Dwellers (7 page)

I’m still operating on the assumption that a student is involved.

“They said the gift is from your students in Fundamental Accounting,” Louis said. “Ivy said Arman, Leslie, and Meryl were in one class. We knew Kayla because she was a student
assistant at the college. I don’t know if she ever became our student.”

“Did they say whose idea it was to bring me a plant?”

Louis shakes his head.

“It could be someone other than the three who dropped by,” I say. “Or a faculty member.” Or the proprietor of the shop where they bought the ivy. Or anyone else in the
world, for that matter. I feel my fingertips go cold, the panic settling in. “Someone
knows
, Louis.”

He exchanged numbers with Ivy the day she fell off her bike; he sends her a text, asking for the students’ numbers. There are several numbers in Louis’s phone, several names we
don’t recognize. Some of the numbers might belong to other students. I itch to send them all a message.
Who did we hire? Who else stayed in this house and knew about the chest
freezer?

We hear a tone. The numbers have arrived.

“What will you say?” I ask. Louis shows me what he has typed:
I haven’t.
A cryptic-enough message that will not get us in trouble if read out of context. Louis presses
Send, and we wait, sitting in my room, staring at the ivy on the study table.

The replies come, almost immediately, almost at the same time.

Kayla:
Huh? Who’s this?

Arman:
Wrong send? Who’s this?

Leslie:
Who’s this pls?

Louis drops his phone on the table in frustration.

The phone beeps again about a minute later. Louis sits back up and checks his phone.

“What?” I say, my heart banging in my chest. “Is it a text?”

It is from a number not listed in Louis’s phone directory. He tries to call it. When he lowers the phone again the voice coming from the receiver is loud enough for me to hear.
The
number you have dialed is either unattended or—

The message is short, angry:
you goddamn idiot

“IT’S ONE OF the three kids,” I say.

Louis brings toast, water, coffee, and his laptop into the room. I take a few bites of the toast he shoves at me and take my pain medication with a glass of water. Everything tastes like
cardboard.

Louis looks at me without saying anything while the laptop boots up. I think he’s waiting for an explanation. “One of them used another SIM card to reply,” I continue.

“Or,” he says, “it’s not even a reply and it was sent by someone else.”

“So the culprit just got up and decided randomly to text us that we’re goddamn idiots,” I say. “That sounds complicated. Occam’s razor?”

“Occam’s razor says
we
did it,” Louis says. “We’re in the damn house.”

“I dreamt that I buried her,” I say. Louis, absorbed in whatever he is reading onscreen, says, “Huh?” without looking up. I don’t repeat myself.

I glance at the screen. He is loading several tabs. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“All of these kids are online now,” he says. “Some of them don’t even bother locking their accounts. They think that one little corner of the Internet is private
enough.”

Leslie and Arman’s Facebook pages are largely empty, save for a few news links and human interest pieces for Leslie, fiction and movie review links for Arman, and school-related kvetches
for both. Kayla’s account is more active, with posts about college activities and university announcements, travel photos (“Singapore 2012!!!”), family birthdays, and dinners with
classmates.

Leslie, Arman, Meryl, and Mona are among the commenters on one of Kayla’s posts about enlistment. Louis clicks on Meryl’s name. Her page is filled with messages that have pushed down
her own content. “I hope to god it’s not you.” “I hope you’re okay, M.” “Praying, praying, praying.”

Louis scrolls down. Meryl’s posts were mostly images of paintings and sketches with their source links. No mention of the hell she was living through inside her body. It appears that she
poured her heart out into her planner instead of on the Internet.

Louis goes back to Kayla’s page and clicks Mona’s name. Mona has no profile picture. The link leads to the Facebook home page.

“She deactivated her account,” Louis says.

Louis spends another hour or so scrolling down pages. I am close to nodding off on my seat when he nudges my shoulder.

“Look at this,” he says. Onscreen is Meryl’s page. He points at a message Kayla has posted on Meryl’s Wall back in late November: STOP TALKING TO HER.

No one has commented on the message status. Either no one saw it, or no one wanted to join in the fray.

“What was that about?” I say.

“Probably nothing,” says Louis, taking out his phone. “Probably everything.”

“What are you doing?”

“What
you’re
doing, you mean,” he says. “You’re calling Kayla.”

LOUIS PUTS THE call on speaker. While the phone rings, I say, “Why me?”

“You’re the star professor,” he says. “And you’re the one they wanted to see this morning.”

“But what will I say?”

“Just stay calm. Ask her about—”

But I will never be able to hear Louis’s sage advice. Kayla picks up.

“Hello?” She sounds cautious, a bit annoyed. Kayla’s environment is noisy.

“Kayla,” I say. “It’s Jonah?”

Like I’m unsure of myself. I clear my throat.

“Jonah!” she says, overjoyed. She moves away from the noisy crowd. “Hello, sir! Sorry about that, I’m in a seminar. But how are you! We dropped by this morning, but your
brother said you were asleep.”

I try to put some cheer in my voice. “Yes, he mentioned. Thank you very much for the ivy. It’s in my room right now.”

“Oh, was it ivy? I know next to nothing about plants.” She laughs.

“Whose idea was it?” I ask. “To give me the plant?”

“Oh, wow, I don’t even remember. I just pitched in.”

I don’t know what to say next. Kayla fills the silence with, “I’m so sorry to hear about the accident. I hope you’ll have a full recovery.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Um.” Louis is jabbing a finger at the computer screen. “Listen, Kayla.”

“Yes?”

“I heard about Meryl,” I say.

“Oh, yes. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“And I have been looking at her Facebook page.”

Silence on the other line.

“I just kept moving down the page, and I saw this message of yours.”

“Okay.”

“‘stop talking to her’,” I say, quoting her, and we hear a sharp intake of breath.

“Listen—” Kayla begins.

“What does it mean? Have you two been fighting?”

“It’s about Mona.”

In my mind flashes an image of a girl swan-diving from the top of a building.

“Back in November,” Kayla says, “I saw Meryl talking to Mona. It was pouring and I was just leaving the Main Library when I saw them having a rather intense discussion
outside.”

“They were having a fight?”

“Not a fight.” We hear her huff in frustration. “Meryl was asking Mona about Burnexa.”

“What’s that?”

“Diet pills.”

Louis and I stare at each other.

“Everyone knows Mona takes them,” she says, “because she tells everyone. Burnexa is from Brazil and, sure, it causes weight loss, but it contains a lot of ingredients,
including both uppers and downers. It causes mood swings, personality changes. It’s also carcinogenic and can damage the muscles of your heart. It’s banned by the FDA. It’s
bad,
sir.”

“How come you know all this?” I’ve never even heard of Burnexa.

“I took it.” There is defiance in Kayla’s voice.
Yeah, so, what will you do about it?
“For a month or so. Back when I was a sophomore. I got it from a cousin who
lives in South America. I lost more than twenty pounds and it made me paranoid. I couldn’t even leave my bed without checking for listening devices inside my pillows.”

“My God, Kayla.”

“I know. So I tried to warn Meryl. I sent her an email but she told me to mind my own business. I posted on Facebook even though it’s incredibly tacky because I was so desperate to
get her attention. Even then, no reply. A friend saw it and thought it was a bug and asked me if my account had been hacked.” She laughs without humor.

“Did you see them talking after the library? Does Ivy know?”

“I don’t know if Ivy knows. If Ivy knew, she’d be the first to shake some sense into Meryl, believe me. And no, I didn’t see them together again after that.”

“Could the pills be the reason Mona jumped?”

Kayla pauses for a moment, thinking. “That’s possible,” she says. “My lowest point was cutting my pillows open with a box cutter but I was
this
close to slitting
my own throat.”

“I NEED A drink,” I say.

It has started to rain. I can’t remember the last time I saw rain in this place. The midday sun disappears behind thick clouds and the street looks the way it looks at 7 pm. Louis wheels
me out on the porch and chugs down a glass of orange juice beside me.

“You don’t drink,” he says.

“It sounds like something you had to say in moments like this,” I say.

We watch the rain for a while.

“The package,” Louis says. “The package that Meryl got at the department. It was from Mona, wasn’t it?”

I have deduced as much.

“I still don’t understand how Meryl ended up here.”

“We need to get rid of the body,” I say, cringing when I realize I have just echoed the message in the rolled up piece of paper.

“Yes,” Louis says, suddenly, and I am surprised.

IT DOESN’T MATTER what illegal thing we plan to do—we can’t do much of anything anyway. The rain continues all throughout the afternoon. It is still raining
when Louis begins setting the table for dinner. He turns on the TV and we listen to news about the southwest monsoon, about flooding in the city. We are used to rains, up north where we were born,
but not to floods.

“Does it flood here?” I ask. I feel a tightening in my stomach when I imagine floodwater rushing down to the basement. To Meryl.

“I don’t think so.”

It is still raining after the dishes are put away. I almost admire the rain’s tenacity, its unrelenting anger as it hits the rooftops. It produces a noise that can mask everything, even a
speeding car, which we don’t hear until Ivy’s already parked out front and aggressively ringing the doorbell.

“What in the world?” Louis peers through the sheet of water pouring down the living room windows.

“What is she doing here?” From what I can make out, she is wearing a pink raincoat and black rain boots, and hugging a plastic-covered box to her chest. Louis meets her with an
umbrella and puts an arm around her as they run to the front door.

She begins talking as soon as the door opens. “Her parents came to get her things and I found this under the mattress. I missed this the first time I looked through her stuff because I
didn’t think of looking there; I didn’t think she’d keep anything there.” She covers her face. “Oh my God.”

“Slow down,” I say, although I am starting to get scared. Louis has torn through the plastic while she is talking. Inside the box—a box that can indeed fit a notebook—is
a disc, with a folded piece of paper. The paper is pink. Louis reads through it and hands it to me.

Meryl,

I can’t stay here any longer. I don’t know who else to trust. I’m sorry to leave you with this but you’re the only person who actually spoke to me
that one time I broke down in class. I would have shown this to the police but I’m too scared.

You asked me why I was crying. Here it is.

Tell my mother I’m sorry.

Mona

“I began watching one of the clips but I can’t finish it,” Ivy says.

I find myself just staring at her. So the package was indeed from Mona, but it didn’t contain pills.

“You better get out of that raincoat,” Louis tells Ivy, which shakes me out of my stupor.

“Let’s hook up the DVD player,” I say.

14

LOUIS PREPARES A huge mug of coffee for Ivy, but she doesn’t want it. She sits on the couch facing the TV set and shivers under her jacket.

“I don’t even know if I want to watch it,” she says.

The DVD is a data disc. The clips are in numbered folders. Louis takes the remote and chooses folder #1. We see the single clip inside. The thumbnail shows a clear enough image to give us an
idea of the video’s subject matter, but Louis presses Enter anyway.

The camera is focused on the girl’s face. We can’t see her body from the waist down. Her bright pink fingernails sink into the pillows under her head. Moans fill the living room.

Louis turns off the clip.

“That’s Mona,” Ivy says.

“This is the only clip you saw?” Louis asks. She nods. There are 37 folders in the disc.

“Do you think it’s all Mona?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Ivy says, beginning to tear up.

“It’s okay,” Louis says. “Relax.”

He chooses a folder in the middle of the pack. The shot is off-center and shows only Mona’s face, shoulder, and her bare breasts. “This is not fun anymore,” she says. We wait
to hear someone speak, but no one does. The camera keeps rolling for another minute. Mona is sobbing. “Stop pointing that fucking thing at me!”

Stop and Escape. Louis thinks for a minute. “Let’s try the last folder.”

Two girls on a bed. One wearing a man’s shirt, the other naked save for a pair of pink panties. When the clip starts running, I am hit with a force of déjà vu so strong that
I feel like vomiting.

They are kneeling on a bed facing a barred window. I know this. I have seen this before. The girl in the shirt slides her fingers under the garter of the other girl’s pink panties. The
girl in the shirt has her free arm around the naked girl’s neck. The naked girl is trying to pull the other girl’s arm down. The naked girl’s fingernails are as pink as her
underwear. Mona. Mona starts to cry. Who is the girl in the shirt?