8
It’s Sunday, the day after visiting Luke. Annalisa, Charlotte, and I are standing in the hallway of his apartment building, trying to find the hidden key to his apartment, which is on the first floor of a sketchy apartment building in a part of town that’s not the greatest or particularly known for its safety. Apparently, his rent has been paid for the next couple of months, so no one’s been here to pack up his stuff and kick him out.
“Remind me why we couldn’t wait until one of the guys was free to come here again?” Charlotte asks, eyeing the end of the hallway with suspicion.
“Because we’re strong, independent women who don’t need to wait for a man to get shit done,” Annalisa reminds her with a straight spine, seemingly right at home.
“This strong, independent woman wants to get the hell out of here ASAP,” Charlotte mumbles, wrapping her arms around herself.
This place gives me the creeps, so I don’t blame her. The hallway is dimly lit and smells like cigarettes. The fluorescent light in the ceiling above Luke’s door is flashing on and off in no particular pattern, giving the hallway an especially eerie feel. The remnants of police caution tape dangle in front of Luke’s door. What we’ll find here that the police haven’t already, I’m not sure, but at least we can say we tried. We walk to one of the potted plants in the hallway and Annalisa lifts it up to look underneath.
“There are five keys there. What a stupid hiding place, why would everyone just leave their key here?” Charlotte wonders out loud as Annalisa grabs one at random.
“Maybe no one here has anything worth stealing?” Annalisa suggests, trying the key in the door to no avail.
She tries all five keys, and none of them work.
“What the hell? He said it was in the plant. This is the apartment he said, right?” Annalisa asks me, annoyance creeping into her tone.
“Wait—he did say in the plant.” I grimace.
Annalisa groans with disgust as she rolls up her sleeve and sticks her hand in the dirt, fishing around for the apartment key.
“I swear, if I’m doing this for no reas—found it!”
She pulls out a key and brushes the dirt off it, then off of herself. She tries it in the door and we hear a click. Nervously glancing around the sketchy hallway one more time, we push the door open and pile into the apartment, shutting the door and locking it behind us.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but Luke’s apartment isn’t too messy. It’s small, with a little kitchen, an eating area, and a TV area together in an open space, and two doors near the back, which I’m assuming lead to the bathroom and his bedroom.
“I guess we’re looking for anything that proves where he was that night?” Annalisa says, sounding unsure of our less-than-solid plan. “Time of death was around 6 p.m., so look for around that time.”
We look around aimlessly, splitting up to sort through Luke’s stuff, opening cupboards and moving dirty dishes into the sink to check the counter, hoping that whatever it is we’re looking for will just jump out at us.
Annalisa finds Luke’s laptop, which luckily wasn’t taken by the police, and plugs it in so she can turn it on and see what she can find. Charlotte’s going through the various papers scattered on his table and counter, so I venture into his bedroom. Anything useful has probably already been brought in as evidence, but we’re not looking with the assumption he’s guilty, we’re looking for clues of his innocence, and I hope that gives us an edge on finding information that may have been overlooked.
Clothes are thrown in a pile in the corner of the room, and the bed is just a mattress on the floor. It isn’t made, either, and the pillows aren’t even covered with pillowcases. The gray paint is peeling from the walls, and other than a small desk with a couple of drawers and a folding chair, the room is bare. The desk, however, looks promising. It’s a dark-brown wood, and has an ancient-looking, gray printer sitting in the corner.
The papers on top are mostly just bills and take-out menus, same as in the kitchen. Sitting in his chair, I open the first drawer, which is just various chargers and office supplies. I try the drawer beneath it, which has a bunch of papers strewn about and some video game boxes.
None of the papers seem to be important. This whole thing feels weird to me, like I’m spying on Luke, and as I push past an open pack of condoms, it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that I’m totally invading his privacy. I mean, he gave us permission, and we might find something to get him out of jail, so it might be worth it in the end.
This is pointless. I want to help Annalisa and prove her brother’s innocence, but maybe he really did do it? What can we possibly find to prove his innocence when the police haven’t found anything? What was I thinking in agreeing to this? Now all she’s going to remember about me when I leave was that I got her hopes up and disappeared without actually doing anything to help.
I stand and shove the chair back under the desk, turning around only to almost trip over Luke’s tangled bedsheets. For some reason, the unruliness of it all makes me feel itchy. It’s not my room or my bed, but the longer I stare at it, the more anger bubbles in my chest. It’s just a stupid bed, and I don’t want to touch the covers, because who knows when he last washed them, but it’s sitting there, all innocent looking, taunting me, looking just as out of control and unkempt as my life and my current situation. My life may be out of my control, but I can fix how annoyingly messed up Luke’s bed is. Grumbling under my breath, I grab Luke’s sheets and yank them up, only to spot a flash of something on the bed before the sheets fall into place. Throwing the covers all the way off the bed, I find a manila folder in the middle of the mattress, some papers scattered around it, like Luke was looking at it in bed before he got distracted and left to do something else. Or the officers found it and regarded it as nothing of importance in their search. Either way, I’m curious, so I grab the folder and open it to reveal the documents inside. As I make sense of what I’m looking at, a certain page causes me to go still. This can’t be right. I pick it up and realization slams into me as my heart stops.
What?
I feel the blood drain from my face and I can barely remember how to breathe.
Why?
I flip to the next page, the room closes in on me.
How?
My brain can barely process what I’m seeing. My throat tightens.
What? Why? How?The words are on repeat as I hastily shuffle papers around to get a better idea of what I’m looking at, trying to find logic, trying to make sense of this. I stumble through paper after paper, my hands shaking, my breathing coming out fast and shallow, my heartbeat too loud in my ears.
This is not right. I am not seeing this. There’s some kind of mistake.
“Hey, guys! I think I found something!”