Murderfunding, p.4
#MurderFunding, page 4
And more importantly, would they be back?
“Oh my God!” a familiar voice cried from the kitchen. Rita. “Oh my God! Becca, are you okay?”
She hadn’t heard her mom pull into the driveway. Hadn’t heard the garage door open and close.
The first thing Becca registered was that her mom was alone. “Where’s Rafa?” The panic was instantaneous, and images of her lazy-eyed intruder pinning Rafa to a wall flooded her mind. “Where is he?”
“Dinner at the Yorks’ after practice.” Rita grabbed Becca’s face between her hands and looked frantically into her eyes. “Are you okay?” she repeated. “What happened?”
Dinner at the Yorks’ house. Rafa was safe. “I’m okay,” Becca began. “I’m okay. I just got home…and…” Was she going to tell the truth and risk her brother’s safety?
“And?”
“And the house was like this. I…I got here just before you did. I was about to call nine-one-one.”
“Thank God you didn’t walk in while it was happening.”
“Yeah.”
Rita stroked Becca’s forehead, then broke away, her phone already out of her pocket. “I’m calling the police.”
The police arrived just as Rita made arrangements for Rafa to spend the night at the Yorks’, then Becca and her mom were asked to do a walk-through of their burglarized house. Which is when the whole situation got even more confusing. Because nothing was missing.
“Nothing?” the officer asked as they finished the inspection. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” Rita said, emerging from her bedroom with a look of relief on her face. The room was a total wreck—mattress overturned, drawers pulled from dressers. The only piece of furniture that wasn’t dumped into a heap on the floor was the massive antique curio cabinet, and it had been thoroughly ransacked. “No jewelry, no electronics, no silver. There’s nothing missing from this house.”
The cop scribbled something on his notepad. “Well,” he began, not looking up, “I’d say it was just kids being destructive, but the crime scene shows classic signs of a perp who was looking for something specific. Any idea what it could be?”
Rita quickly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but no. I’m a professor and my late wife was a stay-at-home mom. I can’t imagine what anyone would want from our home.”
Becca’s heart raced as she remembered the masked figure in her house. What could he have been looking for?
The officer nodded, then shifted his attention to Becca. “And you?”
“Me?” Becca was caught off guard by the question. “I didn’t see anything.”
The cop stared at her. Could he tell she was lying? “I was going to ask if you were having any problems at school. Any trouble you might be in that would cause this.”
Despite the disturbing events of that last hour, Becca had to stifle a laugh. She, Jackie, and Mateo were the three least likely kids in the entire school to get into trouble. “No, sir, Mr. Officer, sir. Nothing.”
He eyed her for a moment, not entirely convinced she was telling the truth, then pulled a card from his chest pocket and handed it to Rita. “If you do notice that something has been taken, let me know. I’m so sorry, Dr. Martinello. I know it’s been a hard couple of weeks for your family.”
“Thank you.” Rita forced a smile. “Do you think it’s safe for my daughter and me to stay in the house tonight?”
“Oh, yeah,” the officer said. “It’s a rarity that the perp in a break-in will return to the scene of the crime, unless their search was somehow interrupted.”
Great.
“So I think you’ll be fine. But I’ll have one of the guys do a drive-by every hour or so, to give you some peace of mind.”
Rita closed the door behind him, then pressed her forehead against it, slowly breathing in and out. After a few seconds, she spun back around toward Becca, still smiling. “What do you say we order a pizza and clean up this mess?”
Half a meatball-and-olive pizza later, Becca and her mom began to put their house back in order. They started in the living room, where nothing—not even Ruth’s bedazzled, embellished scrapbooks—had been left untouched. They’d been rummaged through and dumped on the floor, leaving little puddles of dislodged glitter on the carpet. It took an hour to get the room looking somewhat normal again. They worked in silence, for the most part, an occasional photo or favorite book from childhood eliciting a short conversation, and the whole time she straightened and restacked, Becca debated whether or not she should tell Rita the truth.
The description of the intruder was on the tip of her tongue half a dozen times, but each time, Becca kept quiet. She was afraid for her family’s safety, afraid for Rafa, who was sleeping in Teddy York’s upper bunk bed, blissfully unaware of the terror that had transpired at their house. How could she put him in danger? Nothing had been stolen, no one had been seriously hurt. She should just let it go.
After the living room was done, Rita took the kitchen while Becca started on her bedroom. It was a slow process, kind of like unpacking after a move but less orderly and more disturbing. It amazed Becca how much of the house had been violated. Nothing in her room had escaped inspection. The pile of books by her nightstand had been rifled through, the tiny plastic drawers in her childhood jewelry box had been yanked out and ditched on the rug, and even Becca’s corkboard had been ripped from the wall, though the contents, thankfully, had been left intact. Concert stubs and movie tickets, Mateo’s sketches and pictures of her family. Lazy Eye might have scanned them, but he hadn’t touched a single item.
Except for one. Becca’s eye was drawn to a blank spot in the upper corner of the board where something had been removed. A photo? Becca tried to remember what had been there. She cast her eyes around the wreck of her room, wondering if it had just fallen off in the violent ransacking, and after a brief search, Becca found what she was looking for.
It was a photo, from Rafa’s fifth birthday party. He sat on Ruth’s lap in the backyard screaming bloody murder while the clown who had been hired for the party tried to hand him a balloon crown. Rafa, terrified of clowns, was having none of it.
Becca had taken the photo herself because apparently even as a twelve-year-old she was an asshole. But that wasn’t the reason she had the photo pinned to her corkboard. It was the look on Ruth’s face, this perfect mix of patience, concern, and cheerfulness that pretty much embodied Ruth Martinello. Becca smiled. That was the way Becca would always remember her.
But her smile vanished as she recalled Stef’s theory. She tried to picture her patient, perky mom dressed as the clown in the photo, her smile not one of kindness, but of bloodthirsty glee.
Becca sighed, shaking her head. Stef was out of her mind.
As she continued to gaze at Ruth and Rafa and the clown, Becca heard her mom rustling around in the master bedroom next door and a thought popped into her head. Maybe the memory might cheer her mom up. Photo in hand, Becca headed down the hall.
The door to her moms’ bedroom was closed but not latched, and as Becca pushed it silently open, the words “Hey, Mom, look at this!” poised on her lips, she stopped cold.
Rita stood at the far side of her room—still a tumultuous chaos of overturned furniture and smashed figurines—with her back to the door, staring at the wall. More specifically, she was staring at a part of the wall between the en suite bathroom and the walk-in closet, where the massive curio cabinet usually stood. It had been the only thing in the bedroom that hadn’t ended up on the ground.
Only now it was pushed aside, blocking the bathroom door. And Rita was staring at the blank wall behind it.
After a few seconds, Becca realized what her mom was doing. She swung her arm outward, and Becca saw that she’d opened some kind of a door.
There was a safe in the wall.
As soon as the safe was open, Rita thrust her hands inside and then carefully, reverently, removed something. She turned to the side as she stroked the top of the object still cradled in her hands, and Becca could see that it was a wooden container, about the size of a shoebox but standing on its end. The rest of the safe appeared to be empty.
Becca’s mom brought the box to her lips and kissed the lid. After a few moments, she let out a heavy sigh and replaced it in the safe.
The moment had been so personal, so intimate, that Becca was suddenly ashamed to have been spying in secret. She tiptoed back to her room, the photo from Rafa’s birthday party all but forgotten, and sat down on the edge of her bed.
What the hell was going on? Not that it was a crime for her moms to have a safe in the house, but why hadn’t Becca seen it before? And why were the only contents a wooden box?
Normally, the Mystery of the Hidden Safe wouldn’t have bothered Becca. Whatever, her moms had a safe. Pretty normal, right? But the way her mom had checked it in secret, the way she held that box, practically with veneration…Had that been what the intruder was looking for?
Becca shook her head as she finished straightening up her room. She was being paranoid. Probably. Maybe.
Though she knew one thing for sure. She needed to see what was inside that box.
BECCA WAITED UNTIL RITA left for work the next morning before she made an attempt to open the safe.
She wasn’t really thinking how she’d do it—a master safecracker she was not—but she had to at least try. After watching from her bedroom window while Rita’s Subaru turned the corner at the end of their block, Becca rushed to her moms’ room.
The curio cabinet was heavy, a solid antique that had belonged to someone’s great-aunt, but not immovable, and with some careful wiggling and a slow, steady pull, Becca was able to edge it away from the wall.
The safe was hidden perfectly by the large piece of furniture, and though Becca had pictured an old dial lock like on her locker at school, this safe had a modern keypad on its face. She’d just sort of assumed that the safe had come with the house when her moms bought it fifteen years ago, but the device Becca was staring at was shiny, new, and relatively high-tech. Like her moms had it installed in the last few years. But why? What could they possibly need to keep inside?
If she could only crack the code, maybe she could find out.
Easier said than done. Becca had no idea how many digits were involved, and even if she did, the permutations would be seemingly infinite. The odds of her randomly picking the correct code out of thin air were about as good as her getting elected prom queen.
Okay, but would her moms have wanted a random number? Probably not. If they were going to open the safe only rarely, it was better to have a code they’d know offhand. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Addresses. Social security numbers.
Becca spent the next half hour cycling through every permutation of every number even remotely important to the Martinello family. The month and day of Rafa’s birthday. The month, day, and year. The month and day reversed like the Europeans do it. Then Becca’s birthday. Rita’s. Ruth’s. Their wedding date. The day they first met. Becca even dug through the file cabinet in the garage to get all four of their social security numbers from last year’s tax return. None of them worked.
She was about to give up when Becca had another thought. Ruth was a list maker. The kind of person who wrote everything down. There was even a file in the cabinet marked “Passwords” with everything from online bank logins to the Wi-Fi info. Could the code possibly be in there?
Becca raced back to the garage and pulled out the Passwords file. She had about ten minutes before she needed to leave for school, and the file was daunting. Passwords for old phones that no one used anymore, for out-of-date software programs and shopping rewards programs. Damn, her mom kept everything.
Everything except a note that said “Safe Password” of course.
“This is hopeless,” Becca said out loud. She made it to the last item in the file, prepared to shove it back into the drawer and head to school unsatisfied, when she froze.
Behind the last piece of paper was a bright pink Post-it, stuck to the file folder itself. It had no label, no indication what it was for. Just a four-digit number written in black Sharpie.
2426.
Becca shrugged. It was worth a shot.
Her hand trembled as she pushed the code into the keypad. As soon as she pressed the 6, she heard the lock mechanism release.
The interior of the safe was empty except for the wooden box. It was a deep mahogany color with a simple metal latch at the front that kept the hinged lid in place, and on top, a darker wood had been inlaid to form the letter M.
Becca reached in to lift the box out. It was heavier than she’d expected, but when she shook it from side to side, there was no sound from within. The weight must have been from the wood construction, as the box itself appeared to be empty.
Why would her mom keep an empty box in a hidden safe in her bedroom? It made absolutely no sense at all. She was about to open the box, confirming its contents or lack thereof, when something else inside the safe caught her eye. Just a glint of light as she moved, reflecting the bright overhead fixture, and as Becca leaned in closer to the safe, she realized that the bottom was coated with a fine dusting of glitter.
Glitter? Seriously? Did her parents keep a pixie locked in the safe? Their house wasn’t exactly a glitter, sequin, shiny bauble kind of a place. More like old wood and practical fabrics. Not even Becca’s makeup was particularly shimmery. In fact, the only place in the whole house Becca had even seen glitter was…
Mom’s scrapbooks.
Becca’s eyes swept the interior of the safe. Glitter. And was that a stray sequin? A frayed bit of ribbon?
For Ruth, scrapbooking was as necessary as oxygen, water, and Lifetime original movies. At every momentous occasion in her family’s lives, Ruth’s eyes would dilate, her brows would lift, and a look of angelic euphoria would wash over her face. Whether it was one of Rafa’s spectacular goalie saves or Becca’s awkward first day of middle school, Ruth had been there with digital camera in hand to document the event from beginning to end. The scrapbooks were her pride and joy, proudly displayed in the living room, where Ruth would frequently take them out and subject the entire family—and whatever guests were unlucky enough to be visiting—to a walk down memory lane. They were meant to be shared and “enjoyed.”
So why had at least one of them been shoved in this safe? And more importantly, where was it now?
It made even less sense than the empty box.
Becca stared at Mateo across the lunch table. He was waiting for her to respond, but her mind had wandered while he was talking, and now she had absolutely no idea what he’d said.
“Well?” he asked, sliding his phone across the table toward her. There was a photo of a girl on the screen: blond, blue-eyed, smiling coyly at the camera for three seconds of selfie video while posing like a vain duckling. “What do you think?”
Oh, right. Her friends were trying to find her a date to Winter Formal. “Not my type.”
Jackie’s turn. “How about her?” She flashed her screen toward Becca. “She’s my cousin’s best friend’s sister.”
Becca watched the Instagram story of some girl in the tiniest bikini known to human history, framed by palm trees, sipping Perrier through a straw while laid out on a beach towel in the sand with the text “#BestLife #SouthBeachGurl.” She looked vapid and self-absorbed, and while Becca appreciated her friends’ interest in her nonexistent love life, she was slightly concerned that they knew so little about her type. Funky. Edgy. An asymmetrical bob.
Stop it.
“Very cute,” Becca said. “But she clearly lives in Florida.”
“Right.” Jackie sighed. “I’ll keep looking.”
Becca had absolutely no intention of going to Winter Formal—not only were school dances lame, but it was literally the last thing on her mind right now. She appreciated that her friends were trying to keep her distracted, but between Stef and the break-in and the safe in her moms’ bedroom, Becca’s brain was, like, 95 percent occupied. Should she tell her friends about the break-in? Should she ask her mom about the box? Or if a scrapbook had been in the safe? Should she even bother to go see Stef after school? And did any of these things tie together, or was it just shitty luck that it was all happening right now?
While Becca fumbled through the Winter Formal conversation, she found herself focusing on a tall, lithe figure walking across the cafeteria. Darlene Ahlberg wasn’t one of Becca’s favorite people in the world—her “I’m going to be very important someday” ego rubbed Becca the wrong way—but Darlene was going to Los Angeles to audition for Who Wants to Be a Painiac? in a couple of weeks. Hell, maybe her aunt, who had some kind of job in the entertainment industry, had a connection to the show. What if Darlene’s aunt knew something about the original Alcatraz 2.0 killers? It was worth a shot.
“Hey, Darlene!” Becca called out, waving.
“What are you doing?” Jackie whispered, her eyes wide with horror. “I don’t want to talk to her.”
Darlene turned, head askew, clearly confused that Becca was talking to her. “Yeah?”
Not that Becca blamed her. She hadn’t exactly spent the last three-plus years of high school hiding the fact that she thought Darlene Ahlberg was a pompous bullshitter.
“I heard you’re going to LA over break,” Becca started, trying to sound like she was sincerely interested in Darlene’s travel plans.
Darlene raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Yeah.”
“Is it true you’re going to audition for Who Wants to Be a Painiac?”
“I still can’t believe they’re going to make a show about Alcatraz two-point-oh,” Jackie said, before Darlene could answer. “They can’t kill people on national television, can they?”
Darlene rolled her eyes. “It’s not actual murder, Jacqueline. They’re just casting actors to play pretend Painiacs who will commit fake murders for spikes. Just like on The Postman but without actual death.”
