What January Remembers (The Jolvix Episodes) by Faith Gardner

Author:Faith Gardner [Gardner, Faith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mirror House Press
Published: 2022-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

When my sister isn’t up by nearly two p.m., I go back to the Little Pink House to check in on her. I can hear music behind the door and she answers it soon after I knock this time.

“Hey,” she says, freshly showered and dressed in a long black maxi dress, bright hair up in a slick, wet bun. She’s holding her eyeliner. “Come in. I was just getting ready.”

“Glad you’re ready to join the waking world.”

I follow her, stepping over her clothes to come sit on the bed, the life raft in the middle of the hoarder sea.

“Anyway, sorry about earlier, but Jesus.” She disappears into her tiny bathroom and continues talking. “If you want a rapt audience for your life coaching sesh you could, like, wait until I’m fully conscious.”

I would argue with her, but I don’t see a point anymore.

“Did you buy any presents?” I ask, staring at the floor.

“Were we supposed to?”

“It’s Christmas.”

“I’m unemployed.”

“But you have money for …” I close my eyes and swallow the lecture. “Never mind.”

“You didn’t get me anything, did you? I don’t want anything.”

I’m about to answer her when my eyes, which are resting on the dump that is her floor, catch a glimpse of something next to her bed. I lean down and pick it up. A piece of paper with a footprint on it. A piece of paper that says Your mother was murdered.

“Jada!” I say, getting up.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I know, I have money for pills but not presents, what a terrible bitch I am—”

“No. I don’t care about that, whatever.” I stand in the doorway of her bathroom and hold up the note. “This.”

“Oh,” she says, glancing at it in the mirror as she does her eyes. “Yeah.”

“‘Yeah?’ That’s it?”

“My friends have a sick sense of humor, what can I say?”

“Your friends did this?”

“I assume so? They know how much I love true crime.”

“I got one too, Jada.”

Jada stops drawing the cat eye shape on her eye and turns to me. “Really?”

I nod. “Jesse and Josiah got them, too.”

Her eyes flicker with thoughts and she turns back to the mirror. “That’s fucking weird.”

“It’s disturbing.”

She finishes the cat-eye swoop and gives herself a wide-eyed, approving look before capping the eyeliner. “I wonder who would do that?”

“No shit.”

“And why.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

We leave her bathroom. She throws her eyeliner into the sea on her floor and we head outside.

“It wasn’t you, was it?” I ask as we stand out in the sunshine on the patio.

“Look, if I want to solve a murder, I go onto my forum and work on cracking the Freezer Man case.”

“Do you think it’s possible?” I ask.

“That mom was murdered?” She picks at the pimple on her cheek. “I mean, I guess. Sure. I’ve thought about it before.”

“You have?”

“Of course. I mean, Dad would be the obvious suspect. Husband of the victim. He found the body. Et cetera.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing come out of her mouth—so nonchalantly, like she’s spinning her wheels about a badly produced true crime show on TV.

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