She nods, one corner of her mouth lifting in a half-smile. “Lyudmila’s waiting for me. Goodnight, Chloe. Sweet dreams.”
30
Chloe
Back in my room, I take a shower to clear the remaining haziness from my mind and change into my pajamas. Then, brimming with anticipation, I get comfy on the bed, open the laptop, and bring up a browser.
I start by looking for news coverage of my mom’s death. There isn’t much, just an obituary and a short article in a local paper reporting that a woman had been found dead in her East Boston apartment. Neither goes into details, tactfully omitting any mention of suicide. I’d already read both the article and the obituary when I stopped at a library in Ohio a couple of weeks back, so I don’t spend much time on them. Instead, I make a note of the reporter’s name and look up her contact info, then log into my Gmail and send her a long, detailed email outlining exactly what happened on that June day.
Maybe I’ll have better luck with her than with the other journalists I’ve contacted so far. None of them have bothered to reply—probably dismissing me as a mental case, just as the police had. But those were reporters at major news outlets, and they undoubtedly get harassed by all sorts of crazies. In the movies, it’s always the small-time reporter who gets intrigued enough to investigate, and maybe that will be the case here too.
One can always hope.
Next, I type Mom’s name into Google and see what else I can pull up. Maybe somewhere out there is a mention of her leading some secret double life, something that would explain why someone would want to kill her.
And maybe pigs will hop on a spaceship and fly to the moon.
I find exactly what I expected: a big fat nothing. The only thing my search brings up is Mom’s Facebook profile, and I spend the next half hour reading her posts while fighting back tears. Mom didn’t love the idea of putting her life on display, so her friend count is in the low double digits and her posts are few and far between. A photo of the two of us dressed up to go clubbing for my twenty-first birthday, a snapshot of the bouquet of flowers her co-workers at the restaurant gifted her for her fortieth, a video of me feeding lettuce to a giraffe during our recent vacation in Miami—her profile barely touches on the highlights of our lives, much less reveals anything I didn’t already know.
Still, I diligently review all of her Facebook friends’ profiles on the off chance that one of them may be a drug dealer who’s stupid enough to announce it on social media. Because that’s the best theory I can come up with.
Mom witnessed something she shouldn’t have, and that’s why those men came after her—just as they’re now coming after me because I saw them and know her death wasn’t a suicide.
Admittedly, the evidence for this theory is nonexistent, but I can’t think of a reasonable alternative. Well, I can—a burglary gone wrong—but there are way too many issues with that idea. I mean, guns with silencers? What burglars carry those?
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that those men came to kill her.
The big question is: why?
* * *
Three hours later, I delete my browser’s history and clear the cookies—just in case I have to give back the computer unexpectedly—and close the laptop. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper from all the reading on the screen, and the mellowing effects of pot have long since worn off, leaving me tired and dispirited. I’ve googled just about everything I could think of in connection with Mom’s life and death, have scoured the local papers for reports of other crimes around the same time—in the unlikely case that Mom’s murderers were two serial killers working together—and have stalked each of her Facebook friends and restaurant co-workers with the perseverance of the most dedicated online troll. I’ve even looked into the death of her adoptive parents, in case there was something more to their car accident than I’d been told, but it seems to have been a straightforward case of a drunk driver ramming into them on the highway.
There’s nothing, absolutely nothing to take to the cops. No wonder they didn’t believe me when I burst into the station that day, shaking and hysterical.
I should probably call it a night and think about everything with a fresh head tomorrow, but despite my tiredness, my mind is buzzing with all sorts of unsettling questions—only some of which have to do with Mom’s death. Because there’s another mystery I haven’t let myself think about yet, one that may have just as much bearing on my safety.