“I can’t promise you it’s confidential,” he said.
“I know that,” India said, “Here goes. I was stunned when I heard that man say that on TV. So was Harley. I still can’t believe China knew, because she would have told me. She told me a half dozen times before when she was a little late and thought she might be. And then she’d get another one of those drugstore tests and cry because she wasn’t.”
India picked up a sofa pillow and hugged it.
“All I can think is that she didn’t know it herself because I think if she’d had a hint she would have found out for sure, and she would have been telling everybody, not riding up and down those hills on a bicycle.”
“Russell told Taneesha that she thought she was but she wasn’t sure yet,” Skeet said.
“He did?” India looked surprised. “When was that?”
Skeet thought about it and said, “It was the day after the shooting. We found out from the pathologist on Wednesday, and it was that afternoon. Taneesha told him.”
“But he didn’t tell Harley and me?” she said angrily. “Did Rondelle know?”
“She heard it when he did,” Skeet said.
“And she just let us find out from the television news,” India said flatly. “I can understand Russell’s not saying anything because he’s been about half-crazy, but Rondelle could have told us.”
“I got the impression she was kind of upset about it herself,” Skeet said.
“Rondelle?” India said with a scowl. “That woman never cared a thing about China, and she sure didn’t care about whether they had a baby or not. In fact, one time when China was upset about not getting pregnant, she told her that she’d heard that couples without children had happier marriages. She even told her one time that she was making Russell feel bad making such a fuss about it.”
“So you’re saying China really wanted a baby,” Skeet said.
“Yes, more than anything, and they tried for two years or more,” India said. “I sort of thought they had given up because she stopped talking about it, and then she really got into the weight loss class and the gym.”
She massaged her forehead with both hands.
“I don’t want to start crying again,” she said. “And I’m getting a headache. Can we finish this another time?”
“I’m sorry,” Skeet said. “Of course we can. This has been very helpful.”
She walked with him to the door, and he stopped to look at a set of four small framed drawings of flowers and birds. They were done in ink and with soft colors brushed in. Each one was signed China Rose in tiny script.
“She was really talented,” he said.
“We all thought so,” India said and then she added. “I mean our family did. I wish she had gone to art school instead of marrying Russell.”
Skeet had given some thought to asking India if she might like to go out to dinner sometime soon, but he decided that the timing wasn’t right.
“How was work?” Sam asked Hunter over supper.
“Tyler took charge in about five minutes,” she said. “He said ‘Hunter’s in charge until Wednesday’, and then he started giving orders.”
“Did you mind?” Sam asked.
“No,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I was relieved.”
“So why don’t you just stay home tomorrow if he’s got things under control?” Sam asked.
“I said I’d stay through getting this paper out,” Hunter said, “There’s a whole lot I can be doing that will make things go smoother this week and next week, too.”
“I’m picking you up Wednesday at noon,” he said, “We’ll go have lunch, and after that, you’re staying home.”
“I’m stopping work,” Hunter corrected him. “I’m certainly not going to stay home all the time!”
Mallory was having a very long talk with Sylvie Wagner. First she had heard all about Sylvie’s trip to Italy and her med school plans and then had opened up to her friend about the disastrous events of the summer before and how she was coming to terms with her stepmother’s murder.
“My job just about saved me through all that,” Mallory said. “Dad’s getting married again, which is okay with me. Sue-Ellen’s a nice woman and he needs somebody to help him run the business and look after him. Miranda and Chad have bought this huge house, and they have three dogs and a cat. They even took our old cocker spaniel, Merlin, which was great because Dad just wasn’t up to looking after him. And here I am—living in Miss Rose Tyndale’s upstairs apartment.”
‘Do you think you’ll stay here for good?” Sylvie asked. “I never imagined you staying in Merchantsville.”
“Me neither,” a deep male voice said from the doorway. “Is there any more pizza or did you two eat it all?”
“Timmy!” Mallory said. “You must be six feet tall!”
“It’s Tim, and I’m six one,” the lanky teenager said. “And you must be five two! You haven’t grown an inch.”
He was as fair-haired as his sister, dressed in cut off jeans and an orange t-shirt with an ominous skull on it. He had a laptop computer under one arm.
“There’s practically a whole pizza in there,” Sylvie said. “Mallory brought two in case you decided to be sociable.”
Tim wandered toward the kitchen, and Sylvie said, loud enough for him to hear, “I told Dad I was going to specialize in Digital-itis and try to save the younger generation from the delusion that the real world is on the web. The only way I could get Tim interested in my travels in Italy was by googling buildings and showing them to him on-line. He’s addicted to that computer.”
“I am not,” Tim said, wandering back in with the pizza box.
“So you’re going to tell me that it was homework that kept you from pizza?”
“Nope,” he said after his first bite was chewed and swallowed, “I was playing Brutal Battalion. Arrgface was having a bad time. He was nearly starved, and was too weak to get to the next chasm, so he had to find something to kill and eat, and then I realized that I was hungry myself.”
“It’s a game,” Sylvie said to Mallory. “Arrgface is Tim’s avatar. He’s either starving or freezing or getting chased into ravines every night.”
“Sounds like fun,” Mallory said. “Can I see?”
“Sure,” Tim said, handing her the laptop with one hand as he bit into a slice of pizza. “It’s asleep. All you have to do is touch the screen.”
Mallory opened it and saw a landscape of blacks and reds in a dramatic comic book style. A small female figure in camouflage and boots seemed frozen in flight, upside down.
“That’s Ninx, Shawnee Pickard’s avatar,” he said. “She’s in my AP History Class. Ninx is about to… oops.”
The tiny figure disappeared into a chasm.”
“Where’s yours?” Mallory asked. “I mean your avatar.”
“Arrgface is over here in the corner,” he said, “See behind that boulder? He needs to shoot something to eat, even if it’s an uncooked rat.”
“Ugggh,” Mallory said. “Are you winning or losing?”
“Nobody ever really wins,” he said. “It just goes on and on and gets harder, but you get points and move up levels, and there’s a forum so you can brag when you’re out ahead of somebody else, or like, pretend you’re sorry that Ninx fell into a chasm.”
“So you know the other players?” Mallory asked.
“Well, a bunch of us started the game at the same time,” he said, “So it’s five kids from Magnolia, and some others we don’t know. Some people stick with it a long time, and some give up.”
“So some of his classmates are getting ahead while he’s starving and waiting for a rat to shoot,” Sylvie said.
“No, they aren’t,” Tim said. “I’m ahead of the other four. The best one isn’t from Magnolia unless it’s somebody real smart who’s fooling us all. We think he lives near here, though because one time he said something sarcastic about Peach County beating us in baseball.”
“He’s having fun,�
� Sylvie said.
“Yeah, and he’s staying ahead of all of us right now. We kid around on the forum and say things like he must be 40 years old and living in his mother’s basement, and try to get to answer back. Every once in a while he’ll write something like, ‘What fools you mortals be,’ or ‘I’m not the despicable scum eating insects and rodents to stay alive.’ He’s big on fancy language.”
Tim reached for the last piece of pizza, and added, “His avatar is Abomination.”
“Say that again,” Mallory said.
“His avatar,” Tim said dramatically, lowering his voice, “is Abomination. Want me to say it again.”
“Oh dear,” Mallory said. “I’ve got to call the sheriff.”
Sam arrived at the Watkins’ house twenty minutes after getting Mallory’s call.
“How much have you told them?” Sam asked Mallory when she met him on their front steps.
“Nothing except that it might possibly have a connection with the shootings,” she said. “I had to tell them something before I called you to their house.”
Sylvie opened the door and said, “Hi, Sheriff Bailey. Come on in. I took my brother’s cell phone away so he couldn’t call everybody at Magnolia County High.”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” Tim said, coming up behind her. “I was just going to call Shawnee, and she would have kept it quiet.”
“Well, let’s try to keep this between us for now,” Sam said to Tim. He explained about the letter.
“I didn’t know somebody sent a letter,” Tim said. “I’ve watched all the news and read the papers, too.”
“We were keeping it quiet,” Sam said. “Now can you show me how this game works, and where this character fits in?”
“I’m going to have to get to the next level first,” Tim said. “He’s ahead of me. I’ve got to shoot something to eat before I have enough strength points to get across the chasm.”
The Sheriff of Magnolia County didn’t blink an eye.
“So let’s go in the kitchen, and I’ll watch,” he said. “I’ve got all the time in the world unless my second child decides to be born tonight.”
It was an hour and fifteen minutes before Tim made it to level 13 and spotted Abomination.
“There he is,” he said. “See the guy, up in that crevice, in the black helmet with all the weapons on his back?”
“Zoom in,” Sam said.
Tim did.
“He’s sleeping,” Tim said. “Probably his player has stopped for the night. He doesn’t usually play all that late. You want to see the forum again? He could have left a message.”
Sam did, and there were no new messages.
“I think we can call it a night,” he said. “I can’t tell you how important it is to keep this quiet, Tim. This could just be a total coincidence. Probably it is. But the guy who called himself Abomination in the letter has got an assault rifle, and he killed three people and injured another. You don’t want him targeting your school.”
Tim nodded.
“Don’t do anything different in the game from what you usually do,” Sam said. “We’ll have people from the District Attorney’s office and the GBI working on this by tomorrow morning. It could be that the computer game company will just tell them who this guy is, but if they don’t, they’ll be looking for other ways to find out.”
He shook hands with Tim, thanked Sylvie and hugged Mallory at the door.
Back home, he found Hunter and Bethie sleeping,
He took out his laptop and his credit card and found ‘Brutal Battalion” in a few minutes.
An hour and a half later, he had reached Level 3.
He turned it off and went to bed.
India Jackson gave up on sleeping and got out of bed. She was exhausted, but her mind kept chasing after problems. Why hadn’t China told her? Had China even known? If she had known, would she have taken that bicycle trip?
And then that other line of thought. Was Skeet Borders seeing anybody yet? Was he over Tamlyn and all her bad behavior? How was he doing as a single dad? She had thought about inviting him over some Sunday with his little girl but now didn’t seem like the right time.
She went and checked on her mother, who was sleeping peacefully. Then she went across the hall to China’s little bedroom. It had been Harley’s room until he went off to college, and then China had asked for the ruffled curtains and the flowered bedspread and painted all of the furniture white.
India smiled at first and then realized what was keeping her awake. She began to pull open drawers that and found what she was half expecting beneath the old sheets that were folded and stacked in the bottom drawer— a sheer frilly gown, a pair of pink silk shorty pajamas and expensive perfume.
And something she didn’t expect to find – China’s old wooden case for art supplies, the one that had a fold-out drawing board, and places for pens, brushes, ink and watercolors. There was an unfinished sketch of two bears hugging inside a heart.
India frowned at first and then almost smiled.
“Well, Baby Sister, she whispered, “Whoever it was, I hope you had a good time for once in your life.”
CHAPTER 12
On Tuesday morning, Sylvie was up before Tim. She had coffee and went over the strange events of the night before. She was tempted to call her parents but worried that they’d overreact and end the first vacation they’d had by themselves in years.
More than that, though, she was worried that Tim wouldn’t be able to resist telling his friends at school about the sheriff coming over and how Abomination was a suspect. It was just entirely too exciting for a 16-year-old to keep to himself.
She went upstairs to his room and knocked on the door.
“I’m awake,” he called out. “You don’t have to get me off to school.”
“I think you have a fever,” she said, “and your throat is sore. You need to stay home today.”
He came to the door in his pajamas and opened it halfway. With his hair uncombed, he looked closer to 12 than 16.
“You don’t trust me not to talk about Abomination,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. It’s just too good a story.”
“Well, I don’t trust me either,” he said with a grin and a sigh of relief.
Sam told Hunter about Abomination on Brutal Battalion before he went to work, and it was the first thing Mallory wanted to talk about when Hunter arrived.
“I was thinking about it last night,” Mallory said, “and I remembered that Abomination wanted that name out in public, and those high school kids would have heard about it and recognized the name. That makes it seem like he wanted to be caught.”
“Well, it’s safe to assume that whoever shot those people is crazy,” Hunter said. “Maybe he thinks he really is Abomination. Anyway, you are going to have a terrific front page story next week if this leads to their making an arrest. “
“Should I tell Mr. Bankston all this?” Mallory asked.
“I already told him about the letter on Sunday afternoon,” Hunter said. “Let me fill him in on this. You know he’s probably going to run out of patience with our cooperating with law enforcement on keeping things quiet.”
“Ooops, here comes Novena,” Mallory said.
Novena put the morning’s mail on her desk and sat down to check her make-up before going out to deal with the newspaper’s advertisers.
“Have you designed that ad for the Shape-Up Shack?” she asked Mallory. “Ike wants a copy to approve. He liked the ad on the website.”
“It’s done,” Mallory said. “Let me just take one more look, and I’ll print it out for you.”
When Novena had the proof and was gone again, Mallory turned to Hunter.
“I’ve got to be at GetFit at nine thirty,” Mallory said. “Sue-Ellen is getting some of the volunteers together so I can get pictures, and then I’m going to talk to Sasha and maybe to Ricky, too. They’ve moved him to the rehab unit. I’ll see if I can get a picture of him in rehab.
Sasha says he’s determined to make that leg strong again, but more than that, he’s used to exercising all the time, and he’s just impatient with staying still. I thought he might make a good sidebar to the story.”
She paused and frowned a little.
“I hope that guy at the Shape-Up Shack doesn’t get mad about the volunteers at the GetFit Gym getting a big story in the same issue with his big ad.”
“Can’t be helped,” Hunter said with a shrug. “It’s a good human interest story and very timely and positive. I know that business is business, but we haven’t had one ad from the Shape-Up Shack the whole time I’ve been here. Then when the owner of the competition is in the hospital and there’s been a huge tragedy, here comes this guy with a big promotion.”
Tyler arrived as Mallory was leaving, and Hunter told him, “I’ve got to fill you in on something.”
In the conference room at the courthouse, Skeet and Taneesha were staring over Sam’s shoulder at the battleground on his computer screen. Sam had gotten up early and taken his avatar, YdobonX, up to Level 5.
“Could I take that home with me after work?” Taneesha asked. “Jeremy’s real good at this sort of thing.”
“Let’s wait and see if T.J. gets anywhere,” Sam said. “It may be really simple if he can pull it off. He’s going to get in touch with the company that produces the game and see if they’ll just tell him who Abomination is. He’s already found a phone number and an e-mail address.”
“In the meantime,” he asked Skeet. “How’d your talk with India Jackson go?”
“Pretty good,” Skeet said. “I don’t know what difference it makes, but India says that Russell and China tried for two years to have a baby. China got into the weight loss program and the gym and that seemed to distract her, but India says if she’d known she would have been telling everybody.
“So why would Russell make it sound like it was no big deal?” Taneesha asked. “And why was Rondelle so upset about it?”
In South Orange, N.J., Jason Wallerstein was watching the players on the Level 13 Battlefield of Brutal Battalion on a gigantic screen, and considering whether he wanted to return a call to somebody named T.J. Jackson.
Over Troubled Water: A Hunter Jones Mystery Page 11
