Darynda Jones - Second Grave on the Left

“You got a set of lungs, girl,” I said as I raided a small fridge for a water. I handed it to her when her nose stopped bleeding.

“I am so sorry about that,” she said, waving a hand in front of her face. “I was disoriented. I just didn’t know who you were.”

“Well, it didn’t help that Casper the Flashlight Ghost was all up in your face.”

Cookie scowled. “Mimi, this is Charley,” she said.

“Oh, my gosh.” She tried to stand, but her legs didn’t hold and she toppled back into the chair.

I reached a hand over and took hers. “Please don’t get up. I’m not that special.”

“From what I hear,” she said, holding my hand in hers, “you’re every bit that special. How did you find me?”

Cookie grinned. “That’s what Charley does. Are you okay?”

After a few minutes of introductions and the lively tale of how Mimi ended up in a homeless shelter that involved a drunken taxi driver and a small but containable fire, we moved onto the more important part of the story, why she was in a homeless shelter.

“I just thought no one would look for me here. I thought they wouldn’t find me.”

“Mimi,” Cookie admonished, “Warren and your parents are worried sick.”

She nodded. “I can live with that. Better worried sick than dead.”

She had a point. It was late and my head was on the verge of exploding. I decided to fill her in on our suspicions and go from there. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

She frowned up at me.

“One night in high school, there was a party. A girl named Hana Insinga snuck out of her house and went to this party, and the next day she was reported missing by her parents.”

Mimi looked down when I said Hana’s name.

I continued. “Some people remembered seeing her there, some didn’t. Some said she might have left the party with a guy, some said no way, she didn’t leave with anyone.”

A soft hitch in Mimi’s breath had me thinking I might be on to something.

“And now, twenty years later, everyone who saw Hana leave the party with a boy is dying one by one. Does any of that ring a bell?”

Mimi lowered her head as if unable to face us. Cookie put a supportive hand on her shoulder.

“You’re almost there, but Hana didn’t leave the party with just a boy. She left with several of us.”

Cookie stilled. “What do you mean?”

“She means,” I said, fighting through the sorrow that suddenly consumed her, that pushed against my chest, “that several kids took her body out of the house that night. She was already dead, and they went together to bury her. Am I right?” It was the only explanation that made sense.

She wiped at a tear with the blood-soaked napkin. “Yes. Seven of us. There were seven.”

Cookie tried to stifle a gasp behind her hand.

I kneeled down to Mimi’s eye level. “Someone at that party killed her. And you saw it, perhaps? Did they threaten to do the same to you?”

“Please stop,” she said, sobbing openly now.

“Did they bully you at school? Push you in the halls? Knock books out of your hands? Just to remind you. Just to keep you on their leash.”

“I can’t … I—”

I decided to begin with Tommy Zapata, to leave Kyle Kirsch for my grand finale. “Did it have anything to do with the car dealer you had lunch with, Tommy Zapata?”

She gasped and looked up at me. “How did you know that?”

“Tommy was found dead three days ago.”

Her hands flew over her mouth.

“They’re bringing murder charges against your husband if we don’t prove he didn’t do it soon.”

“No!” She jumped up and headed for the door. “No, he didn’t do anything. They don’t understand.”

I followed suit and clutched on to her arm. “Mimi, stop. We can help, but I have to know what happened.”

“But—”

“You have to sit down and explain this to me so I can get both you and your husband out of trouble. What happened that night?”

She hesitated, wavered, then with a shaky sigh folded herself into the office chair once more. “We were at the party, and I’d went to an upstairs bathroom with a friend. I wasn’t feeling well.”

The friend was most likely Janelle York.

“We were at Tommy Zapata’s house. His parents were out of town.” She turned a desperate gaze on me. “We were having fun. You know, just messing around and listening to music. But my friend and I went into the bathroom off Tommy’s parents’ bedroom. I guess we were in there awhile, just talking. Then we heard voices, so we turned out the light and cracked open the door to look. We figured someone was making out on his parents’ bed, and we were going to scare them. As a joke.”

Cookie found a clean tissue and offered it to Mimi. She took a moment to blow her nose.

“But it was three of the boys. Three of the football players. They had Hana on the bed. They were having sex with her.” She sobbed into the tissue.

“Was one of them Tommy?” I asked.

“No, he was making out in the corner.”

So he had definitely been there, and now he was dead.

After taking a moment to recover, she continued. “I don’t think it was actually consensual. Hana was so drunk. Then she threw up on one of the boys. He got off her and started yelling. He scared her. She stumbled to her feet and tried to walk to the door. That’s when it happened. I’m not sure if the boy pushed her or what. It was hard to see. But she fell into the corner of the Zapatas’ dresser and busted her head open. Tommy tried to stop the bleeding, but she was dead in moments.”

I found the fact that she wasn’t telling us Kyle’s name interesting. Was she that afraid of him?

She looked up at us beseechingly. “It was an accident. It could have been explained, but the boys freaked out. For, like, half an hour they paced and cursed and tried to figure out what to do. Tommy’s dad worked at the cemetery, and one of them came up with a plan. So, the guys were going to wrap her in some towels, and that’s when they found us. I was crying really hard. The guys freaked out even more.”

“Did they hurt you?” Cookie asked, her expression almost as desperate as Mimi’s.

“No,” she said, “not really. They wrapped Hana in some towels and cleaned up the blood, and after everyone left the party, they carried her to Tommy’s truck. After throwing two shovels into the bed, they made us get in the back with them. Then they drove us to the cemetery.”

“Of course,” I said, having a V8 moment. “The numbers you wrote on the bathroom wall by Hana’s name. I knew they looked familiar. They’re plot addresses. They buried her in a fresh grave.”

“Not just in one. Underneath one.” When my brows furrowed in question, she said, “The mortuary had already dug a grave for a funeral that was to be held the next day. The guys dug down some more while we watched.” Her voice cracked with the memory. “We just watched. We didn’t even try to stop them. If ever there was a time to do the right thing…”

Cookie took both her hands into her own. “This wasn’t your fault, Mimi.”

“But they said it was,” she argued. “They said that we helped, that we were accomplices, and that if we said anything, they would kill us. Oh, my god, we were so scared.”

The fear that had consumed her for twenty years reared up and took hold of her again. It washed over me in suffocating waves. I fought it, filled my lungs with air to keep it at bay as she continued.

“We thought for sure they would kill us, too. But they didn’t. They put Hana’s body in and covered her up. The next day, they buried Mr. Romero right on top of her. And nobody knew.”

The fact that it was somewhat of an accident and not a planned murder was the only reason in my mind Mimi and Janelle survived. If those boys had been true killers, utterly remorseless, I doubted I would ever have met Mimi.