Pyro caught her arm before Teddy could shake Jillian out of the trance. “Marlena can’t breathe,” he said. Then his gaze shot to Dara. “Do you think we can ask her questions?”
Dara nodded. “I saw something like this once in my grandmother’s shop.”
Pyro leaned forward. “We want to help you, Marlena. Nod if you’re listening.”
Jillian gasped. She was struggling for air.
“Someone strangled you,” Pyro said. “Was it Corey?”
Jillian’s eyes rolled back in her head. Her body trembled as she drew shallow, labored breaths.
“Was it Corey?” Pyro asked again.
Jillian stopped breathing.
Teddy rushed forward, grabbing her by the shoulders. She lifted Jillian’s blond curls and pushed two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse, then waited before she felt the faint beat of Jillian’s heart. Jillian opened her eyes and gasped. “Did I fall asleep or something?” she said.
Pyro placed a hand on Jillian’s shoulder. “Nice work. Jillian, you just communed with Marlena.”
“I did?”
Every step forward felt like a step backward. Sure, Jillian had connected with Marlena, but that hadn’t made the way any clearer. Teddy had been so sure at the start of the assignment that casework would be straightforward. Follow the clues. Find the bad guy. But the more they studied the facts, the murkier they seemed.
Teddy glanced nervously from Jillian to the other Misfits. “So, we’re sure that Marlena was strangled. Even if the coroner wasn’t. That’s something,” she said.
* * *
The Misfits’ lucky streak continued the next day, when they returned to the library to reexamine the kits. They split up again, this time each choosing a different clue from each kit. It wasn’t long before Teddy looked up to find Jeremy quietly standing over her desk, a grin on his face.
“I’ve got something,” he said, tossing the copy of Romeo and Juliet on top of her crime-scene photos.
“What?” she asked.
“He didn’t do it,” Jeremy said. “Corey is innocent.”
“How can you be so sure?” Jillian demanded. The group had gathered around them.
“I held the book before, but I didn’t get a clear picture of Corey from it. Or what I got was all muddled. So I went through the book page by page. I mean, look at Jillian. She went all in, right? I read each annotation. No flashes or anything, but I got a feeling: whoever wrote these notes didn’t kill anyone.”
Teddy slumped back, silently processing. Dara swung around to look at Jillian. “What do you think? You channeled Marlena. Is Jeremy right?”
Jillian’s brow furrowed. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I’m not sure. I only know how she died.”
“Well, I’m sure,” Jeremy said. “So now we need to figure out who did do it.”
Pyro scoffed. “A feeling? Right. What we need to do to prove he’s innocent is establish his time line. Make sure he has a solid alibi. That’s something his attorney failed to do in court. It left the jury open to suspicion to convict him. We should look through his Facebook photos of that night again.” Pyro rifled through some printouts documenting Corey’s social media activity in the moments leading up to Marlena’s murder, including a picture of him looking like any other clean-cut college kid: UCLA Bruins hat, ripped jeans, white shirt.
“This is all we have,” Dara said. “It must be enough to get a read on Corey.”
“Teddy will have to figure it out,” Pyro said.
At the end of the assignment, one person from each team was going to San Quentin to question Corey McDonald. She knew, like she knew how a player next to her was about to fold, like she understood all the unknown things that came to her known, that she would be the one making the trip.
Teddy looked at the copy of the book that Jeremy had left on the desk. She would need to know as much about Corey as possible to survive a trip into his mind. She just hoped Hollis Whitfield was a fan of Elizabethan playwrights, as she headed into the stacks to search under S for Shakespeare.
As Nick gathered the kits for safekeeping, Teddy handed him the Whitfield copy. “Don’t forget the book,” she said while stuffing Corey’s copy in her tote bag.
* * *
Later, Teddy sat in bed with Corey McDonald’s copy of Shakespeare’s play. She’d never been one for poetry in high school, but she began to reread the text, quickly falling into the story. A dog-eared page caught her attention: “These violent delights have violent ends.” The friar speaking to Romeo. The passage was circled, highlighted. Teddy shivered. Did Corey know what was coming? Cramped notations in pencil and ink in the margins. Underlined passages. Notes for an essay in the back. If she could find out how this kid’s mind worked, maybe she could figure out how to gather his thoughts and memories into a structure she could navigate. She had to find his memory of that night. She fell asleep with the book on her stomach. She had dreamed of the yellow house in the nights since the midyear exam, but each time she reached to turn the doorknob, she found the chipped green front door locked. When she peered into the darkened windows, it looked as though no one was home.
Tonight the dream began in the way it always did. As Teddy walked up the steps, she saw that the porch was covered in shards of glass. She looked up. A window was broken, the door ajar. She stepped inside.
If before it had looked like someone was packing for a move, now the house looked completely abandoned. The little table was overturned; the picture of Clint and her parents was gone. Teddy made her way through the rooms, searching for something, anything. There had to be a reason she’d gotten inside tonight.
She paused in a bedroom to the left of the hallway. Dust covered the wooden floorboards, and cobwebs laced every corner. Another dead end. She returned to the entryway, pausing by the door. She righted the little table, noticing a piece of paper she
