We Know It Was You Read online

  Benny went online and studied common types of knives. He knew all the boys at Winship had bowie knives for deer hunting. But bowie knives had long, rounded edges designed for slicing, not stabbing. The perpetrator could have used a throwing knife or a butterfly knife, but only hicks and rednecks had those kinds of knives, and Benny was convinced the Slasher was a Winship student. Lots of kids had nice cars, but the only ones getting slashed were from a particular circle of guys, and never girls. The Slasher had targets; it wasn’t just some random townie.

  It was possible the Slasher had acquired a pointed knife specifically for tire-stabbing purposes, but to Benny that seemed unlikely. Tire slashing was an unoriginal crime, an immature offense usually motivated by spite. Whoever did it wasn’t the most creative person in the world and probably used a pointed knife because that’s just what he happened to have access to.

  Then Benny remembered that rusty old gun Winn Davis kept in his car. It was a Confederate musket with a short bayonet on the end, “a real Richmond rifle,” Winn bragged to everyone. The teachers let him bring it to school because the shooting action was long broken. But the bayonet was still sharp, its blade ending in a nice stabby point. After one hundred and fifty years you could probably still kill someone with it, and you could definitely puncture someone’s tire. They were all Winn’s friends, the guys who kept getting messed with. And the more Benny watched Winn, the more he sensed something weird about him—a hidden rage maybe. Something.

  In any case, as soon as Benny realized the Slasher was Winn, he dropped it. It was enough to have privately solved the mystery; he didn’t need to cause a sensation by accusing Winn Davis of slashing his own friends’ tires with no apparent motive. The point of the story was that you didn’t need daring heroics to solve a mystery, just the ability to look closely.

  But now the Lexus was pulling out of the parking spot, and Benny had the agitated feeling that he should stop looking for once and do something. But do what? He couldn’t follow them because he didn’t have a car. And it wasn’t like he could just run up to them—that idea seemed insane. Beyond the fact that they had a girl who was supposed to be dead in their car, they were cheerleaders and he was nobody. The social order was so rigidly in place that even in this bizarre scenario Benny couldn’t bring himself to defy it.

  “What should we do?” Virginia asked. The question felt like it was a spotlight on his ineptitude. It was time to act—even Virginia knew it—and she was looking to him for instructions. But Benny didn’t have a clear idea.

  The Lexus pulled out and turned directly toward them. Benny tried to hide behind the tree, but then stopped, knowing it was too late and that hiding was pathetic. Then, in a swift, unexpected motion, Virginia leaped from the curb. She planted herself in the middle of the parking lot, legs apart, blocking the exit to the street.

  The car stopped, waiting.

  Virginia didn’t move.

  4:15 p.m.

  The glare from the windshield made it hard to see the girls inside. For a moment the car just stood there, the engine idling. Then Virginia could see Angie raising her hands from the steering wheel like, Hello?

  The passenger-side window lowered with a whirr.

  “Excuse us?” came Corny Davenport’s small voice. She was glaring at them. Virginia had never seen Corny glare at anyone. Her fat pink lips were pressed into a hard line. It made her look like an indignant four-year-old. But the look only lasted a moment before it was gone, as though Corny lacked the essential meanness to sustain it. “Um, can we help you?” she asked with a small smile.

  “Where are y’all going?” Virginia asked loudly.

  Corny opened her mouth to answer, but Angie cut her off. “Don’t tell her. She’ll tell everyone.”

  Virginia crossed her arms, looking very offended. “No I won’t!”

  “Yes you will. You’ll tell everyone and put it on your gossip site.”

  “I will not,” Virginia practically shouted. “I’m not that person anymore. People change.”

  “Well obviously you didn’t, or you wouldn’t be butting into our business.”

  Virginia fumed. “Oh my God! You are so rude!”

  “You’re rude,” Angie spat back. “You’re standing in our way.”

  “Virginia, we really have to go,” Corny said in an excessively gentle tone. “It’s an emergency, honey. Let’s have donuts tomorrow, okay? We’ll talk, woman to woman.”

  “Get out of our way!” Angie shouted.

  Meanwhile Benny was studying the car. There was a faint smell of urine mixed with exhaust from the idling engine. A GPS was poised on the dashboard. And Corny kept glancing back at Brittany heaped in the backseat, as if checking to make sure she was still there. Benny narrowed his eyes at the lump of a person wrapped in the Wildcats blanket. It looked like a corpse. Blond hair stuck out in greasy-looking clumps. A pale, lifeless wrist poking out, hung with a sterling silver charm bracelet, the kind all the girls wore. It had always amazed Benny how everyone at Winship seemed to know what to wear, like it was their birthright, these Patagonia fleeces and charm bracelets and backpacks with the little polo players on them.

  Is she dead? Benny’s stomach twisted. Surely she wasn’t dead. Surely Angie and Corny weren’t dragging a corpse around in the middle of the afternoon. The idea made Benny feel repulsed, but also faintly impressed. People thought girls were the squeamish ones, but he was the one who was on the verge of throwing up all of a sudden, while Corny and Angie and Virginia bickered in the parking lot.

  The blanket moved, and there was a quiet moan. “Ooohhm . . .”

  At the sound, Corny’s eyes snapped to Benny. She held her arm up to the car window, feebly trying to block his view. Benny just looked at her. What were they doing? It was hard to imagine Corny and Angie carrying out some sinister twin-hiding plot, yet there they were with Brittany’s unconscious body in the backseat. And Corny didn’t even seem that upset about Benny seeing everything. She just seemed a little flustered.

  Virginia was still refusing to move, and now she was looking at Benny like she expected him to back her up. He just gave a tiny shrug. He wished he could disappear. Or that he could make Virginia disappear. It was one thing to jump in front of the car with no plan, but now she expected him to save her and finesse the whole thing?

  “I know who’s in there,” Virginia declared, her arms crossed. Then, in a faintly threatening tone: “Maybe someone should call the police.”

  “We already did,” Angie said. “Now will you move?”

  Virginia looked at Benny again to see if he would step in. Benny did nothing. “Well . . . fine!” she said, stepping back.

  “We’ll get donuts at Glaze tomorrow, okay, Virginia?” Corny called, flashing a fake-looking smile. As soon as Virginia was out of the way, Angie slammed the gas. The tires screeched as the car tore away.

  Once they were gone, it was quiet. The leaves swished in the breeze, but other than that it was silent. For a while neither of them said anything. Virginia breathed heavily, clearly still mad.

  “You can’t let people get to you like that,” Benny said finally, not looking at her but at the empty street.

  “Like what?” Virginia asked, kicking a clump of dirt.

  “You totally let Angie control the conversation.”

  Virginia scoffed. “Well at least there was a conversation. If it had been up to you, we would have stood here like blobs and nothing would have happened.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing,” Benny said.

  “Well that doesn’t sound very American.”

  Benny looked at her. “What does that mean?”

  Virginia was sort of pacing. Her face was red. “Just that it’s better to try and fail than to never try at all. I mean it’s the American way. It’s why we have the bankruptcy system.”

  What is she talking about? Benny thought. “Okaaay,” he said, “but what I’m saying is, you know how people say, ‘Don’t just sit
there; do something’? Well I saw a YouTube video of a Zen master who said, ‘Don’t just do something; sit there.”

  He waited for her amazement. It didn’t come.

  “A YouTube video of a Zen master,” she repeated.

  “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. While you were busy sniping with Angie, I was examining the scene. That was definitely Brittany in the backseat. And they were taking her to the hospital.”

  Virginia stopped pacing. “Wait, how do you know that?”

  “I saw it on the GPS.”

  “Wow . . . you really know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  Benny looked at her face—was she making fun of him? It didn’t seem like it, but he couldn’t be sure, so he just sort of grunted.

  “Anyway, hopefully you can find out even more tomorrow,” he said. “You can practice controlling the conversation. With Corny it shouldn’t be that hard.”

  Virginia looked at him like she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she said, “Oh, that? I doubt we’ll actually go to Glaze. Corny constantly invites people places, and then it never happens. She’s a flake.”

  “Oh . . .”

  They were always embarrassing, these moments when Benny realized how little he understood about the people he’d been surrounded by for five years. Not only was it embarrassing, it was a problem. Investigation only got you so far if the minds of your suspects were a mystery to you.

  “So should we follow them?” Virginia asked.

  “Do you know anyone with a car?” Benny asked halfheartedly. He liked to think a real detective didn’t need anything but a brain to solve a mystery, but it wasn’t true. The fact was, you needed a brain and a car.

  “Your mom,” Virginia said with a shrug. Then she giggled. “That sounded like a ‘yo mama’ joke.”

  Benny grimaced. “How can I get her to drive us to the hospital without asking a billion questions?”

  “Tell her we’re visiting a cancer patient,” Virginia suggested. “Tell her it’s for Compassion Club.”

  Benny looked at his cell phone, apparently considering it. Then he sighed. “There’s no point. Angie said they called the police? It’s over. It’s beyond us now. God, I hate being fifteen.”

  Virginia looked at him. She’d never seen him get mad before. Benny hated things? It was a revelation.

  “So . . . who was in the mascot suit?” she asked, hoping the question would distract Benny from his tantrum. She didn’t like seeing him all perturbed. It was unsettling, like seeing your dad cry. “I mean, there was a body, right? People saw it. It was on the Internet.”

  Usually Benny enjoyed these moments, the moments where it turned out everything you thought you knew was wrong. But this time felt different. Instead of being energized by the twist of events, Benny felt baffled and lost. Maybe it was just embarrassment from how badly Virginia screwed up the altercation with Angie, but everything felt like it had gotten suddenly out of control.

  He took a breath. “Okay. Let’s just pause. We’ll go home, and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” Virginia asked, sounding disappointed. “Shouldn’t we Be There? At the hospital or wherever?”

  “We can’t Be There after you accosted them like that,” Benny snapped. Then he changed his tone, trying to be patient. “We’d be conspicuous and they’d run us out. Do you see what I mean about doing nothing being better than doing the wrong thing? We talked to them, sure, and we found out some stuff, but in doing so, we were cut off from other opportunities. Your initiative is an asset, but it’s also a liability.”

  Virginia felt annoyed, but she couldn’t articulate exactly why. Why was her initiative a liability, but Benny’s total timidness wasn’t? Probably because he’d call it conscientiousness. Benny was so full of shit sometimes. But they were his club and his rules, which he’d never let her forget.

  The media lab, 6:00 p.m.

  STILL FLOATING, SAYS LOCAL RESIDENT.

  Zaire Bollo hit the refresh button, but the headline was the same. For three days Brittany’s body had eluded the police, bobbing to the surface of the Chattahoochee River and then disappearing again into its murky depths. Pictures of the corpse showed it morphing into a bloated and purplish sack as it floated on downriver. It was becoming a joke. People needed resolution, they needed to say good-bye—but instead all they could do was watch helplessly as the inept police continued to let the body slip through their nets. Maybe they’d never get the body out. Maybe it would just disappear into the Gulf of Mexico, poured from the river into the sea. The thought haunted her, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She felt obsessed.

  She hit the refresh button again for the billionth time. Then she checked her e-mail. There was a message from Chrissie.

  Hi Zaire this is so awkward but it’s like, people are dying and life is so short, I just want to make sure I follow my heart. No regrets, you know? So anyway would you be mad if I liked Gottfried? I know you two were pretty intense but it’s been six months so I don’t know. I’m too nervous to ask you this in person. xoxoxo, Chrissie

  Zaire read it twice, then deleted it without responding. Chrissie had been hinting for months that she liked Gottfried. It gave Zaire a kind of cruel enjoyment to pretend not to catch her drift. She knew she was being ungracious. But the idea of Chrissie and Gottfried getting together made her want to throw up.

  She clicked back over to the news site and hit refresh again. STILL FLOATING. Across the lab some sophomores were talking loudly:

  “And Trevor was like, get the fuck off me! And Gerard was like, I know it was you! Or something like that, I don’t even know. And then Gerard punched him.”

  “He punched Trevor? Christ, did he have a death wish?”

  Everyone was talking about Trevor and Gerard’s big fight at the vigil. Apparently Gerard had started it, which was insane. You don’t touch football players. They were animals who had no control over their aggression. It wasn’t their fault—the coaches trained them to be violent and thuggish, and yet everyone was surprised when they beat kids up or were insensitive to women. They’d been hardwired to be barbarians, and they couldn’t just turn it on and off. Your best defense was to stay out of their way. It was one of the first things she’d learned at Winship. She’d never been to a school with a football team before. Her schools in England and Nigeria had rugby—which was arguably more violent—but somehow football was scarier. Something about the bulky equipment the players hid inside, making them impossible to distinguish from one another as they rammed and slammed and heaped in piles.

  She clicked refresh again, barely seeing the screen. She’d been in the lab for three hours, refreshing and rereading. Which is why it took her a moment to realize that the headline had changed:

  BODY FOUND.

  Benny’s house, 6:00 p.m.

  Benny folded his hands in the furitama position and shook them up and down. The name of the exercise literally meant “shaking the soul.”

  It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.

  Benny thought the words, but his mind was elsewhere. He kept seeing Brittany heaped in the backseat. If she was alive, who was the body in the river? Whose purplish, bloated sack of skin had been floating past houses and under bridges for three straight days? He got a chill every time he thought of the video, and once the image of the corpse was in his head, it stuck there until he forced himself to think of something else.

  “Rodrigo, can I get you a drink?” Mrs. Flax called from the kitchen.

  “I’ll get it,” Benny said, quickly dropping his pose. He went into the kitchen and poured a bourbon on the rocks. That was Rodrigo’s drink, and the smell didn’t feel new anymore. Before the accident Mr. Flax had been a scotch man; scotch had a cold, smoky smell, like a campfire extinguished by rain. Bourbon was different—rich and warm like leather or toast. It had taken Benny a while to get used to it. A little-known fact is that the nose is the strongest memory architect of all th
e senses. The connections made by olfactory receptors stay with the mind forever. In this way Benny’s life was defined and divided by two aromas: before the accident, scotch; after the accident, bourbon.

  For more than a year Rodrigo had been coming to the house five times a week for Mr. Flax’s occupational therapy. His job was to help Mr. Flax relearn physical tasks like holding a cup and dressing himself, as well as complex mental functions like how to read.

  “It . . . felt . . . like . . . rain. . . .” Mr. Flax read slowly from a special large-print book. At this stage he could see words and recite them, but was unable to articulate the meaning of sentences. What did “It felt like rain” mean? To Benny it seemed very deep and existential. What did “It felt like rain” mean? Why did anyone attempt to communicate at all? It was futile; no person was capable of understanding another person through words. Everyone was alone in their minds. An impassable gulf existed between what people said and what they thought. Brain damage just made the case more obvious.

  “Gracias, amigo,” Rodrigo said as Benny handed him the bourbon.

  “Ein davar, chaver,” Benny said back.

  Rodrigo swirled the glass so the ice clinked. He held it up and smiled at Mr. Flax. “You know this one, don’t you?”

  “D-drink,” Mr. Flax said, his mouth twitching. His expression was always in flux. One second his eyes would seem as sharp as ever, almost impatient, as if the idea of having to demonstrate that a drink is called a drink was too stupid to bear. But then the next second his eyes would glaze over, and Benny wouldn’t really recognize him anymore.

  “Not going to write that one down?” Mrs. Flax said from the kitchen.

  “Rodrigo prompted him. It doesn’t count.” Benny had explained that to her about a million times.

  “Mm-hm.” It was a classic Mrs. Flax utterance, meant to convey precisely how foolish someone was being. She used it with his father whenever he made some addled, unintelligible demand. When she used it on Benny, it made him want to scream, I don’t have brain damage! Don’t mm-hm at me!