The Lookalike-Excerpt

Prologue

The average human holds eight to ten pints of blood. Until you see it with your own eyeballs, eight to ten pints means nothing. There’s no actual way to measure what it looks like. A night on the town, maybe. Belly up to the bar, pounding back Guinness until you can’t see straight. That sort of thing.

                  But real, actual blood, pooled and dark and smelling like copper…that shit enthralls. Infuses a person with fear or dread. In some cases, even excitement.

 I take pictures and do it old school, with a disposable camera. I’m not stupid enough to leave digital evidence and I sure as hell don’t wait for them to develop because there’s no time for self-indulgence.  That will come later when this is done and I’m alone. When the shadows hide all but my secrets. The photos get shoved into my pocket and I get to work. 

                  The party will be over soon.  

Chapter one

Kristen

                  Nova Kennedy vanished from a party on the Cape the second weekend in May. She was beautiful with big blue eyes, and long wavy hair the color of aged tobacco. She had the kind of smile and cheekbones that looked good on social media, and the following to back it up. Five hundred thousand on Insta and twice that on TikTok.

                  At twenty-five she was on a trajectory any girl would want and was too young to be dead. Too pretty to be nothing. To not exist anymore. Because of that beauty and privilege her face was everywhere. In particular, one photo of Nova wearing a cream-colored, low-cut dress that barely covered her nipples, holding a red solo cup in one hand, while a cigarette dangled from the other. There was also the high school grad photo, taken as she gave her valedictorian speech. Or the action shot that showed her hacking away at an opponent during a field hockey game. 

                  In all of them her appetite for life was undeniable and it made her disappearance and presumed murder all the more interesting. She was talked about endlessly on social media—there were at least fifty Facebook groups dedicated to finding her killer as well as podcast and hundreds of reddit threads. 

                  The fact that her body hadn’t been found only added to the mystery. It meant folks could make up shit. Construct their own narrative. But really, the facts were simple. There was a party on the Cape, she had an argument with her boyfriend, and then she disappeared. There was a supposed murder scene and blood and maybe some other evidence, but that was all speculation or leaked bits of information, because the police were tight-lipped. The family was prominent after all and I, like most people, assumed information was being withheld not just for the investigation, but because they were Kennedys.

                  Initially the police had been at the Kennedy estate for days. “We’re doing everything we can to find her.” That, a direct quote from a detective Wallis who’d looked straight into the camera and made no effort to hide his disgust. “You guys aren’t making it easy.”

They combed the woods that blanketed the property. Searched the coast. Their house. The neighboring homes. They questioned family members and the guests who’d come to eat lobster and drink champagne. Paid extra special attention to the boyfriend. Forensics did their part and collected what they could, but by the time the family realized Nova had disappeared it was hours later and it had rained, which meant if there were evidence of a crime committed most of it was gone save for a few small bits of blood and one strand of hair found out in the woods. Both of which had been confirmed through DNA testing, belonged to Nova. It was suggested that the blood and hair could have been left behind earlier. Days. Weeks even. The Kennedys were known to frequent the woods and perhaps she’d gone for a hike and cut herself.

                  There was no note. Nothing to implicate she’d up and left on her own. She simply vanished. 

                  It was one hell of a mystery and made the front pages of every newspaper in the US and beyond for weeks. Friends insisted she wouldn’t leave without a word, while the family remained silent. "No comment," was the official statement. 

Where are you Nova? It was a headline seen over and over. But with no new leads and as aforementioned, no body, there were whispers the police weren’t certain a crime had even been committed. After weeks with no real evidence, they scaled back and though the investigation was still open, some people believed it might never be solved. Someone had committed the perfect crime. 

                  I suppose if we didn’t look so much alike I would have lost interest in Nova Kennedy. Moved on to the next big thing that flooded social media. It’s what our generation is known for, isn’t it?  We consume and then throw away. But our resemblance was hard to ignore. Plus, we were practically the same age. I turned twenty-five in June. She was six months older. Her eyes are a darker blue than mine, and if it weren’t for the small mole near her right temple, we could be twins. Identical twins. It’s fucking weird. 

                  Other than the physical stuff we have zero in common. She grew up in Beacon Hill, a fancy part of Boston, had the big summer house on the Cape, while I was born in Beau Chance, Louisiana; a small town that has one bar, one Piggly Wiggly, and more churches than it deserves. Nova went to an Ivy League school, Yale, while I deferred college because my mom got sick. I looked after her for four years, but she died anyway and I’m still here. Stuck in a town I should have left a long time ago. But Beau Chance has long fingers that dig in deep and don’t let go. And those fingers have nails that are sharp. They slice through dreams and shred them into little bits until there’s nothing left. With no dreams, a person settles. 

So, there I was, putting in thirty-five hours a week at the Piggly, smoking dope out back during my break, sleeping in the bedroom I’d had since before I could remember, and screwing Noah Beach, a local guy with no money, no future, but the kind of face that would make any girl cry. He’s that beautiful. I ignored the other stuff because of that face, but after a while even his gorgeous eyes and strong chin didn’t do it for me.

                  I hated pretty much everything about my life.

Then Nova went missing and the minute that girl’s picture hit the news things changed. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but there was a subtle shift. Mr. Barker, my boss at the Piggly Wiggly called me into his office, convinced that the Kennedys were some rich relations we’d never told anyone about.

“You look just like her,” he’d said.

“Who?”

“This Nova Kennedy that they think got herself killed.”

“Kennedy? Like JFK?” I’d asked, clearly confused. 

“No, not those Kennedys.” 

He turned his laptop around and, hand to God, it was like looking in a mirror. There were a few differences of course. A) the mole I didn’t have B) my hair was currently a faded shade of pink with the ends dipped in black and C) my makeup wasn’t that dewy fresh-faced stuff everyone is chasing these days. I like heavy liner, pink cheeks and bright lipstick. 

I would have rocked the nineties. Would have been that girl who looked like someone famous in that band that sang songs of despair and indulgence. I would have worn plaid and ripped jeans and maybe cut myself.

“Can you see it?” Mr. Barker said, staring at the picture of Nova in her lowcut dress, before glancing my way. His eyes lingered on my chest like he was comparing our boobs. “You should change your hair.”

“You should get a life,” I muttered. Asshole.

So, I look like some random girl who died. Whatever. 

But, like everyone else in the USA, I got caught up in all the questions. The need to know. I read everything about her family. Her boyfriend. Her milestones. I followed the official investigation as well as the unofficial ones online. I spent all my free time learning everything there was to know about Nova Lynn Kennedy.

I knew that she’d graduated with a law degree but hadn’t taken the bar. That meant she was smart. She had a bit of a cocaine problem (allegedly) and there were rumors about an abortion the previous year. Her family was stupid rich. The dad was some kind of tech wizard who’d made a mint in Silicon Valley when it counted, and her mother was a descendent of some European aristocratic family. She had the pedigree but not the money. Though I guess that didn’t matter on account of the tech wizard hubby.

                  Nova had a brother, Benjamin (though everyone calls him Benji) who is three years older than her, a sister Bea who is two years younger and still in college, and a cousin, Franklin, who’d come to live with them when his parents were killed in a train derailment in Switzerland. He has one blue eye and one hazel, likes to post pictures of himself with dead animals, and seems like a bona fide weirdo. 

Her boyfriend, Axel was some surfer dude from California she’d met the year before when she’d gone to LA to mingle with influencers and movie stars. He’d given up sun, sand and surf for her. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was that together, they looked great online and he got caught up in the visual of a perfect couple. Of what they projected. Success and beauty and money. Or maybe it was because she was a Kennedy. Even though she wasn’t one of those Kennedys. 

                  About a month after Nova was tossed off the edge of the Cape, again, allegedly, I changed my hair. It cost a fucking fortune, and I had to go to New Orleans to get it done, but it was worth it. Change is good, I thought.

                  Over the next few weeks as she slowly faded from the news I morphed into a carbon copy of what she’d been. She was a project I tackled with the kind of tenacity I used to have, back when I still had dreams. It wasn’t just my hair and makeup. Sometimes, for fun, I’d drop my Cajun accent, watch myself in the mirror and talk. I read an entire book doing this. The book was boring, but I liked watching myself. I studied all of her social media posts, especially the videos. She laughed a lot. A big open kind of thing that got attention. She pursed her lips when she was thinking, tossed her head a certain way because it gave maximum hair movement. She posted thirst traps that were definitely not safe for work. 

                  Her life was big and glamorous and fast and busy. The girl had no money issues.  A handsome boyfriend. Endless vacations. School accolades. A condo in Beacon Hill. All of it, posted to her socials for the world to see. And comment on. And like. She had everything anyone could want until she didn’t. Until someone clipped her wings when she was about to fly.

 I was sad for her. More than sad, really. I mean, at our age, who’s ready to close their eyes forever? Maybe it hit harder because I saw myself when I looked at her photos. Maybe I felt a kinship with her family because I knew what they were going through. One moment she was there, at that party, living life and the next she was gone. 

  My best friend, Tawny, thought it was the boyfriend. Even though he was hot. Maybe because he was hot. 

                  I thought it might be the weird cousin. Or maybe her brother. There wasn’t much about him online (not current stuff anyway) though in one of the earlier news reports I’d read, a source had hinted at sibling unrest.

                  That last night before Tawny left town for good to start a life with her boyfriend in Texas, we headed to the lake with some weed and a bottle of JD. We sat under the stars and contemplated all the mistakes we’d made. Tawny regretted the night she’d slept with Mick Davies, her married neighbor.  I was depressed that I still lived in Beau Chance. 

 I stared up at a sky full of diamonds and wondered what Nova would be doing if she were still alive. Traveling, was my guess. Having hot sex with her yummy boyfriend and eating gelato in Florence and posting it all over her social media accounts.

                  “Can you imagine what her family would say if you showed up at their door?”

                  I sat up, more than a little drunk, and looked at my best friend. “What?”

                  “If you walked into their house. What would they say?”

                  I scoffed at the idea. “They’d probably call the cops.”

                  “I don’t know,” Tawny said, blowing smoke in my face. “You’d fool me.”

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