A heavy fog settles over Proudley College the next morning, disguising all the spires of the buildings in clinging clouds of gray, casting a dim shadow upon everything it touches. Indy wakes up in the stillness of her dorm and looks out the window above her desk, where the campus looks like a faded image of itself, a painting in desperate need of restoration.
Out of some strange, dismal curiosity, she brushes her face with her hand. The skin of her cheeks is puffy and salt-roughened, and old makeup grits beneath her fingers. She groans. It's a good thing she got Aunt Jocelyn to give her the weekend off for homecoming. It leaves her an excuse to lay her head back on her pillow, to sink into the cushions and pretend to disappear.
Her roommate, it seems, has other plans.
She doesn't know the dorm isn't empty until a pillow sails across the room and hits her in the back of the head.
Indy grabs it and annexes it into her cave of pillows and blankets. "Good morning, Sylvia."
"Thought you were awake."
"I certainly am now."
She hears a soft plop as Sylvia hops from the ladder of her loft bed, the subtle susurration of her bare feet shuffling across the thin carpet. "Hey," she says, and knocks gently on Indy's bed frame. "A little birdie told me you had a rough night."
"The little birdie is Gatz, isn't it?" Indy murmurs. "You should ignore little birdies."
"Not when they tell me important things," Sylvia says with a wink. She sighs, resting her chin on the top of the ladder. This early in the morning, she's without makeup, subtle freckles across the bridge of her nose and the acne between her brows made beautiful for the scarce opportunities anyone has to see them. Her eyes, however, are no less sharp. They're dark, impenetrable, like a sea ten thousand leagues down. Who knows what all lurks there.
"I'll give you two options."
"Is one of them laying in bed all day?" Indy asks.
"No," Sylvia says. "One of them is I go bring us the greasiest, fattiest, most delicious food ever and we talk about whatever the fuck's bugging you. Two is, well. I still get us the food but I distract you instead."
Indy smashes another pillow on top of her head as she considers it. She tries to think of talking, to conjure the words that might explain the knotted, twisted up feeling inside of her besides wrong, wrong, wrong. But she can't. Her tongue is sand in her mouth, dry and formless and impossible to wield.
Indy just shakes her head, and thankfully, it's a message Sylvia understands.
"To be honest, I was hoping you'd say that," Sylvia says, turning around. She tears her bonnet from her head and tosses it in no particular direction, sitting down at her desk and fussing around in her wig drawer before she selects her choice for the day: lavender purple, long and layered, with retro fringe. "A little birdie also told me your visit with Lamar Pine may have given you a place to start."
"If you mean looking for witnesses, I asked that the first time I met with that cop. He refused to tell me anything."
Sylvia shimmies the wig onto her head, then turns, lifting an eyebrow. "And that surprises you?"
"No," Indy pouts. "And don't look at me like that. Obviously I tried googling some things, but it didn't get me very far. They quoted some neighbor in an old, old newspaper article about the caseâI think her name was Mary Chernenko or something?âbut that was all I could find about her."
Abruptly, Sylvia stops moving.
"What?" Indy forces herself up onto her elbows, not sure if the rise in her heartbeat is from excitement or panic. "What is it?"
"Chernenko," Sylvia says. The way she says it, the name holds weight, and Indy doubts it's in a good way. "I've heard that name before."
Indy just stares at her, waiting for an explanation. "Where?"
"You'll see." Sylvia gets up from her chair, going for her wardrobe with new urgency. "Change of plans. Get dressed. I think we should go on a little field trip, me and you."
Slightly more than forty minutes later, Indy and Sylvia stand before what looks like an old garage door, the metal decorated with mildly offensive graffiti and dented in random places. The brick walls around it are littered with unidentifiable stains.
"Sylvia."
"Mhm."
"Why did you bring me to a crack den?"
Sylvia lets out a loud, harsh laugh. "You're funny, Indy."
She marches right up to the garage door, knocking on it six sharp times, the metal rattling loud enough to make Indy flinch. She watches Sylvia's back, the long curtain of lavender beneath her white beanie, and she watches the crack den door, and she waits for something to happen.
An incomprehensible series of thunking and clacking sounds from behind the door, before it rolls up, revealing a complete stranger and the room behind him, which is not, in fact, a crack den.
At least, if it is, it's quite the luxurious one. It's complete with a bar against the exposed brick in the corner, an arrangement of bean bags and futons and slouchy couches, and a fully-equipped stage for live entertainment.
Indy senses they've interrupted something. A guitarist and a drummer sit on the stage, illuminated by the harsh white shower of the stage lights, both staring at Indy and Sylvia. After a few seconds, they lose interest, and go back to plucking and tapping quietly at their instruments.
"Sylvia?" asks the man in front of them, still holding up the garage door with one hand. He's frighteningly pale, and the dark, dark, midnight shade of black of his hair doesn't help his case much. His voice is strangely calm, pleasant, even, as he says, "What the fuck. I didn't ask for a keyboardist this week."
"Oh, poor Dewey. For once, I'm not here for you." Sylvia grins, patting the guy's shoulder, right on the spikes of his leather jacket. "Hey, Jude!"
The guitarist's previously unknown riff shifts into a tune resembling the one from the Beatles song. Indy turns, as confused as Dewey, as the drummer stands and tears his headphones from his ears and cuffs the guitarist playfully on the back of the head with a buoyant chuckle.
She couldn't tell when he was sitting, but the drummer's tall, enough so that he has to duck his head to avoid knocking it on the stage lamps as he hops from the platform. Vibrant red hair falls long and unkempt around his face, but artfully so, as if every strand is exactly where he wants it. Silver piercings in his nose and his lip glint beneath the lights, and the large sweatshirt swamping his figure is almost the same milky shade of purple as Sylvia's hair.
Indy can't grasp how he is at once so conspicuous and so enigmatic. She also can't grasp how he has anything to do with Lamar Pine.
"Sylvie Valdez," Jude says, slipping his drumsticks into the back pocket of his jeans. His eyes find Indy's. "And..."
"Indy," she answers. "Helaire."
"Ooh. Sounds French. Nice to meet you, Indy Helaire." He lifts an arm, leaning his weight onto the speaker next to him and exaggerating a frown. "Dewey's right, though. We were sorta in the middle of a rehearsal."
"Gig tonight?" Sylvia asks.
"Yeah. The retirement home down the street from here, actually, for a very generous pay of zero dollars and some delicious boxed mashed potatoes. Very eclectic venue, and I've heard the crowd is always wild. What can I do for you?"
"We need to talk," Sylvia says, and nods her head at the bar in the corner. "But first. Anything over there worth drinking, Chernenko?"
There are things worth drinking, but it turns out the vampire-looking guy named Dewey owns the place and has a strict policy not to serve alcohol before three PM. This makes no difference to Indy, who can barely handle champagne, but Sylvia pouts until Jude pours her a glass of orange juice instead.
"How about you, Indy? Will you also partake in the liquid citrus?" He pauses, brown eyes half-dazed for a moment. "Liquid Citrus. Sylvie, tell me that's not the sickest name for a band ever."
Sylvia wrinkles her nose. "Sounds pretentious. Not as fucking pretentious as Neurogoblin, though."
"I will kick you out," Dewey calls from the stage.
Sylvia rolls her eyes.
"Seriously," says Jude, sliding Sylvia's cup over to her. He moves to pour a glass of water for Indy, and she thinks about turning it down, but decides not to waste the time. "This is weird. I mean, you are weird. But you showing up here is weird, Sylvie. Is everything okay?"
"Everything's fine, asshole," Sylvia says, sipping from her orange juice. "Indy, ask him the thing."
"The thing?" Indy and Jude say at once.
"The thing we came here to ask him."
Indy sighs. Ice settles in her glass, and the guitarist plucks softly at a string, almost as if to mimic the clement clink of it. "Are you related to a Mary Chernenko, by chance?"
To her relief, the recognition on his face is automatic. "If you mean Maryna, then yeah. That's my grandma."
"Called it," Sylvia says. "Question two. Did your grandma ever live in Erskine?"
Now Jude just looks bemused. "Uh, yeah. She's there now. Has been for years."
Indy and Sylvia share an eager look, Indy's heart pounding so loud in her chest that she worries Jude must be able to hear it. The vague note in Dobbs's journal and Pine's own testimony had been little to go off of. But now, if they can play this right, they might have their first concrete lead.
"Jude," Indy starts. His eyes flick to hers, watchful, curious but not imposing. "This might sound crazy, but if your grandma was in Erskine fifty years ago, I think she may be a key witness to a murder case that happened back then."
Jude walks his fingers along the counter, tapping the wood with his nails, short and clean, but bitten in some places. "You mean that handyman guy, right?"
Indy jolts. "You've heard of Lamar Pine?"
"Just what my grandma's mentioned to me," Jude answers with a shrug. "He did most of the heating and AC service for the whole neighborhood, including her place. When he got convicted, all of the neighbors gave in to the frenzy. Oh, I can't believe I let him in my house! Think what he could have done! That sort of shit."
"And your grandma?" Indy asks.
She senses Jude hesitate, as he turns, resting his elbows back against the bar and facing the stage. "She doesn't like to talk much about her past, but I remember her telling me onceâyeah. She said she'd seen the eyes of many violent men. She said she knew what those eyes looked like, and Lamar Pine didn't have them."
They have the wrong guy.
But we can fix it.
"Listen," Jude says, dropping his voice to a whisper. "You're not...trying to free him, are you? Don't you think that's a littleâI don't know. Ambitious?"
"That might be true. But isn't saving someone's life a good ambition to spend your time on?"
"Time to stop flirting with the ladies and get over here, Chernenko," Dewey says into the mic all of a sudden, making all of them jump. "You still keep fucking up that one solo part. Don't think I forgot."
"Don't you think it still sounds cool when I fuck it up, though?"
Dewey gives Jude a glare that clearly communicates that he finds it anything but cool when Jude fucks it up.
"Alright, alright," Jude groans. He reaches over the counter, recovering a small square napkin and flattening it out beneath his palm. "Give me a second."
He rummages in his pocket before he recovers a silver sharpie, pulling its cap loose with his teeth and scribbling something down.
"Call me when you get the chance," Jude says, leaning in to hand the napkin off to Indy, rings clinking together on his fingers. "To be honest, my grandma's not a people person, but I'll see what I can do."
He pulls his drumsticks from his pocket and taps them rapidly upon the bar in no particular rhythm, before he whirls to join his waiting band members.
Indy glances down at the napkin in her hands.
Sure enough, a phone number is written there in silver sharpie, the numbers clean and sharp.