Riza nodded. It wasn’t a dreadful story, not nearly as ugly as her own, though Casey had never been one to show the emotional side of the bad moments. He could lay it all out, matter-of-fact, and not mention the black depression, the fear, the humiliation, the desire to die.
“You’re up,” he said.
“Booze, crack, heroin, pills that I don’t remember the name of. Fights, homelessness, a lot of hustling.”
“And how did you get straightened out?”
Riza looked down at the table where her fingernails, which she’d bitten to nubs the night before, looked back at her. She hadn’t bitten them in years. Now they were stubbed almost to blood. “A friend, the only person I’d met since the Six who wasn’t afraid of me.”
“Brave friend.”
“Yeah.”
“Rehab?”
“Three. I ran away from the first. Ended up overdosing on oxy in the second. Third time’s a charm.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Six years. Six years of sobriety. And that’s why I can’t do this with you, Casey. I can’t dredge all this shit up. I don’t think I can come back again. People like us don’t get that many chances.”
Casey studied her, his brow furrowed. “Riza, people like us deserve the most chances of all. What happened to us as kids… we didn’t bring that on ourselves.”
She didn’t nod. Amy would agree, had said the same thing a thousand times, but had Riza ever really believed it? Nah. She’d been born bad. Her own parents had left her at the start of life as if they’d known what she was before she’d revealed herself.
“You started it all those years ago,” he whispered. “It was you, Riza. You led us.”
“I was twelve fucking years old.”
His eyes didn’t flick away. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It does, though. Don’t you get it? We killed people, Casey. Killed them.”
Not a flicker of guilt crossed his face. “They deserved it.”
Riza closed her eyes.
“You can’t run away from this, Riza. If you could, you never would have come back here.”
“You started that forum, Casey. I didn’t decide to come back here, you fucking lured me back here. What happened to Jaws?”
Casey clasped his hands on the table. “Do you actually want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Sure, but every other thing you’ve said in the last half hour implies that you’ve moved on, you’re past all this.”
“Fine, whatever.” She stood and turned away.
“Belladonna. Someone tied him up and forced it down his throat.”
Riza froze. The word ‘belladonna’ brought a crippling sense of dread into her body. She turned back, but didn’t sit. “How do you know?”
Casey tossed a newspaper on the table. “Page four. Homeless people never make page one. Even if they’re murdered.”
Riza sat down and scanned the article that spoke of Jaws, actual name Ryan Hobbes. He sometimes stayed in shelters, but mostly he lived in a tent by the Boardman Lake. In the winter, he shifted from church to church as part of the moving shelter program. Another homeless couple who camped in the same woods had found him.
“It doesn’t say murder here. It just says he died under suspicious circumstances.”
“I have a friend in the force. He’d been hog-tied. They found crushed belladonna berries all over the ground. In his mouth, nose…”
Riza held up a hand. “That’s enough.”
“It was brutal.”
“And Sandy?”
“She’s missing. She reached out to me on the forum two weeks ago. It was the first time I’d spoken to her since we were kids. We met for coffee just after they found Jaws. Sandy was scared. She talked about buying a bus ticket and getting out of town.”
“Maybe she did.”
“I checked her apartment. Door unlocked, purse on the table.”
“Did you report her missing?”
“No. I’m not sure who’s behind this shit and what he’s trying to do. Pay us all back? I can’t be connected to her right now.”
“So, no one is looking for her?” Riza thought of Sandy with her cherub face and her Pollyanna demeanor. She’d been the most innocent of the Six, the most vulnerable.
“I’m looking for her.”
“And have you found anything?”
“I’ve talked to her neighbors. One of them saw her get into a car with a guy a few nights back. It was dark. He didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Maybe he was a friend. Maybe she took off with him.”
“I don’t think so,” Casey said.
“But how do you know? You just met her again two weeks ago. Do you know anything about her?”
“She lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Fourteenth Street and works at a bank two blocks from her place. She’s a creature of habit. Leaves at the same time for work every day, gets home at the same. She has no pets, few friends, and, from what I learned from her neighbors, no social life. Men don’t stop by; she doesn’t go out. And she told me as much herself. She doesn’t date. She likes to watch movies on her days off and she bakes a lot. That’s it.”
Riza frowned. Her own routine life didn’t sound all that different from Sandy’s—substitute movies and baking for yoga and mantras. “The first doctor died from the belladonna,” Riza murmured. “The second from…”
“The balcony.”
The memory twisted through Riza’s head. She heard the man’s scream as he fell, the crunch of bones when he landed, and then silence.
4
Riza made her bed, tucking the comforter beneath the edges of the mattress. She perched on the edge of the couch and slipped on her black tennis shoes, double-knotting the ties.
Safe and soothing behaviors, Amy called them. Riza used to make lists of them, hundreds of ‘safe and soothing behaviors’ she did repeatedly on the long road to building a functional life.
She had wanted to stay in bed, had spent a restless night tossing and thinking of Casey, but forced herself up and out at six am like she did every day.
Riza filled her metal to-go mug with coffee and clamped the lid on. She’d been tempted to turn on her computer and see if JunkyardDog13 had posted in the group, but she fought the urge. She’d spent years developing a routine. Her sobriety and her sanity depended on it.
Plus, Sandy had probably taken off, and though it seemed unlikely, Riza had begun to wonder the night before if Jaws had committed suicide. Of the Six, Jaws had been the most destroyed by the murders. He’d come from a religious family and had often sat up late into the night rocking and murmuring that they’d committed a mortal sin.
In her mind’s eye, she saw him, thin and pale with deep-set hazel eyes and a tuft of dirty blond hair cutting down his forehead. He liked to read the Bible, and he talked about his brother who’d become a priest and moved to Rome. It was the only good story he had. The rest of his family were drunks. By the time Jaws was five, he’d been a permanent resident of the state of Michigan foster care system. At ten he’d landed in the asylum, plucked by Dr. Cain from a rundown trailer where five other fosters lived.