I Was Here(37)

             “Where were you yesterday?” she asks.

             “No one was here. I went to Seattle with the guys.”

             “I waited for you and then you didn’t come back so I went to the movies. Never mind. You’re here now. I’m going to make us French toast!” she declares. “With homemade bread.”

             I follow her into the kitchen. She goes to slice the loaf of bread but can’t get a knife through it. I suggest we go out instead.

             We go back to the diner I spent the night in a few weeks ago. Alice doesn’t like it because the eggs aren’t free-range, but I like it because the breakfast special is two ninety-nine. Alice gabs on about her term, her upcoming finals, summer back in Eugene, which she says, if the weather is nice, is like living in Eden, including the nakedness in some circles. She invites me to come down before she goes to Montana for her summer job. I put on a tight smile. I’m not sure what else to do, because she’s acting like we’re friends, and we’re not friends, we are mutual acquaintances, only the person we’re mutually acquainted with is no longer.

             “Why’d you go to Seattle yesterday?” she asks after a bit.

             “To see the kittens.”

             “And Ben McCallister?”

             “Yeah, he was there too.”

             Her eyes flicker up. “He’s pretty hot, right?”

             “I guess so.”

             “You guess so? He and Meg had a thing, right?”

             I think of Ben’s tawdry description of it. I fucked her, he’d said, so full of distaste, for Meg, for the act, for himself, I wondered why he even bothered. “I wouldn’t classify it as ‘a thing.’”

             “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that thing.”

             Alice seems so sweet, so young, so innocent. What would happen to her after she’d been used and abused by Ben? It’s not a pretty picture. “Yes, you would.”

             When we’re finishing up breakfast, Harry texts me. Cracked it.

             I pay for both breakfasts, and we hustle back to the house. Harry is waiting for us on the porch, Meg’s computer in his lap. “Look,” he says.

             I look.

             There’s a document open. It has a professional letterhead reading Hi-Watt Industrial Cleaning Company and some numbers.

             “What’s that?”

             “It’s a business license.”

             “Why would she have that on her computer?”

             “You need a license to buy this.” He clicks over to another window. It has a list of lethal chemical agents, where to procure them, how to procure them, expected physical effect, and “success rates.” The poison Meg used is listed. It has one of the highest success rates.

             I start to feel sick to my stomach.

             “There’s more,” Harry says. He opens another document, this one a sort of checklist, the kind of thing you’d get in a class. But when I peer closer, I see the items in the left-hand column are a sort of syllabus for death. Order poison. Pick day. Write note. Clear email/browser cache. Email note on time-delay delivery.

             “Oh God . . .” I begin.

             “Cody,” Harry says, with an edge of warning in his voice. “There’s more.”