Linda looked over my shoulder. “See! I knew I recognized you.”
It was a picture of Clem, Laurel, and me, from junior year of college, standing in front of Rothschild. Clem wore a Whitney soccer jersey and bright-purple hair—she’d gotten into the habit of dying it a different color every few months. Laurel and I looked like polar opposites, her blond next to my dark, but we wore matching grins.
There’d been someone else standing in front of Rothschild that day. I unfolded the last quarter of the picture and sucked in a breath. Rachel, our fourth roommate, with her arm slung around Laurel’s shoulders. But you couldn’t see Rachel’s face, see how much she and Laurel looked alike, or the flat, dead smile she was giving the camera. Because Laurel had destroyed her with thick slashes of pen, turning her face into a dark, inky miasma.
“Jesus. Who’s that?” Jamie asked.
I handed him the picture. “Rachel Rockwell. She was our roommate junior and senior years.”
He gave me a sharp look. “You had another roommate? You never mentioned her.”
“She was…” I thought back to Linda’s word from earlier. “Off.”
Off was only the tip of the iceberg, but Rachel was a part of the past I refused to revive. Even saying her name out loud felt like invoking a curse, like calling Bloody Mary three times in the mirror. I understood Laurel’s impulse to erase her.
I was saved from explaining when Jamie turned over the picture and stilled. “Look.”
Words crawled across the back in unfamiliar writing: Tongue-Cut Sparrow.
Jamie looked up. “Either of you know what this means?”
“No idea,” Linda said. “Never heard of it.”
I frowned. “Me neither. Can we keep the picture?”
Linda glanced at Rachel’s scratched-out face. “You’d be doing me a favor.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I’ll get you those accounts Laurel used to pay her rent.”
Jamie paused on the way to Laurel’s closet. “Accounts, as in plural?”
“She paid with a personal account for years,” Linda said. “Then, one month, her rent started coming from a new one. Some corporate-sounding place. Dominatrix…no, that’s ridiculous. Dominus Holdings, that’s it. Figured it was coming from wherever she worked, though that’s still a little odd.”
Jamie caught my eye. Laurel hadn’t held a job in years, at least according to the police. Where was the money coming from?
“Before you leave,” Linda said, “I’ll go upstairs and write them down for you.”
“Thank you.” Jamie slid open the closet to reveal a sparse collection of jeans and T-shirts, hanging neatly. “We appreciate it.”
I looked under the bed, the pillows, even swept my hand under the mattress, looking for anything Laurel might’ve hidden. Nothing; but then again, Laurel was an only child, like me. She’d never learned to put things in hiding places. One thing did strike me: “Where’s her sewing machine?” She was never without one.
Linda looked dumbfounded. “I didn’t know she sewed.”
I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach. It was like Linda and I had known two different people. “I think I’m done,” I told Jamie. Coming to Laurel’s place had turned out to be chilling, not comforting.
“Wait a sec.” He reached above his head into the high, empty shelf in Laurel’s closet. When he pulled his hand back, it was covered in dust, but he held another photograph. He looked at it and his face paled.
“What?”
Wordlessly, Jamie handed me the picture.