The Lost Night (Page 37)

“I’m impressed you remembered.” I looked down at my knees. I’d changed into sweatpants after I got back from Bushwick and now I wished I looked cuter.

“It’s a memorable name.” He sighed and looked straight ahead. “I was in an Uber to Grand Central and found myself putting it in. As the destination. You really worried me on the phone.”

I shrugged. “I was just disturbed by everything Edie’s mom told me. She’s a disturbing woman.”

“That’s for damn sure.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I just don’t understand why you’re going back into all this stuff. So many years later. If I can help, I wanna help.”

His hand slid to the back of my neck, and like gravity was pulling me, I leaned into him. His chest smelled like autumn; his hand rubbed my far shoulder.

“Alex, I found this horrible video,” I told him, and my eyes filled with tears.

He craned his neck to look at me. “A video?”

“From the night Edie died.” A tear broke free. “Here, I’ll show you.” I stood up and got my laptop from the table, careful to leave a few feet between us when I sat back down. His knees sloped toward me as I found Damien’s email with the cleaned-up clip; I hit play, then hooked my heels on the sofa and wrapped my arms around my shins.

“I want that bitch out of my apartment!”

“I want to push her off this building!”

“I want to slit her throat!”

I could feel Alex cringing next to me. When the screen darkened, I hit stop.

“That’s all there is,” I lied. “The rest is just it recording inside my bag.”

“All these years you’ve had this, and you never told anyone?”

“I just found it,” I said. “I must have deleted it that same night. I just found my old camcorder and figured out how to recover deleted videos.”

“Wow. Did you show Sarah?”

I shook my head. “It scared the shit out of me. And the fact that neither you nor Sarah ever mentioned it makes me think…” I trailed off.

“I one hundred percent do not remember that,” he said, pointing at the computer. “I seriously don’t. My mother didn’t raise me to talk like that, dude. I don’t even know.” His voice was getting higher, his head shaking back and forth—a basketball player insisting he didn’t just foul.

“I know. Obviously, I feel the same way. I mean, yeah, we’d been fighting, and I wasn’t totally happy with her, but I would never…wish her harm.” I picked at my fingernails. “So you don’t remember this conversation at all? Or me having a camera?”

“Not at all. Swear to god.”

I nodded. “I believe you.” I didn’t want to show him my squabble with Sarah, when I declared I wouldn’t come to the concert—my alibi, the spot we both assumed I’d been. And I definitely didn’t want to show him the end of the video, the part where I stumbled into SAKE. Because I didn’t want him to suspect me. Ten years later, an unsolved death hanging in the balance, and I cared most about his esteem.

“So you don’t remember deleting it?”

I shook my head, then looked at him slowly. Who’s to say I deleted it, really? Couldn’t it have been someone else, perhaps the other person in the room, alarmed to discover a recording device jangling around in my bag?

“So this is why you had so many questions. About Lloyd. And Edie’s mom.”

I nodded. “I can’t shake this hunch that it wasn’t a suicide. That something happened to Edie.”

He didn’t reply and I pressed my forehead against my knees. “My friends think I’m obsessed,” I murmured, “like this is taking over my life. But you get it, right? Why we need to figure it out?”

“Of course. That doesn’t make you obsessed. It just makes you a good friend. Hey, don’t cry.”

I turned away. Why had I shown him the video? Tessa, Damien, and now Alex: Everyone promised to help. And then they dug a little deeper and told me to back away.

“Just let me know if you think of anything else, okay?” I said. “I tried to track Greg down, but he’s out on paternity leave. Oh, I want to talk to Lloyd—do you have his contact information?”

“Not anymore, no. Maybe you can find it online?”

I shook my head and stood up. “Don’t worry about it. You should probably be getting home, right?”

He stayed planted. “So you haven’t said anything to Sarah?”

I shook my head again. “I’ve been trying to sort of pursue this on my own. Back when we had dinner, she had a lot of conviction that her whole Edie-was-killed theory was stupid.”

He propped his elbows on his knees, his chin on his knuckles. “But it might not be. Let’s talk to her. She might not know what she knows.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Good point. She did follow the same thread, albeit ten years ago.” Never mind that I was a little afraid of shining a spotlight on her memories: Alex and me screaming our hexes on Edie from the rooftop, the little tiff before she headed to the concert.

“Ask her to lunch, something casual,” he said. “I’ll be a surprise. We won’t say it’s to grill her, obviously—just a little reunion. Maybe it’ll knock some memories loose.”

“I’m on it,” I told him. It was nice, having someone else plan the next move—someone decisive and confident, too. In fact, it was hot.

He glanced back at the laptop. “We don’t need to mention the video. Do you want to send it to me? I can check if I recognize anyone else in it or anything.”

The nausea boomeranged back. “I just don’t really want it, you know, in the cloud.” Never mind that Damien and Tessa had copies already. God, if anyone else found it…

“Isn’t it already in an app?”

“Just a filtering app.”

He frowned. “Tomorrow I’ll send you an invite for a file-sharing method. Encrypted. You probably shouldn’t be keeping that on your hard drive, just in case…”

“In case what?” Suddenly I was crying again.

“Aw, Bach. It’ll be okay.” He rose and leaned forward, and I let him wrap his arms around me, my tears streaming into the warmth of his collar. I leaned back and he kissed my forehead; then I turned up my chin and suddenly we were kissing, urgently, his warm soft mouth on mine.

I yanked away first and froze, his face an exact mirror of my shock. Finally I shook my head and wiped the tears off my cheeks dramatically, with the backs of my hands, the way little girls do.

“I’m sorry,” he half whispered, and then he was gone.

I returned to my computer, trancelike, clicked on the folder of Flip cam videos, and opened one from early June. I’d thought it was one of the gang at Rockaway Beach, one where Alex and Edie couldn’t keep their hands off each other, where they embraced in the chest-high water, laughing and kissing and bobbing like a single buoy. Self-flagellation, something to make me feel extra terrible after what I’d done.

But I mistook the date and what popped up instead was a dark scene in a bar. With a little effort, the lens focused on Sarah and Kevin, playing Jenga and sipping beer. Why did we play so much Jenga? Everyone waved languidly at the camera and went back to what they were doing. The Levee, that’s where we were, a beer-y dive near the subway stop. Sarah was gossiping—her old roommate Jenna had been caught selling drugs in Calhoun, and rumor had it that Anthony the landlord had really been the one dealing, but he’d thrown her under the bus, the exact kind of microcosm-y drama we thrived on—and begging Kevin, who probably knew the drug scene better than most, for more details. Kevin was doing his usual reserved shtick, neither confirming nor denying.

“Is it true Jenna and Anthony are sleeping together?” Sarah asked, a little too eagerly.

“Why don’t you just ask her yourself?” Kevin said, poking a middle block loose.

“That’ll be the day,” she replied.

“Hey, let the man focus,” my voice broke in. “We’re going for a new world record.” Slowly I scanned the tower of blocks, from the bottom to the top. Then I zoomed in on his maneuver. Kevin had chosen one of the last three-block levels left, and the move threatened the whole stack’s structural integrity.

Kevin took a break, flexed his fingers. “I feel kinda bad. I mean, a bunch of people in Calhoun deal.”

“A bunch,” Sarah offered, smacking her glass on the table. “Shit.” The stack tumbled over, slow mo at first and then in a big crash. A few pieces skittered across the floor and I canted the camera down, focusing on the downed blocks for a few seconds before turning the Flip cam off.

Sarah had been so on top of the gossip, so quietly in the know. Onward, forward with the plan. I texted her and she agreed to come see me in the city that weekend. But to minimize her commute from New Jersey, she asked that we meet near Penn Station, which meant hanging around New York’s tourist-clogged hellmouth. I sent the info to Alex, all business, and he responded with a thumbs-up. He never did send me the video encryption link he’d promised. Perhaps he, too, had a hard time remembering anything we’d talked about before the kiss.