All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  CHAPTER 3

  Friday, March 23, 2018

  9:06 a.m.

  The living room of the Gonzalez home was tidy and showed some money. Sunlight from a large bay window glittered through the translucent white curtains, highlighting a large brown leather couch underneath. The couch faced a pair of reclining chairs, separated by a cherry coffee table topped with scrapbooks and family photo albums. Daly noticed that the room was bereft of a television set; apparently, this was the place Celeste Gonzalez used to entertain guests, relegating the tube to another corner of the house. Looming over the room was a large golden crucifix, displayed on a wall next to a mahogany grandfather clock that ticked away the seconds to eternity.

  Celeste sat down on the edge at one end of the couch as Daly lowered himself to the other.

  “So the police never announced Justin’s death as a homicide,” Daly began. “What makes you say that?”

  “For one thing, I know my son. He was a good boy, went to church every Sunday. He made the honor roll most semesters. He had plenty of friends and didn’t get picked on, at least that I know about. There’s no reason he would have done that to himself.”

  “What exactly happened to him?” Daly asked.

  “I really would rather not talk about it,” she said.

  “I understand. But it could really help me try to figure out what happened here,” Daly said.

  “I don’t know,” Celeste said. “I guess I can tell you. It happened the night of February ninth. My husband and I went out to see a movie that night — the Academy Awards were coming up and we wanted to see ‘The Shape of Water’ because it was nominated for Best Picture. We got home around 11 o’clock and when I came upstairs, Justin was in his room, messing with his laptop. I went in and gave him a kiss on the cheek and told him not to stay up too late. He was always up on the computer or playing that Xbox until all hours if I didn’t stop him. He said okay and that he loved me. That was the last thing that he ever said to me: ‘I love you.’”

  Celeste paused as she choked up. Daly waited in silence, trying to appear understanding. He knew that with a good pause, most sources will start talking again to fill the void — sometimes saying things he wouldn’t have thought to ask.

  “We found him early the next morning,” Celeste continued after dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex. “My husband, Jerry, woke up around four o’clock in the morning to go to the bathroom. He checked on Justin because he could see a light shining beneath the crack of the bedroom door. He thought Justin was still up playing “Call of Duty” or something. When he opened the door, there was nobody there. Jerry looked around the house for a few minutes to make sure Justin wasn’t in the den watching TV or something. When he couldn’t find him, he came back up and got me.

  “At first I couldn’t believe it. Justin was never the kind of boy who would sneak off during the night. I asked Jerry if he was sure Justin wasn’t down in the basement, but he said he was sure. As I reached for the phone on my nightstand to call the police, something outside the window caught my eye. Down in the yard, I could see a light shining in the garage. I hung up the phone and told Jerry. We went down together.”

  Here again, Celeste took a long pause, mustering the courage to tell a newspaper reporter about what must have been the most horrifying sight she’d ever beheld.

  “He was hanging from one of the joists,” she said. “There was a noose made out of a rope that had been in the garage. I can still see him, gently twisting in the air. There was an old folding chair tipped over under his feet. His eyes were still partially open. It looked like he was watching us.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Daly said, pausing again so she could compose herself. “Was there any kind of a note left behind?”

  “There was something pinned to his shirt. I don’t know if you would call it a note. It was more of a memo. Or a poem or something.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Celeste looked up, startled as if she had suddenly realized to whom she was speaking.

  “I don’t have it. The police took it,” she said morosely.

  “Do you remember what it said? Anything at all?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Something about being watched. It didn’t really make any sense.”

  “Did it end with: ‘Nothing can make it stop’?”

  “How did you know that?” Celeste asked suspiciously.

  “The girl who killed herself, Kimberly Foster, used the same phrase. The one from Hanover Area.”

  “You see?” Celeste said, pointing with wide eyes. “I told you Justin didn’t kill himself. How else do you explain them saying the same thing?”

  “It is strange, I’ll give you that. But we know for a fact that Kimberly killed herself because she recorded it. So I think it’s safe to say it could be something besides murder. At this point we don’t even know what the words mean or where they came from. It could be from a book or movie or something,” Daly said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I want to know how Justin and Kimberly were connected — how they knew to use the same phrase. Are you sure they didn’t know each other?”

  “Not a chance. Justin didn’t know anyone from Hanover Area. And we kept pretty close tabs on his Facebook page. I don’t remember any Kimberly Foster on there.”

  “All right. Well, I’m going to help you look into this if you don’t mind. Something strange is going on, and I’d like to find out what. Do you mind if I get a good number for you so I can call next time?”

  After exchanging digits with Celeste, Daly got up off the couch and started walking to the front door, thanking her for talking to him at such a difficult time. As he was about to leave, he thought of something else.

  “One more question: Why did you think Justin was murdered before you learned about the similarities in the last words?” he asked.

  “His hands.” Celeste said. “His hands were cuffed behind his back.”

  * * *

  Back in the newsroom, Daly sat down at his desk and logged back onto his computer. He clicked on the Chrome web browser and went online, intent on trying to figure out the significance of the words Kimberly Foster had last spoken — the same words that were pinned to Justin Gonzalez’s shirt. He googled the phrase, expecting to get results for a song lyric or an obscure passage from a book.

  Instead, he got nothing. No poems, no quotes from a movie. No indication that anyone else had ever uttered that exact combination of words before. It just didn’t seem to make sense. How could two people who appeared to be complete strangers each be connected to the same esoteric phrase? There has to be a connection, Daly thought. There’s someone else.

  The conversation with Celeste Gonzalez still fresh in his mind, Daly decided to give Phil Wojcik another call. By the clipped answers he got, Daly could tell Wojcik was hedging, not revealing everything he knew or thought about the cases. But Wojcik was adamant that Justin Gonzalez died by his own hand.

  “A lot of times, the family just doesn’t want to believe it,” Wojcik said. “They think their son was a good kid, not the type of person who would commit suicide. Even in blatantly obvious cases of suicide, the families are often in denial. They don’t want to admit they missed the warning signs. They don’t want to think that they could have intervened if they’d noticed a little sooner. Because then they would start to think it was somehow their fault.”

  Still skeptical, Daly asked how Wojcik knew for a fact that Justin killed himself. For one thing, Wojcik said, there was no sign of forced entry to the home or any indication that someone else had been there. The note was also in Justin’s handwriting, he said. When he didn’t mention the handcuffs, Daly asked the question.

  “The only prints we got from the handcuffs were Justin’s,” Wojcik said. “We checked his computer and saw that he ordered them online himself two weeks before he died. Sometimes when people decide to hang t
hemselves, they’ll take steps to make sure they can’t change their minds after they get started.”

  Daly ended the call and sat thinking for a minute. Two suicides by two people who apparently didn’t know each other, connected by a strange set of final words that didn’t make sense. Daly decided he next needed to talk to Kimberly’s family. That would probably be more difficult because her death was still so recent and so public. No doubt reporters from the Other Paper and the local TV stations had been at their doorstep already.

  Daly decided to give the family the weekend to digest what had happened before he came knocking. Besides, he had some other work to get to: over on Carey Avenue, someone had been hacked with a machete overnight, and he had to cover a sentencing later in the afternoon for a drunken driver who ran down a ninety-three year old great-grandmother who had been crossing the street.

  Never a dull moment, Daly thought.

  * * *

  That night, Daly sat across a red and white-checkered tablecloth from Lauren at their favorite restaurant, Leopold’s Pizzeria. The restaurant had burgundy mosaic-tiled walls covered with framed mirrors, black-and-white photographs, and nineteenth-century advertisements. To one side of the room, a bartender wearing a shirt and tie and a towel slung across his shoulder poured martinis behind a wide marble-topped bar lined with red and gold stools. The stools sat mostly empty for the time-being, but as the night wore on that would change.

  At seventeen years old, Lauren was turning into a beautiful woman, with piercing green eyes and flowing golden hair that reminded Daly of her mother. Just like her mother, she had a fierce independent streak, and had for several weeks now been at odds with Daly over her plans for college. Lauren dreamed of going to Stanford University for pre-law. Daly knew she had the grades for it. She had always done well in school and had scored a fifteen hundred on her SAT.

  Daly acknowledged she had a decent chance at being accepted, but counseled Lauren to go to Penn State instead. For one thing, he shuddered to think about how he would afford Stanford on his meager reporter’s salary. His primary objection, however, was that it was on the other side of the country. Which, incidentally, was one of the things Lauren liked best about it.

  Daly knew he was being selfish in trying to keep her nearby. He registered it but it didn’t change how he felt. He just didn’t want to be alone. Lauren could get a good education at Penn State or any one of dozens of schools that would be within driving distance for him – most of which would be considerably cheaper than Stanford.

  So around they went, debating the merits of each other’s visions until they decided they weren’t going to come to an agreement and the conversation fell flat. Lauren poked at her salad and asked Daly how work had been.

  “It was all right. I had the sentencing for Terry Fitzgerald. That vehicular homicide case,” Daly said.

  “How’d that go?” Lauren asked.

  “He got hammered,” Daly said. “He offered a half-assed apology and then started talking about how it didn’t make sense that he was probably going to go to prison for such a long time when the person he killed was ninety-three and would probably have died soon anyway. I understood where he was coming from, but your sentencing hearing is not the place to wax philosophical on the justice system. The judge gave him up to twenty years in prison.”

  “Wow. When I become a lawyer, I’ll make sure my clients keep their mouths shut,” Lauren said, laughing her infectious laugh.

  “That’s right. If they’re not sorry, just tell them to lie to the judge’s face, if they know what’s good for them,” Daly said, taking a long sip from a Susquehanna Brewing Co. lager.

  “Hey, I wanted to ask why you got up so early this morning,” Lauren said after a short pause. “I thought you were supposed to be going in later.”

  “I was, but I couldn’t sleep,” Daly said. “You know how I get when I wake up in the middle of the night. I start thinking about stuff and get so worked up I can’t fall back asleep. The more I think about it, the worse it gets.”

  “You had the dream again, didn’t you?” Lauren asked.

  Daly paused. He had told his daughter about having a terrible dream about her mother, but he had never discussed exactly what happened in it. Talking about it made him feel dirty and embarrassed.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Lauren said, watching her father’s gaze shift to the pizza crust on his plate. Daly sat for a moment in silence before reaching for his glass.

  “I know,” he said, gulping down the rest of his beer.

  CHAPTER 4

  Monday, March 26, 2018

  11:35 a.m.

  As Daly stepped into the newsroom, he saw John Richardson hunched over in front of his screen scrolling through the news budget. Daly could tell he was already getting to work planning next Sunday’s edition. The Sunday paper was the best-selling edition of the week and brought in the most advertising, so naturally Richardson was under the most pressure to fill it with compelling coverage — coverage that would stand out from the front page of the Other Paper.

  Unfortunately, the added pressure on Richardson resulted in added pressure on the reporting staff. In the hyper-competitive environment of the newspaper war, reporters often responded by churning out lengthy reports about scheduling updates or mundane procedural explainers. Reporters and editors also often felt pressure to simply be the first with a story — even if the story was not quite ready for prime time.

  As soon as Richardson motioned for Daly to come talk, Daly could tell this was going to be one such moment.

  “Look, I know we need a lead Sunday story, but this isn’t ready yet,” Daly said. “We don’t even know what we have. All we know is that two kids killed themselves and had the same last words. What would that story even say?”

  “It’s a mystery,” Richardson agreed. “That’s exactly what will make people read it. We’ve got a strange set of last words tying what is probably the most public suicide we’ve ever had to the death of another teenager a little more than a month earlier. Maybe they both read the same obscure passage or saw the same shitty B-movie last Halloween. Or maybe they both watched some kind of suicide challenge video. Hell, it could just be a coincidence. No matter what, people will want to know what happened here. We need a follow-up to try and explain why Kimberly did what she did.”

  “I get that, but if we do this story now all we’re going to do is tip off the Other Paper so they can start chasing it too,” Daly said. “I don’t think anyone else knows about this angle yet. If we hold off a little longer, we can keep the exclusive for when we know exactly what’s going on. I can still write it up as a mystery. But at least we’ll have some answers then.”

  “Well, we need a Sunday story,” Richardson said, looking away and shaking his head. “I’m not promising anything. Keep reporting it and see what you get. I’ll see if we can find something else for the weekend. But if we come up short by Thursday, this is going to be it.”

  Flustered, Daly walked back to his desk. This could be a great story if told right, but now it was in danger of being revealed before its time — serving no purpose other than to tip off the competition. He put the thought out of his mind for the time being and got to work looking up Kimberly Foster’s family.

  A check of the White Pages website turned up a Jack and Sarah Foster listed at an address on Lee Park Avenue in Hanover Township. It was the only listing for that name on that street. The parents, Daly thought. He slipped a notebook in his back pocket, grabbed his coat, and headed to the door.

  Daly pulled up to the house about fifteen minutes later, finding a group of cars parked out front. It appeared that the grieving family had company. It wasn’t an ideal situation – Daly knew people were more likely to talk when approached alone or in small groups. A larger group increased the chances that someone would object to a reporter’s prying questions.
It could also embolden the subject to decline an interview the person might otherwise have gone along with. But Daly knew it wasn’t a certainty. Some people prefer privacy. Others simply want their story told.

  As Daly climbed the warped wooden steps to a home that was clearly over a century old, he could hear talking behind the peeling painted shingles. He rapped lightly on the door and a woman dressed in black answered, her eyes red and puffy from crying.

  When their gazes met, Daly immediately knew two things. First, he recognized the woman from the video as Sarah Foster. Second, his presence on the doorstep was a mistake.

  “Yes?” Sarah Foster asked.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. I’m Erik Daly with the Observer. I just wanted to see if I could talk to you about Kimberly.”

  Sarah’s eyes narrowed, her gaze turning to steel.

  “No comment,” she said.

  Hearing the exchange, her husband then came to the door.

  “What do you want?” Jack Foster asked coldly.

  “I just wanted to see if I could talk to you about your daughter,” Daly said.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than harass us? Get the hell off my porch before I call the cops,” Jack said, slamming the door shut.

  Daly turned back to his car, feeling stupid for imposing. He climbed into the driver’s seat and sat staring blankly at the wheel for a long minute wondering how to proceed. He needed to talk to the Fosters to learn more about the cryptic message Kimberly had left. They obviously didn’t want to cooperate. But they also almost certainly didn’t know about Justin Gonzalez and the identical words he left as his parting message to the world. Daly wasn’t much of a gambler, but he would be willing to bet that Jack and Sarah Foster would be very much interested in that information. He decided to give them a few more days to digest the tragedy and let things settle before he returned. When he did, he would be ready.