“And what does that mean?”
“Oh, don’t listen to me.”
He never would have believed when he first rented thewalk-out basement two years ago that he and his elderly landlady would move beyond an occasional awkward hello to a genuine friendship. He had tried to keep his distance from Paula the first few months, but one day he came home to find she had discovered the old Gatorade bottle he was using to contain his discarded needles. He considered lying about why he had so many hypodermic needles, making up a story about allergy shots or diabetes, but instead he went with the truth. He was done hiding. He told her the needles were for testosterone and that he was transgender. “Oh,” she said dryly. “How nice.”
The next day when he came home from the library, there was a red plastic medical waste container sitting outside his door with a bow on it and a note that read:Join me for dinner? I’m making pad thai.
Now she holds a knife skewered with an orange slice toward him, a concerned look on her face. “You work too much, that’s all,” she says. “Young people should be out enjoying themselves.”
“I need the money.” He plucks the orange slice off the tip of the knife and bites into the red flesh. It isn’t a lie. His various gigs in the neighborhood—dog walking, pet-sitting, and running errands for a woman who’s immunocompromised—supplement his salary as a librarian’s assistant. But his motives are not purely financial. These jobs offer access into people’s homes and their lives, and he hopes, perhaps, clues to what happened to Autumn. Like the house he is visiting this morning. It’s one he has been trying to get inside for a year. It backs up to the Prison House. That’s what he calls the cement gray box that Autumn was living in when she was killed. Paula seems to accept his answer, and why not? Who doesn’t need more money? That’s why she’s renting her basement after all.
Neither he nor Autumn wanted to live in the suburbs. He made the move first, after graduating from American University and getting a job at the Little Falls Library. He was the one who told Autumn about the nanny job in the neighborhood and convinced her to take it. They could live a few blocks apart, and she could establish residency for graduate school just like he was doing—child psychology for her and library science for him.
The first few months were wonderful. They jokingly referred to themselves asbasement dwellers, met regularly for coffee in Spring Valley, and walked into downtown Bethesda on the Capital Crescent Trail to buy cupcakes to eat in the dark at the artsy movie theater there. On weekdays, Autumn would take her charge, Leo, to the library and visit Finn. There, they would swap funny stories about their neighbors and bosses.
“At least take some coffee,” his landlady says. “You’ll save money if you don’t go to one of those overpriced shops.”
She passes him a travel mug, and Finn lifts the lid and peers inside.
“Black, one sugar. I know how you like it.”
Armed with his messenger bag, coffee, and earbuds, Finn heads to his potential client’s house and makes it there in less than five minutes. He gave himself way too much time. He’s fifteen minutes early with nothing to do.
His palms are already sweaty at the thought of this morning’s job interview. Not because he thinks it will be hard to convince these people he’s the man to walk their dog. He’s found that people in this upper-middle-class suburb are only too happy to delegate the annoyances of life to gig workers. Every morning the neighborhood fills with folks that mow the inhabitants’lawns, clean their houses, power wash their cars. No, he’s sure they will like him and offer him the job.
It’s what he might discover in the house that gets his pulse racing.
He looks up and down the street, wondering how to kill those fifteen minutes.
It’s a nervous habit, showing up to places too early. He’s had it since he was a kid, when he would make his mother drive him to the bus stop at the end of the long dirt road they lived on twenty minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive. Showing up late, when everyone else was already settled, and having all those heads turn in your direction was unbearable for a kid who didn’t want to be seen at all.
He walks down the street to a utility pole and stops. He’s not surprised to see that the flyer he put up is now crumpled into a ball in the gutter. That’s how it goes. He puts them up, and people rip them down. He takes a fresh one from his messenger bag. He always carries a batch along with a small staple gun.
DO YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME?
Autumn smiles at him from the picture.
She’d probably find this whole endeavor overdramatic. She never liked that picture of herself, complaining that it made her look like Velma from Scooby-Doo with her thick-framed glasses and her bangs.
“They can rip you down, they can try to pretend it never happened. But I’ll keep reminding them,” Finn mumbles to himself as he staples a new flyer to the pole.
He looks at his watch. Thirteen minutes to go. He decidesto walk around the block and stops in front of the Prison House, staring up at the imposing gray box. It doesn’t fit on a street of center-hall Colonials and brick ramblers. Some of the neighbors have added on to the backs, but they’ve kept the façades the same, lending the street a uniform mid-century look. Except for this one house.
He steps onto the overgrown lawn. AFOR RENTsign announces the house’s vacancy as if the ankle-high grass doesn’t already do that. The sign has been here almost a year. No one wants to live in a murder house apparently.
He looks around to make sure no one is watching, then walks along the narrow concrete path that leads to the rear. The house takes up most of the lot, and what little land is left for the backyard has been paved over. Only a slender edge of garden bed around the perimeter of the property breaks up the concrete. It’s the middle of June, and these beds lie fallow. It must have seemed modern and fresh when it was staged with furniture and lights. Otherwise, who would live in such a desolate house? He knows who.
Autumn’s boss, Tori Price. Whereabouts currently unknown.
He turns and looks at the back of the house—tall, gray, and imposing with shutterless windows. His eye travels to the second floor. Autumn was in one of those rooms, FaceTiming him, moments before her murder. He closes his eyes and urges the memories of the night to come back.
“You should come over.” Autumn drifted in and out of the camera’s frame as she moved about the room. Finn had his laptop open on his bed. On one tab he had practice GRE questions, on another he was FaceTiming with Autumn. “Keep me company. It’s weird being in this big house by myself.”
Finn noticed the background wasn’t Autumn’s usual basement room. “Are you in your boss’s bedroom?”
“Of course! You think I’m going to stay in the musty basement when I don’t have to?”
“Aren’t you afraid she’ll find out?”