City Under One Roof

Chapter One

Amy

"And when did you find the body"-Officer Neworth paused for a moment before adding-"parts? When did you find the body parts?"

It was a hand and a foot, to be exact. Or at least Amy thought there was a foot. She hadn't bothered to look inside the boot, but since Officer Neworth said "parts" instead of "part," she assumed there must have been a foot-a bloated, sawed-off, purple-blotched piece of flesh that would have made her dry heave at the sight.

"Yesterday, around eleven a.m.," she said. She was pretty sure she had mentioned this detail at least six times that very day. She'd thought getting pulled out of algebra class would be fun, but now she was having second thoughts.

The boot, she remembered, looked fairly new. It was covered with mud and grime, but the treads weren't that worn and the laces hadn't frayed yet. She hadn't told any of this to Officer Neworth, though. Up until then, she'd tried to say as little as possible, sticking to answers like "Yes," "No," and "I don't know."

Amy Lin stared at Officer Neworth and his receded-to-an-island hairline and decided that he was not someone who could be trusted. For one thing, he was wearing a gold watch. Any man who wears a gold watch is a little shady. Second, anyone who asks you the same question over and over expecting a different answer does not trust you, and therefore you should not trust them. And last of all, Neworth was from Anchorage, and Point Mettier people tended to keep their mouths shut around any of the "otters." "Otters" is what the kids called people outside Point Mettier because it kind of sounded like the word "others."

"So, tell me again, who were you with?" he asked.

Amy sighed internally and gave him a glare. Did she look like a caged parrot that would keep repeating the same thing over and over again?

Officer Neworth shifted in his seat and adjusted his leather duty belt, which sagged with the weight of lethal equipment-a baton, cuffs, a magazine pouch, a flashlight, a Taser, pepper spray, and of course, a Glock pistol. But despite all his protective equipment, Neworth looked uncomfortable under the glare of a seventeen-year-old teenager who was barely five foot two. He finally turned his eyes away and looked down at his notepad. "Celine Hoffler and Marco Salonga?"

"Yes," Amy finally answered as if his question was somehow offensive.

"And what were you doing at the cove?"

"Just getting out." Amy wasn't about to tell him the real reason they went to the cove, which was to smoke pot. Marijuana was legal in Alaska, but they were still minors.


It was a Sunday, and there was a break in the rain, so they had all bundled up in their neoprenes, parkas, and ski caps and decided to paddle their kayaks out to Hidden Cove. On sunny days in summer, Sanders Glacier across the inlet would look brilliant against the sky, with blue and white ice caps like a giant slushy spilled onto a mountain valley. Tourists would come in flocks during the high season to Point Mettier. Even though, Amy knew, the real pronunciation of "Mettier" was probably the French way, rhyming with "get away," everyone butchered the name and said it in a way that sounded like "dirtier." The otters always wanted to see the glaciers in the sound and paid top dollar for cruise ships and yachts to take them up close. Amy wasn't sure why. She'd been up to a few of the glaciers, including Sanders, and had come to the conclusion that they were prettier from afar. On that Sunday in October, though, there had been dense clouds hanging low over the cove and Sanders just looked like a looming gray monster behind the mist.

Since tourist season was over and the thrum of motorboats and seagoing vessels was gone, it was pretty quiet on the water. Just the dwop dwop sound of their paddles dipping in and out, and the kittiwakes screeching overhead. Once they got to the beach, they loitered around, passed a joint, not really talking or doing anything specific. Celine hopped on a fallen log and balanced across the length of it like a high-wire act. Her sandy blond hair floated behind her in the wind, the way you see in the movies. Amy had always been envious of Celine's hair, because hers was just a dull black. She wanted to dye it platinum blue, except that her mother would probably kill her-literally. Marco was skipping rocks, or maybe he was throwing them at birds; she couldn't remember exactly.

Amy started combing the beach for mementos to add to her collection: fish skeletons and coins, jewelry, and other odds and ends left behind by careless tourists. It was about that time that she noticed something on the south side of the cove-just a little shimmer, like a Morse code of light-and headed over toward it to i...