Page 25 of Last Seen
New words come. A shriek. Halley shuts her eyes and listens to the memory.
“How could you do this to me?”
“Cat, honey, I love you.”
She opens her eyes and scans the rest of the report. It is basic, straightforward, and the most painful thing she’s ever experienced.
Cat stabbed Susannah three times in the chest. Halley thinks about how hard that is to do—was her mom down on the ground? Standing? Did the first wound happen standing, and the last two when she was down?
She tries to visualize it from the drawing, the almost childlike outline of a body with three lines designating the three stab wounds. It’s too bare bones. She needs to get back to the screaming, shrieking voice. That’s how she’ll know the truth about what happened. She has to access the memories of that day.
She can imagine a million things, and none of them will be accurate until she sees the actual crime scene photos, reads the analysis, and puts herself back in the scenario. Maybe then things will become clear.
Halley scrolls through everything Theo sent, but nothing else shakes free. Her head is starting to hurt again, and a glance at the clock shows it’s past midnight. She needs to rest.
Using the ancient poker they found at the annual swap meet when she was eight, she smacks the embers of the fire so they’ll die out and goes to bed. Ailuros is already there, on his back, waiting for her to rub his belly.
She does, frustrated. How can she remember the swap meet as if it happened yesterday, and not remember seeing her sister kill their mother?
Growing up, she was enamored of the seasonality of her home, but now, the April winds are too loud, the air too cold. The darkness too dark. The cat jumps from the bed and startles her from a light doze. She tries to get back to sleep but is thwarted by her own brain. It’s hammering away on the reality of her new circumstance, trying tocomprehend what it all means while her heart concurrently breaks. She tosses and turns, staring at the ceiling of her childhood room, painted black and plastered with pinpoint glow-in-the-dark star stickers and thin strips of barely visible green tape. A representation of the stars and constellations that she knows as intimately as the back of her hand and, oddly enough, exactly mimics the sky outside right now. There is Arcturus, and Betelgeuse, and Pollux. Sirius, and Canis Major. Hydra. The Big Dipper. Orion.
She maps the night skies and listens to the trees whispering their secrets. How is she supposed to move forward with her life, her plans, when the entire past has been a lie?
Her scientific brain chimes in.It’s not really a lie. Your mom is dead regardless.That philosophical conundrum makes her sit up in the bed and wrap her arms around her knees, like she used to when she’d had a nightmare. There will be no sleeping tonight.
She has a proper argument with herself, just to pass the time.
Mom’s been gone all this time—does it matter how she left this earth?
God, yes. Of course it matters.
She was taken away. That’s a fact. She dies in either scenario.
But my sister didn’t die. I’ve loved Cat my whole life, mourned her for twenty-eight years, missing the very idea of her, and now? How do I love someone who’s done such a horrible thing? How do I turn off the emotions, harden my heart toward her, go from love to hate?
How could Cat havedonesuch a thing? What drove her to murder the one person who had openly adored her? Yes, they fought; yes, there were tensions in the house because of the new stepfamily and the usual teenage brattiness. But when push came to shove, Susannah would die for Cat.
Did die for Cat.
It’s this last thought that drives Halley from the bed and back downstairs to the computer. She takes a seat. Ailuros is nowhere to be seen, and she realizes she misses him. “Kitty? Where are you?”
He ignores her.
Halley searched on Google for her sister earlier and found the article and the missing persons report, but nothing more. She decides to try a few new parameters, and this time scores an article that was written about Catriona in a long-form magazine, actually only a few years ago. Not wanting to wait until she can get to the library in the morning and read it for free, she pays the subscription fee to access the article, heart in her throat. It’s not so much about her sister, she realizes, reading, but about the failures and successes of the juvenile justice system in general. It is unsatisfying, especially because it is so open ended, discussing the need for forgiveness and understanding for juvenile criminals, how there need to be massive reforms, and doesn’t detail Cat’s crimes at all, other than identifying her as a success story of the system. A success.
But it does leave Halley with one tantalizing piece of information.
While Cat was in juvie, her sister applied to and was accepted into Harvard.
Did they know her sister went to jail for murder? And let her in anyway? Was she part of some sort of rehabilitation program? Did she graduate?
Halley starts digging. This is quantifiable information. If Cat got out of the system in 1993, there’s a time frame to look at. Harvard’s archives are accessible, and while the Facebook alumni pages are private, some of the members of the groups are listed. She goes through them one by one.
It is nearing dawn when she finds a name that rings a bell.
Tyler Armstrong. Class of 1995.
Tyler Armstrong.
