- SAM -

Six days.

It'd been six days since the cops locked up Leith Carlsson, six days since Alice was admitted to the hospital for her gunshot wound, alongside the much more egregiously injured Marcus Hall...and six days since Lane Martin had vanished into thin air.

Reporters said Marcus's dying moments were an excruciating blaze of agony prolonged by doctors' best efforts, while the cops tried to assure his family that the girl who butchered him couldn't have gotten far; they blocked every exit, every highway—no one was leaving town until they found her.

But it had been six days. Six days of flashing blue and white at every corner, of officers at every intersection. Six days of traffic stops and news updates.

Six days without a trace.

I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I saw her—that hollow look of rage etched immoveable across her face. I couldn't stop hearing those final, haunting words she breathed before she dashed from the room and disappeared into the dark halls of EdgeWay Church of Christ, the same halls in which she'd fallen victim to the vilest horrors imaginable.

To this day, it brings me to the brink of rage just thinking about it.

She was twelve years old.

We were children, barely alive; and Marcus would've killed her.

I bared my teeth, peered through my bedroom window at the morning sun—bright, obnoxious, blazing.

I slid into a white dress shirt, zipped a pair of black slacks around my waist. My left arm ached as I raised it to wrap a tie around my throat. I gulped hard; it felt like I was slipping on a noose.

I walked downstairs, greeted the cleaning lady, exited my apartment building.

I inhaled deeply as I made it to my car, then set upon the road still densely populated by police cars combing the town for any sign of Lane.

The closer I got to my destination, the thicker the street's congestion with black and white vehicles.

"Can't believe I'm even going to this thing," I muttered once I made it to the parking lot.

But here I was, EdgeWay Church of Christ—the main doors propped wide open by greeters who held ceremony programs in one hand and straw-threaded flower baskets in the other.

The one on the right smiled at me as I reluctantly accepted the folded page she offered, embossed with the brazen likeness of Marcus Emerson Hall.

I had only seconds to glance at it before I heard a familiar voice, Irina's, calling me to where she sat three rows removed from the main stage and had saved me a seat at the end of the row.

To Irina's left were GiGi and their mother Myra, followed by Charity, Prudence, and the Deputy Commissioner. Steven sat next to Dylan, one seat apart from the rest, wearing a gauzed cast around his neck.

A few minutes later, Ahmed came and took the empty seat next to Steven.

I shuddered to look to my right, where streaked patches of carpet, though they must've been steam cleaned at some point during the week, retained nevertheless the slightest rosaceous hue.

The ceremony commenced with a choir dressed in stripes of navy and white, their voices lofty and their notes unbelievably high. Mid-trill, a violinist took the stage and pressed against his instrument with such vigor that I thought he might rend it in two. Classical it was, and beautiful to be sure—but only in the way that the noise of an old harp is able to catch the attention of the perceptive ear, lovely for the ardor of its strainlessness rather than its refinery.

After the music, I shouldn't have been surprised to see Landon Rhymes take the stage. He squawked about Marcus's achievements within the church, how it'd been a blessing to know such a revolutionary man of God. The more he talked, the more I felt he was speaking to the men and women in the back, the ones from the blogs and the papers whose suits and skirts were as black and cold as their notepads and camera phones.

Landon's last words were an invitation to all present, a call to speak in earnest of the man whose face filled the mega-screen above the stage.

Darla Portolini stood to speak, and Principal Turner made a few strong comments in support of Marcus's visions for academia and leadership. There was probably some shred of genuine praise to be found amid the forest of flattery that was springing to life from the pulpit, but much of what was said rang hollow to me—to Irina, to Ahmed, to Myra...to Charity, Prudence, Dylan, Steven himself.

We all knew the truth; we'd all lived the truth. Marcus Hall was not a man to be lauded.

The ceremony concluded with a few brief comments, followed by the return of the choir to the stage for one final hymn, when—

Wait, what's that?

With a slow but steady ebbing, the overhead screen—at first printed with music lyrics bordered by embellishments that overlaid Marcus's visage—faded austerely to blackness...then to the image of a terrified boy with the outline of a leather belt choked around his neck. Blood looked to be seeping onto the white carpet beneath him in waves of red, and puffy white gauze was stuffed inside his mouth and protruded between his teeth.

The crowd began to gasp, several shielding their eyes with their hands as the photo came into clearer and clearer focus.

But I didn't gasp or scream, for I knew just who that boy was.

Turning to my left, I spotted a physically quaking Steven, next to Ahmed, who grasped his arm in support. But Steven stood to his feet, fighting the pain shooting behind the cast on his throat, and fled from the room as the reporters on the back rows pulled out their phones and began snapping photos.

I didn't know what else to do, so I stood up and followed Steven out; Irina and Ahmed stuck to my heels.

"Steven!" I called, "Steven, wait!"

When I made it outside, I heard sniffles, saw Steven crouched on the asphalt and shielding his eyes with his left arm.

"Dude," I stopped about six feet away from him. "Steven, I...I can't believe someone did that..."

My words were drowned out as Steven's light sniffling morphed into a full-on cry, anguish and despair seeping out with every tear.

Ahmed ran past me, knelt down next to Steven and gripped him around the shoulder.

"I can't do this, guys," Steven cried, his voice quivering. "I can't."

I glanced to my right at Irina, who stood as still as I. The sound of Steven's sobs rebounded against the hallway walls, filling the air with a weight all their own—the bereft melancholy of a father lost, a family broken, a community of lives that would never be the same; it was a sound of gloom and wistfulness...until slowly, on a creeping, sinister wave, something—someone—began to giggle.

I couldn't believe my ears, but as I turned—

"Alice?"

She giggled all the more. "Well, who else would it be?"

"What...how are you even—?"

"I am not a woman without connections, Sam," she scoffed. "Did you really think those idiots at the hospital had a clue?" Though her right arm hung suspended from a cast, her left was free to arch into a sideways V as she rested her hand on her hip.

"So what, then? You sneaked out just to crash a funeral? I can't believe—"

"Sneak? Oh, darling, give me at least a little credit. I can be very persuasive." She smiled. "Girls aren't the only ones who get to be nurses."

"You're a monster!" Ahmed screamed at Alice from the ground, his arm still wrapped around Steven's shoulder. "Steven's dad is dead, and you put up a picture like that during the middle of his funeral!? How could you do something like this?"

"Me?" she gasped sarcastically, mordantly. "I didn't do anything. I'm just here to watch the fireworks."

"Then who?" Ahmed shouted back. "Is it Leith? Did you and your 'connections' manage to break him out of jail?"

Alice just stood there, her eyes drawn thin as she stared coolly at Ahmed, at all of us, hand still on her hip and mouth turned upward in that ever-present, ever-enigmatic smile.

Behind her, the doors to the church swung open again. I expected a mobbing crowd and a torrent of nosy reporters, come to gawk and snap pictures at Marcus Hall's only remaining son, the heir to his mendacity; but it was single woman who walked forth, wearing a black silk scarf and modest high heels. Her hair was a thick blond almost yellow in its waves, and her brown eyes bored angrily into Alice's back.

Alice turned around, her hand at last falling from her hip. "Hello, Mother," she breathed.

"Alice, what is the meaning of this madness? Have you not one ounce of shame!?"

"I just came to see my old pastor for the last time, Mommy," Alice mocked. "You and Daddy always said funerals were important."

"Alice, do not start with me." Elizabeth lifted her phone. "The police are on their way as we speak, and rest assured that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the—"

"Perfect," Alice fired back. "If you hadn't called them, I would have."

What?

"Why do you think I came here in the first place, Mom? You think I really expected justice in this town for anyone but Marcus and his pathetic excuse of a family?" She exhaled slowly, evenly. "Maybe I am going to jail; if I'm lucky, maybe they'll even kill me, free me from a world where monsters like Marcus Hall get away with whatever the heck they want while the rest of us are left to fight like dogs for scraps. I don't care if I die; I don't need to care." She took another breath. "Whatever happens to me, I'll always know that I loved my sister, I saved her—I did more for her than anyone else ever did."

Irina gasped next to me. "S-saved her?"

Alice turned to Irina. "She loves you, always has...you're all she talks about."

"Where is she?" demanded Elizabeth, her voice booming. "What have you done with my daughter!?"

"I AM YOUR DAUGHTER!" Alice screeched.

"WHERE IS SHE!?" Elizabeth raged. "TELL ME WHERE SHE IS!"

Police sirens began whirring, surrounding the parking lot—the church—in the cries of crime and punishment.

Alice smiled. "She's safe." She replaced her hand on her hip. "Tell me, Mother, did you finally do it? When you called the police, did you do as you said—did you manage to conscript every officer in the state?"

Elizabeth's eyes grew wide, the sheer force of some awful revelation blasting her directly in the face. "No...no, no, no, no!" She turned frantically to the encroaching police vehicles as they began blocking every exit from the parking lot. "No, stop!" she screamed, waving her arms. "You have to stop! You have to go back now! Get back on the streets!"

"Wha-" Ahmed began. "Mrs. Martin, what's wrong? Why're you—?"

"YOU HAVE TO GO!" she wailed to the droves of approaching cop cars, the officers stepping out of their vehicles. "She's a distraction! Alice is a distraction! My daughter is still alive!" Elizabeth twisted her head left, then right, squinting and straining her eyes into endless distance.

But by pure incidence, it was I who saw what she so dreadfully feared; it was I whose gaze lay suddenly upon a single black car stationed along the side of the road, free and clear of the church's incarcerated parking lot. And it was then that my newborn, mining suspicions struck the truth.

Yet unlike Elizabeth Martin, I could bring myself to say no words, to scream no admonitions of warning or fearfulness. Were things really as Alice had said? Had I done nothing, meant nothing?

I didn't like that question, and I liked the answer even less.

And standing there before Elizabeth, before Lane's elder sister, I felt as though I'd been rendered a statue of stone.

As the police closed in and cuffed Alice's free hand, forcing her to the ground, that black car in the distance pulled freely into the flow of passing traffic, ascending to the tip of the road's inclining slope.

Pausing briefly at a flashing red light, the car stopped for only an instant before speeding over the hill and vanishing away. And in that moment, the slender passenger leaned forward and scarcely into view. She batted her eyes at me flirtatiously—furiously—as stroke after stroke, her fingers laced and weaved through the vanilla blond strands that waterfalled from her head and splashed behind her shoulders.

She was so beautiful.

She had the prettiest hair in the world.