Chapter Two - Westbrook

The bus pulled into Westbrook at 8:17 PM. The station was small, a single platform, a vending machine humming its lonely fluorescent hymn, a bathroom with no lock. Alexa stepped off and breathed air that smelled like lake water and pine, clean and indifferent, the way places smell when they haven't yet learned to mourn.

A woman in a wool coat approached. Detective Cross. Forty-five, tired eyes, a wedding ring that had left a pale band on her finger…recently removed. Not divorced, Alexa thought. Not yet. Just someone who'd stopped pretending in the mirror each morning.

"Alexa?"

"How did you know?"

"Saw a photo." The detective's breath fogged in the cold. "I'm sorry we have to meet like this."

Alexa didn't respond. She followed the detective to an unmarked car, a Ford Taurus with coffee stains in the cup holders and a child's sock wedged between the seats. 

The campus rolled past the window. Red brick. Green lawns still wet with evening dew. Students laughing, walking in groups, holding hands as if nothing terrible had ever happened here or ever would. Alexa pressed her palm to the glass. Alice had walked here. Alice had laughed here, probably too loud, the way she always did, that unapologetic spill of joy that made strangers turn and smile. Alice had died here.

"The morgue is at the county hospital," Detective Cross said, her voice softer now, the way people speak when they're about to offer you an exit you won't take. "You don't have to do this tonight. We can wait until morning."

"No," Alexa said. "I want to see her."

She didn't want to see her. She needed to. Because until she saw Alice's body…really saw it, touched it, breathed in the finality of it, a part of her would believe this was a mistake. That Alice was still alive somewhere, waiting to explain. Waiting to say, Guess what, I faked it. Got you good, didn't I? That was Alice: the prankster, the escape artist, the one who always found a door where there was only a wall.

The morgue was cold. Too bright. It smelled like bleach and something else, something chemical and wrong; formaldehyde and the ghost of every body that had passed through these stainless-steel doors. Alexa's boots squeaked on the linoleum. She focused on the sound to keep from floating away.

The detective looked at Alexa and then to the attendant, a young man with bad skin and kind eyes who probably hadn't slept in thirty hours. He nodded once, solemn as a priest, and pulled back the sheet.

Alexa looked at her sister's face. She wanted to scream. She wanted to fold herself into the smallest possible shape and disappear between the floor tiles. But the scream stayed locked behind her teeth, and her feet stayed planted.

Alice's skin was gray. Her lips were blue. Her eyes were closed, but not peacefully, there was tension in her jaw, a tightness that spoke of struggle. The kind of struggle that leaves its fingerprints on the living and follows them into the dark. Her hands, visible at the edges of the sheet, were curled into fists.

She'd fought.

She'd tried to live.

And someone had held her under until she stopped.

"That's her," Alexa said. Her voice didn't shake. That surprised her. "That's my sister."

She reached out and touched Alice's hair. Still soft. Still dark. Still Alice.

But her fingers froze halfway through the second stroke.

Beneath the edge of the hospital gown, just above Alice's collarbone, a bruise. Not the mottled purple of postmortem settling. This one was fresh. Deliberate. The shape of it caught the fluorescent light like a signature: three distinct points, evenly spaced, pressed hard enough to rupture capillaries while the heart was still beating.

“Oh my God.” Alexa whispered to herself in a shaky voice and to the hearing of the detective and the attendant.

“We need to head to the station, Alexa.” Marlene grabbed her arm gently and led her out the morgue.