I sent Zarah a quick text. Meet tonight?
I waited for the telltale bubbles to pop up, knowing they represented more than someone composing a text. They would be proof Zarah wasn’t as involved in this as Erin was alleging.
While I’d been working my cell, Erin was doing the same. Desiree’s phone sat between us. “I DMed Zarah’s finsta,” Erin said. “She read it. No response.”
She showed me. The message was just a quick How you holding up? The word “Seen” appeared under it. I still had Zarah pulled up, so I tapped her name and hit AUDIO. I wasn’t expecting her to answer, just to let it ring before going to voice mail. But she didn’t even give me that courtesy. It barely rang once before the automated message kicked in. She’d hit IGNORE.
By the time I heard the beep, I was pissed. I hung up. While I was brooding, Erin was searching Desiree’s phone again. I snatched it from her. Protective. “What are you doing?”
“We need proof before we talk to her. Hopefully someone from the bar will remember something but maybe not. There has to be something here.”
“I checked,” I said but still opened Desiree’s camera roll. Last night the goal had been proving Erin wrong. Now I wanted to prove her right.
But there wasn’t anything. Not in the finsta messages. Not on the camera roll. Not in their iMessages. The last messages were the same. The makeup and link to the Omni website.
“Click on it,” Erin said.
“It’s just a link to where the party was.” iPhones show a preview. The address was right there.
She tapped it herself. I wanted to break her finger. Sure enough, the Omni webpage popped up. Staring Erin down, I X’d out. She looked away. Point proven, I was about to close Safari when I noticed the GoFundMe site. Safari keeps track of pages you visited, displaying each open in a new tab. Desiree had been looking at a post for help with funeral expenses for someone named Kevin House.
There was an old blurry photo. A Black guy with his arm around a little girl who looked just like him. They’d raised $25,845 of their $12,000 goal. Just below the DONATE NOW button was the creation date: June 15, 2017.
“That’s the month after Desiree’s DUI,” I said, pulling it up to full screen. There weren’t any details about how he’d died, just the donations. One hundred bucks from a Nadine Jenkinson. Twenty-five from a Dillon Rookers. A whopping fifteen thousand dollars from Anonymous.
“You recognize the name?” Erin said.
“No.” Desiree’d never mentioned a Kevin House. But it could have been an old teacher. A friend’s dad. Even just the wrong link.
So I searched online for “Kevin House” and “death.”
The Daily News popped up, the story ironically written by Stuart. HOMELESS MAN FOUND DEAD IN HIT-AND-RUN.
Things clicked into place.
Desiree’s car hadn’t just hit a pole that night.
If someone else really had been driving, here was a very good reason to keep her quiet.
*
My wrist throbbed the entire forty-five-minute subway ride to Zarah’s place in Tribeca. So much so, my body began to normalize the feeling. Go numb.
No one answered when we rang the buzzer. Zarah was hiding or not home. We camped out on the stoop of the closed art gallery next door, Erin calmly sipping coffee she’d picked up down the block. I hadn’t gone with her, rooted to my spot, not even able to blink.
Kevin House had indeed died the night of Desiree’s accident less than ten blocks from where her car hit that stoplight. Sometime in the early morning of Saturday, May 20. No one had seen—or heard—what happened. Someone had come across his body while walking their dog at dawn. None of the papers had given Kevin’s passing more than a couple of sentences. Police had no suspects. There were no follow-ups.
The few details I did learn came from Kevin House’s GoFundMe page. He’d been a father, though the phrasing—or lack thereof—made me think not a good one. There were no positive adjectives—“beloved,” “adored,” “cherished.” Just facts. Their father had died and they needed money for a proper burial. Thanks to the fifteen-thousand-dollar anonymous donation, they’d reached their goal.
The lack of pomp didn’t change that Kevin House had been killed, and there was a good chance my sister’s car had done it. Any physical damage to the car was blamed on the stoplight.
Desiree had witnessed a murder. I just wasn’t sure what had happened next. Had the deposit not been blackmail but hush money? And if they’d paid Desiree off, why take her life? As Erin loved to point out, Zarah was the only person we knew who was there that night. I still wasn’t sure that automatically made her the driver. But it did make me more anxious than ever to talk to her. Neither Erin nor I spoke while we waited. Erin busying herself with her coffee and phone. Me watching the people who occasionally walked by, hoping and not hoping that one would be Zarah. It was after 10 p.m., but no one glanced in our direction. This wasn’t Pennsylvania. People minded their business in New York.
At 10:18, my phone buzzed for the first time in hours.
Stuart.
I deleted the notification, but Erin saw it anyway.
“Is that the reporter? Thought he was back in your good graces.”
I ignored that.
She didn’t let my bad manners deter her. “How’d he screw things up this time?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No prob. I’m just glad you hate someone more than me. Maybe we could start a club. Him and me and—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hopefully you didn’t let his car get repo’d too.”
“That’s not funny,” I said. Then, “He’s writing a book about her. It’s going to be a hit piece—sex, drugs, rap music. And that’s if he just includes what people already know. He wants my help.” I mimicked his deep voice. “Someone’s going to write it, at least it’s me.”
I finally shut up, and she did nothing to fill the silence. Obviously thinking about what this meant—for her. Then she spoke. “Can Mel talk to the publisher? Get it killed?”
“Would he?”
“Maybe. He’s probably still pissed about the article. He now knows he can’t control what Stuart writes. You should talk to him.”
I was about to tell her that wasn’t happening when an Escalade pulled up. Zarah didn’t wait for the driver to open the door. When she got out of the back seat, she was alone. She looked fine. Great even. Nothing like the shell I’d seen last time.
I jumped up. But Erin was faster. “Hey, chickee.” Erin’s voice was friendly.
Zarah paused long enough to take us in as we did the same. Up close was a completely different story, like a photo with the filter removed. The two layers of perfectly applied makeup probably not from her drugstore-bound line could not hide how exhausted she looked. Like she’d been on for so long she needed a citywide power outage.
“Hey,” Zarah said. “Wasn’t expecting you two.”
“We were in the area,” Erin said. “Stopped by Ch?teau. You know Desiree loved that store. Was hoping to get something for the funeral. Lena and I were just chatting about how hard you were taking things. We wanted to make sure you were okay. Can we come up?”