This Is How It Ends

“You okay?” Sarah asked.

I nodded, but I really didn’t feel okay. She put her hand on my shoulder, and for once I didn’t think about how it felt to have her close or touching me. I was too busy trying to stay conscious.

“We can do this,” I muttered.

“That’s what you told me in physics,” she reminded me.

I took another deep breath, feeling the dizziness pass. I unzipped my bag. “Okay, let’s get started.”

Once we got into the numbers, it was much better. Sarah took the tape measure, leaving me to record.

“This one look good?” she asked, standing just beside the blood-soaked couch.

I glanced over and nodded. She stuck a Post-it with an A on it beside a long splotch. It matched the other Post-its left by the police, but with Sarah’s distinctive sharp handwriting. She took the measurements, calling them out to me, then started hunting for splatter B.

Beside the phone was an ashtray, empty but with the scattered dust of old cigarettes on the bottom. There were rings on the table, overlapping one another like a Spirograph design made by someone who hadn’t quite been able to get the hang of it. I guess Mr. Cleary hadn’t believed in coasters. Trip’s mom would have had a fit. I snorted, the idea of her somewhere like this so ridiculous.

“What?” Sarah glanced over.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

We did the next three splatters the same way—Sarah marking and measuring, me note taking and scanning the Clearys’ living room. They’d never bothered to put photos up or hang anything on the walls, except for a bizarre oil painting of a clown. It looked like it had been done with a paint-by-numbers kit, and sure enough, when I got closer, I saw R. Cleary scrawled at the bottom.

Opposite the sofa was an old TV on a stand, with books and a few games stacked on the shelves. None of it looked like it had been touched in about fifteen years. I wondered if it was stuff they’d bought for Natalie, maybe even played with her when she was a kid. Or if it had always sat there unused, little Nat left to manage for herself just the way she was now.

“What ever happened to Natalie’s mom?” I asked Sarah.

She glanced over at me. “Nat said she left them. Years ago. When Natalie was seven or eight.”

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t think Nat knows.”

“She hasn’t talked to her in all those years?”

Sarah shook her head.

“That’s kind of crazy, don’t you think?” I asked. “That her mom would just take off like that?”

“Why?” She gave me a funny look, then turned back to the wall. “Happens all the time, Ri.”

Oh, shit. I’d forgotten about her mom. “You don’t talk to yours, either?” I asked gently.

“Not much. She checks in once a year or so,” Sarah said without turning around. “When she can squeeze it in between the five hundred other things she’s doing. It’s one of the reasons Nat and I clicked right away,” she said. “Just us and our crazy dads.”

“Your dad didn’t seem crazy.”

“I’m not sure you would have noticed.” She smirked at me over her shoulder. “You seemed a bit . . . preoccupied.”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“He’s not crazy, of course,” Sarah said. “Just eccentric. Absentminded. Shrinks are like that sometimes.”

“That’s the word on the street.”

She shook her head sadly. “You hanging out on the streets again, Riley Larkin?”

“Fo’ shiz.”

“Good grief,” she muttered, leaning in to read the measurement. “Sometimes I think my dad forgets I even live there with him. Like I ceased to exist when she left. Like everyone did.”

“He still misses her?”

“She was the life of our house,” she said. “Of our family. It broke his heart when she left.” Sarah said it simply, without any of the melodrama the words implied. But I could see her fighting for composure. Sarah took a shaky breath as she stepped back, assessing the wall. She set down the tape measure. “Anyway, enough of that. I think we’re ready to map it,” she said. “You have string and tape?”

I pulled them out of the backpack. Sarah leaned over to turn on the table lamp. Nothing. She frowned.

“Power’s probably off,” I said.

“It’s going to get dark before we’re done.”

I smiled and pulled a high-powered flashlight from the bag. “I figured.”

“You are such a Boy Scout.” A chill raced up my spine as I realized that was exactly what Nat’s dad had called me. Sarah didn’t notice, handing me the end of the string.

“Go that way.” She pointed toward the middle of the room.

It took almost two hours of painstaking work to get the strings taped across Nat’s living room. When we were done, Sarah and I stood back, taking in the obvious impact point.

“It’s kind of amazing how that works, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yeah.” It was. Because looking at where the strings intersected, you could see exactly where Nat’s dad had been when he’d been shot. Standing directly in front of the sofa.

“He must have fallen back onto it, then,” Sarah guessed.

I nodded, the huge pool of blood there making it obvious. Without mapping the scene, I’d have assumed he’d been shot sitting there, but the strings made it clear he’d been standing, and I could almost picture it happening, like the ghost of him was there before us.

“So what does it tell us about the perp?”

“‘The perp?’” Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Did we just walk onto the set of Law & Order?”

I grinned sheepishly. “Okay. The criminal? The shooter?”

Sarah backed up, looking at the strings, the splotches, and the measurements. “Well, if her dad was standing, the angle of spatter would tell us the perp”—she grinned at me—“was taller than him.”

I nodded, having come to the same conclusion. “Randall Cleary wasn’t exactly a giant.”

“No,” she agreed. “Lots of people are probably taller than him.”

Except Moose, I thought, feeling a huge relief. “Not Natalie,” I said aloud. “Unless she was standing on a chair.”

“Most people don’t look for a podium when they’re shooting their parents.”

“Yeah, even the police probably figured that out. Maybe that’s why they cleared her,” I said.