Free The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice Page B

always she thought she could save him from his feelings by barking a bunch of sensible orders at him. And Anthem? Had Anthem once turned to him and asked him how he was handling everything? And for Christ’s sake, he’d only been with Nikki for three years; Nikki had been Ben’s closest friend in the world for fifteen.
    He didn’t want to go down that road. He really didn’t. But he was so damn tired, and when he wasn’t absorbed in some obsessive quest to find another person who had been sitting at Marshall’s table that night, the inside of his head felt like a jar full of wasps.
    “I think he caused the accident,” Ben said.
    It was the first time he’d said the words aloud, and their effect on Marissa was instantaneous. Her eyes widened and she leaned forward so far she had to place her fleshy elbows on the edge of the table. “Marshall Ferriot?”
    “Yes.”
    “Start at the beginning.”
    “Nikki and Anthem broke up about a month ago because they had a big fight and this girl at our school claimed Anthem hooked up with her afterwards. The girl was lying. I got to her admit it. Then, when Marshall did his thing, the girl called and told me Marshall was the one who asked her to lie about it.”
    “Why’d she agree to lie?”
    “The bottle of Vicodin Marshall lifted from his mother’s medicine cabinet helped.”
    “Okay . . . Keep going.”
    “The night the Delongpres went missing, I went to the house before the cops got there. I knew where the key was. I didn’t tear apart her room or anything. Mostly, I just wanted to see if any of her belongings were there. Like her cell phone or anything. There was a phone there, all right, but it was in her desk drawer and it wouldn’t turn on, which was weird because it looked okay. But after a few minutes, I realized it had been soaked in water.”
    “Wait a minute. You think she came home after the accident and—”
    Ben shook his head. “That’s what I thought at the first. But the cops checked the records and saw the last call she’d made on it had been the week before. And I know she had another phone on her the night she went missing because I talked to her on it before Anthem and I left to go meet up with them at Elysium.”
    “So she replaced her phone, the week before she went missing?”
    “Yep. Because it got soaked. Not wet. Soaked . And she didn’t tell me where or how. And we told each other everything. But that wasn’t all . . .”
    “I’m listening.”
    “There was a card. It was on her desk. Can’t wait to see Elysium. XO, M. I didn’t make much of it at that time. There was going to be a party at Elysium that weekend, the weekend they . . . I mean, that’s why we were all driving out there that night. But the more I thought about it, it just didn’t seem right. And she only had one relative I know of whose names start with M, an uncle. And he died two years ago. Besides, the card had hearts all over it.”
    “But you’ve got no real proof the two of them went out there together.”
    “I’ve got the card.”
    “A card that says M on it.”
    “Marshall uses drug dealing and lies to try to break them up. Daysafter they get back together, her entire family disappears. A week later he throws himself out a thirty-one-story window and no one knows why. Remember his last words? The ones you couldn’t remember until today? I . . . put . . . a . . .”
    “I remember,” Marissa said.
    “I think he was trying to confess. I think he put something in their car. Maybe it was in the gas tank or the brakes, I don’t know.”
    He could tell from the way she was staring openly at him, without any apparent regard for how her mouth was hanging open and her nostrils were flaring, that he almost had her. That she was more convinced by his theory than she would like to be. But all she said was: “Well, Mister Broyard, you are imaginative and articulate.”
    “Only when I have to be.”
    “Do you have to be?”
    “You