Riza grabbed her cup and stepped from the apartment. Frost sparkled on the grass that hedged the sidewalk. She walked and breathed the cool October air and focused on the physical things around her. Mindfulness, Amy called it.
“Oak tree, fish mailbox, wind chimes,” she murmured, naming the things she saw, keeping her mind empty of the other things. “Blue minivan, ten-speed bike.”
The ten-speed bike dragged her out of the present and cast her into the past. She remembered three bikes lying at the curb in front of the asylum. They’d belonged to a few kids who showed up at the former mental hospital to gawk and point at the lofty buildings and whisper about the crazy people who’d lived there. When the kids walked out of sight, Riza and Sandy had run over and grabbed two of the bikes. They pushed them to a trail in the woods, laughing, and watched how the kids freaked when they returned to find only one bike. One kid shouted a psycho probably took it. They fell over each other trying to grab the remaining bike. They hopped all three on it—one riding on the handlebars, another on the seat, and a third on the hubs of the back wheel as they fled down the long driveway that would take them back to the safe world. It had been a mint steal for the Six, a way to escape faster when they nabbed candy or cigarettes from the convenience store.
At the end of Riza’s street, she turned into the wooded park that she walked every morning. Her shoes slapped the pavement and a few birds chittered in the trees, but otherwise the park lay quiet.
“Spiderweb,” she murmured, pausing at a metal swing set anchored deep into the earth. A gauzy web, seemingly spun of sunlight, stretched between two metal bars. Droplets of water glittered on the fine threads.
She turned away and cut through a forest trail that led into the deep wet woods. Leaves brushed against her arms and left their moist residue.
“Acorns, birch, maple, beech, mushrooms.” Her muscles grew warm as she walked. The forest trail took about ten minutes and when she emerged, her tennis shoes were soaked from the dewy grass. She left the park and headed towards home.
As Riza stepped onto her own street, she stopped. The space in front of her apartment building was lit by flashing blue and red lights. Cars crowded the street and people swarmed the sidewalk. She took a step forward and then another, her blood icy and slow as it pumped into her heart. She couldn’t see what lay on the cement walkway in front of the building. The police had thrown a plastic sheet over it.
People murmured in little groups. Riza walked toward a guy who lived in an apartment on her floor. “What happened?” she asked.
He turned, fixing his watery brown eyes on her face. “A woman killed herself. She jumped off that balcony up there.”
Riza shuddered and looked at the fifth-floor balcony. “That’s crazy. Did someone see her do it?”
“No. I heard Mrs. Humphrey telling a cop she heard a scream and then next thing you know something big went by her window. Bloody mess.” He grimaced and gestured at the pavement.
Yellow tape and a scattering of police blocked the front door, so Riza took the side entrance and hurried up to her apartment. She slid open the glass door to her small balcony and pressed her ear to the opening.
Voices drifted from below, and it took her a minute to distinguish words.
“Just talked to the super. That apartment is empty,” a man, likely a cop, said.
“Empty?” a second man asked.
“Yeah. She must have broken in.”
“To kill herself?”
“We’ve got reports of screams, possibly a struggle happening up there. A suicide is looking unlikely.”
“Shite.”
“I’d say. Here come the dicks.”
Riza peeked out as an unmarked blue sedan pulled to a stop behind a police car.
She glanced at her watch. If she didn’t leave for work in five minutes, she’d be late, which meant a meeting with bad-breath Don. Don would ruin her cup of coffee by leaning into her personal space and telling her, yet again, about his boat. Scarlett, he’d named her after Gone With the Wind, and she offered a swim platform, massive stateroom, a luxurious galley. Riza could go on it with him some time, take Scarlett for a starry night cruise. Blah, blah, blah. He’d throw in a reprimand for her tardiness only after she refused a ride on his boat.
By far, her least favorite part of her job was Don.
Riza stepped away from the door, sliding it closed. As she left the building for the parking lot behind it, she tried not to imagine who lay beneath the sheet. Her conversation with Casey from the day before swirled sickly in her head.
“The first doctor died from the belladonna,” Riza had said. “The second from…”
“The balcony.”
As an employee for the property management company Up North Properties, every day looked different for Riza. Today, she raked leaves at a few cottages on Elk Lake, cleaned out fireplaces and filled bird feeders. It was a sweet gig that Amy had hooked her up with four years before. One of Amy’s cousins was good friends with bad-breath Don, and she’d made some calls.
Prior to that, Riza’s employment history consisted of selling drugs, a few stints at fast-food joints, and two years working the overnight shift at a fuel station on a desolate stretch of wooded highway. She hadn’t minded the last job. It was quiet, but now and then someone sketchy would come through about two am and look at Riza like they might drag her out the door and make her disappear. When she’d confided the incidents to Amy, the woman immediately set about helping her find a new job.
At lunchtime, she walked to her car to grab her insulated cooler. She’d packed a turkey and cheese sandwich, a bag of baby carrots, and a small container of trail mix. She ate the same thing every day. Fewer choices meant fewer opportunities to screw up and make impulsive decisions.
Casey leaned against the hood of her car.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped, hitting the remote unlock button and mentally cursing Julia, the Up North Properties secretary who’d obviously given away her location.
“Did you see the news?” he asked.
She said nothing. He didn’t know it had happened right in front of her apartment.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Still think everything’s fine? That you can just carry on business as usual?”
Riza opened her driver’s door, but Casey got there first and pushed it closed.
“What do you want me to do, Casey? Huh?”
His eyes softened as he looked at her. “I want you to wake up, Riza. I don’t want to see your face in the paper next week and that’s where this is headed.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Really? Jaws and Sandy were killed exactly the same way as the first two doctors.”
“How do you know it was Sandy?”
“I told you, I have a friend in the force.”
“And they’ve already identified her?”
“Her driver’s license was in the back pocket of her jeans. Elizabeth Healy, blonde, blue eyes, born August first, 1976. The guy who killed her wanted us to know exactly who had died.”
Riza felt a surge of emotion well into her chest. They’d called her Sandy, but Elizabeth had been her name, and Riza remembered thinking it was an important name, the name they gave to queens. She shoved past Casey, opening her car door. “I can take care of myself.”