The Row Read online

  “See you soon.” I hang up and stick the phone in my pocket, taking a quick glance around us. This end of the park is empty this time of night; the crickets near the bayou chirp in an off-balance way that makes my nerves feel raw. When I turn to face Jordan, his expression matches the grim feeling that has settled over me.

  “Why can’t we meet him in the middle of a hot, sunny afternoon?” I say quietly to Jordan as we start walking toward the Mason Park Community Center, which is near the sports fields. Shadows move across the ground in the distance, close enough to be seen, but far enough that I can’t make out any details. I can’t help but feel like someone is watching us.

  Jordan scoffs and shakes his head at me. When I give him a look, he frowns and says, “Your Mr. Masters does seem to have a bit of a flair for the dramatic.”

  “He does.” I smile softly to myself. “I just hope that’s all this is.”

  “Me too,” he answers immediately.

  “Do you know specifically where they found Hillary?” My voice sounds tight and Jordan leans closer before shaking his head quickly.

  “They said it was near a popular jogging path, but didn’t give specifics on which one.” He frowns and looks down at the path we’re on. “There are so many in this park, it could’ve been anywhere.”

  My eyes immediately scan each path in the park around me. In the darkness, each one looks more frightening and ominous than the last. Every branch seems to be an arm reaching out; every howl of wind through the branches could mask a distant scream; every minute we are here feels like it brings us an inch closer to Hillary’s fate.

  I quicken my pace and pull my jacket tighter. “The sooner we can finish this and get out of here, the better.”

  We walk past the empty sports fields, their lack of light and life making them seem dismal and lonely. It’s odd how these reminders of happy times somehow become incredibly depressing the instant the crowds leave and the lights go out.

  Every movement and sound draws our attention with each tense minute that passes. I glance over at Jordan and see his gaze shifting from side to side with nearby sounds, with the rustling of a branch.

  He catches my eye and attempts to smile. “Isn’t this the part in the scary movies where everyone dies or we find a skeleton or something?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve seen this one. It’s usually the girl in the bikini who dies first.” I gesture toward my jeans and purple striped T-shirt. “We should be safe.” I try to play it off, pretending I’m not as scared of what we could run into as he is.

  Jordan puts on a brave smile, too, then shrugs. “Don’t be too sure, Riley. You don’t know what I’m wearing underneath this.” He points to his dark blue jeans and red shirt, then winks. A surprised laugh bursts from me at the imagery.

  “Excellent point.” I squeeze his hand and think I see the grove we’re looking for up ahead. I whisper the rest. “Although, if you are wearing a bikini under that, I think there may be an entirely different discussion for us to have.”

  We both freeze when I hear a woman’s voice yelling up ahead, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. My entire body breaks out in a cold sweat, and Jordan instinctively steps in front of me. As we jog a few steps closer, I see two figures in the grove where we are supposed to meet Mr. Masters. From this distance, it’s hard to tell, but they seem to be fighting.

  My thoughts settle on one possible scenario: the woman is the next victim of Valynne’s killer, and maybe if we hurry, we can stop him from killing someone else. I glance at Jordan, and can see he’s thinking the same thing. We both break into a run.

  Before we get to the grove, an earsplitting boom rends the air and Jordan and I dive toward each other, tumbling to the ground. My eardrums are vibrating and I keep staring at Jordan to make sure he’s okay. He seems to be doing the same thing with me.

  When we realize we’re both fine, we crawl into the shadows of the nearest tree and peer through the branches as quietly as possible toward the grove.

  Now there is only one figure standing—next to a large mound on the ground.

  A gunshot? That isn’t the East End Killer’s M.O. My panicked mind searches for some other explanation as we move a few steps closer: a mugging gone wrong perhaps?

  Should we run? Should we help?

  Then pure fear slides through my veins as I realize that Mr. Masters should’ve been here already … that maybe he beat us here and one of the figures in the grove is him.

  I hear footsteps and a woman runs into view. With her back toward us, I see a gun dangling from her fingers. Her entire body quivers. I gasp and grip Jordan’s arm.

  Even from this angle, I would recognize her frizzy hair anywhere.

  She turns at my gasp and lifts the shaking gun in my direction.

  “Stacia,” I whisper, and Jordan immediately grabs my arm, trying to pull me back into the shadows behind him. I don’t move.

  Her eyes are distant at first, then they focus in on me. Her blouse hangs oddly to one side, and her jacket is ripped. She has something rectangular clutched in her free hand, but I can’t make out what it is. She looks unkempt and wild in a way I’ve never seen her before, and she lowers the gun back to her side.

  I hear people in the distance and she looks toward them. She pulls the rectangular package in against her chest before sprinting into the trees and toward the other end of the park. I watch her go, wondering if I should have stopped her and whether she was being attacked and needs help.

  With my mind whirling, it’s only when her back disappears into the trees that my thoughts settle on the form on the ground and my whole world lurches to a stop.

  “No … no, no, no!” My words begin as a whisper and end as a shout. Jordan reaches out to stop me, but I break free, running over to the body on the ground and praying again and again in my head for it not to be him.

  When I reach the form, I roll him onto his back. Everything in me seems to lock up in one instant as I see those familiar blue eyes gazing up at me.

  Jordan is by my side immediately, pushing his hands into the bloodstained shirt, trying to apply pressure to the wound in the center of his chest.

  I can’t breathe. I can’t think. How can this be happening? Stacia shot Mr. Masters? Why? Why?

  Then the blue eyes blink and turn on me. Choking in a deep gasp of air, I lean down. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll get help.” I pull out my phone and begin to dial 9-1-1 with shaking fingers, but Mr. Masters pushes the phone out of my hand and it falls somewhere in the grass behind me. He seems like he wants to talk, but blood trickles out of the corner of his mouth when he opens it.

  “No … don’t talk. Just wait until you’re better.” I sit beside him, hugging his head. “I love you. Please don’t leave me.”

  Sitting back, I see a tear leak out the side of one of those blue eyes. Then they fill with an abrupt terror as he pulls me down again. Jordan still has his hands pressed against Mr. Masters’s wound, but I hover close over Mr. Masters, brushing one hand across his forehead.

  He draws another rasping breath. It looks like it causes him extreme pain, and I choke on a sob.

  Then he utters the one word he’s been trying so hard to tell me: “Run.”

  My head shoots up, and I look around us, suddenly feeling a very different sort of fear, but there is no one else. The commotion of people in the distance is getting closer, but it’s only the three of us alone in this clearing. I lean back over this man who has always been there and whisper, “Shh. It’s okay.”

  With a final shudder his body relaxes and his eyes become unfocused. By now the entire front of Mr. Masters’s shirt and jacket are red with blood, and there is a rapidly spreading damp spot on the ground beneath him.

  I kneel beside his head, a slow numbness creeping over me like the ocean tide on the beach.

  “Mr. Masters?” I whisper, but there’s no response. My own voice seems far away, and I move in a daze. On instinct, I do what I always see people do at crime scene
s on TV. I press my fingers against his neck, trying to find a throbbing pulse—something to give us hope that he can be saved.

  I feel nothing.

  Jordan is covered in blood up to his elbows and his skin is deathly pale in contrast. He keeps putting pressure on Mr. Masters’s chest and repeating his name. Finally, I reach out and grab Jordan’s wrist.

  “He’s gone,” I say, then I repeat it again until it sinks in for both of us. “He’s gone. He was trying to help Daddy. He was trying to help me, Jordan. He came here to meet us, and oh God … he’s gone.”

  My voice cracks, and Jordan finally looks up at me. Neither of us speaks. There isn’t anything to say.

  Suddenly there are flashlights and shouting people everywhere. Not people—police. I look for the phone Masters had pushed out of my hand. I didn’t call them. Jordan is yanked to his feet and I see Chief Vega behind him. He grabs Jordan’s face and looks hard at him. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

  I glance in the direction Stacia ran and raise my shaking hand to point that way. “Stacia … she ran that way.”

  Vega looks down at me, his face a mask. Then he nods, releases Jordan, and starts shouting orders.

  She really killed Masters? How could this have happened? Nothing makes any sense. I squint into the darkness but I see no movement anywhere in sight. My entire body is quaking even though I don’t feel cold. In fact, I’m so hot I think I’m sweating. My brain and body don’t appear to be communicating, and I can’t figure out how to make them start talking to each other again.

  I hear Jordan’s voice from a distance as I smooth Mr. Masters’s silver hair back off his forehead. “We didn’t get a chance to call you. How did you know to come?”

  “Mr. Masters called me fifteen minutes ago and said I needed to come. He said he thought you were in danger at Mason Park, and then he hung up.” Another officer comes up, pulling Vega’s attention away.

  Out of nowhere, one of the chess games I played with Daddy comes to mind. I’d thought I had him, and then he turned everything around on me in a completely unexpected move.

  Always make your smartest possible move, and keep the endgame in sight.

  Mr. Masters must’ve called the police just after he called me. Did he know Stacia was here then? Did he know how dangerous she is? He and Daddy are the smartest men I’ve ever known and somehow they’d both been cornered, trapped. We’re running out of options in an increasingly deadly game, and now I have to face it without either of them.

  Jordan kneels beside me. He keeps trying to close Mr. Masters’s coat over the wound, but with the position of his body, it refuses to stay closed. I’m deeply grateful for the numbness that seems to be protecting me from feeling anything right now, because one of us has to function.

  I smooth my hand over Mr. Masters’s face, closing his eyes before I climb up on my trembling legs. Chief Vega looks over at me and tells the person he has on the phone to hold on.

  I turn and look him straight in the eye. “I w-want to help you. Tell me what you need to know.”

  33

  “WHY DID YOU COME HERE TONIGHT?” Chief Vega asks once he has me wrapped in a paramedic blanket and seated on the front of his car.

  “M-Mr. Masters asked us to meet him here,” I answer, trying to ignore the worried way Jordan is watching me from his seat in the back of the ambulance. The paramedic keeps trying to clean the blood off his hands—Mr. Masters’s blood.

  An intense wave of dizziness hits me, and I tilt on the car hood. Chief Vega reaches out to steady me, but I place my hands on the hood beside me and do it myself.

  “Did he tell you why he wanted you to meet him?”

  “Not exactly,” I answer, my throat feeling and sounding raw. “He said he had information about my dad’s case.”

  I hesitate before continuing with a biting edge. “I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with that.”

  Chief Vega acts as though I didn’t add the last part as he asks a few more questions about whether Stacia saw us and if Masters gave us any reason to think Stacia was involved.

  “You said you saw two figures in the clearing before you heard the gunshot.” He squints down at his paper before looking at me again. “What were they doing?”

  “I heard her yelling, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.” I think back on the image of the two figures fighting in the clearing. “They were struggling. Maybe fighting over the gun, I don’t know.”

  Then I hear the gunshot again in my head and I flinch.

  Chief Vega puts down his notebook. “Let’s take a break. I’ll get the rest of the answers at the station. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I’m grateful. I need a minute to process this before talking more about the end of Mr. Masters’s life. It’s too much.

  The chief puts his hand out like he’s going to pat me on the shoulder, but when I shrink back, he only returns it to his side. Without another word, he turns away and starts organizing the many officers who’ve gathered in the clearing.

  Under Vega’s command, the police swarm through Mason Park like honeybees in a field of wildflowers. They’ve taken so many pictures that I’ve lost count, and I watch them move Mr. Masters’s body into a black bag. It’s exactly like the one they put Valynne Kemp in. I haven’t cried. I’ve barely blinked. Even though I can’t see Mr. Masters anymore, I can’t take my eyes off the lumpy contours of the bag. It feels wrong to stick someone who was vibrantly alive only a couple of hours ago into a black sack. It feels like he has already been discarded. Even though I know he doesn’t care anymore, it makes me feel claustrophobic just looking at him.

  Jordan comes to sit beside me on the car hood, but he doesn’t speak. I tuck my feet beneath me because I can’t stop thinking about walking over and unzipping his bag. Seeing him one more time. Letting this man, who has been there for me through everything, have access to the air that he can no longer breathe.

  Eventually, I stop trembling, but my jaw won’t seem to unclench. The paramedics—who have now declared us to officially be in shock—keep bringing me wool blankets and draping them over my shoulders, but I feel so overheated that I keep pushing them off.

  Chief Vega has been in charge of telling what appears to be every officer in Houston what to do and where to search for Stacia. He questioned me after I basically ordered him to, but I’m not sure he’s spoken to his son at all. Jordan’s shoulders slump farther in on himself as he watches his father from a distance. He looks like a turtle trying valiantly to pull his head into a shell that has somehow become too small for him.

  Everything about this feels so unreal. Mr. Masters’s voice over the phone … he’d sounded terrified, and now I’ll never know exactly what he’d wanted to tell us. Was it about Stacia and what she was capable of? Even his final word, run. From what? What did that mean? Did he somehow not know that Stacia had already left?

  Now one of only two people who’d never left me is gone. The man who was more like family than my own family is dead.

  Except for the pictures from the trial and the bag from Valynne’s crime scene, I’ve never seen a dead body. Now I know what it’s like to see the life drain from someone and the spark leave their eyes.

  I shudder as a tiny sob escapes my lungs and it burns. The quaking begins all over again.

  After about two hours of waiting, Chief Vega finally turns in our direction again. His skin is as pale as Jordan’s. The main difference between father and son right now is that while Jordan looks terrified and angry, his dad looks exhausted. “I’m going to need you both to come down to the station for a few more questions. Riley, I’ve called your mother, and she is going to meet us there.”

  I groan, looking at my watch and realizing I’ve definitely broken my promise about being home by curfew.

  Jordan’s hands ball into fists beside me as his father turns away. I hear him respond with a “Yes, sir” that is so vehement that it might as well have been a curse. Chief Vega’s back stiffens, but he conti
nues walking away without even another glance toward us.

  * * *

  Jordan and I are placed in separate rooms as we fill out written statements about everything we saw and heard at the crime scene. By the time I’ve relived and written down what happened, I feel like someone has squeezed me like a rag and drained all the emotion from my body. I hurt everywhere, but it feels like an ache so deep that it’s burrowed below my muscle and into my marrow. The kind of pain I may never be rid of. Still, I feel like I did a good job of remembering everything. I’m not sure if I’m too rushed or if Jordan’s far too detailed, but I finish long before he does.

  I’m sitting alone in Chief Vega’s office and looking out the window behind his desk. I’m so tired I just want to go home and pretend this night, this month, this lifetime never happened. My mind is absent as I stare into the darkness outside, until a navy blue Toyota pulls up and turns off its headlights. I sit forward, squinting because the car looks so familiar.

  Then the door opens and a very wobbly Stacia climbs out.

  I tense, wondering if I should duck down so she won’t see me. She doesn’t even look my way. Vega sent officers to her home and we’d heard someone over the police radio report in that she wasn’t there. I’d thought maybe she’d made a break for it, but here she is.

  I watch her stumble out of her car, obviously drunk and wearing heels that are so high I’m certain I couldn’t even walk in them while sober. Her makeup is darker than I’ve ever seen it, and there are black mascara trails down her cheeks. She’s wearing a sequined top with a multicolored scarf and she has on more jewelry than I’ve ever seen on her before. Compared to her normal appearance, this looks like an explosion happened while she was standing in front of a jewelry store.

  Stacia looks more like she’s getting ready to go clubbing than stopping by the police station after just murdering her boss in a park. I breathe out a small sigh of relief when I look closely at her outfit and can’t see anywhere that she could be hiding the gun she’d run off with.

  When she makes her way toward the station entrance and out of my sight, I get to my feet and move to stand in the doorway so I can see what happens when she comes in. She walks straight up to the front desk. Everyone is busy and no one is there, so she dings the small silver bell again and again until everyone stops what they’re doing and looks over at her.