“Oh my God. You are so brave. I’d never do something like that.”
Kate laughed. “That’s the first time, and probably the last time, anyone’s called me brave.”
“No, you really are,” Sumera said. “I mean it.”
“Okay. I’ll accept it.”
“Where’s your apartment?”
Kate told her that she was living just off Charles Street near the river, and Sumera said: “Did you hear about that murder over there? Some girl was killed in her apartment.”
“It happened in my building,” Kate said, deciding to not add that it happened in the apartment next to hers.
Sumera covered her mouth. “Oh my God. That’s terrible.”
“How did you know she was killed? I thought the papers only reported that she’d been found dead.”
“It was on Reddit,” Sumera said. “Check it out. It’s awful. Someone said she’d been split open.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if it’s true, but they said she’d been cut open down the middle, like maybe it was some kind of surgery thing. It’s obviously some kind of serial killer thing. I mean it’s Reddit, so who really knows—”
“I don’t know what Reddit is,” Kate said.
As Sumera explained, Kate tried to shake the image of Audrey Marshall cut open. Until this moment, she’d not imagined the specific details of Audrey’s death for the simple reason that there were too many possibilities. But now that she knew what had happened, her mind was picturing it, and she wondered why she’d seen nothing—no bloodstains at all—when she’d snuck into Audrey Marshall’s apartment. Had that been a dream?
“Look, I don’t know if you should stay there. In the same building.”
“I think it will be fine,” Kate said. She suddenly wanted to leave. Sumera’s face, ever since they’d started talking about the murder, had been wide-eyed in alarm, and it was starting to make Kate nervous. “It was nice meeting you, Sumera. My neighbors invited me to their apartment tonight, so I should probably get going.”
“Maybe they’ll know more about what happened.”
“Maybe. I’ll see you back in class on Wednesday.”
“Okay. Are you walking to Porter T?”
She’d been planning on it, but Kate said, “I’ll probably walk to Harvard. I have some things . . .”
Sumera, finally sensing Kate’s discomfort, let her go, and Kate began the walk back along Massachusetts Avenue. The wind had lessened, but the sky was now entirely filled with clouds, so that the light seemed to blur. She wondered if she could walk the entire distance home; she was pretty sure that the wide, busy avenue that she was currently on extended all the way into Boston. But as she approached Harvard Square and spotted the T station, she decided that it was important she rode the subway again. It was only a few stops. Her panic earlier had had more to do with the sketchbook than with the claustrophobia of the train. And she’d be heading home this time, back to the relative safety of her apartment.
Without hesitating, she entered the subway station, weaved through a disembarking crowd, and got onto a nearly empty car. It was a much easier ride on the way back. She was anxious to get back and see what she could find out on the Internet about Audrey Marshall. She wondered if Sumera had even known what she was talking about. Was there genuine information out there about the nature of Audrey’s death? Before she knew it, she’d made it to Charles Street Station. On her walk home, she stopped for more provisions. Her next class was not until Wednesday, and she wanted to at least give herself the opportunity of spending all of Tuesday inside.
Back at the apartment, Kate climbed onto her bed and pulled her sketchbook from her backpack to take one more look at the sketch she’d done of Audrey’s friend. Maybe she’d overreacted on the subway earlier. But, no, looking at the drawing again it seemed significantly wrong, maybe even more so in the better light of the apartment. The eyes had completely changed.
Someone else drew those eyes. George’s voice again.
She tried to ignore him, flipped a page, removed a charcoal pencil from the pack, and quickly sketched Sumera, her round face and thick, unplucked brows, hair parted in the middle. She didn’t know how to spell Sumera, so under the picture she wrote, girl in graphic design class, cambridge, ma, and then the date. She flipped to another page and started to draw a new sketch of Jack Ludovico, but it wasn’t coming out right. She had lost confidence in what he looked