Page 9 of Twelve
The names don’t fit together. He picked one, the ex-wife picked the other—or maybe one is a family name.
“I’m not your daughters,” Cassie states clearly. She knows she’s probably staring at him too hard. “You can ask me whatever you need to ask me. I saw people at the theater. I can describe them to you.” She doesn’t pause, because she knows that if she does, he’ll tell her to slow down. “My mom doesn’t date, but she does meet with clients one-on-one. She’s a mentalist. Do you know what a mentalist is? People think she’s psychic, but she’s not.” That seems important, when Cassie thinks back on the blood on the walls, the floor…
Too much blood.
“Maybe she fooled the wrong person,” Cassie thinks out loud. “Whoever did this—they meant to. They planned it.” Cassie sees it every time she closes her eyes. She sees it even when her eyes are open. “I need to go back there.”
For the first time, her voice trembles. She hears it, and the detective does, too, and Cassie senses immediately that he’srelieved. Relieved that she’s showing emotion. Relieved that he can comfort her. Relieved that he can treat her like a kid.
“I need to see the evidence,” Cassie insists. “The pictures you took. Are you interviewing anyone?”
She sees his answer coming, as he places a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Just breathe.”
Mackenzie was backlit. There was something haunting about the image: her face visible through the wooden boards, the sun reflecting in a halo off her hair, her eyes in shadow.
“Three kids from the high school are dead.” Mackenzie’s voice wasn’t emotionless, but it wasn’t expressive, either. She saiddeadlike it was any other word. “Two girls, one boy. People say it was suicide. They say the kids jumped.” She paused, and I got the sense that she was watching me every bit as closely as I was observing her. “There are cliffs, where the older kids go to party. My brother goes there sometimes. He knew one of the girls.”
I forced myself to concentrate on what she was saying and not just the way she was saying it. I couldn’t just go through the motions here. I had to listen to her. I had tobelieveher.
I had to let her take control.
“Three victims,” I repeated back to her. “Two girls, one boy.” If this were a normal case, I’d be thinking victimology—what did the three have in common, what need did they fulfill for the person who’d killed them? “People say they jumped.” I continued echoing Mackenzie’s statement back to her, all the better to burrow into her subconscious and water the seed I’d planted when I’d told her that I wasn’t normal.
We are the same.
“But you don’t think they did,” I continued.
“Iknowthey didn’t jump.” Mackenzie’s voice turned harsh—vicious, even.
You’re angry.
I should have seen that coming. I should have been ready for it. This wasn’t the kind of anger that popped up overnight. This was old and deep and more powerful than anything else she was capable of feeling.
“Tell me how you know,” I said.
My understanding of emotions wasn’t like Michael’s. He read what someone was feeling in the moment. He looked at a person and read, based on physical cues, what they felt—and how they felt about what they felt and precisely which emotions they were trying not to show.
But what I did wasn’t just about the moment. It was about who someonewas.Emotions were a part of that, but I couldn’t separate them from everything else.
Like the fact that Mackenzie had been victimized as a child.
Like the fact that the man who’d taken her had killed himself before the case could ever go to trial.
He took control. He took that from you.She wouldn’t let anyone else do that, not ever again. Adults didn’t get to look through her. They didn’t get to make decisions for her.
They didn’t get toignoreher.
“I saw the body.” Mackenzie raised her head to the sky again, when most people in her position would have looked down. “The third one. After the first two, the adults blocked off the cliffs. There’s a police officer there all the time now. They brought counselors into the schools—not just the high school. The middle school, too.”
Unlike most of her classmates, Mackenzie would have been familiar with counselors, with grief, with things that no kid should have to experience.
“They talked about warning signs,” Mackenzie continued bitterly. “And prevention and suicide contagion, like that’s a thing.”
It was a thing, but I didn’t say that. I knew better.
“It didn’t help.” Mackenzie’s voice was soft now.
