Winter (A Four Seasons Novel)

by Rae, Nikita

  “Morgan doesn’t need rehab,” I say, clenching my fists.

  Luke doesn’t look at me. He swigs his coffee and sighs. I’m on the verge of repeating myself when the elevator doors ding open and a man and a woman with panicked expressions burst into the corridor. I know in an instant they’re Morgan’s parents; the woman’s auburn hair is a dead giveaway. Luke starts to stand but I hold my hand out. I definitely don’t want to be the one to tell them about their daughter, but they deserve to hear the news from someone who knows her. I can at least do that.

  TURNS OUT I don’t know Morgan as well as I’d thought. Her parents aren’t shocked when I tell them she OD’d, and they don’t believe for a second that she was spiked. Morgan has landed herself in hospital twice before through drugs. TWICE. She’s struggled with cocaine and pills since her senior year, and her mom and dad packed her off to Seabrook House in New Jersey for three months. They only let her come away to college this far out of state because she maintains regular appointments with her doctors there, and they apparently know what kind of behavior to watch out for.

  Well, her doctors can’t have been doing their job. And I haven’t been the only one keeping secrets. The difference is Morgan knows all of mine, or most of them anyway, and I’ve trusted her. She hasn’t trusted me.

  Luke drives me back to SU after Mr. and Mrs. Kepler start shouting at the already harassed nurse in the ICU; there’s no way I wanted to go in and see Morgan while her parents were there and her mom was crying so hard. I’ll go back later during visiting hours. Mad isn’t even close to describing how angry I am at Morgan, but she still needs a friend right now. When she’s out of hospital and capable of standing on her own two feet, that’s when I’ll tear her a new one.

  “I’d offer to go grab you some breakfast,” Luke says as he unclips his seatbelt, “but I had a hell of a shift and I’m gonna pass out any second now. Can you come by my apartment later? I’m sure there’s some things you’d like to look at.”

  I swivel in my seat. “So you’ve got it? You’ve really got the Wyoming Ripper file?”

  Luke gives me a small nod. “It’s a copy, obviously. My old partner, Chloe, she scanned everything and emailed it through for me.” Reality suddenly hits me—that the file that could condemn my father as a serial killer, is within Luke’s possession. Can I do it? Can I really open up that file and rifle through it? I guess I don’t really have a choice. “It won’t be able to come by until later. Is that okay?”

  Luke reaches across and unfastens my seatbelt, his knee pressing up against mine. I shift uncomfortably and stare at him. He seems engrossed by the way I’ve gripped my hands tight in my lap. His forehead creases a little when he looks up at me. “No problem. I’m off for the next three days so it doesn’t matter what time. Call me, though. I’d prefer to come and get you if it’s late.”

  ******

  “What the hell were you thinking, Morgan?” Her skin is even paler than usual, her eyes are bloodshot. She’s so weak she can barely sit up without help, and even then it seems like a lot of work.

  “It’s not like I did this on purpose,” she croaks.

  “Didn’t you?” Mrs. Kepler snaps, stuffing her used tissue up the sleeve of her cardigan. Why people do that I can never work out. It’s so gross. “People are beginning to wonder if this was a cry for help, Morgan. The doctors have already explained that to us. Addicts use these events as a way of getting attention.”

  “I don’t need help, Mom!” Morgan yells, suddenly more awake than she was a second ago.

  “Oh yes you do, young lady. And you’re going to get it. You’re going back to Seabrook. My daughter is not going to end up dead in some seedy—”

  “I can’t go back to Seabrook, I have school!”

  “And what use is school to a dead person, Morgan Marie? If you’re dead, then it won’t matter whether you graduated college or not. You’re only a freshman. You can go back to SU next year when you’re fit and healthy.”

  The look on Morgan’s face is distraught. I want to comfort her but that would feel weird with her mom staring at me like I’m intruding on a private family moment. I probably am. I twist the leather strap of my purse nervously and make to get up.

  “Don’t leave, Ave, please. Mom, can you give us a little while to talk?”

  Mrs. Kepler’s severe expression deepens. “I’m not letting you out of my sight, kiddo. Who knows what you’ll get up to while I’m gone. If this is the only way you’ll—”

  “Mom!”

  “No, Morgan. I’m sorry. You can’t be trusted.”

  Morgan’s face turns bright red, something I’d never seen before. She bunches up her bed sheet in her fists and squeezes, her whole body locked tight. “Mom. Get the fuck out of my room right now. I want to talk to my friend. You can come back in when she leaves.”

  Mrs. Kepler flinches back. Her lower lip wobbles like she might burst into tears. I feel sorry for the poor woman; she must be worried out of her mind. She gets to her feet and slings her woolen trench coat over her arm, trying to appear unflustered. Her eyes are wet with tears when she looks at me. “I want to thank you for waiting here all of last night, Miss. Patterson, but I also want you to know that I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any of Morgan’s friends, seeing as it’s likely one of you gave her that dirty pill. In the future I won’t be leaving Morgan’s side, and if you want to come and visit her again, I’m going to have to ask that you don’t bring a bag with you into the room.”

  She swings around and slams the door behind her as she storms out, blowing over a get well soon card that must have come from someone on campus. My jaw hangs open. Morgan’s mom just accused me of potentially supplying her drug addicted daughter with pills. I feel like laughing, it’s that absurd. Me!

  Morgan cringes and falls back against her pillows. “I’m sorry. That was—”

  “Totally okay,” I tell her. “She’s worried about you.”

  “She’s always blowing things out of proportion.”

  I give a hard laugh and get up out of my chair so I can sit on her bed. It’s all I can do not to grab hold of her and shake her hard. “She’s not blowing anything out of proportion. You nearly died. Are you gonna tell me what the hell you were doing at that party and why you were taking drugs?”

  Her eyes drop to the bed, avoiding mine. She looks like a naughty five year old who’s been scolded for no reason. That’s enough to make the anger I’m fighting to control flare up brightly in my chest. “Seriously, Morgan. Tell me, because I am shit outta clues as to why you’d do something like this. How many did you even take?”

  She looks at me finally, her eyes swimming. “I know you’re not going to believe me, Avery, but I only took one pill, I swear. I’ve been clean for months and months. I took one a couple of weeks back and it was fine, so I thought I could do it again. I have no idea how I got to that party. I just remember being there and Tate getting really sick and then…I wake up here with a tube down my throat.” A single, fat tear rolls down her cheek and she brushes it away angrily. “My mom’s never going to let me go back to school now. Never in a million years. I had a coke problem and she thinks I’m back on the slippery slope because I took one single pill. This is so messed up.”

  “It really is,” I agreed. “Wait, you took a pill a couple of weeks ago? When? Where?” I’ve been with Morgan at the last few parties she’s attended. I’m wracking my brain, trying to figure it all out, when…

  “Oh, God, Morgan. The Irish party? That’s why you freaked when you saw the cops?”

  Morgan slumps back against her pillow, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, okay. I thought it would be all right, and it was. Nothing bad happened. I didn’t wake up the next day desperate for coke or anything. I felt great, remember? We went running. It’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal? Shit, Morgan, if it wasn’t Luke, if it had been some other cop who wanted to search you, what would he have found?” I’m met with a tense silence that spe
aks for itself. “Great. That’s just great. And now here we are with you in hospital. I can’t believe you don’t remember anything. Jeez, Morgan, anything could have happened to you!”

  “Yeah, well it didn’t. I’ve already been poked and prodded at and suffered through the indignity of a rape kit, and I was thoroughly un-interfered with. Tate took care of me. I just hope he’s okay. He was so sick when I saw him last. He was puking his guts up. He hasn’t been by yet; he must be terrified of bumping into my parents. Will you tell him to come anyway? I have to see him. This is all getting completely out of hand.” Morgan drops her head into her hands and starts crying, but instead of being hysterical it’s the exhausted weeping of someone who ran out of tears hours ago.

  “I’ll find him. I’ll tell him,” I say. “Can you just swear…please swear to me that you’re never going to touch anything like that again. Please?”

  She scrambles across the bed and falls into my arms. “I promise, Avery. No buzz is worth all of this.”

  The nurse comes in then, with Mrs. Kepler hot on her heels, and I make my excuses and leave, wondering if Morgan is going to keep her promise. Doubting she will.

  Luke’s Fastback pulls up outside the hospital at eight thirty, twenty minutes after I call him to come get me. The heat and the music are cranked up high when I get in, and Luke hits the volume control so that the indie tune he was listening to is a muted buzz in the background. The past few times I’ve seen him he’s been clean shaven, but now he already has a couple of millimeters of stubble marking his jaw. His hood is pulled up again, hiding most of his face. He opens my door for me and drives us back to his place without saying much. He asks after Morgan and smiles briefly when I tell him her mom accused me of being a drug dealer, but then we fall into an easy kind of silence. He hums along to the music and waits patiently when the traffic is particularly bad. I watch him out the corner of my eye, trying to figure out why it’s so easy to sit in silence with him. I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever been able to do that with. Not even Morgan or Leslie. There always has to be something going on, something to chatter or laugh about. Luke just seems content to…be.

  When we pull up outside his place, he jumps out and grabs the door for me like he usually does. The only difference is that this time I thank him properly. He gives me a coy smile and gestures me into the building.

  “Did you eat at the hospital? I was going to order some Chinese,” he says at the top of the stairs, producing keys from his pocket and rattling them as he opens his front door. I push the memory of Casey smiling at me nastily right there on his doorstep out of my head and shrug. “I didn’t eat. I could go for Chinese.”

  That seems to please him. He orders a whole bunch of stuff he assures me is good while I properly inspect his apartment. The last time I was here was after he told me about Mayor Bright’s book and I drank myself into oblivion. I hadn’t been in the most observant frame of mind back then but now I’m feeling particularly nosy.

  The place is open plan, very much a bachelor pad. A huge flat screen TV is mounted on the wall and a book shelf to one side is filled end to end with DVDs. Oddly his books are all on the floor, which seems a little backwards to me, but what he’s done with them is pretty cool. The row of books presses from one side of the apartment to the other, and they undulate as they grow taller or smaller in waves. I pace along, trying to see what kind of stuff he reads. There’s a bit of everything there: Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Dickens, even a few poets. To round things out there’s a huge stack of comics at the very end. Spiderman. Luke doesn’t strike me as the type of twenty-three-year-old that reads Spiderman.

  “You like Stan Lee?”

  His voice behind me has me almost jumping out of my clothes with surprise. He pushes back his hood when I turn around and pulls his sweatshirt up over his head, revealing a simple plain black t-shirt underneath. He has a lot of those. And they’re all ridiculously tight across his shoulders, his arms, his chest. Hell, they’re tight everywhere. I can’t help but notice his jeans are slung a little low off his hips; it isn’t a style I’m usually into, but they aren’t obscenely low or anything, and he makes them look unbelievably sexy. I scowl and slip by him, angry with myself for even admitting that.

  “Not got a clue who Stan Lee is, I’m afraid.”

  Luke pulls a mock-horrified expression and follows me into his kitchen. “He only created some of the most amazing comics ever. The man’s a genius.”

  “Then why are you keeping his masterpieces on the floor?”

  A slow smirk tugs at Luke’s lips. He really needs to stop doing that. He steps forward into the kitchen so I have to back up to give him room. I panic for a second when he reaches out—I think he’s going to touch my face—but he leans toward the fridge and plucks a postcard out from underneath a magnet. He hands it over and raises an eyebrow. The card is plain black apart from some block white lettering:

  Floor: the world’s biggest shelf.

  I roll my eyes and clip it back to the fridge. “You kept that just so you could use it in this situation, right? I bet you get to reference it all the time.”

  “All the time,” he agrees. There’s a playful glint in his eye that I’ve never had directed at me before. It makes my skin prickle. I back out of the kitchen and sit down at the breakfast bar in the same spot I occupied when I polished off half his whiskey supply. “Want a beer?” he asks, his head disappearing into the fridge.

  “Sure, thanks.” He produces a Bud Light and sets it down in front of me, and then starts rifling in his cupboards for plates and cutlery. “Aren’t you having one?” I ask.

  “Uh, no. I’ll have to drive you home later. It’s kinda frowned upon for cops to get DUIs.”

  “I can get a cab, it’s fine. I’m not drinking on my own.” I hold out the beer and shake my head. Drinking alone is bad enough; doing it in front of a guy you’re liable to spill your guts to…not a great idea at all. He shrugs and gets another bottle out of his fridge for himself. He leans back against the black marble counter—all the furniture seems to be black in this place—and twists the top off, looking at me. I follow suit and take a swig, aware that he’s still staring.

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Avery? I mean, there are some pretty horrific things in this file. Have you seen a dead body before?”

  I swallow back more beer and set the bottle down on the counter, picking at the label. “No, I haven’t. I don’t really want to see one either, but…”

  Luke stuffs his free hand into his pocket and studies me. He’s trying to assess whether I can handle whatever is in the file or not, and from the torn look on his face he doesn’t think I can.

  “You can’t hold out on me, Luke. I need to be ready for this nightmare when Colby Bright releases his book. It’s all lies. I have to be able to prove that.”

  “Okay. Fine. But you’re going to freak the fuck out. Be prepared for that, too.”

  He disappears down the long corridor to the right of the kitchen and when he comes back he’s taken his shoes off and there’s a bulging manila file in his hand. A split, red elastic band holds it all together. He drops it onto the breakfast bar in front of me and goes back to leaning. The file is so huge, I can’t even pick it up with one hand.

  “Your old partner took the time to scan this in for you?”

  “Yeah, I know right?” Luke agrees.

  “She must be a good friend.”

  “She is. Doesn’t have much family. Her sister died when she was a kid and her parents are both long gone. I think I’m the closest thing she’s got to a living relative.”

  That’s sweet. And so like Luke to be that for someone. I eye the file, frowning. “Have you already looked through everything?”

  He shakes his head. “Not all of it. Just the evidence relating to the first few killings. I wanted to wait for you.”

  I place my hand on top of the file and bite my lip, wondering whether I really am strong enough to do t
his. It’s one thing watching a horror movie or reading about something in the news. It’s another matter altogether being faced with the gory, clinical details of murder—to see the actual pictures and read the statements of the victim’s families. It feels like the contents of the stack of paper underneath my hand is burning a hole into my skin and for a moment I consider pushing it away and telling him to forget it. But then I think of Dad. I fill my lungs with oxygen, grasping at my resolve.

  “Come on, then. Let’s do this.”

  THERE ARE four categories on the front page of the file, each with subheadings: Immolation, Decapitation, Poisoning, and Drowning. Under each are names. Some have more names under them than others. For instance, decapitation has seven under it, while poisoning has only two. I scan over the names, all female, trying to see if I recognize them from somewhere. Maybe they were on the news. Maybe I even knew some of them. The names are just names, though. No faces materialize when I turn them over in my head. Just girls who went missing one day and wound up murdered. I swallow and instinctively know Luke is watching me. I flip the page over and look up at him.

  “What does Immolation mean?” I try to keep my voice nonchalant. Luke steps forward to lean closer on the other side of the bench.

  “It means to be burned to death.”

  “On fire?” I choke while he nods, feeling sick. “So all these girls died in one of four different ways?”

  “Yeah. Which is part of the reason why it was so hard for the police department to catch the guy. He wasn’t like a regular serial killer. Usually they have a pattern, like I was saying before. There’s a reason why they kill the people they kill and it’s useful to figure out their pattern and build a profile from that. You can make predictions based on that profile—how they’re going to behave in the future. It’s worked a hundred times before when we try to catch a killer. It was different this time, though. None of the psychologists on staff could figure this guy out, or how the symbols tied any of the victims together. The only obvious clue was the way they died, but that didn’t give us anything.”