Fake Me To Church

Epilogue - Giggle at a Funeral

- SAM -

Six days.

It'd been six days since the cops locked up Leith Carlsson, six days since Alice was admitted to the hospital for her gunshot wound, alongside the much more egregiously injured Marcus Hall...and six days since Lane Martin had vanished into thin air.

Reporters said Marcus's dying moments were an excruciating blaze of agony prolonged by doctors' best efforts, while the cops tried to assure his family that the girl who butchered him couldn't have gotten far; they blocked every exit, every highway—no one was leaving town until they found her.

But it had been six days. Six days of flashing blue and white at every corner, of officers at every intersection. Six days of traffic stops and news updates.

Six days without a trace.

I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I saw her—that hollow look of rage etched immoveable across her face. I couldn't stop hearing those final, haunting words she breathed before she dashed from the room and disappeared into the dark halls of EdgeWay Church of Christ, the same halls in which she'd fallen victim to the vilest horrors imaginable.

To this day, it brings me to the brink of rage just thinking about it.

She was twelve years old.

We were children, barely alive; and Marcus would've killed her.

I bared my teeth, peered through my bedroom window at the morning sun—bright, obnoxious, blazing.

I slid into a white dress shirt, zipped a pair of black slacks around my waist. My left arm ached as I raised it to wrap a tie around my throat. I gulped hard; it felt like I was slipping on a noose.

I walked downstairs, greeted the cleaning lady, exited my apartment building.

I inhaled deeply as I made it to my car, then set upon the road still densely populated by police cars combing the town for any sign of Lane.

The closer I got to my destination, the thicker the street's congestion with black and white vehicles.

"Can't believe I'm even going to this thing," I muttered once I made it to the parking lot.

But here I was, EdgeWay Church of Christ—the main doors propped wide open by greeters who held ceremony programs in one hand and straw-threaded flower baskets in the other.

The one on the right smiled at me as I reluctantly accepted the folded page she offered, embossed with the brazen likeness of Marcus Emerson Hall.

I had only seconds to glance at it before I heard a familiar voice, Irina's, calling me to where she sat three rows removed from the main stage and had saved me a seat at the end of the row.

To Irina's left were GiGi and their mother Myra, followed by Charity, Prudence, and the Deputy Commissioner. Steven sat next to Dylan, one seat apart from the rest, wearing a gauzed cast around his neck.

A few minutes later, Ahmed came and took the empty seat next to Steven.

I shuddered to look to my right, where streaked patches of carpet, though they must've been steam cleaned at some point during the week, retained nevertheless the slightest rosaceous hue.

The ceremony commenced with a choir dressed in stripes of navy and white, their voices lofty and their notes unbelievably high. Mid-trill, a violinist took the stage and pressed against his instrument with such vigor that I thought he might rend it in two. Classical it was, and beautiful to be sure—but only in the way that the noise of an old harp is able to catch the attention of the perceptive ear, lovely for the ardor of its strainlessness rather than its refinery.