been watching way too much CSI.” I roll my eyes, but flip the receipt over anyway. There’s a note scribbled on the back in faded blue ink.
J.—
Hope you like my picks. Let me know what you think.
—Your Favorite Person in the Universe
It’s the initial that bothers me most. That single letter. No one has ever shortened June’s name like that. And the tone of the note, the signature—it suggests an inside joke, some kind of casual closeness. I crumple the receipt in my fist and toss the balled-up wad over my shoulder.
“You know what we should do?” Laney springs off the bed again, bouncing on her toes. “We should go to this Oleo place!”
“What for?”
“Uh, hello? To see if they might know who bought these? Don’t you watch television? You always start at the scene of the crime.”
“Last time I checked, buying music is not a crime,” I point out. “Actually, they kind of encourage that, with all the illegal downloading these days—”
“Work with me here, Harper.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, aren’t you curious? This could really lead to something.”
Of course I’m curious. It’s driving me crazy, not knowing. It’s why I called Laney in the first place. I don’t even have to say anything and she can see it, written all over my face.
“Go put on your shoes,” she says, pushing me off the bed, “because we’re totally going, right now.”
Grand Lake is a town split into two sections, with the namesake lake as the epicenter. There’s the east side of Grand Lake, where Laney and I live, primarily consisting of well-kept houses in quiet suburbs, and then there’s the west side, generally considered lower income and populated with more apartment complexes. The east and west sides have two elementary schools and one middle school each, and after that, the kids are shuttled into the town’s sole, centrally located high school.
The whole town centers around the lake. “Grand” is something of a misnomer, since it’s pretty small, and the only stretch of beach is the man-made one behind the iron gates of the Grand Lake Yacht Club, where the town’s upper crust keep sailboats and pontoon boats and have a dining hall for club dinners. The area by the lake was an amusement park in the fifties, with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster and everything, but they tore it down long before I was even born. Now there’s just the park and a few businesses and restaurants, including the waterfront Sterling’s Steakhouse. Laney’s father, Richard Sterling, owns the joint, but we never eat there because Laney doesn’t eat meat, much to her family’s chagrin.
To get to the west side, you have to drive past the lake and through this strip called Windermere Village. Windermere is a shopping area, purposefully kept antiquated with a cobblestone road, the streets lined with gaslights and outdoor sculptures. There’s an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Duncan’s, a bunch of old family businesses and other little shops. It’s the kind of place where mothers amble with their baby strollers and golden retrievers, and older women wearing fluorescent headbands power walk in pairs.
I don’t usually have much reason to go west past Windermere. As we speed by in Laney’s piece-of-crap car, I watch the newer housing areas give way to dated apartment buildings. She turns down a side road, passing a gas station and a liquor store, and continues down to a two-story building made out of dusty red brick. That’s when I see the sign, lit up in neon-green over the doorway of a store on the bottom level: the Oleo Strut.
A bell above the door chimes as we walk in. There’s a guy behind the counter, looking like he’s in his twenties, sporting Buddy Holly frames and an eyebrow ring. His brown hair is short and spiky. He scrawls something onto a notepad at rapid-fire pace, pausing every so often to fiddle with a calculator—it’s one of those old-fashioned ones, with a ribbon of receipt paper churning out with each button pushed.
“Can I help you?” the guy asks, distracted. He punches a few more numbers into the calculator and scratches the top of his head.
Laney looks at me expectantly, but I’m not sure how to even begin, so she jumps in without missing a beat.
“This is going to sound so weird,” she starts, “but we’re trying to find out the identity of someone who made a purchase from you a few months ago. We know what was bought, but that’s it. Maybe if we gave you the date, you could, like, look back through security tapes or something?”
Now he looks at us, bemused, tapping the pen cap against the countertop. “Yeah, we don’t keep track of that.”
“Well, you look like the type who has an amazing photographic memory.” She pushes herself up against the counter, bending so far over I’m sure her boobs will spill out of her top, and gives her most charming smile. I roll my eyes behind her back. “The Kinks? Tom Waits? Any of that ring a bell?”
“Sorry, kid, my memory is for shit,” he says with a grin, and I’m impressed with the fact he doesn’t even give her chest area so much as a second glance. He jabs the pen in our direction in mock seriousness. “That’s why you should stay away from drugs.”
As he starts to walk toward the back room, Laney throws her hands up in frustration.
“A walking PSA,” she mutters under her breath. “How helpful.”
Suddenly he turns to face us again. “Hey, you know, you might have better luck with my brother. He works the register sometimes and he’s good with faces.”
“And where would he be?” I ask.
He nods his chin in the direction of the back of the store. “Stocking. I think he’s doing vinyl.”
With that, he disappears. Laney and I exchange glances.
I shrug. “Worth a shot.”
The store is so crammed with music that it’s difficult to squeeze through the aisles. Everywhere are carts filled with CDs and cassettes, handwritten signs plastered on the walls categorizing them by genre, and even those have subcategories. The rock section is split into classic rock, garage rock, glam rock, soft rock, psychedelia, alt-rock and indie rock. Punk contains anarcho-punk, garage punk, hardcore and riot grrrl. New Wave has an entire cart to itself.
We’re turning a corner when Laney says, “That must be him.”
I look in the direction where she’s pointing, and suddenly I can’t breathe.
“Oh my God,” I gasp. I grab her arm, haul her around the corner and safely out of sight.
It’s the boy. The boy from the wake, who leaned up against my house and smoked cigarettes and glared a lot. The boy who obviously had some connection to my sister, but at the time I’d been too preoccupied to even consider his, like, existence, never mind what that connection could be.
Well. Now I know. Sort of, anyway.
“Hey,” Laney says. Her eyes widen. “I know him!”
“You—you do?”
“I mean, I don’t know him, but I know of him. His
