Page 15 of Come Find Me
It’s just…gone.
I walk into his room—still nothing. I hit the side of the device, jarring the needle, and try again. Nothing. I start to worry I imagined the whole thing. That I conjured it into existence, from my imagination.
Hands shaking, I pull up the video I took earlier in the day, just to make sure it exists, that it happened.
As it replays, I let out a breath of relief—it’s exactly how I remembered it. The spike, the pause, over and over, in a pattern.
Then I hit Reply on KJ’s message and upload the video.
I write:Something’s happening here.
The room we’re sitting in could use a makeover. There’s a table with plastic chairs like from a school, where Joe and I sit on one side and a man with brown-gray hair wearing wire-rim glasses and a brown suit jacket sits on the other. His tie is crooked, off-center and twisted, and I keep getting the urge to reach across the table and fix it for him. He introduced himself with a couple of letters, followed by what was obviously a last name, but I missed it.
There are no pictures on the walls. But the paint is fading in sections, like something must’ve hung there once.
“Thanks for coming in today,” Crooked Tie says, drawing my focus from the lack of décor to the state of the tabletop (old, worn, in need of a polish). “Kennedy, you’ve probably heard that we’ve been preparing for the upcoming trial.”
There’s this crack running through the surface of the table in front of me, dips and valleys, and I trace my nail through it.
“Kennedy?” Joe says, and then he sighs. “Yes, she knows.”
“Okay.” Crooked Tie stacks a pile of papers on the table. For a moment, I think the crack in this table must come from him, from doing this day after day. He lays the papers in front of him so I can see a few notes in scribble, in his own handwriting.
“Today we’re just going to walk through how the questions will go. It’s nothing you’re not expecting. It’s basically everything you’ve already said.”
I see the shadow house again for a moment, and then it’s gone. Replaced by fresh paint, fresh carpet.
“Then why do you need me to repeat it?” I ask.
Joe sighs again, but the other man smiles.
“Kennedy, the timing is important,” he explains. “Youare important.”
“The police have my statement,” I say.
“Yes, they do,” he says, nodding. He looks down at the papers, readjusting his glasses. “So let’s go over the statement. Can you tell us, once more, where you were on the night of December third and the early morning of December fourth?”
I sigh. “I was at Marco’s house.”
“Marco Saliano,” he says, as if correcting me, or asking.
Then I realize he’s waiting for me. “Marco Saliano. Yeah,” I say.
“Great,” he says, making a check mark, like I’ve just given the correct answer on a pop quiz. “And would that be Marco Saliano at Fifteen Vail Road?”
“Yes.” At least, I was pretty sure that was his address. Since I cut through the fields to meet up with him there, I never really noticed the street signs. I described his house to the police asthird on the right from the fields.
Another check mark. “Okay, so, on the early morning of December fourth, you left your boyfriend Marco Saliano’s house, located at Fifteen Vail Road, sometime after one a.m.”
He pauses, looks up at me, raises his eyebrows.
Apparently, that was a question. “Oh, I guess. I don’t know.”
He frowns, then looks at the paper. “That’s what you said.”
“Exactly, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You have the statement. The person who made it remembers more than I do by now.”
He blinks slowly, his eyes looking unnaturally large behind his glasses. The pen hovers over the paper. He doesn’t make a mark. “You’re the same person.”
