“It’s my fault you’re dead?” I said. “Who the hell are you?” I was kind of aggressive. This will become relevant.
The voice didn’t say anything. I held tight to my bag and kept on going to school. I was shaking, my heart racing. I don’t think it crossed my mind then that something was wrong with me. I just thought: It’s a dead person. Or an angel, or something.
A strange angel, yes. But I don’t know. I just assumed it was supernatural, a phantasm of some kind. Which frankly scared me a hell of a lot. I was shaking as I continued the walk to school, past the long-dead FRANKIE’S GO KARTS with its vast cracked parking lot, furred with weeds, its broken neon sign pointing to the ticket office and its fading painted race courses.
At school I was distracted. That didn’t make a big difference from usual. I was pretty much coasting through my junior year. It drove my dad mad. He kept saying, “You’re a smart girl, Cass. You spend half your life in the library. Why are you wasting your abilities?” I told him once that using my abilities at school would be the biggest waste of them, and he dragged me to a kitchen chair and made me sit there till my assignments were done, so I never said that again.
Anyway, when I arrived at school, a few people turned and spoke low to each other when they saw me. I saw others glance at me and kind of raise their eyebrows. I figured the news was circulating about the foot on the beach, and me being the one who found it.
And underneath the buzz of curiosity, something else. Fear. I sensed it as I walked up the stairs, especially from the girls. That anxiety that had been there in the town, silent but present, like a tumor, since the killings began. That anxiety that said, So far it has been sex workers, but what if he starts on other girls?
Even as I walked, I saw people pulling away from me. Like I was a bad-luck charm. Like getting too close to me might get you killed.
Great. Another reason to be ostracized. It had to be me who found it. Just had to be.
Weirdly, though, I could swear a couple of kids looked at me enviously, hesitating, almost like they wanted the scoop, wanted to know if I knew anything. I mean, it was national at this point. How fourteen young women had disappeared in the last couple of years, never to be seen again. How the cops supposedly didn’t care enough to solve it because the victims were in the sex industry, and if it were ordinary girls then the murderer would have been apprehended long ago.
I don’t know how “Houdini Killer” got started. But by then it was already being used by news anchors, commentators in the New York Times, everyone. Because of the way that the bodies never turned up, like the killer was a magician.
Except that now, part of one had. And it had been me who found it, me who hit the jackpot with a severed foot. Even so, I was surprised by the speed with which it had gotten around, my discovery. Dad had told me it was hush-hush. I guess the officers, at least one of whom was FBI or something, didn’t know how small New Jersey towns operate. Someone at the station would have told his wife, who told their neighbor, who told Marjorie the school secretary, and that was it. Someone has probably written an equation for the speed of gossip.
I walked up to the main doors, and that was when someone tripped me. I felt the foot hook my leg, and I went sprawling. I put my hands out and landed on them, hard, the jolt fizzing electric up my arms and into my shoulders. I cried out, involuntarily.
And heard a laugh, somewhere behind me.
I eased myself into a sitting position, started picking up the books that had spilled from my bag. My hands were grazed, and now there were blood smudges on my calculus.
Mr. Nakomoto held out his hand and lifted me up. “Did you see who did it?” he asked kindly. He had a round face and round glasses; circles suited him. He was like someone with no edges, you know? No sharpness about him.
“No,” I said.
“Shame,” he said. “These bullies.” He shook his head. “I don’t like to see them getting away with it.”
“They always get away with it,” I said.
“Not always.” But even he didn’t look convinced.
I shrugged. I could have said, People who hurt other people always get away with it, because it was the truth or at least the truth as I saw it then, but hey. What would have been the point?
I picked up one more book, and he picked up one and handed it to me, and then he coughed and walked away.
Later, I was in English class with Ms. Gilbert. I always felt kind of sorry for Ms. Gilbert. I mean, she knew I’d read most of the novels in the library, let alone the ones we were studying, so she was forever firing questions at me, trying to draw me into the discussion.