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“Ma’am are you okay?”
There was a knock at the door followed by “Police.” So much was happening I could barely focus on any of it.
“I—” I tried to respond to the dispatcher but the police knocked again, more forcefully. My head swiveled back and forth, from them, to Vera’s room, to the phone in my hands. Police burst through the open front door before I could make any kind of decision.
“Is that the dispatcher?” a kind-yet-forceful-looking officer asked me while men in black uniforms swarmed the apartment. I could only nod and hand him the phone. He said something to the dispatcher, hung up, and handed me the phone.
The officer sat me down on the couch. Even though it was my apartment, my couch, my plant that I bought with Vera on the table, it didn’t feel like mine. I felt like a bystander.
“You have a roommate?”
“What?” I was pulled out of my haze by the officer. He had a notepad and was watching me sternly. “Yes, her name was—is Vera.”
He wrote that down. “Do you have another?”
“Oh, yes sir, his name is Chad. He’s the landlord.” Speaking of Chad, where was he? How much school did that boy have?
“Do you know where he is?”
“School, I think. He’s in some kind of graduate program, sir.” My eyes trailed over to Ver
a’s room. Officers and the like were picking it apart. I watched as a woman picked up her panties and put them in a clear plastic bag. I frowned. Why did they need those?
“Do you have his number?” I shook my head at his question. I should have had Chad’s number, I guessed, but I rarely saw him. Vera and I paid him rent by leaving cash on the counter.
The officer tapped his notepad. “How did you meet Chad?”
“The internet,” I said, returning my gaze to the officer. “Wait, you don’t think he did this, do you?”
“Just covering my bases.” The officer smiled translucently.
“He’s barely here,” I explained. “He didn’t do this. You need to find who did this.”
“Did you know this apartment is owned by the university?” the officer asked.
“What?” I exclaimed. “Chad owns this apartment.”
The officer shook his head slowly. “No, I’m afraid this entire complex is student housing.” I frowned so hard I could feel a headache forming. I wasn’t sure what to say to the officer, so I kept my mouth shut. Probably best, anyway, because it was clear from the way he put down his notepad and looked at me with pity that I wasn’t giving him anything useful.
“Do you know Chad’s last name?” I didn’t want to answer the officer. The entire line of questioning was revealing me to be an idiot. I didn’t know Chad’s last name. I didn’t know the apartment was owned by the school. I’d moved in with a stranger I’d met at a coffee house and had decided to live with someone I’d met on the internet.
I wished I could say if I’d just opened my eyes I would have seen how obvious it was. The truth was I wasn’t prepared for life. Maybe I never would be. My perceptions were shaped in a shadowed house and defined by a man who knew little about truth.
I was dangerously naive.
When I didn’t respond, the officer told me he was going to give the information to his superiors and see what turned up. I mumbled my appreciation and shrunk back into my couch—no, not my couch. A school’s couch.
“Eli?”
There was a slight pause, as if adjusting, and then the voice sounded much closer. “Grace?”
“Eli…” I sighed his name into the phone. I shouldn’t have been calling him, but I didn’t know better. My heart called out to him. My pain sang for him.
There was crime scene tape blocking the entrance to Vera’s room, but I’d ducked underneath and sat myself squarely in the center of her bed. Blood and mess surrounded me, but so did her scent. It was almost like she was right there with me.
“Gracie, what’s wrong?”
“Everything,” I answered truthfully.
