#murder solving

She slips away from her dorm room, sticking to the darkness provided by the girls’ building. Harrowdene rises above her, three stories and red brick, her home for the past three years. She knows which shower has the best pressure, the creak of the floorboards, how far out of the window to lean to get cell reception. First year she shared with Nancy Wheeler. Last year, it was Tina Watts, and this year she got Vickie Dawson. Vickie is in band, the LGBTQ club, and performed in last year’s production of Cinderella. She also hadn’t said too much when Chrissy had shimmied out of their window, along the ledge and down the large white trellis that goes from their floor all the way to the ground. She’d been in bed, feigning sleep but Chrissy had seen the glint of her eyes anyway.

Once she hits the rear entrance - the emergency fire door that gets propped open during the day and closed by Mrs Click every night - she makes a dash across the grass to the thick line of trees that surrounds Hawkins Academy. Mockett’s wood, the small forest that hides the school for the rest of the world.

Rumor goes that the original owner of the land - before it was a school - was a conspiracy nutjob and had it planted to keep anyone official out. Another rumor says that a girl was murdered by her teacher in a clearing after an affair gone wrong. This one is only half based in fact. Someone was definitely murdered here. 

It’s terrifying, walking through the forest after dark. Every crack, every rustle, the faint noises of a fox all make her jump and she wishes desperately that they’d agreed on another meeting place. She was here mere days ago, but in the setting sunlight rippling through the gold colors of the trees, it had felt almost magical. 

The bench in the woods is a relic from a time long gone by. Supposedly, once the school had a cluster of benches out in this clearing for students but they were nearly all removed over a decade ago. There’s just one left: the legs covered in moss, the wood faded and covered in scratched initials. More students have marked their names on it than even the bench can remember. 

He’s already there when she emerges from the line of trees, wrapped up in his denim jacket against the cold October bite. Her heart judders when she sees him there, tracing the wood with his long, elegant fingers. The silver of his rings glint in the light of her torch and he turns to look up, his face breaking into a smile when he sees her.

Stop, Chrissy tells her heart. We’re only solving a murder.

“Hey, you got out,” Eddie says, sounding impressed, as she slings her bag on the table and climbs onto the other side of the bench. “Not hard, right?” She narrows her eyes.

“How did you get out?” she asks, suspiciously. Apparently, the trellis trick is quite well known among the residents of her dorm, often used when sneaking out to go meet boys. Apparently the auditorium is a popular make-out spot…or it used to be. “The boys’ building doesn’t have a rose trellis.” He shrugs, looking unconcerned. But then again, he’s Eddie Munson, known dealer and outcast. Unlike Chrissy, this probably isn’t the first time he’s snuck out at night.

“The bathroom on the second floor opens out onto the roof of the administration building,” he explains, twirling the chunky ring on his index finger. It has twists of silver wound around a large amber stone. “Easy drop down and I just have to climb onto the bins to get back up. Unless some dick has locked the bathroom window before I get back but that hardly ever happens.”

“Okay,” Chrissy says slowly, and pulls out the black notebook from her shoulder bag. She barely had time to write all of her notes up after dinner but she’d needed to get them out of her head. Everything has been churning over in her mind for the last three days, ever since the body was found. She recognises how cliche it is to have a murder notebook and that true detectives probably keep everything in their heads but she just isn’t up for that. Everything makes more sense written down.

And she can’t keep a big whiteboard in her room so this will have to do.

“I put down everything that we have so far,” she says, opening it to the correct page and turning it around for Eddie to see. Eddie pulls out his phone and turns on the torch function, holding it up so that he can see her neat handwriting. She’s outlined everything as best she can: possible suspects and motives, a sketch of the auditorium, a timeline of the victim’s last day.

“This is good,” Eddie says finally, setting his phone down on the table beside them. “Really good. Is that timeline finished?”

“I think so?” Chrissy hedges, chewing her lip. People have been less than helpful with the details but she’s been able to get enough. “There’s half an hour just after class ends that I can’t account for. No one seems to have been with him then.” Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up so high that they nearly blend with the dark mass of hair on his head.

“Shouldn’t you know?” he asks, incredulously. “I mean…weren’t you guys dating?”

“No,” she says defensively, because she resents explaining her former relationship with Jason to someone who is essentially a stranger. Even though she’d…even so, she doesn’t want to explain it all to Eddie. She’d loved him as much as she’d hated him and then his body had been found three days ago, which made things much more complicated. 

“We broke up,” she says, folding her hands up into her lap so he can’t see her digging her fingernails into her palm. She’s drowning in grief and guilt and confusion, and she doesn’t know which to feel first. “The day before he died.” Eddie rests his chin on his palm, looking at her. 

“And that’s why the police wanted to talk to you?” he asks and she hesitates.

“No,” she says, eventually. It still feels like bile in the back of her throat, the cold look on Jason's face when she’d told him that it was over. How the news trickled through the dining hall the next day at breakfast that a body had been found in the auditorium. How the first feeling that flowed through her body was relief. “Because no one knew. I hadn’t told anyone and Jason didn’t either. I think he thought…”

It’s both too obvious for them to voice out loud. Jason had expected to get her back, and he’d probably never doubted that she would eventually do just that.

“Right,” Eddie drawls, his voice dripping in contempt. “Of course. What Lord Carver wants, he gets.” 

She swallows. She can’t speak ill of the dead, but she also won’t say it wasn’t true. Jason had…expectations. 

“Anyway,” Eddie says, seeing her discomfort. “It’s good shit. Couples of leads, a few suspects. People who aren’t us, which is the vital thing.”

She nods, because that’s the whole point of this little alliance. The drug dealer who’d had a very public fight with the victim only a few days prior to the murder. And the girlfriend who’d suddenly ended what everyone else thought was a picture perfect love story.  Police tended to suspect people who had motives like that.

“Were they horrible to you?” she asks, because she hadn’t been the only one pulled out of class for questioning. Everyone with a connection to Jason had been taken to the principal’s office at some point since it had happened. Chrissy, Patrick and Billy, and all the other guys from the basketball team, that freshman kid, Lucas, who found him…and Eddie. Even Steve, who’d never really been friends with Jason, had been pulled in. 

“Nah,” Eddie says, but there’s lines around his eyes that betray the lie. The police hadn’t even been very nice to her, and she has a reasonable alibi for most of the time frame of the murder. “It was fine. They can be dicks to me because I’m not a minor. They just asked about the fight.”

Chrissy knows better than to ask about the fight. There have been rumors flying around school, and there are even more now suggesting that Eddie had lost his temper and murdered Jason in a fit of rage.

People have too much time on their hands.

“What’s your alibi?” Chrissy asks, suddenly. They’re partners in this and she doesn’t know. But Eddie’s face turns guarded, a little defensive. 

“Why do you ask?” he says and she shakes her head.

“I don’t think you did it,” she assures him, because in a school full of doubters, she doesn’t want him to think she’s one of that number. “But what did you tell the police about where you were?”

“I was just…writing songs on the roof,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. There’s a delicate flush to it, rising just above his Hellfire Club t-shirt. “Alone.”

“Do you do that a lot?” Chrissy pushes, and tucks her hands inside her jumper. It’s colder out here than she’d expected and she’d tried so hard to not disturb Vickie that she hadn’t stopped for anything like a hat or gloves. 

“Just when I have some good inspiration,” Eddie mutters vaguely. He’s avoiding her gaze, nervously strumming his fingers against the dry wood. She wonders if their meeting in this very spot nearly a week ago affected him as much as it affected her.

“Okay,” she says, deciding to let it go. She pulls the notebook back towards herself, squinting at the pages in the dim light. 

“I don’t know if we can get into the auditorium yet,” she considers, thinking of their next move. “The police are done but the staff still have it sealed off…what?” Because Eddie is grinning widely.

“I can get us in,” he says, in a low voice, jabbing a finger at the page, and her outlined sketch of the crime scene. “I have a key. The janitor is very forthcoming if you're willing to supply him with weed.”

“I’m really glad that your law-breaking helps us commit further law-breaking,” Chrissy says, flatly. But she sighs and stuffs the notebook back in her bag. What’s a little more rebellion?

“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she admits and is startled when Eddie pulls himself out of his seat, sweeping her bag off of the table.

“What? We might as well go now,” he says, her bag dangling by the strap from one finger. “No one will be around and the guard patrols get less frequent after midnight. Less chance of being caught.”

“Sure,” she says in a daze and takes her bag from him, slinging it over her shoulder, easily falling into step with Eddie as they leave Mockett’s wood. She’s tired and it’s only a matter of hours before she has to roll out of bed and go to her classes like nothing has changed. Like her ex-boyfriend isn’t dead. Like she hasn’t snuck into a crime scene after dark. Like the idea of a killer hiding at school doesn’t terrify her.

Like the boy next to her isn’t the whole reason for breaking up with Jason in the first place.

“We probably shouldn’t hang out much together during school hours,” Eddie says awkwardly, as they head back towards Harrowdene and the shape of the drama building and auditorium beyond it. Maybe her dorm’s easy access to the murder site is what has the police thinking she makes an ideal suspect. Motive, access, relationship…all the dominoes in a line. 

The frank acknowledgement of it stings but she gets it. Any sign of a closeness with Eddie, another person of interest, might send those dominoes tumbling down. The police would probably love the idea of a murdering teenage Bonnie and Clyde.

“Oh hey,” Eddie says suddenly, noticing the goosebumps clinging to her skin. He unwinds the thick black scarf from around his neck, something chunky and handmade from wool. He deftly wraps it around her, looping it carefully around her hair. It’s soft, something well loved and she catches the faintest smell of his skin on the material, something woodsey and deep, like the inside of a guitar. 

“Thanks,” she murmurs and swallows heavily.

Oh yeah. She’s screwed.