Mei Ling was standing closest to Hal when the lowering of the tiny casket happened. The sight ripped her own heart apart but she knew that Hal had to be coming undone in ways she couldn't even imagine.
She went over to him and embraced his thin—thinner than usual—and chattering frame tightly.
"Hey," she said, running her hands up and down his back and arms to generate some heat, "you need a jacket or something, Hal? Are you cold?"
He simply shook his head. In the same beat of the moment, he said, "I don't want to live."
"What?" She prayed she hadn't heard that right.
"I don't want to live anymore. Not without her."
"Don't say stuff like that, Hal. We all need you here still."
He glanced back at the casket, now sitting almost ominously in preparation for the burial dirt.
"I told you I was cursed, Mei Ling, and Sunny suffered because of it. I'm going to kill everyone I care about."
She couldn't find it in herself to immediately dismiss his theory this time. The pattern was tragic and unfortunate yet remarkable.
"That's not true and you know it." She kissed him on his stubbly cheek. "I'm gonna go check on Dave, okay?"
She didn't want to leave him but she couldn't bear to hear him talk that way either.
As she walked past Roy, she felt compelled to stop. He was in a trance, doing battle with some unseen force within himself as he looked into the grave.
"Roy," she said, placing a hand on his shoulder, "I want to thank you for everything over the past few weeks. We might not have had even this much closure if it weren't for you and Adams."
"This isn't closure," he said, "this is failure."
"You and Adams did everything you could."
"But it wasn't enough, was it?"
"Roy…"
"I refuse to stand here and pretend like I accept this. If I have it my way, I'll make sure I find out who did this…with or without Sgt. Adams."
Mei Ling touched his shoulder again but it went unnoticed.
***
Dave glanced up at her when he noticed her approaching but didn't say anything.
"You've been quiet," she said to him.
"There's nothing to say, Mei. We're burying Sunny."
Mei Ling pursed her lips together and clasped her hand over her mouth as if she had just remembered there was something unsightly about it. He touched her arm.
"Mei, I'm sorry. You're only trying to help."
"It wasn't you. I guess it's all officially hitting me. For the last few days, we've all been mourning the news of Sunny's death but actually seeing the coffin… That means she's gone, Dave. Sunny is really gone."
Without thinking about it too much, Mei Ling turned right into the hollowness of his chest just in time to let her first real tumble of tears out since the funeral. He spent the first few seconds in a near frozen state, as if he was remembering just how to react. Finally, he loosely put an arm around her, imitating what he knew as the comforting gesture the moment required.
This caused her to suddenly retreat back to look at him.
"I'm not good with stuff like this." He quickly said like a preventative measure, just in case he was doing something wrong.
She smiled with a teacher's approval. "You're doing fine, Dave. Thanks."
She left his grasp but fell into a silence watching the gravediggers add the last few pats to the mound the coffin resided under now.
Dave shook his head like he was rejecting the images his eyes were giving him.
"Something's off. I feel like there's still pieces of Sunny's death missing."
"Maybe it bothers you that you still don't know exactly who did this."
"Perhaps…but I feel like it goes deeper than that. The attack on us that night wasn't only planned…it was well executed. Those guys knew exactly where Sunny was and how to get to her. That's the only way it happened that quickly."
"Dave, don't think about it so much. At least not right now. You may not realize it but you're mourning Sunny just like Hal is."
Dave peered over at his friend for a reminder of just how Hal was grieving. He was fighting to find something in him that would allow him to put the single blue rose in his hand onto Sunny's grave. When he did finally place it down, the action ripped open another wound in him that began to flood is face with a new coating of tears.
"No," he softly corrected her, "I'm looking for answers."
"I know. We all are and no one is going to rest until we find out who did this."
Dave nodded though he didn't look convinced that he needed anyone else's help.
Mei Ling caught Meryl approaching them in her peripheral vision. When she turned to greet her, she was surprised to see so much sorrow breaking the surface of Meryl's usual even nature. She briefly embraced Meryl before she turned to join the two of them now watching Hal.
"Poor guy," she said sympathetically, "he's truly been to Hell and back. I think making it a closed casket did more harm than good. I hope he'll be okay."
Mei Ling tried to not think about what he had said to her earlier.
"He's going to be just fine. He's got a lot of people around him that care about him. A lot of people fighting for his cause." She looked at Dave but he was too far into his own world to feel her attention on him.
Meryl narrowed her eyes in a way that suggested she was discreetly making fists. "This isn't over for the people who did this to her. I'll hunt them down myself if I have to."
"Justice will come, Meryl. Your father and his friend are taking care of things."
"Not fast enough," she mumbled.
"I really have to thank you for calling Roy the night everything happened. I'm sure I would have gotten around to it eventually but my mind was on making sure that Hal was okay."
Meryl's features scrunched slightly. "What are you talking about? I didn't call Roy the night of the attack."
This got Dave's attention focused on the girls.
"Yes you did," Mei Ling insisted, "maybe you don't remember but you calling your father is the way he found out about everything. I called you and then you called him."
"Mei, I hadn't talked to my father for months before all of this. He's been acting way strange for the past few months so I decided to just not deal with him. When you called me with the news, I immediately went to the police station."
"Strange," Dave interjected, "how so?"
"I don't know. Just strange. After I told him about my…" she stopped and glanced at Mei Ling, "problem, he became obsessed with fixing it. He had me and Johnny tested and retested over and over again. Once, even in Paris! At one point, he became convinced that if I changed my diet that I could fix it so he became obsessed with what I ate. The last straw for me was coming home and finding half the things in my refrigerator tossed out…and I hadn't even given him a key."
"But he told me that you had called him." Mei Ling continued to muse aloud.
"He lied then."
"Maybe he didn't realize what he was saying. Everyone was really upset." She turned to Dave. "Did you by any chance talk to Roy before you went to the hospital?"
Dave shook his head. "I didn't know Roy had gotten involved until Meryl visited me later on."
"I know Hal didn't call him. He was too distraught to call anyone but me." She twisted her mouth as she bit her lower lip. "This doesn't make sense. If no one called him, how in the hell did he know about what happened that night? Maybe Adams has some answers." She retrieved Adams' card from her purse and stepped off to the side away from the view of everyone to call him.
"If Roy had anything to do with this, it would certainly explain a lot." Dave said after Mei Ling wasn't within earshot anymore.
Meryl closed the gap between them and moved next to him. "Like what?"
"Like how those guys were able to come in and know their way around. He's been in our house so much that he could have easily drawn a map from memory."
"I'll be the first to admit that Roy's done some things to weird me out but you really believe he could have gone that much over the edge? Enough to…hurt Sunny?" She had side stepped saying 'kill' as if it could hurt her physically to say it.
"I don't want to believe any of what's happened in the past weeks, Meryl. I barely want to believe that Sunny's dead…but the pieces fit too perfectly."
"Guys…"
Meryl and Dave turned to face Mei Ling. Her face was bloodless and she was clumsily trying to put her cell phone away.
"I called Adams' cell phone number a few times but didn't get an answer so I called the police station. When I tried to explain to one of the officers who Adams was and the case he was working, he said there was never a missing child case for a Sunny Gurlukovich filed with them. It never went through their system."
Meryl's face nearly took the same complexion as Mei's. "What? What in the hell does that mean? Is Adams even a real cop?"
"I asked about that. He told me he had never heard of a Sgt. Adams though he admitted that it didn't mean a whole lot since they get cases where they bring in people from other precincts."
"Adams is your father's friend, Meryl," Dave reminded her, almost as if it made something in the situation her fault, "why don't you know about this guy?"
"I…I met him exactly once and it was at some party Roy was having. The guy's a total pig though and I spent a good portion of the night trying to stay away from him."
Mei Ling put her hand on Dave's shoulder and connected momentarily with him through eye contact.
"If we bring any of this up to Roy directly, he'll just deny everything," he said a bit more calmly. "So, we'll have to talk to Adams but I doubt him not picking up his phone for Mei was an accident. There's no way he'll answer a call from any of us right now."
"If we can't talk to either one of them, wouldn't that leave us even further back behind our starting point?" Mei Ling asked.
"Not necessarily." Meryl paused and tapped an index finger over her painted red lips to let her thoughts come together a little more. "I could get Roy to get in touch with Adams for us. That wouldn't be out of the ordinary. We wouldn't set off alarms with either one of them."
"Exactly," Dave said causing Meryl to smirk a little at the approval in his voice. "If we can talk to Adams, the rest will fall into place."
***
There were two courtesy knocks before Dave's door slowly cracked and Hal poked his head in.
"You have a moment?"
Dave nodded but didn't stop work on the laptop in front of him.
"I owe you an apology, Dave."
"For what?"
"Oh come on. I've been terrible to you for the past few weeks."
"It's fine. You've been through a lot."
Hal sighed in frustration. "Don't do that. I hate it when you do that."
Dave finally took his attention out of the notebook and looked up with a face that asked for an explanation.
"You pretend like your feelings mean nothing. I doubt anything I said hurt your feelings…but it didn't help them either. I've been going through this whole process like I'm the only one who misses her and I'm sorry about that." Hal leaned his weight onto the arm of the chair adjacent to Dave. "I don't even know what we're supposed to do now. Do we keep her room the way that it is like some shrine to her or will that just torture us and keep us from healing?"
"You're a lot better with all of this stuff than I am. You'll figure out the right thing to do."
Hal nearly laughed. "Yeah, I guess I am the grief expert after all."
Dave shook his head, realizing the implication of his words. "Hal, no…that's not what I meant…"
"Don't worry about it, Dave. As many times as I've been through this, I think I'm supposed to have some kind of a plan by now. A plan for how to deal…and how to let go." He looked at his friend like he was expecting an input for the last thing he had said.
Dave was silent.
Hal reached into his pocket. "I thought about what you asked me a few weeks ago, about other people who knew the safe room pass phrase." He straightened out a small piece of paper in his hand before he gave it to Dave. "According to these records, in addition to Mei Ling knowing it Roy does too. I told him a few months ago."
"Do you remember why you told him too?"
"The same reason I told Mei Ling. If something were to happen to us while Sunny was in the safe room, I wanted a few people that we all trusted to be able to get her out. We all trust Campbell so it's not that big a deal…or is it?" He added when Dave's face didn't look like it agreed with him.
"No," Dave assured him quickly, "it isn't. Thanks for the information."
"I can nearly see the wheels turning in your head. Are you going to tell me what you needed it for?"
"Only if I need to and I really hope I don't. Hey Hal," he called when he noticed him on the way to the door, "you don't have to let go. Not just yet."
He nodded but without looking like he knew what he was actually nodding to.
Dave's cell phone rang almost as soon as he was alone but he waited until he was sure he would be the only person hearing the call to answer it.
"Dave," he heard Meryl's voice call to him, "I got Roy to get in contact with Adams for us. Hal still doesn't know anything, right?"
"No. As far as I know, he's still clueless."
"Good. I don't want to give him any false hope. If Roy is cleared of having anything to do with Sunny's death, we're back at square one and I'm not sure if he can handle such a step backwards."
"I agree. Hal did unknowingly provide me with something useful, though."
"What's that?"
"Roy knows the pass phrase for the safe room. If he was on the grounds the night of the attack, he could have gone through the basement door and said the phrase to get her to come out of that room. She knew and trusted him. She wouldn't have thought twice about doing it."
She sighed into the receiver in neither agreement nor disagreement with the theory. "This is too weird. It's all hitting too close to home, Dave."
"My gut tells me it's only going to get weirder."