Dig Two Graves, page 21
The anger was ebbing now, giving way to a desperate kind of grief. Her voice escalated in pitch, and she had to hold on to the microphone stand with both hands to keep herself upright. Her words were labored and she took frequent breaths.
“If the police stand by and do nothing, then we must take justice into our own hands. We must act. Right now. To flush out a criminal.” Her husband laid a hand on her arm, but Mrs. Attar shook him off. “I say we go to her house and show that girl and her family what happens to murderers.”
Neve’s range of vision collapsed. The world swirled around and around until all she could see was Mrs. Attar’s mask of rage. She’s talking about me. She’s talking about my family.
That’s what Charlotte meant by rumors. The whole fucking town thought Neve had killed Yasmin.
The crowd cheered raucously at Mrs. Attar’s call for a posse, and suddenly, finding Charlotte no longer mattered. Neve needed to get home. She needed to protect her family.
Neve’s brain told her legs to run for her life, but her feet wouldn’t move, her limbs felt heavy and sluggish, and all she could do was stand there and stare in horror as Mrs. Attar egged on the mob surrounding her.
“We all know who I’m talking about,” Mrs. Attar continued, gaining strength from the increasingly agitated crowd. “Hiding at home, hiding from justice. I mean—”
But before she could say Neve’s name, Officer Hernández stepped forward and covered the microphone with her hand, oozing the quiet strength and authority that Neve simultaneously feared and respected.
Officer Hernández took Mr. and Mrs. Attar aside for a private word, and in the pause the people in the crowd turned to one another to discuss what had happened.
“She’s talking about Neve Lanier.”
“Who?”
“That chick who does that old-fashioned thing with her hair.”
“Neve needs to pay.”
“If I ever see her again, I’m gonna punch her in the face.”
“I heard Neve’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”
“I heard they found Neve’s hair gripped in Yasmin’s dead hand.”
Panic set it. Her vision blurred, her face burned, and the blood thundered in her ears so loudly she could barely hear Officer Hernández on the microphone, attempting to calm the seething throng. Neve had never witnessed such focused, mob-fueled anger in her life. If someone recognized her . . .
Neve tiptoed backward, slowly, her heart thundering in her chest, expecting at any moment to hear someone cry out her name and find everyone pointing at her. It would turn into Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges surrounded by an indignant, bloodthirsty mob at the end of The Sound of Fury, and it felt like an eternity before she reached the far edge of the barbecue pits. The instant Neve was out of view of the bandstand, she couldn’t contain her panic any longer. She turned and broke into a run as she rounded the fence.
But instead of a clear path to her car, Neve hit something hard and tall.
Not something. Someone.
“Neve?”
Even in the waning daylight, Neve could see the fear wash across Javier’s face, probably because he realized that the angry cries from the bandstand were about her. He grabbed Neve by the arm and hurried her to the parking lot, pulling her behind a large van parked in one of the accessible spots near the tennis courts. His grip was gentler than she would have anticipated, and Neve wondered whose safety he was worried about: his or hers?
They stood face-to-face, both panting from adrenaline, until Neve broke the soul-crushing silence.
“What are you doing here?”
Which was possibly the stupidest question in the world. Yes, he’d had some uncomfortable moments with Yasmin, but his best friend was dating Yasmin’s best friend. Of course he’d be at the memorial. Even though he was late, it would have been super weird if he hadn’t been there.
“I, uh, knew Yasmin, remember?”
“Right.” Neve turned away. She didn’t want to be reminded of his beautiful hazel eyes. “I forgot you two were friends.”
“I was not Yasmin’s friend.” He said it so vehemently, Neve flinched. “And I don’t think you were either. So I’m going to ask you the same question.”
“What am I doing here?” Neve said. Then she almost laughed at the irony. “What am I doing here?” she repeated under her breath.
Javier’s eyes narrowed and he angled his head as if examining a particularly abstract piece of art, intent on learning its meaning but totally failing to do so. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said, the laughter coming for real now as hysteria took control. “No, I’m not okay. There are like three hundred people back there talking about marching to my house for some mob justice. Everyone thinks I murdered my ex–best friend and there’s a—”
Neve caught herself in time. She was about to say and there’s a sociopath trying to get me to murder someone before she realized that the “sociopath” was his stepsister and the “someone” was him.
“There’s a what?”
“Nothing.” Neve took a deep breath. She had nothing to say to Javier. She needed to get out of there. “I need to go.”
She tried to squeeze between him and the giant van, but Javier stepped in front of her, blocking her escape route. The panic she’d felt moments before in the riled-up crowd flared anew.
“Let me by,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as scared as she felt.
“I need to talk to you.”
This was neither the time nor the place. “I can’t.”
“Neve . . .” He grabbed her arm again, stepping close. Neve couldn’t tell if the move was menacing or sexy. “Please.”
“I didn’t do it!” she said, shaking herself free. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Okay? I didn’t kill her. Tell your friends that I’m being framed.”
Javier reared back, confused. “I . . . I was just going to apologize for being such a dick at lunch.”
Neve relaxed a skosh. “Oh.”
“I don’t think you’re a killer.”
Neve wiped below her eye with her middle finger, mascara stinging as it bled from her lashes. “Oh.”
“But I thought maybe . . .” He paused, swallowing hard as he ran his fingers through his short brown hair. “I thought maybe you knew why Yasmin died.”
Neve inhaled slowly, careful not to display any emotion. No shock, no surprise, no confusion. Except she was feeling all of them at once.
Did Javier know what Diane was up to? Did he suspect that she’d murdered Yasmin and was trying to blackmail Neve into killing him? If he did, maybe he could help her. They’d go to Officer Hernández together and tell their stories. Neve would bring up Pamela and Mitchell, she could even loop Charlotte in. Surely, their combined accusations against Diane would at least warrant an investigation?
“Why do you care?” she asked.
Javier came closer, reaching out to graze the back of her hand with his fingertips. He was so close now she could smell the laundry detergent scent lingering on his clothes. Tide, like her mom used at home.
“What do you know, Neve?”
Nothing. Everything. Javier’s attention was confusing and intoxicating, and it reminded Neve of the night she spent in Diane’s dorm room where she wasn’t quite sure if her excitement was from the girl bonding or the attraction she felt. But Diane had been manipulating her, giving Neve what she thought she wanted in order to get something in return. Javier had no reason to manipulate her. She had nothing he wanted.
“I . . .” She took a deep breath. She’d trusted Inara and that was working out. Maybe she and Javier were on the same side of this war. She looked up into his eyes and remembered why Yasmin had fallen for him in the first place. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“About why I was at Holy Name the day that car almost hit you.”
“It doesn’t matter who you were there to see.” Those eyes bored into her as if they could lay bare every thought in her head. Even though he was totally off base on this one.
“It does, though.”
He paused, thinking. “Okay. If it’s that important, I’ll try not to—” A muted beep interrupted his thought, followed rapidly by two more. With a sigh, Javier reached into the front pocket of his jeans. His brow furrowed as he stared at his screen.
Neve tensed. “Who is it?”
“My stepsister’s looking for me at the bandstand.”
Diane is here? Neve should have known. Diane was everywhere. She backed away from Javier, ready to run.
“Are you okay?” Javier asked, stepping toward her.
She could only imagine what he saw. Probably the palest pale-faced Irish girl in the world, since she was pretty sure that all of the color, warmth, and vitality had completely drained out of her body. “Fine,” she croaked. Her voice had apparently abandoned her as well.
“You don’t look fine.” He laid a hand on her arm. “You’re trembling.”
Fuck. She hated that he was seeing her this vulnerable. Hated even more that the mere mention of Diane sent her into this paroxysm of fear. “I have to go.”
“But you were about to tell me something. Something important?”
Nothing was more important than getting the fuck out of that park before Diane saw her having an intimate moment with Javier. She didn’t even wait to answer him but bolted around the back side of the van and sprinted to her car.
THIRTY-THREE
NEVE WAS HALFWAY HOME WHEN HER PHONE BUZZED.
She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see Diane’s latest taunt. It was disturbing enough that Diane was paying respects at the memorial service of the girl she murdered, but then to fuck with Neve, whom she was trying to frame for said murder? That was truly evil.
But even though her brain said not to look, her eyes betrayed her. As soon as she stopped at the next red light, she glanced down at her phone in the cup holder.
Only the text wasn’t from Diane’s burner phone.
It was from Charlotte’s cell.
Got your texts. Can you meet me at 4905 Montaña Road ASAP?
By some miracle, Neve didn’t get pulled over for speeding while she raced the Bolt down the I-5 freeway toward San Diego. The GPS had told her it was a thirty-minute drive to the address Charlotte had given, but Neve made it in twenty. She followed the turn-by-turn directions with hands trembling on the steering wheel, not even questioning the app when it took her into a quiet commercial district. But when she pulled into the deserted parking lot of a huge business park, she was completely shocked to hear the app proclaim that she had arrived.
Neve double-checked the address against the one Charlotte had texted, expecting that in her rush to cut and paste it into her Maps app, Neve had accidentally left out a crucial digit, which would have taken her to this weird commercial complex instead of some McMansion on a tree-lined street closer to the coast. No such luck.
The business park was old construction, like, older than her parents kind of old, and had seen better days. The single-story structures were spread out in rows around a tree-lined parking lot off the main road. The buildings were laid out like rows of storage units instead of business establishments. Number 4905 wasn’t so much a street address as it was a unit number, a nondescript darkened glass door in a building that held three others exactly like it: 4904, University City Small Appliance Repair, was the kind of outdated business that might well have been a mob front because who the hell got their vacuum cleaners fixed anymore, while 4906 was a catering company. Both offices, like 4905, were dark and empty on a Sunday evening.
Neve got out of the car and cautiously approached the front window. She wasn’t sure why she was tiptoeing—there wasn’t anyone around to hear her coming. Other than her Bolt and two vans that belonged to the catering company, the business park was silent.
Why had Charlotte brought her here? Neve didn’t understand until she was close enough to the window to see the signage above the door: MIRIAM TRAINOR, CPA.
Was this Charlotte’s mom’s office?
Neve tried the front door, but it was locked, so she cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed her face to the glass. Without the reflected light from the parking lot, Neve could see a little bit more into the space. It was empty.
There were no desks other than a built-in reception counter, and no furniture of any kind. It looked like Miriam Trainor had relocated.
Neve texted Charlotte back, hoping for more direction.
I’m here. Where are you?
While she waited for a response, she looked in the window again. Beyond the reception desk, a hallway disappeared into the darkness. Probably storage and maybe the back entrance. But Neve’s eye was immediately drawn to an L-shaped wall that had been built to one side of the space. It had a door, creating what Neve assumed was a private office in the back corner. And there was a light on inside, creeping out from beneath the closed door. A blue light, like the glow from a phone screen.
Charlotte.
She banged on the front door and waited for Charlotte to slip out from behind the partition wall, but the office remained still. Maybe Charlotte had her headphones on. Neve had said she’d be in there in thirty, so Charlotte probably wasn’t expecting her so soon. But she felt exposed standing there in the open, the silent darkness pressing in on her. Maybe she could slip in through the back instead of waiting?
Neve hurried around the corner, where an alley separated the office park from the train tracks that ran behind it. Five doors on the rear side of the building were labeled with their unit numbers, and Neve approached the 4905 door, yanking on the handle with the kind of forceful confidence of someone who knew the door was going to be unlocked.
It swung open noiselessly.
“Charlotte?” She waited, but there was no answer. “Charlotte, it’s Neve.”
In the darkness, Neve crept warily through Miriam Trainor’s old office. She pulled her phone from her pocket and switched on the flashlight, which instantly illuminated a swath of the room with focused light.
A single, thin, five-drawer file cabinet lay on its side, a visible dent in one drawer the apparent cause of its abandonment. The tile floor felt gritty beneath her rubber-soled boots, as if the floors hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and the room smelled vaguely of wet newspaper and sawdust, a strange combination that tickled the inside of Neve’s nose. She pressed forward through the old storage area, past an open bathroom door, and into the main space of the office.
The blue light that Neve had seen under the office door had gone out and the only light in the abandoned office came from Neve’s phone. “Hey!” Neve said, approaching the door. “Charlotte?” She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want to open that door.
Flipping her phone around, Neve noticed that Charlotte hadn’t replied to her text. So she sent another.
Charlotte, are you okay?
Within seconds, the blue light blipped on inside the office, peeking out from beneath the closed door.
Charlotte’s phone was inside that room.
Neve’s hand shook as she gripped the knob, and when she pushed the door open, she felt like the dumb girl in a horror movie, the one who goes off alone into the creepy old house and ends up dead before the film’s halfway point. She always envisioned herself more as the Final Girl in one of those movies. The survivor. The one who made all the smart decisions and figured out all the clues.
Well, she’d figured out one thing at least. It was Charlotte’s phone that had lit up the room. It was right there, gripped in Charlotte’s hand, except Neve’s brain only registered that fact for a second before her eyes were drawn to Charlotte’s face.
It was turned toward the door, her eyes wide and unseeing, her mouth twisted in a silent scream of fear and pain. She lay on her stomach with the handle of a chef’s knife sticking out from between her shoulder blades.
Charlotte Trainor was dead.
THIRTY-FOUR
FOR A SPLIT SECOND, NEVE THOUGHT ABOUT WALKING AWAY. No one knew she’d been to that abandoned office. No one would ever connect her to it when Charlotte’s body was eventually found. And considering how much suspicion was already heaped upon her over Yasmin’s murder, the idea of adding more fuel to the rage-inspired fire she’d witnessed at the memorial service by being discovered beside Dead Body #2 was utterly overwhelming.
But the instinct was a fleeting one, born of panicked self-preservation and dismissed in an instant. Charlotte had been her friend. She didn’t deserve to lie here, forgotten and alone, because Neve was worried that she would be blamed. Well, blamed by the authorities, as opposed to blaming herself. Because as she pulled her phone from her bag, all Neve could think about was the fact that Charlotte, like Yasmin, was probably dead because of her.
If Charlotte hadn’t caught me spying on Javier, she might still be alive.
As Neve waited for the police to arrive after her 911 call, she sat on the industrial carpet outside the private office door, which was still littered with bits of torn file folders, ejected paper clips, and mangled staples that looked as if they had been wrenched away by an angry, aggressive hand. She stared at Charlotte’s body, her eyes still open and locked on Neve through the open door.
Neve had wanted to close Charlotte’s eyes, check for a pulse, do something to feel as if she could have saved Charlotte’s life, but she knew the moment she saw the body that Charlotte was beyond saving, and that even approaching her, let alone touching her body, would probably get Neve into more trouble. So she sat there, impotent and helpless, while her mind raced.
What the fuck am I going to do?
The question was many-pronged.
What the fuck am I going to tell the police when they arrive?
What the fuck am I going to do about Diane?
What the fuck am I going to tell my parents?
Not to mention Javier. Who shouldn’t even have been popping into her head at that moment.
Damn it.
