Not Quite Dead Yet, page 6
“The doorbell camera shows you getting home at 10:39 p.m.,” the detective said, leaning closer. “So it’s after th—”
“—It’s here,” Jet said, cutting him off. Tracing the white line with her finger. A peak out of nowhere, a white tower rising above the rest of the day, 158 beats per minute. And then a drop. Sharp. All the way down that tower, to 56 bpm. “My heart rate rose, maybe when I heard the footsteps. The first blow. The second, when I realized what was happening. Then I must have lost consciousness here.” Jet thumbed the line to bring up the exact time.
“10:46,” Ecker read it over her shoulder.
Jack removed his notebook, scribbled something down.
“10:46,” Jet repeated. “That’s when it happened.”
“Any messages?” Jack piped up now, his pen ready and waiting. “That thing shows your texts, doesn’t it?”
Jet didn’t wait for permission from Ecker, searching for the green message app. “I think it would’ve only picked up any messages I got while I was still here, on the WiFi. Anything after that, the watch would have been out of range from my iPhone, wouldn’t receive. Yep, just two texts. One from my mom at 10:48 p.m.” Jet sniffed, eyes running ahead of her. “You wanna do the honors, Detective?”
He cleared his throat, read aloud: “We will be back later now. Have to take the chairs back to the hotel because you wouldn’t do it.”
Jet looked up at the cops. “I don’t think that’s a strong enough motive for murder, do you? The chair thing?”
None of them smiled. Come on, she was the one dying; they could at least pity-laugh.
“The other text?” Ecker asked as Jet backed out into the menu of messages.
A blue dot next to the contact name.
Ecker stiffened beside her, leaning closer still. “Who’s that? Who’s Don’t Pick Up?”
Jet bit down on her lip. “That’s…my ex-boyfriend. JJ. I changed his name in my contacts after we broke up.” They were all looking at her, eyes narrowed, Jack’s going farther than that, more like troubled. “Look, it’s a thing, OK? People do it. Young people. Never mind, not a big deal.”
Jet pressed the notification and their message thread jumped up.
Weeks of silence. Then, on Halloween, just one word from JJ:
Sorry.
“What time did he send that?” Ecker asked, voice picking up speed.
Jet swiped the message to see.
“10:58 p.m.”
“After you were attacked.” It wasn’t a question. “Why is he apologizing to you?”
Jet shrugged.
“You can’t think of any reason?” Ecker sidestepped to face her, to study her eyes.
“No. Not really,” Jet said, meeting his gaze. “We’ve been broken up a while, since July. He didn’t want to, but it’s fine. It’s been fine. I bumped into him at the fair—”
“—Did you speak? What did he say to you? What time?”
“Nothing. I think it was around ten. He asked to talk to me, about something important, which I knew meant he wanted to talk about us, so I blew him off.”
“Are you sure that’s all?”
Now Jet’s eyes were troubled. “I have no reason to withhold anything from you. I want to solve this more than you do. I didn’t give JJ a chance to talk to me at the fair—I don’t know what he wanted. And I don’t know why he sent Sorry to me. Or why he’s left town, not answering his phone.”
“I can think of a reason,” Jack said quietly.
“Sergeant,” Ecker snapped in his direction, sharpening the consonants to a point.
“You think he tried to kill me, then texted me Sorry twelve minutes later?” Jet asked, not to any of them in particular: collective cop. “The timing is weird; I give you that. But the killer took my phone. Why would JJ text the phone he knew he had?”
“Well, it came up on your watch, didn’t it?” Ecker said.
“Could have been symbolic,” added the chief.
“But if the killer has my phone…wait,” Jet stalled, her heart picking up on it the same time as her head. “The killer has my phone, I’m so stupid.” But she wasn’t; the cops were. Why had they wasted time looking at heart rate data and messages? “Find My Phone,” Jet explained, turning back to the watch, scrolling through the home screen until she found the little green app. Pressed it.
Three devices were listed.
Jet’s Apple Watch. Battery half full. With you now, it said.
Jet’s MacBook Air. Low battery. At home. Upstairs in her room.
Jet’s iPhone 14.
Jet clicked the final option and it expanded.
Jet’s iPhone 14. Woodstock, VT. Last connected Friday, 10:56 p.m.
A map appeared on the little screen. Small white roads, gray background, and a blue flashing dot. The location of her phone.
Ecker pointed at the screen. “Where is that?”
Jet zoomed in until the road names appeared, and the bend in the Ottauquechee River.
“River Street,” she said. “Near the corner of North Street. Just beyond Elm Street Bridge. That’s less than five minutes away.”
Most of Woodstock was less than five minutes away.
The blue dot didn’t look like it was sitting in any of the houses, out there in the middle of the road.
“Last connected Friday at 10:56 p.m.,” Jet read out. “So that’s when they turned it off, hasn’t been on since. But it was there, right there, when they turned it off.”
“River Street,” Ecker sounded it out. “Does that mean anything to you? Know anyone who lives there?”
Jet searched her mind, memories intact, even if not all her words were. “Nope, I don’t know anyone who lives there.”
The detective swapped a look with the other two, then up at the darkening evening sky. “All right. I’ll go speak to the people in these houses. See if they saw anything that night. Chief, you coming?”
“Coming,” Lou said, screwing on his cap.
The detective held out his hand, gesturing for Jet’s watch.
Jet looked down at it: 6:49 p.m., it told her, still trying to be useful. She placed it in his open palm but didn’t quite let go.
“You’ll tell me? When you learn anything more?”
“I’ll let you know what you need to know,” he said, closing his hand around the watch.
Cop speak for: Maybe.
Ecker got back into his car, the chief climbing into the passenger seat. Jet and Jack backed away as he started the engine, driving off with a wave, fingers tapping the glass.
“Can I borrow your pen, please, Mr. Finney?”
She smiled up at him. He offered it over without a word.
“And maybe a couple of pages from your notebook?”
A bigger ask. But he still did it, without a word, ripping out two fresh sheets.
“Thanks.” Jet grabbed them, leaning against the roof of Jack’s squad car.
10:46—Time of murder, she wrote, before she forgot any of it. Didn’t know how much she could trust her condemned brain.
10:56—Phone turned off. Last known location: River Street, near corner of North Street. Is that where killer lives? Or they turned it off on their way home? Didn’t throw it in the river?
10:58—“Sorry” text from JJ.
“I’ll just go say goodbye to your parents,” Jack said when she finally looked up from her scribbles. “The cleaners should be finished soon, then you can get back in, get back to—” He stopped abruptly.
“Normal?” Jet guessed. They both knew it was the wrong choice, sorry written all over his creased eyes.
Then he blinked and they softened, the flicker of a smile. “Someone’s here to see you,” he said, pointing, then turning away toward the backyard.
Jet spun around.
The crime scene tape lay trampled across the drive now, forgotten in the wind, pinned down by a pair of boots. And four paws.
“Reggie!” Jet yelled, stuffing the paper in her pocket, darting forward.
Billy smiled, letting go of the leash.
Reggie launched toward Jet, his back half almost leaving his front half behind, legs a tangled blur, yipping as he collided with her.
Jet dropped to her knees, screwed her face as he jumped up to lick it.
“Hello handsome boy,” she said, rubbing his belly. “Hello. Hello. I’m here. I’m here. Careful of that bandage. No, you can’t have it, silly. I’m sorry you had to see that, boy. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’d kill them if they touched you.”
She tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t stay still, lurching in manic circles around her.
“Dad said you were back from the hospital,” Billy said, his turn to approach. “Knew Reggie was staying with Luke and Sophia. Picked him up on my way. Thought you’d want to see him.”
“He’s clever, isn’t he? Our friend Billy,” Jet said to the dog, straightening up, knees clicking.
Billy glanced at the vans behind her, the plastic people.
“Crime scene cleaners,” Jet explained. “They’ll be done soon.”
“I can’t believe you’re out of the hospital already.”
“Why would I waste any more time in there?”
Billy didn’t answer. He did something else: stepped forward and buried her in a hug, Jet’s nose pressed up against his chest.
The first person to actually hug her.
It almost brought her blockades down, the ones made of screws and wire mesh in her head. But if they came down now, how would Jet ever bring them back up? She coughed into the fabric of Billy’s shirt.
“I’m so glad you’re OK,” he said, his breath warm against her hair, against the bandages.
“Don’t be too glad.” She pulled back out of the hug, Reggie settling by her leg, dusting the drive with his tail.
“I can’t believe it.” He sniffed, catching a tear that fell to the groove of his chin.
Jet shrugged. “I’m only a few hours ahead of you there.”
Billy’s eyes settled on his dad’s squad car. “They don’t know who…?”
“Not yet,” Jet replied. “I’m going to work out who did it. I guess you’re the only person I can trust not to be the killer, right? I mean, who would come back a few minutes later to discover their own crime, on camera, and leave their DNA all over the scene, call the cops and the ambulance? And we grew up together, and I know you can’t even kill a bug, so it’s a pretty safe bet that it wasn’t you, Billy Finney. I did want to ask, though. Why were you here? You live in the center of town.”
“Dad’s wallet,” he said. “Someone found it on The Green, handed it to me as I was leaving the fair. Think he must have dropped it during the scuffle with Andrew Smith. I walked here to bring it back, put it through the mail slot. Didn’t even get to his front door before I heard Reggie screaming, knew something was wrong over here.”
They both looked down at the dog. Jet might not have survived at all if Billy hadn’t found her when he did. Did she owe these final seven days to this man and this dog?
“I’m going to do it, Billy. Always told you I’d do something big, didn’t I? OK, I thought I was going to be president or an astronaut back then, but this is just as big: solving my own murder.”
Billy dipped his head, eyes darkening. “Why do you keep saying it like that?”
Jet shrugged. “If you’ve gotta die, might as well be funny about it.”
No one else seemed quite ready for it.
Another tear: Billy didn’t catch this one in time, soaking into his checked collar.
“I was so scared when I found you. I thought you were dead. I really thought you were dead. I don’t know what I’d do if…but you’re alive, you’re OK, you survived. It’s all going to be OK.”
“Not that OK,” Jet said, confused by the sincerity in his face, the hope in his eyes alongside the blue, where hope absolutely did not belong. Wait a minute. “Billy…has no one told you?”
He sniffed.
“Told me what?”
Ah, fuck. This wasn’t going to be fun.
Jet pulled her coat tighter, night settling in, claiming her exposed skin. “Billy. It’s…the thing is…I’m…well…” Just rip off the Band-Aid, it would hurt him the same whether it was fast or slow. “I’ll be dead in a week.”
His face changed, one second to the next. Mouth cracked open, eyes faraway and spinning, a quake in his knees that made him stumble back.
Poor, sweet Billy.
Six
Jet watched it again.
The third time.
Motion Detected 10:39 p.m. 10/31/2025.
Herself, walking up the drive toward the front door, dressed all in black, hair a little mussed from the walk, from the wind, from the zombie mask.
Jet slid her knees up and her MacBook closer, resting against the lump of her thighs, padded by the comforter. Lights off, dark except for the screen, except for the video of that Jet, looking into the bucket of Halloween candy, realizing it was empty.
The world was dark behind her, but she glowed from the lights mounted by the front door. Then Jet turned, looking right into the camera, through the screen, staring at this Jet, the one tucked up in bed now. She stuck out her tongue and Jet stuck hers back.
“Don’t go in,” Jet muttered darkly, warning her past self as she pulled out her keys and slotted them in the door. The Jet who was still alive, the one who had everything: all the time and all the laters she could ever want. Jet envied her, hated her a little. “Don’t go in.”
She didn’t listen.
The door opened and swallowed Jet whole, and it took less than a minute to do it.
The frame froze and the video ended.
Was the killer already inside when Jet had opened the door? Or did they come in later, when Jet was distracted by her phone and a fucking cookie? The footage had no answers for her, not the first time she’d watched it, or the second or the third. The killer never crossed the frame, never set off the motion detector.
Jet turned to the notebook spread open on the pillow beside her. The writing on the left-hand page was crossed out: Ideas for dog walking app in Boston/other cities. Many ideas crossed out before that one, half a notebook of them. On the top of the fresh right-hand page she’d written: Who murdered me? Underlined. She’d transferred the times and data they’d found on her Apple Watch, and below that she’d asked: Ring doorbell camera—was the killer already inside when I got home? Now she answered: I don’t know. Dropped the pen.
Outside her door, she heard her parents creeping past on the way to their bedroom. Saw them too, the gloom from their passing feet. One set faltered, two shadows that lingered, blocking the glow under the door. A boundary, between here and there, the living and the dead.
“Keep going, Mom,” Jet whispered, not loud enough to be heard. “I’m asleep.”
“She’s asleep, Dianne,” her dad hissed. “Let her sleep.”
The shadows moved on.
Mom had asked her one last time three times since they got back in the house. So Jet told them she was tired, going to bed. Because she didn’t want to sit at the dining table and eat lasagna with her parents in the bleach-cleaned air; she wanted a bar of chocolate and she wanted to be alone: to do this. Log in to her parents’ Ring.com account—got the password from Dad—and see it for herself. The moment she goes in alive and comes out dead.
Jet skipped ahead to the next video, the next time the motion detector, well, detected motion: 11:05 p.m.
Third time watching this one too.
Billy, hurrying toward the door, pulling his hands out of his pockets, an awful screeching sound that buzzed against Jet’s speakers. Reggie. Screaming.
Reggie from now stirred at the sound, sleeping by Jet’s feet, or trying to.
“Sorry bud,” Jet said, turning the volume down, dimming his distress.
The dog wasn’t allowed upstairs, and definitely not on the beds, but this wasn’t the first time Jet had ignored those rules.
“Hello?” Billy called on-screen, before he even got close. “Mr. and Mrs. Mason? Jet?”
He reached the front door, knocked his fist against it, the camera fish-bowling his face, distorting his panicked eyes. “Hello? Are you OK in there? I—I can hear the dog. Is everything…” He stopped, cupped his hands to his eyes, peered through the crinkled stained glass of the front door. He drew back, bent down to the mail slot. “Reggie,” he called through it. “Reggie, boy, what’s wrong? Come here. Reggie!”
The howling didn’t stop.
Billy ran his hands through his hair, fingers trapped in the curls.
“I don’t know what to do,” he muttered to himself, looking around. He spotted the doorbell camera, looked right into the lens, into Jet’s eyes, forty-eight hours in the future. He pressed the button, that annoying chime—doo-di-dooo, you know the one. “Is anyone in?” he asked the camera. “Hello, can you hear this? I think something’s wrong. I…”
Billy’s face moved right up to the camera, then beyond it, out of frame. The rustle of the bush as he clambered over it to look through the window, into the living room.
You could hear it. The very moment he spotted Jet, lying there, head bleeding and undone. There was a click in his throat, too mechanical to really sound human, something breaking that might not be so easy to fix. Metal screws and wire mesh wouldn’t do.
“Oh my god, Jet, no! Jet!”
Knuckles on glass. Over and over. The dog screeching louder.
“Jet!” Billy screamed. “Jet—can you hear me?! Oh my god!”
That break in his voice, raw and grating, like earlier when he walked away from the house and thought Jet couldn’t hear him, crying down the street.
Billy darted back into the frame, past the camera, his jaw set as he eyed the front door.
“I’m coming, Jet!”
He backed up and kicked out at the lock. The door buckled but didn’t break.
