Fastening the Grave (Kali James Book 1) Read online

  Woodson walked over and examined the door frame leading out of the room. “Are these the only two exits?” he asked, pointing at the door he came in and the one he stood next to.

  “Just those,” Craig said.

  Woodson turned his attention back to me. “Where did you find the victim?”

  “He was right where he’s lying now,” I said.

  Woodson knelt again to examine Gates, careful to avoid stepping in the blood pooling next to the body. “Ms. James, can you describe what happened, starting from the moment you entered the room?”

  After having listened to numerous interrogation stories from my dad and brother, both cops, over the years, I recounted my movements in as much detail as I could recall.

  “And when you got here?” Woodson asked the group of men.

  “I thought it was fake,” White Sox said, glancing at me. “Until that freak sniffed his blood.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Not ketchup,” I volunteered.

  Craig raised his eyebrow. Dodd turned red. Woodson just cleared his throat before turning back to Craig. “Who was the last person through this room before Ms. James?”

  “I’m not sure. We can check with the staff who were working in the other rooms, but a lot of people come through here. Hundreds a night.”

  “What about the room after this?” Woodson asked.

  “This is the last room before the slide out.”

  “Any security footage?” Woodson asked hopefully.

  “Sorry, not in here,” Craig said. “The only camera we have is in the front of the building.”

  “We’ll need a copy of whatever footage you do have,” Woodson said. “And any names of tonight’s crowd that you might have, as well as a list of staff working tonight.”

  “Of course.”

  “You mentioned a slide out?” Dodd peered across the room.

  “Yes. At the end of the haunted house, everyone goes down a giant slide to the outside of the building.” Craig motioned for Detective Woodson to follow him into the next room, but we all trailed after them. There, he showed the officers the entrance to a large, twisting slide.

  “Were there staff working this room?”

  Craig shifted his weight. “Normally, there would be, but we were short-staffed tonight.” He pointed at a sign directing guests to exit. “We had to make do.”

  “What about that door?” Woodson asked, pointing to the closed door behind the sign.

  “That leads down to the gift shop.” Craig walked over and turned the knob to show it was locked. “But because of the short staffing, it was closed off and locked.”

  “Then whoever came through here would have just slid out of this room and landed outside the building?” Woodson asked.

  “Yes,” Craig said.

  Dodd stuck his head inside the opening of the slide, looking down, as if the murderer might still be wedged in one of its bends. “Where does this end?” His voice echoed off the metal sides.

  “In the back alley,” Craig said. “It ends about a foot off the sidewalk behind the building.”

  Dodd pulled his head out of the slide and faced us. “That’s bad.”

  Woodson shook his head. “Yes, Dodd. That’s bad.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It was long past midnight before the police were done with me. By then, Emma was already gone. Ruby, the redhead who had been working the door, told me that Bennie had taken Emma home. Although I couldn’t blame Emma for running for the beige-walled safety of the suburbs, I would have felt better if I could have checked to make sure she was okay. I did have several missed calls from Riley, but I didn’t have the energy to call her back. I sent her a quick text to let her know I was all right and that I’d check in tomorrow.

  Craig lent me a spare t-shirt and pair of sweatpants, both of which were giant on me, so I could hand over my blood-soaked clothes to the police. The only piece of clothing I kept was Riley’s jacket, which had miraculously survived without a speck of blood on it. Craig also insisted on walking me the two blocks to my place. For the first block, we walked in awkward silence. It was hard to make small talk after leaving the scene of a murder.

  “Are you okay?” he finally asked.

  “A lot better than the dead reporter back there.”

  Craig smiled, a small crack in his otherwise stoic face. “Fair point.” As he walked beside me, his eyes scanned every direction as if the killer might be just around the corner. Not that I was in much danger with him hulking down the street next to me. “You know, it is okay to be shaken up.”

  I stopped and peered up at him. “I know you are trying to help, but I don’t want to talk about it.” When Craig stiffened, I added, “at least not yet.”

  He nodded and walked the rest of the way with me in silence, awkward or not.

  It wasn’t until I was alone in my apartment with the deadbolt latched behind me that I let the panic overtake me. I tried to slow my breathing, to inhale deeply, pause, and push the air back out of my lungs. Wouldn’t the shrink that claimed my teenaged Tuesdays be pleased something stuck from those sessions? I sagged against the door and closed my eyes.

  For the past year, I’d reveled in the fake monsters I crafted in the shop, believing myself far removed from the grim world of actual murders. I had moved five hundred miles from the place my sister had been killed for a fresh start. Here, I didn’t have to live with constant reminders of her all around me—the route we walked every day for years, the colleges she would never attend, the places I’d now go alone.

  Back home, I had looked into every car that passed me on the street wondering: was his the last face she saw before he ran her down? Did he wait, watching until she took her last breath, before backing up and leaving her body crumpled like trash on the side of the road? In Chicago, there was nowhere left for me that wasn’t tainted with Claire’s death.

  Sometimes, I wondered if death followed me like a bad coin. I pulled out the penny I’d pocketed at the crime scene, the small weight cool in my hand. I should have turned it over to Detective Woodson for the evidence locker, but the impulse to keep it had been too strong. Why I felt the need to collect a dead man’s penny was a matter better left to psychotherapy, and that was something I ditched the day after my eighteenth birthday.

  I’d been collecting things for years, starting with the button from my dead sister’s jacket. I was fifteen the year my twin sister Claire was killed in a hit-and-run. While everyone else laid roses over her open casket, I twisted off the metal fleur-de-lis button, severing the loose string with my fingernail and hiding it in the folds of my dress.

  Later, I told my shrink it was because I needed to hold on to a small piece of Claire’s, a tangible connection to the sister I lost. The truth was, I didn’t have a choice. The urge to take it was a compulsion, its metal like a beacon to me in that dimly lit funeral parlor. When I got home after the service, I hid it in my diary, hollowing out the book with a razor blade and spray gluing the pages until they formed a paper casket for my stolen button.

  When you kept a token from your dead sister, you could convince yourself it was about connection. When you found yourself pilfering coins from a random murder victim, you were treading on serial killer territory.

  I dropped the penny back into my pocket and headed for the kitchen. When I’d rented this place, a kitchen had been low on the priority list. As always with real estate, location was king. Of course, most people probably wouldn’t understand the locational appeal of a row of run-down warehouses in West Bottoms, Kansas City, but for me, it was love at first sight. The retail space, complete with upstairs living quarters, may not have been a prime location for most business owners, but for a costume shop, it was ideally situated.

  I’d scrimped and saved for five years, taking business classes at night and working dead-end retail jobs during the day to make my shop possible. A program that offered funding for young, creative entrepreneurs willing to move to Kansas and a misdelivered magazi
ne that featured Kansas City were enough to set me in motion. The rest of my family didn’t understand my need for distance, but I took the opportunity anyway. I’d rented this place sight unseen and moved a few weeks later.

  The first time Emma visited, she had taken one look at the apartment’s cramped galley kitchen with its peeling Formica counters and upper cabinets that looked like something the previous owner used for dart practice and declared it a room with potential. Over the summer, we’d removed all the wobbly cabinet doors. We patched and painted the cabinets a semi-gloss off-white and lined them with four rolls of contact paper patterned with faded yellow lemons that we found in a neighborhood thrift shop. When we finished, the kitchen was functional and cheery, a picture of normalcy.

  Tonight, it would take a lot more than retro lemons to cheer me up. I pulled a chair over, so I could reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. I felt around behind the assortment of wine bottles with pretty labels to pull down my rainy-day bottle of tequila, not bothering to reach for salt or a lime. Tipping the bottle, I took a long swig before heading for the bedroom, bottle still clutched in my hand.

  I rummaged through my nightstand for my prescription bottle of sleeping pills and washed a pill down with another sip. One swig too many later, and I was as convinced that Jack Gates had nothing to do with me as I was that I’d never touch tequila again.

  Despite the sleeping pill, I tossed and turned for hours. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of Gates. In my dream, he was still alive when I tripped over him, a pair of shears stuck in his neck. A pack of wild dogs circled him, growling at me as I edged closer. They waited until he took his last breath and then fell upon his body. The dogs ripped the flesh from his stomach the way my childhood beagle went after rabbits. I watched Jack’s face morph into Claire’s. Her eyes snapped open, and she locked her gaze with mine. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t save her.

  Despite my pounding head, I forced myself out of bed early. A quick shower later, I pulled on the first thing I grabbed from my closet—a breezy floral midi dress with raglan sleeves and deep pockets. Even hungover, I didn’t do sweats.

  When I checked my phone, I saw a missed call from Emma. She kept the message short, her voice strained as she said she wouldn’t be coming into work today. I called her back to check on her, but my call went straight to voicemail. I hung up without leaving a message. Then I texted Riley to let her know I was fine and that I’d fill her in when she came in for her costume appointment this afternoon.

  I headed downstairs to the shop early, determined to put Jack Gates where he belonged: a passing obituary in the local paper. I threw myself into work, hoping if I was busy enough, it would keep the images of the crime scene at bay.

  To an outsider, the back of my shop probably looked like an overstuffed mess, which is why I’d hung a curtain in the archway between the rooms to keep customers’ eyes from wandering back here. Today, the rows of industrial shelving, bins of fabric, embellishments, and rolls of wire in assorted gauges were familiar and comforting.

  Across the back of my work room were wall-to-wall racks of costumes, including my custom designs. In the front of the shop, I displayed no more than two costumes of the same type, keeping any duplicates in the back, out of sight. Even the customers who wanted cheap costumes demanded the illusion of uniqueness.

  Early on, I realized that to succeed in the costume business, I couldn’t just do monster balls and cosplay. Instead, I had to cater to young families, and I needed a slice of the sixteen- to thirty-year-old market of young women with money to burn. And that demographic wanted costumes in every flavor of sex-it-up. Mass-produced French maid costumes were perennial favorites, along with sexy nurses, cops, cheerleaders, and cats. Pair a hard hat with a short skirt and cleavage, and even construction workers were hot enough for masquerade parties. Those mass-produced costumes kept the lights on.

  My specialty, however, was handcrafted, blending new fabrics and accessories with upcycled thrift store finds. The custom costumes I sold outright tended to be simpler, more assembly-line favorites: things like pirates, witches, and princesses. I invested more of my time and talent on the interesting creations that came in on special order and the ones that made up my rental inventory. The latter I reserved for customers with discerning tastes and a healthy deposit.

  I wasn’t as much a seamstress as I was an assembler. As a child, my favorite part of the garage sales my grandmother took my sister Claire and me to was the free box—that box of odds and ends that the seller recognized as absolutely, unequivocally unsellable. I, however, had a soft spot for lost causes. While Claire would search for name-brand jeans, I’d make a beeline for that box, digging through the knickknacks and self-help books to find the mismatched socks, the fake Mardi Gras beads, and the hand-knitted scarves. Occasionally, I’d hit pay dirt and find a tattered cowboy hat, a plaid vest, or a patterned curtain.

  My grandmother claimed everyone had a talent. She said Claire’s was bringing harmony to those around her, and mine was seeing a second life for what others discarded. Clothing, accessories, bottle tops, you name it. That plaid vest became a fat headband, the silk sock its flower. My room had always looked like a cyclone had blown through with fabric wedging like confetti in the nondescript carpet. Buttons were my Legos, and according to my barefoot mother, both Legos and buttons were the work of the devil.

  As a kid, I waited for the air to turn crisp and the smell of cinnamon and pumpkin spice to fill our house, markers that meant I could start constructing Halloween costumes. While my friends donned cheap superhero costumes each year, I transformed myself into Boudicca and Claire into Amelia Earhart. I remade Claire into Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt, while I became the god Saturn, wearing a headless doll strung on a rope around my neck.

  By middle school, thrift stores had become my hunting grounds, an opportunity to reinvent myself. Each week, I blew my entire allowance on bits of lace, secondhand prom dresses, and retro curtains. My first intervention was about my vintage clothing “problem.” My mother threatened to clear out my bedroom with trash bags if I brought one more article of old clothing into it. So I hid polyester pants inside my pillowcase and learned how to nest costume jewelry inside socks, shirts inside shirts, and bits of broken but colorful glass inside the sturdy pockets of my blue jeans.

  Color drew me like nectar. Floral prints, jewel tones, and turquoise earrings were all hard to resist. The gaudier, the better. I cocooned myself in blues and greens, brilliant yellow, and aggressive orange. I changed colors like the seasons.

  After Claire was killed, the winter before we turned sixteen, I couldn’t bear color. For a year after her death, I layered black upon black. I still altered, cut, and stitched, but I did it all in shades of mourning, each outfit a penance. Claire had been the shining star in our family. Popular and kind, she had seemed destined for a gilded life. And when she died, the world went dark.

  Although Claire came back, first in my dreams and later as a ghost who begged me to right the wrong done to her, she was never the same. After her death, Claire was muted. She was less than she had been but still enough herself that she could pull me along wherever she led. But no matter how many times I looked for the man who took her life, I couldn’t find him. Gradually, she faded away, until all I had left of her were memories.

  After I stopped seeing her, it took months before I could stand the brightness of color on my own body. Even then, colors were different. Red satin pooled like blood; icy blue was the color of the winter that took her.

  Today, I shoved aside my memories of Claire and reached for the dove-gray hooded cape I’d been working on, the color fitting my mood. I donned my favorite work apron as I gathered supplies. After a bit of searching, I’d found a faux fur coat at one of the West Bottoms thrift stores. I’d already cut it into strips. All that was left was to trim the cape. I reached in my pocket for the measuring tape I thought I’d grabbed earlier but came up with nothi
ng but lint and Gates’ penny. I didn’t remember bringing it with me.

  As if he knew I was thinking about him, Jack Gates appeared behind the dress form, startling me. I jumped and clutched my chest as I took a step away from him. I dropped his penny as if burned.

  I kept my eyes trained on the cape, doing my best to avoid looking at Jack Gates, because I knew what he wanted. He was a stranger, and while I felt bad for him, the police could find whoever was responsible for his death. The last thing I needed was the ghost of a murder victim taking up residence in my life. Claire taught me that once I acknowledged a ghost, the visits would become frequent and the demands more insistent. I’d moved halfway across the country to build a life untouched by the dead, so I did my best to ignore him.

  I reached inside the container for a pin, my hand only shaking slightly. Keeping my gaze fixed on the intersection of dark fur and misty gray fabric, I pinned the next stretch of hemline. I pricked my finger reaching for another pin. When I lifted my finger to my mouth, the bead of blood was another reminder of last night. Although I had skipped breakfast this morning, an empty stomach didn’t stop the wave of nausea that hit me. I tried to ignore it, continuing to work until the cape was finished, and I had nothing else to distract me.

  When I finally forced myself to look again, Jack Gates was there, waiting patiently beyond the dress form as if he had all the time in the world. He opened his mouth to speak but paused, reaching for his throat. From the way he ran his fingers over his neck, I knew he must still feel the wound tearing at the delicate skin of his throat. Although his neck appeared smooth and tanned without the gaping wound that had stolen his life, he didn’t seem to know that. I couldn’t look away, watching as he worked the muscles of his throat, then flexed his jaw and attempted speech. He was as silent as if his vocal cords were still severed.

  Suffering like his was difficult to ignore. Without meaning to, I leaned in, opening my lips to speak first. By the time I found the words, however, Jack Gates was already gone.