DEIRDRE

That evening, I had energy to burn, so I went to my dojo to punch and kick the heavy bag until it gave in. It was too late for a class, but Sensei Higashi kept the dojo open until eleven for students who wanted to train on their own. He was in a corner, jumping rope so fast you couldn’t see the cord, though it cracked against the splintery wooden floor now and again. I was working on the bag when my best friend walked in. I caught sight of Reagan in the mirror.

“How’d you know I would be here?” I asked her.

“Where else would you be on the day of your sister’s funeral?” she answered. “You’re nothing if not predictable.”

We were in the same rectangular room where we’d started studying karate together when we were seven. A mirrored wall ran along one side, with a framed photograph of Dr. Chitose, the founder of the Chito-ryu style of karate, hanging above it. The other walls were mangy gray, equal parts old paint and smoke from the pool hall that shared the hallway with the Higashi School of Karate. Around the dojo were black-lettered banners saying things like Only those who have patience to do simple things perfectly can do difficult things easily. At seven, I’d been a pocket-sized cynic who read that as a hackneyed cliché. That hadn’t changed.

“You suiting up to spar?” I asked.

“Facing off against you in a mood? No, thanks.” She set down the duffel bag she was holding. “Tiger Mom is worried you’ll get rickets from living on protein bars. She cooked for you.”

“She’s the best,” I said.

“You say that because you don’t live with her anymore,” Reagan said. “Last Saturday, I slept in until eight, and she lectured me about wasting my life. I told her I worked seventy hours last week and got a spiel on how hard she and my dad had to work when they were our age.”

“I like that she’s tough.” Reagan’s mom was named Vera, but I could only think of her as Mrs. Chen. She was incredibly kind, but also bracingly direct and opinionated. Now that Caro was gone, Reagan and her mom were the closest thing I had to family. When Reagan’s dad had gotten sick with a brain tumor when we were ten, my best friend had practically moved in with my family. She stayed with us for the two years Mr. Chen suffered through before he died. Then Reagan and her mom had taken me in when I was a teenager who couldn’t live in her parents’ house anymore.

“She’s kind of worried about you.” Reagan crossed her arms. “She figured we’d hear from you after the funeral. I told her you’d be hiding out like a wounded wolf.”

“It wasn’t just the funeral. It was . . .” The words died on my lips. Reagan knew me well enough not to say anything. I took a few breaths from my diaphragm. That was one thing karate had taught me that I carried everywhere. “What would you say if I told you there’s something suspicious about my sister’s death?”

Reagan didn’t flinch. “She died suddenly, and no one knew she had a heart condition. You could call that suspicious.”

“More than that. Something else.”

“Is this about a feeling you have, or evidence?” Reagan was a data analyst, and I had yet to meet anyone whose work matched their personality better than hers. She had a photographic memory and the ability to recall conversations perfectly. It could be annoying sometimes, because she questioned everything.

My phone was against the wall, charging. “I got a message from my sister today,” I said, picking it up and scrolling through my email. When I found what I was looking for, I passed the phone to Reagan.

She stared at it for what felt like an hour. When she finally looked at me, she was frowning.

“It sounds like your sister,” she said. “But are you a hundred percent sure it’s real?”

I ticked the reasons off on my fingers. “She mentioned what our mom went through, and who else knows that? She called me Dodo, which was her nickname for me when I was a kid. I found out it’s true that her husband was married before. What part doesn’t ring true?”

“That first line—I keep thinking of Mom, and how you never believe you’re going to end up like one of your parents, until you do—I can literally hear Caroline’s voice in my head saying that,” Reagan said. “But the part where she says to bring her husband to justice? What does she expect you to do?”

I had been wondering about that myself. “Maybe she meant I should go to the police. Or maybe she wanted me to do to Theo what I did to my father.”

“Absolutely not.” Reagan’s voice was sharp. “Your sister cared about you. She wouldn’t ask you to do something that would land you in jail, Dee. Stop thinking like that.”

I sighed. She was right.

“Caro wrote it because she knew she was in danger,” I said. “She was expecting something awful to happen.”

“That makes sense,” Reagan said. “But here’s another thing that doesn’t sound like Caroline: she knew Theo killed his first wife, and she stayed with him? No. She wouldn’t do that.”

Reagan was right about that too. She was good with puzzles, and she was sliding bits of information into place, creating a picture I could barely grasp the edges of. Maybe I wasn’t ready to look at it.

“When I confronted Theo, he was shocked I knew about the first wife. Maybe Caro just found out about her? That could be what put her in danger.”

“Back up,” Reagan said. “What’s this about you confronting Theo?”

“I was in the car with him on the way to Green-Wood. I felt like . . . like it was now or never. I had to find out if what Caro wrote was true.”

“One day, you’ll pass the marshmallow test, Dee. But today is not that day. You just lost the element of surprise.”

“I don’t care.”

“Dee, if this guy killed his wife, what do you think he’ll do to you?”

“I don’t care,” I repeated.

Reagan set the duffel bag on the floor and retrieved the medicine ball. It was a misshapen leather sphere weighed down, we suspected, with lead. Gyms had them, too, but the dojo’s was unique. It looked like Dr. Chitose himself might’ve sent it over from Kumamoto, back in the day. It was no longer spherical, if you wanted to be picky about it, and it was crisscrossed with dozens of Frankenstein-worthy seams that were probably sewn with fishing wire. It had been in the dojo as long as I could remember.

She threw it at me. There was no way to catch it without absorbing some of the blow with my body.

“Okay, you’ve got some sense of self-preservation,” Reagan observed.

I tossed it back. Reagan was five four, but she had a lot of muscle, and she caught the ball easily. “My sister trusted me,” I said. “She sent me this message asking for help.”

“Caroline could’ve sent your father a message too. Have you talked with him?”

I almost dropped the ball. Sometimes Reagan seemed to have ESP. There was no point hiding any detail from her, because she’d drag it out of me. “I went to the company that forwarded the message. They were assholes, but one guy tried to help me. Caro sent a message to our father, but I don’t know what it said.”

“You could ask him, you know.”

“Ha ha. And there was a third message.”

“To her friend Jude?” Reagan guessed.

I set the ball on the floor. I’d guessed Theo, but I’d been wrong. Jude was a much better guess.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, retrieving the page from my bag. “There’s no name, just an X. This was the message.”

Reagan took it in quickly, and her eyebrows shot up. “This is nuts. Is that Jude’s email? It looks like a random string of numbers and letters.”

“It’s not the one I have for her.”

“This is getting crazier by the minute. Who else was your sister tight with?”

I shrugged. “I can’t think of anyone.”

“Maybe the police can figure that part out.”

“I don’t have a lot of faith in cops.”

“Fair enough, based on your experience,” Reagan said. “Promise me one thing. You will go to the police. You will not try to get revenge on Theo by yourself.”

“You think I can’t take him?”

“Dee, listen to me. You can’t do this alone,” Reagan said. “If we’re going to get justice for your sister, we need the police to be involved.”

“We?”

“Yes. We,” Reagan said. “Dummy.”

There was a hard lump in my throat. “Okay. I’ll talk to the cops before work tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 9

DEIRDRE