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“No, I wasn’t thinking about my sister at any point today. Only ye. There was no other space in my head.”
It was dangerous how much I liked that.
He watched me for a moment. “Want to know what happened?”
Holy shit. My heart pounded. I tried to force calm. “If you want to tell me.”
He backed off, finding a couple of beers in the fridge, then entered the living room. He settled on the couch in the lamplight and patted the seat next to him.
I curled up, leaving distance between us to give him space.
This was so cosy. An innocuous setup for the pain I knew would come.
“I’ll never look at this sofa the same way again,” I quipped, tension coiling in my gut, alongside a real need to know what happened to him.
It burned in me.
Jackson smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He held up his phone with a picture on the screen. A family beamed back at me. A teenage version of him, a shorter, pretty girl in front of him, and their parents behind.
“Lisa Marie was a year younger than me. My pain-in-the-arse little sister, and my polar opposite. She was bossy, outgoing, and highly social.”
“I like the sound of her,” I said, examining the still.
She’ddied. I couldn’t imagine how it felt for him to see this photo.
“You’d have gotten along a lot better with her than me.” He set the phone down. “Everything was fun to her. She even loved how we’d been named—our parents had been huge music fans. I was named for Michael Jackson, she was named for Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. Neither our mother or father considered it weird that Michael and Lisa Marie married in real life. My sister thought it hilarious and used to tell everyone, and I was so embarrassed by her. She used it as a threat to get her way when she wanted a lift somewhere or for me to do her chores or whatever. But she always made up for it, just by being herself. When I was fifteen, I was assigned by my home tutor at school the awkward role of befriending a new boy, TJ.”
From the twist in his lips, I immediately knew TJ was the killer. Oh shit, so he’d known him first.
I stayed silent, giving him the floor.
“At first, I liked TJ. Our birthdays were the same week, and we shared the same hobby, so he called himself my brother from another mother. He had a loud personality which was the opposite of mine. He did reckless shite while projecting this wholesome boy image so authority figures loved him. In comparison, I was so buttoned up. We fell away from being friends when I realised he just didn’t give a shite about who he hurt in his life. This was after he got fired from the supermarket we both worked at for stealing alcohol and blaming it on a man who couldn’t defend himself. When we were a few months shy of seventeen, he asked if he could ask out Lisa Marie. I didn’t like it, but I told her, of course. I wasn’t her keeper. But I warned her off him. Told her about his petty rebellious acts and his lies. She made a big deal out of my negativity and said if I made a fuss, she’d surface the naming joke again. I pushed her into his arms. They started dating.”
He worked his jaw, setting his gaze on something across the room. “She fell in love with him in weeks, but her personality changed. His did, too. He was jealous and possessive, and she stopped seeing her friends because of fear he’d get angry over what she was wearing or who she spoke to. I think he was probably violent towards her, or at least threatening. To all of our relief, she broke up with him the day after his seventeenth birthday when he’d got drunk off his arse and screamed shite at her about talking to his friends at his party. He’d called her a slut. It was her last straw.”
He breathed, his focus still not on me.
“A week later, and TJ had been around every night, begging and apologising, but my sister refused to see him. My da had the police come for him, but Ma sent them away. She felt sorry for TJ and blamed Lisa Marie for not handling the breakup well.”
I swallowed. “Your mom blamed her?”
He rolled his gaze my way. “It gets worse. After the cops left, Ma told TJ to wait, then sat my sister down and told her that TJ was a good boyfriend, and she’d been wrong in flirting with others. That’s why he’d got upset, not that he was in any way fucked up. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Da yelled that she was blaming the wrong person, and I did, too, but our mother had always had issues with Lisa Marie, picking on what she wore, where she was going, how she spoke. She took TJ’s side and backed my sister into a corner, claiming she wanted a peaceful life back and Lisa Marie was holding all of us hostage to her hormones, including her poor ex-boyfriend who only wanted to make things right.”
“How could she?” I whispered.
“Easily. She had someone else in her ear, feeding the lines to her. I stood in front of my sister and defended her, and that drew the fire my way. But she stepped up and told everyone that she’d met someone new. A boy she’d been talking to online. Then she walked out, and the next time I saw her was in a coffin.”
My heart pounded. I stared at him. “TJ took her?”
“At first, everyone assumed she’d gone to a friend’s house to cool off. A message came from her phone saying she needed space and to leave her alone. But the next day, her tutor rang to ask why she hadn’t been in class. I’d left that school by that point and was on course to join the military, like my da had before injury retired him. I hadn’t any reason to see TJ, who was in the sixth form, and I was glad to not be near him.”
I remembered the video on the search results page. He’d put out an appeal for her. “There was a search,” I said softly.
He snorted. “It seems so obvious now, but hindsight paints a different picture. Ma rang around her friends, and no one had seen her. By evening, when she didn’t return, she got angry, claiming Lisa Marie had gone off with this new boyfriend and was even more to blame for worrying us all. It was my father who again rang the police and got them to start looking. From the moment he made the call, I didn’t rest. They took it seriously, forming search parties and going around the houses of all known associates of hers. TJ’s da gave him an alibi. He himself acted a victim. He even came to our fucking house and played the aggrieved ex card, saying shite like if only she’d stayed with him, she’d be okay. How dare she scare everyone like this.”
He exhaled, his expression so full of pain that it hurt my heart.
“She was already dead. He’d forced her into his car and driven her out to the woods where he took her life by his hands to her throat. He’d done it right after the big argument, then he’d watched on while we hunted, put out appeals, and hoped for her. It was three days until her naked body was found by dog walkers. She’d been out there all that time.”
