drives by outside, shifting the light, and for the second before I can close my eyes, the shadows make it look like something is swaying from the banister.

  My heart thumps painfully, and I duck my head as I walk down the hall to the living room. Something brushes my shoulder and I flinch, then call myself ten kinds of idiot when I realize it’s just my hair. We checked every inch of the house, then armed the alarm. There’s no one here but me and Mum. I can list reasons why it’s okay to be this jumpy. I can name them, and naming is supposed to help, but somewhere between wondering who’s dead and if someone is watching the house, there’s a memory that’s a little too present tonight.

  When my dad hanged himself from the banister of the house in St. Louis two days before the first anniversary of Chavi’s death, his feet didn’t brush my shoulder. I didn’t get close enough to find out if they would.

  I walked home from school, unlocked the front door, and before I could even bend down to kiss Chavi’s frame, I saw him. I stopped and looked up at him, but he’d been there a couple of hours maybe. He was definitely dead. I didn’t have to touch him to check. He’d bought the rope a few weeks ago so we could put up the hammock, only the hammock had never gone up.

  I didn’t scream.

  I’m still not sure why, but I remember standing there, looking up at my dead father, and just feeling . . . tired. Numb, maybe.

  I walked back outside, locked the door, and called Mum, listened to her use her work cell to call the police as she raced home to me. She got there before the cops did, but didn’t go inside to look. We just sat together on the front step until the officers got there, followed by the ambulance that was probably protocol but also very unnecessary.

  I was still holding the mail, including the brightly colored envelopes that had my birthday cards from the Quantico Three. They’d arrived exactly on time.

  We stayed in a hotel that night, and we had just settled into bed, knowing we wouldn’t sleep, when there was a knock on the door. It was Vic, holding a bag with long-sleeved FBI shirts and fleecy pajama pants, a CVS bag of nonhotel toiletries, and a half gallon of ice cream.

  I’d known Vic almost a year at that point, and already respected him, but what made me love him a little was that he didn’t tell me happy birthday. He didn’t even mention it, or the cards. Even though it was clearly a suicide, he still came out to Missouri to talk to us, to make sure we would be okay, and he never once asked us how we were feeling.

  It was almost three o’clock before he left to go find his own room somewhere, but he pulled one more thing out of the bag and handed it to me. It was ungainly wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag, but when I opened it up after he left, Oreos spilled out onto the bed, twelve zipped sandwich baggies with three cookies each, and a day and date on each bag in Eddison’s spiky writing.

  Acknowledging the need, rationing the impulse.

  It was the day I fell a little in love with Eddison, too, as family, as a friend. Because the Oreos admitted I wasn’t okay, and the rationing said I was going to be.

  There are no pictures of Dad on display, not the way we have Chavi still with us. That Chavi didn’t choose to leave is part of it, but more than that . . . if Dad had needed to leave, even if he thought suicide was the only thing that could give him relief, Mum would have understood. However their marriage did and did not work, it allowed for that, at least.

  But Dad killed himself in a way that would guarantee I would be the one to find him. We’d only been in St. Louis a few months, and I’d very purposefully not joined any clubs or anything that would keep me late at school. Mum wouldn’t get home from work until the evening, so barring catastrophe, there was never a way I wouldn’t be the one to see him first.

  Almost anything else Mum could have forgiven and mourned, but she’d never forgive him for making me find him.

  I honestly don’t think he thought about it. Don’t think he could have thought about it by that point. Probably the only thing he was capable of thinking about by then was that he couldn’t use one of the trees out back, or a neighbor might see and cut him down before he died, save him somehow when he didn’t think there was anything to save. In my heart of hearts, I firmly believe he was so focused on making sure he wouldn’t be found that it didn’t occur to him that at some point, he would be.

  That will never matter to Mum.

  The pictures of him weren’t burned, they’re just not out.
Carefully packed away, preserved, because someday I’ll want them even if Mum never looks at them again.

  We called his family, that next day. When we left London, Mum and Dad cut ties with both families. Or maybe they left London because they cut ties. I’ve never been entirely sure what happened, only that neither of them liked speaking of it, so I have no idea how many cousins I have anymore. They left family, and religion, and maybe faith in its way, and the first time we talked to my grandparents since leaving was to tell them that Chavi had been murdered.

  They blamed my parents for taking us away, for taking us to America, the land of guns and violence, and somehow it didn’t matter to them that she’d been killed with a knife in a neighborhood a hell of a lot safer than the one we’d lived in in London, it was my parents’ fault for leaving.

  We didn’t talk to them again for a year, and then it was to tell them about Dad, and again somehow it was our fault. If Mum hadn’t taken him away from his family, he would have had the support he needed. If Mum wasn’t a heathen, he would have had the comfort he needed. Mum hung up before Dad’s mother could really get going. They needed to know he’d died, so she told them, and that was as far as she was willing to take things. We have, in theory, this massive family, but in reality it’s only me and Mum and the bit of Chavi we keep with us.

  Like the little over two hundred notebooks filled with her large, loopy handwriting, stacked off to one side of the living room like a broken mountain.

  If I can’t sleep, I should be productive and sort through my journals, find the ones from San Diego, but I can’t do it without turning the light on. It’s too late (or too early) for light that harsh and there isn’t an outlet close enough to the pile of notebooks for me to drag the table lamp over.

  When I walk into the kitchen and flick on the soft, muted light over the stove, the bags of chocolate chips are still plopped on the counter. In the fridge, fake trays of cardboard covered in parchment paper hold small, lumpy balls of crushed Oreos, cream cheese, and sugar. Grabbing the cartons of heavy cream, I dump them into the one pot we keep out and set the burner to medium-low. Cream heats slowly, and you have to be careful not to boil it or it gets gross. When the little bubbles start flocking along the sides, I stir in some sugar, then drop in the chocolate and cover the mess, turning off the heat to let the cream melt the chips on its own.

  The trays line up neatly on the counter, along with the box of toothpicks. I open the box so I can stick a pick into each ball, but my hands are shaking. I stare at them for a minute, trying to figure out if I’m pissed off, scared, or tired.

  Or, you know, all three, because fuck.

  But the answer really seems to be: need. Because I know what happened in San Diego, and what happened after we left; because patterns rarely repeat by accident; because Dad gave up and I’m not as strong as Mum . . . because Chavi’s death is a pain that does not, cannot, make sense, and I have trays full of ways to make it feel a little more real.

  I pull the cover off the pot and stir it all together. As I use the toothpicks to roll the Oreo balls in the chocolate, my hands are still shaking. My stomach is still cramping with need. It doesn’t matter that I know it’ll make me sick, that the concrete pain doesn’t actually make the emotional pain any better. It doesn’t matter that I’ve learned again and again and again that it doesn’t help.

  It just matters that it feels like it should.

  When all the balls are covered in chocolate, I shove the trays back into the fridge to cool and set. I wish fridge doors could slam. It would feel satisfying, wouldn’t it, to know that at least for the moment, I haven’t given in to that?

  Mum’s leaning against the doorway into the hall. The way her weight is slouched against the frame, her throat bared because her temple rests against the wood, tells me she’s been watching me for a while. “How much chocolate is left?” she asks, voice husky and a little thick.

  “Some. Not a lot.”

  “We’ve got a couple of bananas.” She shifts slightly, her toes curling away from the cold tile. “Mushier than you like, but not bruised yet.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  So that’s how we end up sitting on the floor of the living room dipping bananas into the pot of chocolate, a dozen or so fat white candles covering the various tables. I can’t magically make more bananas appear when the two and a half bananas are gone, and Mum takes the pot to the sink before I can think of looking for something else to dip in there.

  “I was kind of expecting there’d be a dent in the truffles,” she says when she comes back, sinking gracefully to the carpet.

  “You’d have stopped me after a few.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t have to.”

  “It doesn’t help.”

  “When has that ever mattered, when you wanted it to help so badly?”

  I don’t really have an answer for that—it’s not like it isn’t something I think every goddamn time—so I snag the edges of the bottom notebook and pull the closest stack in front of me. I find the lizard clinging to a leg of the Eiffel Tower and show it to her. “Split out anything from one-forty to one-eighty, just in case. That’s at least fewer to page through.”

  “You came up with this when you were five?” she mutters.

  “Nine. I had them covered in gift-wrap before that, but I redid all of the early ones when I decided I liked the lizards.”

  By the time she goes upstairs to get ready for work, we’ve got the five and a half months of San Diego split out for me to read through. Mum being Mum, I have a feeling her next project is going to be putting the rest of the notebooks in order so they can be boxed up properly. Keeping them out won’t drive her up the wall quite as much as it would Eddison, but she doesn’t have much use for looking back.

  I spend the rest of the morning logged into my virtual school trying to focus on schoolwork. I don’t have much mind for it, but in the Skype session with the instructor, I must look like hell, because she forgives me for it. She tells me not to worry about checking in until Wednesday, and if I need extra time just tell her, and everyday kindness feels so strange after the last twenty-four hours and I’m not even sure if I can put a finger on why.

  But by eleven, I’ve done as much as I’m going to do, so I throw the journals in the backpack I haven’t used in months, carefully check over my nice camera and settle it in its case in the bag, and head out to chess. My pepper spray is a comforting weight in my pocket.

  I don’t really expect anything to happen. Jonquils . . . those are an opening gambit. There’s time, as strange as that sounds. In chess, the fastest possible victory with resignation or forfeit is called a Fool’s Mate. It takes only two moves per player, but—and here’s the thing—it relies on White being extraordinarily stupid.

  A reasonably stupid man might avoid detection if every murder is in a different jurisdiction, but this case has been in the hands of the FBI for seven years now; remaining uncaught all this time hints at someone not just patient, but smart.

  The most interesting chess games are between opponents who know each other well. They know what the other is likely to do and try to prevent it at the same time they try to advance their own gambit. Every move requires both players to completely reassess the board, like a twelve-by-twelve Rubik’s Cube. I don’t know who killed my sister, but I know a fair amount about him. His murders tell a story.

  He doesn’t repeat flowers, and he doesn’t taunt.

  Whatever the jonquils mean—if they are from the killer—it’s only an opening move.

  If they’re not from the killer . . . whoever it is already knows where I live. Trying to make myself a prisoner in my own house won’t make me any safer than continuing to go out.

  I remind myself of that during the walk. I even mostly believe it.

  Corgi’s out in the parking lot when I arrive, walking toward the pavilion with two cups of coffee in his hand. Not the Starbucks kind, just the crappy free shit the grocery store gives out in tiny Styrofoam
cups for the seniors. He startles when he sees me, almost spilling the coffee over his gloves. “Jesus wept, Blue Girl, had a night?”

  “That’s what we’re calling it,” I agree. “Looks that bad?”

  “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.” He gives me a head-to-toe once-over, then nods and sips from one of the cups. “Maybe not a lit one, neither.”

  “How ’bout a parking lot?”

  “I hear us soldiers are brave, or used to be.” He grins at me, and he really does have a nose out of a hobbit movie, but his eyes are clear. I’ve seen him after a bad day, and the week that follows. He’s doing okay.

  Everyone’s there, including a very hungover Happy. Rather than take a seat, I clear my throat. “Does anyone mind if I take some pictures?”

  The men look at each other blankly, then back at me.

  “I take photos. It’s kind of what I want to do for a living. If it’s okay with all of you, I’d really like to get some pictures to keep once we move. Not posed or anything, because that’s awkward, but just . . . all of you. As you.”

  Happy stares mournfully into his coffee, as if the answers to the universe are in there somewhere but fucked if he can muster the energy to find them. “You would pick today,” he sighs.

  “Not just today. Sometimes.”

  “Take your pictures, Blue Girl,” says Pierce, setting up his pieces. “Today you’re like to set fire to the board, you stare at it too long.”

  I watch the games for a while, my camera still in its case in my bag, letting them get back to normal. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to not be able to focus on a game, to prowl around the tables and sort of keep an eye on all the matches in progress, or if someone has a doctor’s appointment or something and we have an odd number. It doesn’t take them long to settle in.

  When I pull out the camera and look through the viewer, the world seems to sharpen. Focus. Not that terrible things aren’t still out there, or even in here, but there’s a glass barrier between all of that and me.