Look What You Made Me Do Read online

  My surprise is again genuine. “Seriously?”

  Another mouth quirk. “Seriously.”

  “We’re not. We weren’t,” I correct. “I trained her, but then we worked separately. I don’t know her better than anyone else here. And I didn’t notice anything different about her before she—disappeared.”

  That’s true, too, and Detective Greaves is nodding like he believes me. “Let’s talk about Friday,” he says, the day Angelica was killed. Before I knew she was dead. “Walk me through that day.”

  Even though it was only three days ago and you’d think helping to hide a body would crystallize the details in your brain, my mind is studiously blank. “It was just a normal day,” I say finally, the words sounding lame, even to me. “I came to work, like always.”

  “What time did you get here?”

  “Nine. Maybe a few minutes before.”

  “And then what?”

  “I just worked. I have a design project—specialty binder clips, shaped like monarch butterflies—it’s for the conservation society—and I was doing that for most of the day. Then, um, on Fridays I go to hot yoga—”

  “Does Angelica go to hot yoga?”

  “I-I don’t know. Not this class, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I went to the class, then afterward I went to the grocery store.” My mouth goes dry, and the words stick in my throat, like that’s the end of the story. I wish it were.

  “And then?”

  My underarms are damp. “Then I went home,” I lie. I could tell him what I told Graham, that I had a work emergency and returned to the office, but it would be easy enough to check my computer’s log to see if it had been turned on again that evening, which it obviously hadn’t.

  Greaves jots down something in a notepad I didn’t see him produce. “What can you tell me about Angelica?” he asks without looking up.

  “About her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Um…She worked here for just under a year. She was really outgoing.” My mind races, trying to decide if I should mention the promotion. If I don’t, it’ll look suspicious. But if I do, it’ll look suspicious. “She was a good designer,” I say finally. “That’s all I know about her.”

  “Did you see her leave the office early on Friday?”

  I shake my head. “I wasn’t paying attention. Is that when she—when she—”

  Greaves doesn’t answer. “Did she ever have any problems at work? Staff she didn’t get along with, ex-boyfriends visiting, unhappy clients?”

  “Not that I know about. It’s a small office. I think we’d know if there were issues.”

  “Right.” He clicks the pen shut, like that’s the end of the conversation. Then he says, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  My whole life I’ve wanted someone to help me, someone in a position to actually do something about Becca, to step in and confront her, to stop her. But that person has never come along. Those who suspected were too afraid to try, and I’ve paid the price for their silence. And now my silence is bought, my complicity in her evil too thorough, too enduring.

  Greaves is staring at me, his gaze sincere, like he’d march out of this office and arrest Becca right away if I just gave the word.

  “No,” I say.

  * * *

  Becca has a key to my house. I don’t know where she got it, because I didn’t give it to her. But that doesn’t matter because, whether I gave it to her or not, whether or not I ask for it back, she’s always going to do whatever she wants, and what she wants is to be annoying. She feeds on other people’s grievances the way demons feed on fear.

  It’s always easy to tell when Becca’s there or has been there. Every light is on, the front door is wide open, the television and radio blast like they’re in a battle to drown each other out. I have a dishwasher, but she’ll leave her dishes in the sink, caked with cheese or egg or whatever she managed to find and microwave. There’ll be a tub of ice cream in the refrigerator, half melted, my pitcher of water left on the counter to become lukewarm. Becca might kill strangers with one smash from the front of her car, but for me it’s death by a million hurt feelings.

  I step inside the home I bought three years ago. It’s small and dated, but it’s mine—in theory—and I close and lock the door Becca left open. I use my foot to push her sneakers to the side, scoop up her leather jacket from the floor, and hang it in the closet. I’d gone through the motions after the meeting with Greaves, gossiping with my co-workers, eyes wide as we recounted being interviewed by a real-life detective, rehearsing the stories we’d tell later at home, expanding, elaborating. Laverne from Promotions had cried.

  I’m still going through the motions, even now that I’m home. I set my laptop on the hall table, take off my shoes, and hang my coat next to Becca’s. I spot my brand-new leather gloves sticking out of her pocket and steal them back, stashing them in a pair of rain boots, out of sight. I drop my purse and keys next to the laptop, wondering how many more times I’ll repeat these actions, these normal, day-to-day behaviors, in my own home, on my own schedule. How long will it take the police to analyze the DNA from Becca’s stupid kiss of death? To find a piece of my hair on Angelica’s corpse, to learn of the promotion, to find me?

  I peer over the half wall into the living room, at my brand-new couch and love seat, the mismatched ottoman. The coffee tables and thrift store lamps with shades I’d designed and crafted with care. And in stark contrast, a carelessly abandoned bowl of cereal, a beer bottle, and a soda can, courtesy of Becca.

  “Oh my God!” she cries, exploding out of the kitchen and barreling down the front hallway toward me. “Can you believe this?” Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are bright, hair flying loose from its ponytail, but the time lapse between my entering and her exclaiming is too long to be anything but unconvincing.

  “This is amazing!” she trills. “The first time I leave a calling card, and they find it?” She cackles hysterically. “I can’t even. It’s incredible.”

  “Incredible?” I echo. “I’m the one who was interviewed by the police today, and it was not incredible.”

  Becca is enthralled. “What did they look like? What did they ask you? Did you mention me?”

  Unlike my co-workers, I have no intention of replaying this afternoon’s events for Becca’s entertainment. She’d like it too much.

  “What part of them finding your stupid kiss on her forehead is incredible?” I counter. “And how did they find it?” Though I’d talked to Greaves for twenty minutes, he hadn’t mentioned how Angelica’s body had come to be unburied; nor had he alluded to any strange findings on the body, like my sister’s kiss of death.

  She narrows her eyes. “It’s not stupid.”

  “It has your DNA!”

  “So? I’m not in any systems. Assuming they can even extract the DNA, they can’t match it to anything. And there’s no reason to look at me.”

  “They’ll look at me!”

  She frowns, like that’s the most ludicrous thing she’s ever heard. “Why?”

  “Because they already did!” I snap. “Because we worked together! Because we were up for the same promotion!”

  Becca props her hands on her hips. “You’re the only one who even cares about that job, Carrie. Trust me—it’s hardly a motive.” She does a high-pitched imitation of my voice. “I wanted the interior office so bad I killed for it! Angelica gets all the best paper clips!”

  “That’s not funny.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You’re ruining this.”

  “Everything was ruined the second you started killing people and roping me into it.”

  She’s not even offended, just leans against the wall and watches me, deciding how to approach this. What she settles on is, “We bonded, Carrie.”

  I blink. No matter how I try to predict Becca, there’s no way a sane person could possibly guess her next steps. “What? Who? You and Angelica?”

  “No. You and me
. We were going to go our separate ways, lead separate lives, and not even be sisters anymore. And now, because of all this, we’re connected.”

  “All this” means murder, and being “connected” to Becca is the very last thing any healthy person would want, hence her slew of non-engagements. Hence the fact that my parents decided to start spending winters in Arizona, where Becca finds it too hot to handle. Then, when she refused to visit them, they made the move permanent. The problem is that not being “connected” to Becca is easier said than done because, when Becca decides to sever your “connection,” it means you’re dead.

  “I would rather be connected in a different way,” I say, knowing it’s never going to matter.

  She shrugs. “Well, we’re connected in this way. Now come have dinner. I cooked.” She flounces off like we weren’t just talking about how she wrangled me into a life of crime.

  I take two steps toward the kitchen and then pause and sniff. “Is that—”

  “Short ribs!” Becca calls. “With parsnip puree! Your favorite. I’ve been working on it all day. Come eat.”

  We were solidly middle-class growing up, which means we only went out to eat on special occasions and “dining out” meant chain restaurants, with a glass of water for our drink and never any dessert. One time my dad got a promotion at work and they gave him a hefty gift card for a fancy restaurant in town, and we all went. I got braised short ribs because I’d seen them on television and fell in love. We couldn’t afford to return to the restaurant, and my mom refused to invest the time or money to make them, so each year after on my birthday, Becca would save up her money—wherever she’d gotten it—and re-create the meal. It’s pretty much the only thing she knows how to cook, and when she puts her mind to something, she excels at it.

  But today is not my birthday.

  “Why?” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not my birthday.”

  I step into the kitchen and do a double take when it’s not the war zone Becca normally leaves in her wake. It’s the small kitchen typically found in old homes, updated once in the 1980s, and I haven’t found the time or money to update it again. The counters are chipped square tiles, the backsplash more of the same material, the monotony broken up with an occasional painting of a bunch of grapes or horn of plenty. The cabinets are ugly brown wood with matching uneven drawers, and the floor is the same glaring yellow as the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. But Becca, for once, has not made things worse. The slow cooker is on the counter, the sink is empty, and two plates and wineglasses sit on my small table.

  Becca gives an exaggerated sigh and stirs a pot on the stove. “It doesn’t have to be your birthday for me to do something nice for you,” she says, swiping her finger through the dark sauce on the end of the spoon and tasting it. “Perfect.”

  “But that’s the only time you do anything nice, period.”

  She sticks out her tongue. “Ha ha. Look, it was really cold out on Friday, and I saw you shivering so I thought maybe a home-cooked meal would be good. And this is all I can make, so voilà.”

  Not for one second do I believe the answer is that simple, but the only way to guarantee more lies is to ask for the truth. Instead I pick up the opened bottle of red wine on the counter. It’s mine, of course. A bottle I picked up on a wine tour with Graham, one I’d been saving for some special, yet-to-be-determined occasion. Or tonight.

  I pour two glasses, and Becca fills our plates with food so hot steam rises. She takes the seat opposite me and lifts her glass. “To red wine–braised short ribs,” she says. “Because they’re delicious.”

  She’ll pout if I don’t toast so I clink my glass against hers, knowing she’s actually toasting Angelica’s murder and our imminent discovery. She once told me that if she was ever on death row she’d ask that her last meal be a burger and fries. I voted for short ribs. And now here we are.

  I take my time sipping the wine, waiting for Becca to eat first, just in case there’s more to this little charade. But she jumps in, her fork gliding through the tender meat, scooping up short rib and parsnip and braised greens and eating them all in one bite. I’m hesitant but I’m also hungry, and not eating would incur a Becca tantrum that would be infinitely worse than being poisoned.

  I take a bite, and it’s as wonderful as always. The warmth fills me, leaching more of the tension out of my muscles, and I take another bite. Becca does the same, watching me with a tiny smile.

  “What?” I ask warily.

  “Nothing. I’m just happy.”

  “There’s nothing to be happy about.”

  She sighs. “I know you can’t understand how I’m feeling, but life is so dull, Carrie. And now, for the first time in, like, forever, I feel…alive.” She pauses. “Ironically.”

  Suddenly the parsnip puree tastes a little gummy, the strings of meat sticking between my teeth. I gulp my wine. Becca feels alive because Angelica is dead. And though I didn’t care for Angelica, she’s still someone I saw eight hours a day, five days a week, for the past eight months, and will never see again because my sister killed her and I helped bury her.

  “How?” I ask, the word lodging in my throat.

  Becca frowns. “Same as usual, I guess. You sear the meat—”

  “No,” I interrupt. “Not dinner. How did it happen? How did you…hurt her?”

  She sounds bored, like talking about food prep is infinitely more interesting than murder. “Oh. That.”

  “You didn’t even know her.”

  “I knew of her. You talk about her.”

  “I talk about everyone at work.”

  “Yeah, but she’s the only one who was harassing you. Wasn’t she?”

  She was, but even if every other person in the building was causing me trouble, I’d never admit it. “Yes.”

  “So, I knew enough about her. And she was in that picture you took at the office party. With her stupid dye job and her cat’s-eye glasses? And when I saw her, I just…did it. Hit the gas.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  Becca still works at the jewelry store at the mall. She’s a manager now, and as far as I’m aware, no other employees have gone missing. But she has no reason to go anywhere near the industrial park where I work.

  Her cheeks flush, and her mouth quirks. Then she waves a hand like a white flag. “Okay, fine, Carrie. I knew who she was from your picture, and one day—totally a coincidence—I saw her when I was getting gas. I complimented her stupid glasses and pretended I recognized her from her work on that three-hole punch design. Remember the one you worked on that she stole credit for?”

  Of course I remember. It was Angelica’s first month at Weston, and I’d been tasked with training and assessing her. Troy had forgotten to get her station set up, so we’d been working in tandem at mine. I’d had the three-hole punch project saved to my desktop, working on it whenever I wasn’t training. And at some point during the week, Angelica had copied the file and used my design as the launching point for her own. When the pitches were due two weeks later, after she’d started working at her own station, she’d secretly emailed Troy to say she’d been struck by inspiration, and would he mind if she threw her hat in the ring for the pitch? And did he know she was so committed to designer office supplies that she had a tattoo of a binder clip on her ankle?

  Troy presented both our designs to the client, and they ultimately chose Angelica’s, which was a whopping 1 percent different from mine. Everyone knew the truth, but Troy said there was nothing to be done about it. The client had picked her design. Angelica swore she hadn’t seen mine, independent evolution and all that. Plus, it was just a three-hole punch design—was it really that big a deal?

  Troy decided it wasn’t.

  Becca, apparently, felt otherwise.

  “So,” she continues, “I pretended I was a head hunter looking for a lead designer for a company so fancy they couldn’t be named until she’d signed a confidentiality agreement and asked if she
’d be interested in meeting. She said yes, and I gave her the address of that abandoned paint factory—I told her it was being renovated to a state-of-the-art ‘creative facility’—and asked her to come by on Friday before lunch.”

  She scrapes up the last of the parsnip puree with a teeth-aching grind of metal on porcelain. “She showed up late—like, how unprofessional—and I was so mad at her for what she’d done to you, and now trying to steal your promotion, and making me wait, that I just snapped.” She drains her wine, apparently completely oblivious that her level of planning doesn’t correspond with a sudden snap. “I know you feel bad for people, even when they’re mean to you, but if it helps—it only took a second. She didn’t even know it was happening.”

  A loud creak of the floorboards upstairs has us both jumping.

  I glare at Becca. “Is there someone here?”

  It wouldn’t be the first time she’d brought someone to my place and pretended it was hers so she didn’t have to clean up her own messy apartment to play hostess. Her housekeeping skills are almost worse than her social skills.

  “Of course not,” she says, trying her best to appear hurt.

  “Then who’s up there?”

  We’re quiet for a minute, listening, but there’s nothing.

  “No one,” Becca says. “This house is a million years old. It’s always making noise. Simmer down.”

  As always, she’s exaggerating, but she’s not wrong. The place is nearly a hundred years old, and it moans and groans at inconvenient hours, prompted by gusts of wind, large trucks rumbling by, or a cupboard door closed too hard. The timing of the creak was the scariest thing about it.

  Becca gets up and puts her plate in the sink. She comes back with the wine and refills her glass to the brim, red liquid nearly spilling over.

  “I hate to tell you this, Carrie, but you’re too nice. You never stand up for yourself. You never just say, Fuck you, world, and take what you want. That’s why you’re lucky to have me. I have your back, and you have mine.”

  That’s only because I have no choice, something I know there’s no point debating.