All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  After about ten minutes, Daly called over to Richardson to say his update was filed. The initial version at least, he decided, wouldn’t include Kimberly’s name. After all, Daly would probably want to talk to her parents at some point. He decided it would be better not to anger them before he’d even had the chance to pitch an interview.

  HANOVER TWP. — A 15-year-old Hanover Area High School student fatally shot herself in the head early Thursday in a shooting that was captured on a viral video.

  Police say the girl, who is not being identified because of the nature of the incident, shot herself after turning on her cellphone and recording her actions on Facebook Live. Facebook removed the video shortly after it was posted on the girl’s timeline, but it continues to circulate on other websites.

  The girl’s parents discovered her in the bedroom of their home around 1:40 a.m. and immediately called 911, according to police. Medics rushed the girl to Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 2:23 a.m.

  The Luzerne County Coroner’s Office has ruled the death a suicide and does not plan to conduct an autopsy.

  Joseph McNamara, the superintendent of the Hanover Area School District, said grief counselors had been called in to help students cope with the loss of a classmate. He declined to comment about the student specifically, saying he wanted to respect the family’s privacy.

  “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family,” McNamara said. “This is an unspeakable tragedy for the entire Hanover Area community and we will do everything we can to help those in need during this trying time.”

  Short and sweet, Daly thought. Richardson gave it a quick read and got busy posting the story to the website while Daly gave Wojcik a call back to follow up on a few things. He started off getting some general information for a sidebar to the final story for the next day’s paper — an explainer on how parents can spot depression and talk to their kids about suicide.

  After a few softballs, Daly got to the real reason for his follow-up call.

  “I had a few other questions about this case,” Daly said. “For one thing, it seemed kind of strange for a teenage girl to use a gun. Don’t most females use pills or cut themselves?”

  “Usually, yes. But we do have cases of women using a firearm – especially if there have been failed attempts in the past. It’s a lot harder to go wrong with a gun than a handful of pills.”

  “Did Kimberly have a previous attempt?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, but it’s still under investigation.”

  “Right. What about what she said at the end? That stuff about being watched and not being able to stop it?”

  Wojcik hesitated, seemingly considering the best way to respond.

  “We don’t really know what to make of it,” he said.

  Daly could tell Wojcik knew more than he was saying. He decided to see if the detective would unofficially get him pointed in the right direction.

  “What about off the record?” Daly asked.

  “Off the record, a lot of times suicide victims will say and do things that don’t make sense,” Wojcik said. “I’m not saying it was the case here, but sometimes the person is under the influence and not thinking straight. Sometimes they’re just so confused or scared that they can’t get the words out. And that’s if they even bother to leave a note or say anything at all. Unfortunately, a lot of times we just never know what caused them to snap.”

  “But what she said seemed like a little more than confusion. It was almost like some kind of chant. It just seemed … out

  of place.”

  Wojcik hesitated again.

  “We are off the record, correct?” Wojcik said. “I don’t want this getting out there just yet.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’re looking into that. It was a strange thing for her to say, and it didn’t make sense. But that’s not what concerns us most.”

  “What does?” Daly asked.

  “We had a suicide last month in Kingston where a kid hanged himself in his family’s garage. There wasn’t any video in that case, but he left a note. It said the same exact thing.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Friday, March 23, 2018

  3:18 a.m.

  Daly awoke with a start, momentarily disoriented and confused about his surroundings. After taking a deep breath, he realized he was at home, alone in his own bed. In the corner, the fan he used for white noise to help him sleep continued to whir hypnotically.

  The dream again. Always unnerving, and it always ended the same.

  The dream took place in a desolate desert landscape, at a run-down motor lodge along the side of a lonely highway. For some inexplicable reason, Daly had been staying there with his wife Jessica and their three-year-old daughter Lauren.

  He met his wife years earlier in college. Although it had been years since he’d last seen the inside of a church, Daly hailed from a deeply religious family. His mother insisted on a faith-based school, so Daly agreed to study journalism at King’s College, a Catholic school in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre. He stumbled upon Jessica while on assignment for The Crown, the college’s student newspaper.

  It had been a warm spring day in May, and Daly was doing man-on-the-street interviews for a story about traveling during the upcoming Memorial Day holiday weekend. It was a story that few would read and fewer still would remember, but Daly took the assignment seriously. It just so happened that for his interview he chose the attractive woman in the short skirt who was sprawled on the lawn at Main and North streets — a place students converged, ostensibly to study, on especially spectacular spring days.

  Never a ladies’ man, Daly approached the encounter awkwardly, but somehow managed to make Jessica laugh and to walk away with her number. From the moment he met her, Daly loved her smile and the way she teased him. “Is this on the record?” she’d mocked during that first meeting. Daly tried hard not to blush as he smiled, finding himself infatuated with her golden locks and piercing hazel eyes. The mischievous, playful look she gave him during that first sophomoric encounter would stay with Daly forever.

  Now, the look had entered his nightmare.

  When it happens in the dream, Daly’s in-laws are always down by the motel pool, sipping margaritas as some crackling poolside speakers broadcast Jimmy Buffett singing “Coconut Telegraph.” Daly and his family are in their room when something terrible happens. Daly can never grasp exactly what it was, but when he comes to his senses he’s holding a silver Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver. The barrel is still warm to the touch, and Jessica’s lifeless body is lying on the bed. A maroon puddle begins expanding out from behind her head, spreading like a tie-dye sunburst across the bright white comforter.

  It’s obvious the back of Jessica’s head is mostly on the headboard and pillows, but still she continues to stare upward with that same playful look. Then Daly hears the sound of Lauren wailing in the corner. His hands shaking, he turns and tries explaining that everything will be okay even though it’s pretty damned clear everything is not.

  Daly tells Lauren to wait by the door. He looks around a moment before his gaze settles on a plastic red five-gallon can of gasoline sitting next to the door. In a panic, Daly upends the can and douses the room along with his darling wife’s corpse.

  Taking Lauren by the hand, Daly snaps a match to life and lets it fall gently to the floor.

  As he goes to pull shut the hotel door, Daly notices another young girl standing in the corner. She’s in tears and saying something he can’t quite make out. She looks familiar but he can’t quite place her. It comes to him after a long moment.

  That’s Kelly.

  Daly feels like he wants to help her, but he can’t control what’s happening. He has the sense of watching himself as he pulls the door closed, muffling the sound of the crying child.

  When the door latch clicks shut, L
auren stops crying and Jessica vanishes from Daly’s mind. He takes Lauren down to the motel pool and joins Jessica’s parents, Ed and Barbara Thompson, for a piña colada. As they sit sweating under the unrelenting desert sun, the crackling speakers blaring Jimmy Buffett are slowly drowned out by the rising, shrill sound of blaring sirens. Daly looks back toward the motel to see fire engines with flashing lights and a thick, black cloud of smoke billowing for miles into the deep blue sky.

  Still, nobody seems the faintest bit concerned that Jessica is missing.

  They continue sitting by the pool, watching Lauren splash in the cool, blue water, until the police come by asking if anyone had been staying in room 223. The guilt and shame overwhelm Daly as the memory surfaces of his beautiful wife lying in a pool of her own blood, looking eternally pitiful against the pure white bedspread.

  Without prompting, Daly breaks down in tears and begins sobbing uncontrollably.

  “I murdered my family!” he screams, holding out his wrists for the handcuffs. “I killed my family!”

  Then he wakes up.

  * * *

  Sleep was always elusive after the dream. For more than an hour, Daly lay in bed trying to drift back off until he was so worked up thinking about sleeping that he felt he would never slumber again. The sky was still dark and it was far too early for work, but Daly decided to get moving anyway. He got out of bed, hit the bathroom and padded over the hardwood floor to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Lauren wouldn’t wake up for a few hours still, but it had been a long time since she was three years old. She could manage to get to high school on her own.

  With the coffee brewing, Daly jumped in the shower, letting the hot water warm his skin in the chill of the early morning air. His waking mind had long ago learned to quickly dismiss the dream, and his thoughts turned to work.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about what Wojcik had said: that there was another case where a suicide victim used the same last words as Kimberly Foster. The problem was that Wojcik then got coy and wouldn’t give up the kid’s name. Challenge accepted, Daly thought. He decided to make it his mission to find out who it was and what else he could learn about the case.

  Daly stepped out of the shower and dressed himself, then walked quietly into Lauren’s room and looked down at her as she slept. As he watched her in peaceful slumber, he couldn’t help but feel terrified by the feeling that he was losing her to womanhood. She had grown beyond his ability to protect her, and it made him feel small and useless.

  He knelt down and placed a light kiss on her cheek, whispering for her to make sure to catch the bus. Then he tiptoed out of her room. Grabbing a Thermos of coffee, Daly walked out the front door into the cold morning and drove in darkness down the winding mountain road that took him from Shavertown to Wilkes-Barre.

  The building and parking lot were mostly deserted when he pulled in about fifteen minutes later. A few early morning bosses were still finishing up their business with the carriers, but they paid him no attention. He swiped his electronic badge to get into the building, climbed the stairs to the newsroom, and logged onto his computer. He had a few emails about tips to check out, and knew he would have to make cop checks later, but first he wanted to start his project while the newsroom was still.

  Looking around the darkened newsroom to ensure his solitude, Daly decided to get some music going. He turned up his laptop speakers and opened Amazon Music, clicking on a playlist featuring his latest obsession.

  As a child of the 1980s, Daly had grown up listening to bands like Genesis and Dire Straits on MTV. One day, he heard the Ramones playing “Blitzkrieg Bop” and had his eyes opened to a whole new world. Punk rock’s energy awakened an anti-authoritarian streak inside him, and bands like the Dead Kennedys and the Descendents became the gospel of a confused and rebellious teenage existence.

  His aversion to authority ultimately brought him to the field of journalism. As a young student, Daly had been intrigued in his civics class to learn about the First Amendment. He marveled that the bedrock of America was a law saying the government couldn’t tell him what to say or write. As he matured, the thought of exposing injustices and abuses of power — knowing the people in authority would be powerless to stop him — helped solidify his choice of careers.

  Now well into middle age, Daly still had a dislike for authority, but his taste in music had shifted. When Jessica departed, Daly set aside his punk rock records and took up the blues. On its surface, the music seemed old-fashioned and tame, but something about the melancholy riffs and soulful crooning appealed to his subversive streak. Bessie Smith’s mournful lamentations in “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” were just what he needed on those lonely mornings after the dream.

  As the opening notes of the trumpet kicked in, Daly clicked open the Observer’s digital archive to begin his search. He didn’t have much to go on, but he had enough that he figured the search should be pretty easy. Wojcik had said the death took place in February and that it was a kid. A search of the obituaries for the previous month returned a few hundred hits, but most of them could be dismissed at a glance based on age. Daly weeded those out and started up a list of the young deaths. Even though Wojcik had used the word “kid,” Daly figured it was possible he was still talking about a young adult, so he included everyone under thirty.

  When he finished, he had reduced the possible cases to only four names. And he remembered previously checking on each of them. The obits clerk was pretty good about passing along death notices for the young dead, in case a murder or fatal car crash had fallen beneath the radar. One of them was an infant whose death was ruled accidental, and another was a twenty-two-year-old cocaine dealer who had been shot at a drug house in the Heights. For the others, Daly had been told the cause and manner of death was still pending, but that they did not appear to be suspicious.

  One of them deaths was a twenty-five-year-old man whose obituary said he “died suddenly” at home, which Daly knew is often a euphemism for a drug overdose. Combined with the age of the departed, Daly decided the man was probably not the one he sought. Instead, he put his money on the fourth body: Justin Gonzalez, a sixteen-year-old junior at Wyoming Valley West Senior High School. The obituary for Gonzalez said he had died “unexpectedly” on February tenth, a Saturday.

  Daly printed out the obituary and ran Gonzalez’s name through the archive, getting a few hits for the school honor roll, but nothing substantial. He also plugged the name into the online court record database. Juvenile criminal cases are usually confidential in Pennsylvania, so Daly didn’t expect to find much, but it was always possible someone could have slipped up and put something on the public docket. No dice on Gonzalez, though – either he was clean or everything was hidden. Lastly, Daly ran the name through Facebook and found Gonzalez’s page, which had been inundated with “RIPs” and other homages for a few days after his death. Since then, it had gone mostly dormant.

  The profile picture featured the typical attitude and bluster of a high school kid. The kid in the picture mugged for the camera in a bathroom mirror selfie with a baseball cap turned sideways and pants that were in sore need of a belt. Daly saved the picture to his computer, knowing people have the tendency to ratchet up the privacy settings on social media pages as soon as they learn a reporter is sniffing around.

  There wasn’t much to go on — just a hunch based on the kid’s age — but Daly decided to give it a try. He looked up the address, jumped into his car and headed over the Market Street Bridge to Kingston. After throwing the car into park outside the Gonzalez family’s home, Daly stuck a slim reporter’s notepad in his back pocket. If he were going to get a comment from a suspect, he would have kept it out, ready to write down whatever the person blurted out before the inevitable slam of the door. But for now, Daly just wanted to find out what the story was. If there even was a story.

  Walking to the door, prepared to ask a barrage of questi
ons about the family’s late son’s unexpected death, Daly wondered what the reaction might be. In such situations, some people will open right up, wanting their loved one to be remembered. Others will answer a few questions reluctantly. Others still will slam the door in a reporter’s face — sometimes hurling threats to emphasize their point.

  Daly rang the bell to the home, a well-maintained white and green foursquare house typical of coal country. After a moment, a woman in her early forties peeked out from behind a curtain on the front window, eyeing Daly suspiciously.

  “I’m with the Observer,” he said, waving a laminated press pass.

  The lace curtain fluttered closed and a moment later Daly heard the clink of a door chain lock sliding open.

  “Yes?” she asked through the glass of the closed storm door.

  “Hi. I’m Erik Daly. I was wondering if I could talk to you about Justin.”

  The woman wavered ever so slightly, as though a sudden gust of wind had pushed her back on her heels. Her tired eyes watered for an instant. She glanced down the street, then met Daly’s gaze.

  “Why do you want to talk about that?” she asked.

  “Well, I was looking into a suicide we recently had — you might have heard about the girl from Hanover Area,” he said. The woman returned a slight nod. “Well, I was talking to the police about that case. There were a few strange things that we didn’t put into the story, things I’m trying to look into now. The reason I’m here is that I wanted to talk about some similarities between her death and Justin’s suicide.”

  Daly was going out on a limb here, using an old reporter’s trick. He didn’t really know that Justin committed suicide. But if he acted like he did, the woman would either confirm or deny it.

  “Suicide?” she asked, growing indignant. “My son didn’t commit suicide. My son was murdered.”