There. I named him. Armand Vitel, the bastard.
There had been no way to stop him. The police wouldn’t believe me. Truman would have killed him if he had known.
Instead, he ended up involved somehow in Truman’s death. And after I had nearly died, a friend of Marvella’s, a man named Smokey, had gotten involved. While I was in the hospital, Armand Vitel had died. Gang shooting they said, but something in Smokey’s eyes, something in Marvella’s stance made me think that wasn’t the entire story.
I stood under the weeping willow tree in the front yard of the house where my apartment was now, and realized I hadn’t thought that clearly about the attack and aftermath ever.
Maybe I was getting better.
I actually looked at the stairs leading up to the small porch, the tiny entry, which would not have fit a man bent on attacking a woman, and hadn’t been thinking about running through it, about getting past it because I might end up a victim, again.
I had been thinking about the attack as if it happened in the past.
It had happened in the past.
And the only person keeping the past alive was me.
I swallowed hard, squared my shoulders, and moved forward. I climbed the stairs, and felt somewhat secure, which was better than feeling like someone was about to jump me.
I unlocked the front door without looking to see if anyone was behind me, ready to push his way inside the building. Inside me.
I slid through the door, closed it, and heard the snick of the automatic lock. Then I walked up the wooden stairs to my apartment.
Halfway up, someone’s phone started ringing, insistent and loud. It wasn’t until I unlocked my own door that I realized the phone was mine.
No one called me. No one had my number.
My heart started pounding hard. All that fear I had been so proud of avoiding, filled me.
Possibilities went through my mind.
Wrong number. Or my landlord—he had the phone number. So did the phone company. The utility company.
And Pammy. I had put the phone number on my application form for the gym.
I sprinted down the narrow hallway to the kitchen, scurried across the old linoleum, dropped my lunch on the counter, and picked up the phone mid-ring.
“Yes?” I said, then realized I sounded both panicked and breathless. “Hello?”
“Um, hi.” The female voice on the other end was wobbly. “Is this…Paulette?”
I was about to say, No, Paulette is my cousin, when I remembered I had used the name Paulette when I visited Darla’s roommate, Lucy.
And I had given Lucy my number too, on that note, because I had felt guilty.
“This is Lucy Sanders,” the woman said. “You know, from the apartment. Sublet, you know, yesterday? Darla’s…”
Lucy’s voice trailed off.
“Yeah,” I said, faking enthusiasm. “Hi. I didn’t think I’d talk to you so soon.”
“Me, either.” Lucy cleared her throat. “Sorry. Didn’t think. I mean. You heard, right?”
I tensed. “No. Heard what?”
“That girl they found, you know, you heard that right? The one in Tilden Park?”
The one Pammy had mentioned? Hadn’t she said the body wasn’t unidentified? I didn’t ask Lucy, though. I had to remember that Paulette was someone else, someone a bit more timid that I was, even at my worst.
“No,” I said, rather surprised at how innocent I sounded. I had more acting chops than I ever thought. “I hadn’t heard anything. What girl?”
“They found…a body…I guess, someone—Darla’s dad, I guess—someone, anyway, first, then they, well it was a Jane Doe until, like an hour or two ago…”
Lucy’s voice wobbled again.
“Anyway,” she said, “the apartment. We’re officially available for another renter.”
I blinked, trying to process this. Was she saying that they had identified the body as Darla’s or that Darla’s father had grown scared because of the body, and decided to cancel his daughter’s lease?
“A sublet?” I asked, letting my confusion into my voice. “You talked to Darla?”
“No!” Lucy’s voice broke. “No. I’m sorry. No. She’s…that body, they identified it. I shouldn’t have called….”
My breath caught. “Are you saying that body was Darla?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “It’s only been an hour and I thought I was okay, but I’m—I thought, well, I need to call the others, but I thought if I called them and said someone was going to take the room, then they’d feel better, you know?”
God. What a position to put some stranger in. I grabbed one of the kitchen chairs and sat down.
Darla Newsome was dead, found beaten in Tilden Park. Apparently, she had been there for weeks. She had fought back, that’s what Pammy had said.
I was so tired. I couldn’t remember part of that conversation. Only the blame. Girls who fought back were automatically at fault. Hadn’t someone said that to Pammy?
“Oh,” I said, realizing that Lucy was waiting for me to respond, not just to the offer of the room, but to Darla’s death. Maybe Lucy had called me because I had shown some sympathy. Or maybe she had called because she knew I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Darla, and I would be sympathetic, but not necessarily as upset as the other roommates. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” she said, and this time her voice didn’t break. “I—God, I shouldn’t have called. It was the first thing I thought of.”
“Are you all right?” I asked, almost wishing I couldn’t. But I had to. Because I didn’t want to leave her alone with the news.
“I’m…yeah. I called my dad, and I’m going home for a few days, but I have to call the others, and I thought…”
She was repeating herself, and she clearly stopped herself when she realized it.
“I…um…I’m leaving shortly, and thought, you know…”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. God, bad news on bad news.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, after we talked, I talked to my boyfriend, and mentioned how I might have this place, and he asked me to move in, rent-free. I’m sorry. I would normally say yes, but…”
“Oh,” she said, her voice even tighter. “Oh, of course. And yeah, that sounds great. Congratulations. I didn’t know. I’m…well, I’m just a mess of stupidity right now. I’m going to go downstairs and wait for my dad to pick me up. Sorry. And if it doesn’t work out—oh, wait, that’s stupid too. Congratulations.”
And then she hung up.
I put my hand to my cheek. It was warm. I was terminally blushing. What a liar I was. I had really upset this poor girl, who was upset enough.
I hung up slowly. So the body in the park belonged to Darla Newsome. She was dead. And she had been beaten. But I didn’t know if she had been tied up. She wasn’t wrapped in a blanket or someone would have mentioned that.
I ran a hand through my hair, then glanced at the bag holding my lunch. My stomach growled. How traitorous the body was. I had just heard of a woman’s death, and my stomach responded by declaring that it hadn’t had lunch.
I took a deep breath, then wondered what else I had neglected in my haste. Had I closed the apartment door?
Adrenaline shot through me again, filled with that familiar fear. If I hadn’t, then someone could be in the apartment. I would have to search top to bottom to see if he was hiding.
I stood, clenched my fists, and unclenched them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. No one had followed me. I had locked the front door when I came in. No one else had come up the stairs—I would have heard them.
I made myself walk into the hallway. The door was closed, the lock on the doorknob pushed in. Apparently I did that sort of thing automatically.
I let out a small breath, then walked to the door, turned the deadbolt, and put on the chain.
I wouldn’t have to search the apartment after all. Then a little trickle of worry filled me. Or would I?
&nbs
p; I took another deep breath. It was a compulsion, this searching, and it wasn’t based in reality. I had come home for lunch and a nap, and now I had just gotten some upsetting news. I was coping by jumping back into that scared woman I had become.
I didn’t want to be her.
Pammy was teaching me how to banish her, or conquer her, or maybe just to live with her.
Pammy. I had to tell her.
I went back into the kitchen, grabbed the phone book, and searched for the listing for a Gym of Her Own.
I dialed, and the phone rang only twice before someone answered. A voice I didn’t recognize stated the name of the business.
“Hi,” I said, sounding even more breathless than I felt. “May I speak to Pammy?”
“She stepped out for the afternoon,” the voice said. “This is Opal. How may I help you?”
I remembered Opal from that first Sunday. She’d been warm and manipulative, the kind of woman who seemed friendly, but might be a bit too controlling in the long run.
Not someone I wanted to confide in.
“Is Eagle still there?” I asked.
“I didn’t know she had been here at all,” Opal said. “So I guess that’s a no. Would you like to leave a message?”
I thought about it, something in code—something about Darla or the park or something. And then I realized that was just cruel.
“No,” I said. “No message. Thank you.”
I hung up, and stood for a moment with my hand on the receiver. Sadly, the fact that Darla was dead wasn’t really an emergency. It was just another piece of information.
I was startling myself, with the way that my brain was responding to all of this. Like I was putting a puzzle together, rather than dealing with other people’s lives.
Besides, I think I had known about Darla’s death all along. Not consciously. Deep down. The scholarship student who had left her favorite stuffed dog in the middle of her bed. The girl who had come into money somehow, when she really shouldn’t have. The girl who had fought with her parents but who still dutifully called her mother.
That girl wouldn’t have gone silent for more than a month.
Her father, that burly man in a plaid shirt, even though he had given me the stink-eye, I had still felt empathy for him. He had seemed so distraught.
He had known too. Maybe I had known from that moment. When a man like that left his comfortable environment to find his child, humiliating himself by going door to door with flyers, he knew something was horribly, terribly wrong.
I swallowed hard. Attacks—they were like a swarm of bees, all fists and fear and sensation. Swatting did no good, fleeing was often impossible, enduring took forever, and even though the fists stopped and the fighting ended, the effects remained.
If you survived.
I leaned my forehead against the back of my hand, the receiver moving slightly under the pressure from my fingers.
That was why I had felt nothing right away. Puzzle pieces were so much easier than empathy. Than identifying with the victim.
Than remembering.
I made myself raise my head. I grabbed a plate from the cupboard and made a production of unwrapping half of my sandwich. I put the other half in the refrigerator.
Then I filled a glass from the dish drainer with water and sat down at the kitchen table with my meal.
Darla was dead. I had never met her. I didn’t know her. She had died horribly, and her death had upset her father, and Lucy, and would upset Pammy too, probably, and maybe even Eagle.
It had upset me.
But I was still alive. I needed lunch. I needed a nap. Then I needed to talk with my new friends, share this new information.
We would figure out what to do. If there was anything to do.
Anything at all.
40
Pammy
Pammy had no way of knowing if Kelly MacGivers was at Stern Hall in the middle of the afternoon. Pammy thought of calling, but calling a dorm was difficult at best. The phones were in the hallway, and someone might answer or someone might not.
Pammy had no idea if the House Ass, as the resident assistants at Stern Hall were called in her day, was even in the building during the summer. Pammy assumed so. Summer was a legitimate term, and the girls needed guidance—that was what the assistants were for, in theory. But Pammy didn’t know the House Ass’s number or even who she was.
So Pammy decided to drop in. She had a folder in one hand with half a dozen old flyers made for the self-defense classes inside. She didn’t want Kelly MacGivers to think she had been selected at random, although Pammy still hadn’t come up with a good story of how she knew about Kelly’s attack.
The entrance to Stern Hall looked no different than it had when Pammy had lived there during her freshman year. Stern had been built fourteen years before Pammy had moved in so, back then, it had been considered one of the newer dorms. Since then, dorms had sprung up on the hillside behind Stern Hall, making that part of the landscape less familiar to her. Only the eucalyptus trees in front looked the same.
That and the “modern” overhang, with the concrete walls on one side and the bricked walkway beneath. Everything in Stern was concrete, metal, and blond wood, designed in that Prairie Style that supposedly took in the landscape while keeping the interiors stark.
Pammy hadn’t hated it, but she hadn’t loved it either. She had heard, when she was living there, that Mrs. Stern had wanted the dorm to seem homey. Pammy had never been invited to Rosalie Meyer Stern’s home, but Pammy couldn’t imagine any place with lacquered concrete floors and painted concrete walls to be “homey.” Not even with the large fireplace in the living area.
As she stepped inside, she noted the familiar smell of boiled potatoes and brown gravy seeping in from the dining hall. It was summer, so no one was using the fireplace. Indeed, no one was sitting on the blond and cinnamon couches or chairs, which had to be the same ones Pammy used fourteen years before. The ugly cowhide rugs still dominated the lacquered floors and took the view away from the windows.
She shook her head slightly, then ducked into the library. No one was in there either. She glanced at the Beau Room, where, in her day, male visitors had to wait to see any women, and noted that it was empty too.
The entire dorm felt empty, which shouldn’t have surprised her, given it was the middle of the day and the middle of the summer. There were better places to study, even though the afternoon was overcast. It wasn’t that cold outside, so students could sit on benches or outside of cafes and watch the world go by.
Pammy swallowed hard, hoping her gamble would pay off. If Kelly MacGivers wasn’t in her room, then Pammy would come back down here and ask if the college students on the kitchen staff knew where she was.
Pammy went to the Stair Tower, which was her favorite part of Stern Hall. The glazed windows brought in a lot of light, and used to bring up her mood on the tough days of her very first year. She walked up the red concrete stairs to the blue second floor landing and looked at the glazed double doors, with Residents Only painted in black.
Well, she had been a resident once. Technically, then, that word still applied to her.
She shoved open the doors and almost turned down her old hallway. She had lived in a double, with Linda Kaputo. Barbara Springer had roomed right next door, with Sue Ellen Gerry. Sad to think that of the four of them, thick as thieves from the day they met, only Pammy survived.
Tears pricked her eyes. She wasn’t that old. She shouldn’t have lost three friends to violence.
That thought made her square her shoulders and pivot away from the one room that had been home for her for her first year in college. Instead she went down the hall where Kelly MacGivers lived, a hall Pammy almost never had ventured down in the past,.
As Pammy followed the numbered blond doors, she realized that Kelly had a prized single room. In Pammy’s year, the girls who had had the single rooms were either quite wealthy or socially connected, or they were upperclassmen who d
idn’t want to live off-campus. Freshman could only dream of having such privacy.
Kelly’s room was at the very end of the hall. Pammy tugged on her shirt, straightening it, clutched the folder to her chest, and knocked. The door rattled. It was slightly off plumb.
Someone let out a small shriek from inside.
The shriek made Pammy’s heart pound even though she knew all it meant was that she had startled the person inside the room.
No one responded to the knock.
Pammy brought her hand up again, about to knock a second time, then rethought that decision, and said, “Hello? Kelly MacGivers?”
Something rustled, followed by the scuffing sound of slippered feet against concrete—a sound Pammy had forgotten until now.
The door opened a half inch, and the sliver of a face with a greenish-brown eye gazed at her.
“Who are you?” Kelly MacGivers had a mid-range voice, but she pitched it deliberately low so that it had more weight.
“My name is Pamela Griffin. I used to live in Stern Hall.”
“Bully for you,” Kelly said. “If you had the room before me, I am not giving you a tour. I am accepting your apology for the keyed grooves in the closet door. Now go away.”
Pammy felt her cheeks warm. She had started wrong. She had thought the fact that she had roomed here would help her bond with Kelly. Clearly, Pammy had been wrong.
“I’m not here as a former resident,” Pammy said. “I was given your name. I’d like to talk with you in private for a few minutes.”
The door did not budge, and neither did Kelly. “Who gave you my name?”
Pammy wasn’t going to mention the admissions office. This girl was too defensive, and she actually might confront someone there.
“A woman I work with spoke to your mother,” Pammy said, deliberately implying that she had gotten Kelly’s name from her mother.
“My mother?” The words dripped with contempt. “Really?”
“Yes,” Pammy said.
“I suppose she said she was worried about me.” The contempt grew deeper.
Protectors Page 39
