Dare You by Jennifer Brown
“True. But aren’t those your initials on the lighter?” She tapped the picture. “I mean, they could probably lift your prints off it if they want to, but why bother to deny it and make it come to that, right? I’m sure there are plenty of people who’ve seen you with that lighter, starting with that boy. You call him Jones, am I correct?”
But I couldn’t speak. Could barely even breathe. The cigarettes and lighter. The ones I thought I’d lost. They hadn’t been lost at all.
Someone had lifted them and had planted them in Peyton’s car. From my room, my car, I didn’t know. All I knew was that meant someone had gotten close to me again, without me even knowing it.
“You recognize them,” she said. A statement, not a question. I didn’t budge. I couldn’t look away from the photo. I couldn’t take in all that it could mean. She took a deep breath and went back to her file. “So I’m guessing you’ll probably recognize this, too.” She reached into a bag on the floor next to her feet and pulled out a plastic bag with bundled black cloth inside. She tossed it on the table.
I knew what it was before I touched it. “My jacket?” The words popped out before I could even think them. I picked it up and gazed at it, dumbfounded.
She pulled the jacket away from me. “So you recognize that as well. Any idea why it was in Peyton Hollis’s trunk?” She produced another photo—a close-up of Peyton’s open trunk, my jacket wadded among the contents.
My mind reeled. I knew I was staring at my jacket, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I had worn that jacket for months after Peyton’s death, before I had anything to do with her family, her house, or her car. I hadn’t worn it since it got hot outside, but I was sure—a thousand percent sure—it had been hanging in my closet. “No,” I said.
“So you didn’t let her borrow it, maybe?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t have a relationship with her.”
“No.”
“Never hung out with her?”
I shook my head. I was in an impossible place. There was no right answer.
“But your jacket was in her car.”
I shrugged, helpless.
She reached for another plastic bag. “Do you often carry a knife, Nikki?” I didn’t even need to look to know that my penknife was in that bag. It only made sense, right? Well, in the context of nothing making a fucking bit of sense whatsoever, it made sense.
“It’s not mine,” I said, my lips numb.
She nodded, took the bag back. “Here’s the thing. We’ve had a new witness come forward, as well.”
I jolted. “What? Who? Witness to what?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure about the details, because I wasn’t there when the statement was made. My boss handled it. But apparently whoever it was, they reported that you and Peyton were fighting. Something about Peyton not wanting you to date her brother. Apparently you were overheard telling Peyton that she would regret it if she tried to keep you two apart. That you were trained and not afraid to kill someone if you had to. Were you and Dru Hollis . . .” She flipped through some pages. “A thing? Your statement a few months ago claimed that he had admitted to being present during Peyton’s attack. Were you there with him?”
“We weren’t a thing,” I said. “We were . . .” But I found I couldn’t really explain what exactly we were, because even to my own ears, it sounded like a story. We were grieving. We were searching for her attacker. We were . . . consoling each other. “Whoever this witness is, they’re lying. I didn’t say any of those things. I didn’t fight with Peyton. Ever. I didn’t even know—” I stopped myself, clamping my mouth shut, remembering that even if Blake Willis was here “helping me out,” her job was to find Peyton’s killer, even if that meant putting me away. I shouldn’t have said a word. “I want a lawyer.”
Blake switched into full DA mode and continued on as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Well, you definitely broke into and entered Peyton’s apartment—fingerprints there, too, and a positive ID from an officer who has made a statement that you were there when he arrested Dru Hollis. And you also broke into her parents’ house. You admitted that in your statement. You can imagine how it looks that you’ve broken into two of Peyton’s residences, and your cigarettes and lighter, and your jacket, with a knife in the pocket, was found in Peyton’s car, along with a school file with your name on it, after you allegedly threatened her.”
Damn. The file. I had left it there for Martinez to find out about my synesthesia. It was still there. The car was still there. But Martinez was not. What the hell had happened?
“I didn’t threaten her. I didn’t leave my jacket there. None of this is true.”
She continued. “Luna . . . Fairchild, is it? Yes, Luna Fairchild has given a statement that you stole something from Peyton’s bedroom, and that you assaulted her and her parents when they tried to stop you. And that you’d come back to the Hollis house on some sort of vengeful mission, and she was only protecting herself when Dru got in the way.” A flash of Dru’s body crumpling to the ground streaked through my mind, painful crimson. I stared at my hands and willed myself not to say anything. “What did you steal, Nikki?” I said nothing. She leaned in. “This is where you can help me help you. Denying things will get you nowhere. You have to give me something to work with.”
My mind reeled, trying to make sense of all I was hearing. Luna was spinning this onto me? And they were believing her? Had she taken my cigarettes? How was that even possible? How did someone steal from juvie? Whose help did Luna have?
“Okay, we don’t need to know right now. But again I need to ask you, did you have anything to do with Peyton Hollis’s murder?” Blake Willis asked. She leaned forward and dropped her voice again. “I have theories, Nikki. Theories that I can take to the DA if you just help me out a little. Luna is—”
“Luna’s a liar,” I said. “A liar and a killer. You’re never going to get actual facts from her.”
“She’s also free and you’re in jail,” Blake said.
A wall of shock smashed into me—confetti and dots. My heart skipped about a thousand beats. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. My lungs didn’t want to expand.
This must have been what the girl at graduation was trying to tell me. Luna was out of juvie. The crazy, dead-eyed girl who wanted me obliterated more than anything in the world was no longer locked up. Oh, God, I’d been going on about my life, thinking I was safe, letting my guard down, reassuring Dad, berating myself for still being paranoid, while she was combing through my things, setting me up. She had gotten into my car before, so I knew she could do it. Suddenly I felt incredibly naked and vulnerable. My neck stiffened at the thought of stepping outside this building. Boo! Found you! I heard her say, remembering the terrifying image of her face popping up over the trash can I was hiding behind next to her pool house. Boo! Boo, Nikki! Boo!
“So, when you’re ready to talk, and to give me something to work with, I can—”
“She’s out?” I barked, my voice gruff, low.
Blake Willis looked up from her paperwork. “What?”
“You said Luna is free. When did that happen?”
She nodded. “About a month ago. She has been released into . . .” She checked the paperwork again and nodded. “Yep, her father’s custody. She pled manslaughter, self-defense in which her brother accidentally got in the way, and was given probation. I’m guessing her family has some pull somewhere.”
You think? I wanted to shout. You think they might have some pull somewhere? The Great Bill Hollis, who had gotten away with murder, literally, and was living it up on some beach in beautiful Dubai while I was stuck in a filthy jail cell and his own children were stuck in the ground, might have some pull? Maybe just a little, Blake Willis. Maybe just the teeniest tiniest bit.
But I couldn’t speak those words because even thinking them chilled me. Bill Hollis was powerful. Anyone with a brain could see that. But I was starting to get a sense of j
“Okay,” Blake Willis said, shoving the papers back into a file folder, sliding a blank yellow legal pad toward me, and giving me a smile. She leaned over the table and whispered. “Like I said, the only reason I’m even here talking to you is because there’s something about this case that just doesn’t add up. But it’s up to you to save yourself, Nikki. So you start thinking about details of what happened that night at the Hollis home, and write them down. Anything at all to do with Peyton, with her family, anything about the Hollis house. You never know what minutiae might turn out to be important.”
Minutiae. Ha. I specialized in minutiae.
“You’d be surprised,” I mumbled, but I was still speaking through numb lips. My arms and legs felt bumpy gray and black, like cold, rough asphalt. Nobody knew better than a synesthete how true it was that missed details could contain the clue to everything. I leveled my eyes at her. “I didn’t do anything. I was trying to help Peyton. Luna is the one you should be locking up.”
Blake Willis stood, adjusted her suit jacket. “You can’t worry about Luna. You have to worry about you now.”
“One and the same,” I said. “As long as she’s out there, I have to worry about both of us.”
“Whatever you’re thinking right now,” she said, pointing to the pad of paper, “you need to write down. If there’s something you know about Luna that could help this case, we need to know it. Otherwise, you could find yourself arrested for something much bigger than drunk and disorderly.”
I stared at the pad. It trembled, the yellow popping into bumpy gray and black burnt popcorn. Fear, fear, fear, those bumps said as they undulated across the page. Blake Willis didn’t understand how hopeless this was. “Okay,” I said. She produced a leather satchel out of nowhere and stuffed the folder into it. “Hey, if you could get in big trouble for even being here, how did you get in to see me in the first place?”
“Time’s up, counselor,” a voice said behind me. “All charges dropped.”
It was a voice that I recognized.
Blake Willis held back a smile. “Someone did me a favor. And did one for you, too.”
“I brought you a coffee,” Detective Martinez said, holding a cup toward me. “Don’t worry, it’s not French vanilla.”
6
I DIDN’T NEED your help in there, you know,” I said, following Detective Martinez to his car, the tantalizing coffee steam wafting up into my face. I totally did need his help—and we both knew it—but I generally wasn’t great at playing damsel in distress. We both knew that, too.
“I could see you had it all under control. Care to tell me why you didn’t call your dad? Or a lawyer, maybe?”
“Care to tell me why I was arrested in the first place?”
“The way I understand it, you were arrested for doing what you do—jumping in with both feet before thinking. Resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly—sounds like the Nikki I know. But drugs? Now, that doesn’t seem like you. Something is definitely wrong with that one. You could have cooperated, you know. Gone in, answered some questions, been back on the beach by sunrise. Doing whatever it was that you were doing.” He glanced at me over the top of his sunglasses, a violet feeling that stroked a blush from my cheeks.
Okay, even I would admit, Detective Martinez always looked amazing in the morning. Fresh and groomed, his short black hair gleaming in the sunlight, his clothes still pressed and crisp. I sipped on the coffee as a distraction.
“Still. Way to warn me,” I said. “But you would have to actually talk to me to warn me, right?”
“You stopped taking my calls,” he said.
“I stopped taking everyone’s calls. You’re not special.” Truth, plus I was a little bit more than freaked out that I’d let him in as much as I had. And not in the same way that I’d let Dru in. It wasn’t about sex; it was about intimacy. Detective Martinez knew more about me than most everyone else. More about me than I wanted him to. And there was the little matter of how his color had changed from yellow to grapey purple last time I saw him. He confused me. He scared me. If anyone was special, it was him. And I hated him for it. Special never led to anywhere good. “Besides, you stopped calling.”
He opened his door and propped one foot on the floorboard. My hand was still hovering near the handle on the passenger side. “There was nothing to call about.”
I laughed out loud, pulled open the door, and plunked myself inside the car. When he got in, I said, “Oh, I don’t know. How about, ‘Hey, Nikki, the girl who almost murdered you twice is out of juvie now.’ That might have been something worth calling about, don’t you think? A good opener, at least.”
“I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know? It’s your case. You were there that night. You were the first officer on the scene, in fact. You followed me everywhere to solve it. I told you where Peyton’s car was. You were supposed to finish Luna. You said you were going to. And instead, you’re turning the case onto me? You’re deciding that some bullshit witness and a half-empty pack of cigarettes mean I was the one who murdered her? I let you in and you completely sold me out. And now you show up, months later, with coffee—” I crammed my cup into his console, a drop sloshing out of the lid and landing on the edge of his seat. “And get me out of jail that you’re trying to put me into? You make zero sense.”
“I’m not trying to put you in here. I have nothing to do with it,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and tossing them onto the dash. His dark eyes searched mine. “You’re your own worst enemy, Nikki.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed, and I could feel something heavy on the sigh, but it wasn’t clear enough to come with a color. Reading Detective Martinez was different from reading Jones or half the other people in my life. Chris Martinez had secrets, and he was very good at hiding them. “I pulled myself off the case,” he said. “I never even looked at the car because you’d told me your fingerprints were inside it, and I didn’t want to be in a position of having to incriminate you. Because for some insane reason, I actually believe that you’re innocent. I’ve been purposely ignoring evidence all these months to keep you out of trouble, and I got to the place where I couldn’t feel right about it. I was just . . . too close . . . to the whole situation. I turned everything over to another detective a few weeks ago and let him find the car. I had to distance myself.”
So he hadn’t seen my school file in the trunk after all. Which meant he still didn’t know about my synesthesia. I didn’t know how that made me feel. Mostly relieved. But it also made me feel cheated in some small, unexplainable way.
“So you took yourself off the case because you believed in me but gave it to someone else to prove you wrong? It’s still not adding up, Detective.”
He sighed again, pinched the bridge of his nose. “There was another reason I took myself off the case.” He peeked at me, but I only shook my head at him uncomprehendingly. “I’ve been dating Blake Willis.”
I blinked, incredulous. It took a moment for me to absorb the information. A long, deep indigo moment of betrayal—a color I’d never seen, and never thought I’d see, with Detective Martinez.
“The DA? You’ve got to be kidding me. Right? It’s a joke. This is why you so graciously gave her a favor?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know she was involved in the case until we were already . . . together.”
“You didn’t know. How convenient for you. How the hell could you be dating her and not know? It was your case.”
“Was my case, Nikki. Was. And when we started dating, they weren’t even talking about you as a suspect. She knew I’d recused myself, but she didn’t know why. As far as anyone knew, you were just an unfortunate victim who fell in love with the wrong guy and ended up i
“I was not in love with him!” I shouted, realizing that this wasn’t what really had me angry, but unable to stop myself. “Everyone needs to quit saying that. He was a good time, period. He was a complication, and I wish I had never met him.”
He held his hands out like I might float out of my seat and he would need to push me back down in it. “Okay, okay, bad choice of words. You need to calm down. You—”
“No,” I said, reaching for the door handle. “I won’t calm down. Your girlfriend is going to have me arrested and Luna is free, and this is all just crazy. I’m leaving. I’ll walk home.”
“Nikki, stop.”
“And, for the record, I didn’t tell you where the car was to help you build a case. I told you where it was to—” I stopped. I didn’t want to tell him the truth—that I’d done it in hopes that he would find my school files that Peyton had stolen. I’d done it to open up to him about myself. I felt like a fool now.
“Calm down.”
“And I don’t need you coming back all of a sudden to bail me out and . . . and to what? Follow me again? Protect me? Beat up the bad guys? Well, in case you’ve forgotten, I beat up the bad guys all by myself last time, thank you very much, with no help from you. In fact, if you remember, when I sparred with you at the dojang, I actually—”
“Enough!”
I stopped, startled. I’d never heard Detective Martinez raise his voice, not even when he was really, really angry with me. My hand fell away from the door handle.
“I want to help you, and if you’d shut up for five seconds, you would already know that.”
I swallowed. “I don’t need your help.”
“But you will. I know the case they’re building against you, and you will. There’s evidence. And a witness.” He turned slightly so he was facing me and reached out to grab my hands. I started to resist, but found myself unable to. His grasp was strong, but warm at the same time. “I’ve seen your jacket. I know it’s yours.”