Four
“Bryce.”
Nausea churned in Thea’s gut as she drew her best friend’s attention away from washing the dishes. Thea had made scrambled eggs on toast, which had mostly been picked at in a terse silence after Liv’s friends had left this morning. She still sat at the kitchen table now, scrolling mindlessly through her phone to put off drying.
There must have been dread trembling in Thea’s voice, because Bryce threw the washcloth down and turned from the sud-covered sink with furrowed brows.
“What’s wrong?”
Thea cast a sidelong glance towards the living room, where Liv shuffled around, still cleaning up last night’s mess. To prevent her from overhearing, Thea lowered her voice. “There was another murder.”
Bryce paled and fell into the seat opposite without so much as blinking. “When?”
“Last night. They found the body in a scrapyard just outside of town at six this morning.” Thea could’ve been reading off herPerfect Crimesscript in the basement — only this was different. This was happeningnow,in their own quiet little town.
“What the hell are you two whispering about now?” Liv called, over the clattering of beer bottles being tossed into a garbage bag.
“None of your business!” Bryce snapped back. And then, to Thea: “Do they know who?”
Thea slid her phone across the table, no longer able to look at the gummy smile of the familiar man on her screen. A photograph taken on the day he’d graduated. The very same day Thea had.
Bryce’s hands rose to her throat as she scanned the picture. “Oh, God. Didn’t we go to school with him?”
“George Hegarty,” Thea nodded.
“I could swear I saw him working at the bar last night, too. With all the makeup, though… I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“It says that he worked at the Bloody Mary. You probably did. I… I think I did, too.” The smiling bartender dressed as Beetlejuice flashed into her mind. He’d looked familiar. Now, Thea knew why.
“Shit.” The curse choked itself from Bryce’s throat, mangled and jagged-edged and wrong. Thea didn’t know what to do with it. With any of it.
“They’re talking about enforcing a curfew until they find out who it is.”
Bryce’s brows knitted together. “They think it was the same person?”
“Well,” Thea shrugged. “We’re like the quietest, most crime-free town in the U.S. and then two bodies are found under suspicious circumstances in the same week? It has to be connected, right?”
“Right,” Bryce whispered. With a click, she locked Thea’s phone and passed it back to her with unseeing eyes. “I guess that means the arcade will close earlier.”
“Probably.” Another bout of anxiety roiled through Thea, and she tapped an unsteady beat against the table. Even now, she was thinking of all the wrong things, and she hated it. But she didn’t have a filter, not when it came to Bryce, so she blurted the ugly concerns aloud anyway. “You know we have to talk about this in the podcast. Everyone will expect us to.”
Bryce’s focus snapped back to Thea, her dark glare as sharp and cutting as a blade. “Are you kidding?”
Thea wished shewaskidding. She wished she could be a normal, empathetic person who didn’t always have the immediate, relentlessly clawing instinct to figure out why someone was dead before sorrow could even set in. But that was who she was. It was who she’d been for a long time, and it wasn’t something she could help.
“No, I’mnotkidding. We’ve probably covered more cases like these than the cops have. We candosomething about this.”
“Like what?” Bryce’s voice rose and Thea winced. She hated to be on the receiving end of Bryce’s fiery ire. “Profiting off people’s death? Sensationalizing it for a few listeners’ entertainment?”
Thea shook her head, chest heaving with a deep, impatient breath. “That’snotwhat this is about. I want tohelp. I think we can use the podcast to do that. We can ask questions, search for answers.”
“It isn’t our place.”
“How different would it be to what we usually do? Why is it okay when we report on a killer from another place, another time, but not one in our own backyard?”
Bryce’s lips opened and then shut just as quickly, and Thea knew she’d snared her. Peoplehadbecome desensitized to crime and killing, Thea included, but that was who people were. Rather, they could understand how somebody could be so callous than feel the loss and fear that acts of evil left. How could Thea talk about murders each week while ignoring the ones happening in her own town?
“We agreed we’d never romanticize something like this,” she said, when Bryce didn’t reply. “I’m keeping to that agreement. I know we can do this in a way that’s respectful to the victims.”