A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  “You okay?” he said.

  She nodded, but he could tell that she was fighting back tears. And wondered, What’s going on here?

  She punched in the phone number the registrar had provided, then tapped the speaker icon.

  Becca answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Becca. This is Jayme Matson. Any chance Sergeant DeMarco and I could meet up with you for a few minutes?”

  There was a long pause. Then, “About what?”

  “We just need a few minutes. Are you in the residence hall this summer or at home?”

  “At home, but I don’t… My mother’s here.”

  Jayme laid the notebook on the console for DeMarco to see, and tapped the home address. He read Farrell, PA, frowned, then gave an affirmative nod, slipped the gearshift into Drive, and pulled away from the curb.

  She told the girl, “Just pick a place for us to meet. We can be there in…”

  “Thirty,” DeMarco whispered.

  “Thirty minutes,” Jayme said into the phone. “Does that work for you?”

  “I, uh…I can’t think of a place…”

  “Tell you what,” Jayme said. “We’re going to head your way, so why don’t you send me a text in ten minutes or so? We can meet in a park, a restaurant, anywhere you feel comfortable.”

  “Oh,” Becca said after another pause. “Okay.”

  “And Becca, it would be best if you don’t let any of your friends know you’re going to meet with us. Best for you. You understand?”

  A pause. A heavy breath. “Okay.”

  “See you soon.”

  Jayme ended the call. “Sorry. I should have checked the address again before making the call.”

  He shrugged. “It’s closer to home. If it turns out we need to see Daksh after all, we’ll do it in the morning.”

  “She’s scared,” Jayme said.

  “I guess that’s a good thing.”

  Eighteen minutes later, just as they were crossing back into Pennsylvania, Jayme received a text. Buhl Park Casino? She showed the text to DeMarco.

  “Excellent,” he said, but Jayme looked again as if she were going to cry.

  He reached across the seat and took her hand. “After this case?” he said. “What say we take our ill-gotten gains and open a coffee shop?”

  She nodded and choked back the tears. “Where?”

  “Someplace there’s a shortage of coffee shops.”

  “Someplace that’s safe for children,” she said.

  He considered a joke, Like a deserted island? But then thought better of it, and kept the joke to himself for fear she would get upset again. She seemed overly sensitive these days, often reacting with a tenderness that surprised him. Was the case getting to her—too much misery and death? Or was it something he had done or said? Probably the latter. Here she was separated from family and friends, with not even the guys in Troop D to horse around with. Isolated and, except for him, alone. All because of their relationship. What an oaf he was to not realize that sooner. He should try to be more social, take her to one of those paint-and-sip classes, encourage her to take up yoga or something. He couldn’t blame her for needing more than just his company. Hell, most of the time even he didn’t want to be with himself.

  Sixty-Seven

  They crossed from the parking lot to the sidewalk fronting the eleven-acre Lake Julia and, on the other side of the lake, the massive Greek Revival–style Buhl Casino. Framed in white pine boards, and with white Tuscan columns supporting the first- and second-floor covered porches on all sides, the huge rectangular building with its low roof stood like a stern schoolmarm watching over her classroom.

  From the swimming pool beside the casino, the shouts and screams of three dozen children came floating across the lake, where geese and a pair of swans floated undisturbed, and old men sat on white buckets and fished, and a few small children played on the rocky shore. Joggers, dog walkers, baby walkers, bicyclists, old folks grabbing some shade and gossip, picnickers and Frisbee players were scattered all over the three-hundred-acre park, yet an air of calm pervaded. The park, built by a steel magnate and his wife in the second decade of the previous century, had become the summer focal point for citizens from several local communities.

  DeMarco recognized the oasis appeal of the park to urban- and suburbanites alike, but being there brought back old memories and old feelings. He had visited twice as a young man, first on a spontaneous road trip with four other classmates, and again with his neighbor Paul. Neither time had he felt comfortable or welcome in the park. No one had regarded him critically or asked him to leave, yet he felt out of place, a stranger. Everything was too civilized for his taste. The gazebos and picnic shelters, the strategically placed benches, paved walking paths and guided exercise courses, the signs erected to describe the plants and wetlands and bird species—it was all too manufactured and unnatural.

  He liked the woods better. Untended and untrimmed. He could lose himself in the woods, lose all self-consciousness, move with purpose and grace. None of that applied here.

  On this day there appeared to be the female component of a wedding party, the bride and bridesmaids and fifteen or so mothers and friends, using the casino as a backdrop for photos. Only the bride was being photographed, but even she was casually dressed. She posed in front of the building, on the steps at a railing, peeking out from behind a column, while the photographer and her assistant, carrying a huge circular reflector, cooed and smiled and told her how great she looked.

  DeMarco was puzzled by all the shorts and tank tops and T-shirts. “Shouldn’t they be in their wedding clothes?”

  “It’s probably just practice,” Jayme told him. “Checking the lighting and such.”

  “It takes twenty people to do that?”

  He had never understood the tendency for women to do everything in a group. In truth, a part of him envied their camaraderie. He acknowledged that it must make a person feel confident and strong to know she can count on such support. He had learned at a very young age that he had better not count on anyone.

  Jayme, he noticed, was watching the group intently, a wistful smile on her lips. Did every woman want a large, flamboyant wedding? Did every woman want to pose in an expensive white dress? To have at least one day in her life when every relative and acquaintance tells her how beautiful she is? Jayme’s silence and fifty-yard gaze suggested that she wanted that. And yes, he wanted it for her.

  He asked, “What are you thinking?”

  She averted her gaze from the group. Blushed a little, and scanned the upper balcony. “I could never figure out why it’s called a casino. Was it originally used for gambling?”

  “Not to my knowledge. There is a dance floor, I hear. That’s a form of gambling.”

  “For some of us,” she said. “Any sign of Becca?”

  “Not yet.” He told her, “This is the first place I ever played golf. Across the road behind the casino.”

  “How old?”

  “Nineteen. Home from basic training. My neighbor Paul took me. Said he would teach me how to play.”

  “I’d like to hear about Paul sometime.”

  “It’s still the only free nine-hole golf course in the country. I’m sure that’s why Paul took me there. He charged me $10 for gas.”

  Jayme turned to him. “Poor baby,” she said. “But he instilled the love of the game in you, right?”

  “I’d rather wrestle an octopus than play golf. But I’d rather play golf than dance.”

  The trip with Paul had been a fiasco, an excuse for the older man to get a free tank of gas. DeMarco finished only three holes before walking back to the little shed near the parking lot to return his clubs, with Paul smoking and complaining every step of the way. The bugs were fierce, Paul had said, and slapped the back of his neck to prove it. The rough was too deep, the gr
eens looked like crap, but you get what you pay for, right, kid? More often than not, DeMarco’s ball had gone scooting off to the right, into bushes or trees or across the street. You look like you never swung a club in your life, Paul had said, and DeMarco answered, I haven’t. Well, that’s not the way to hit a ball, Paul told him, and DeMarco asked, So what is the way? And Paul said, Not like that.

  The only other time DeMarco had come home prior to his mother’s suicide, he found her with a yellowing bruise below her eye. His father had been dead for nearly four years, and the only other man in her life was Paul, who lived in the trailer next door. By then DeMarco had come to understand that Paul’s favors, as his mother called them, such as driving her to the store, or teaching her son to play golf, were never free. If she had no money, she held off Paul’s demands with sex until the next welfare check came in. Once DeMarco became a soldier, he made certain that his mother always had money. A bruise on her face was not part of the bargain. So he spent a few minutes in Paul’s trailer, pushing the man’s nose toward the whirring garbage disposal in the sink while cold water splashed onto his head.

  “Corner pillar,” Jayme said, and he realized that he had been staring at the building but not seeing it. “First floor.”

  A small figure in red shorts and a pale-pink top had stepped out from behind the pillar. Jayme smiled. “Public yet discreet,” she said. “Good girl.”

  There were no chairs or benches anywhere along the porches, as if the building were intended to be seen but not enjoyed. Jayme suggested they stand at the southwestern corner, with enough water, land, and tennis courts between them and the nearest macadam path that they could be seen only as two tall Caucasians with a petite African American girl between them. Both Jayme and DeMarco stood sideways to the rail, facing Becca, who faced the water.

  “Do you come here a lot?” Jayme asked.

  “I used to swim here when I was little. Come to jog sometimes. My friend Christian is trying to teach me tennis.”

  Jayme asked, “Does Christian go to school with you?”

  Becca shook her head. “He works.”

  Jayme gave DeMarco a little nod.

  “So here’s the thing, Becca,” DeMarco said. “There’s you, Kaitlin, Connor, Griffin, and there used to be Samantha. And there’s Dr. Gillespie.” He spoke slowly, evenly, and watched her face to see the effect of his words. “What’s going on?”

  A muscle in her jaw tightened. She stared at the water, and was visibly trembling. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She looked up at him briefly, then looked away. “No, I don’t.”

  Jayme said, “You don’t really want to be a part of their group, do you, Becca? That’s what I think. But you’re stuck with it now. Is that the way it is?”

  Nothing was said for half a minute. Voices from the pool on the opposite side of the building echoed and raced along the porch from one side to the other. Becca said, “It’s just that we took the same class is all. We get together sometimes to talk about what we learned. It’s interesting.”

  DeMarco bent toward her, his voice almost a whisper. “And what exactly did you learn? What is so interesting that students who took the course two, three, even four semesters apart are still getting together to talk about it?”

  The girl was trembling so violently now that Jayme longed to pull her close and wrap her up with warmth. But she could not. She said, “Somebody is going to talk, Becca. And whoever does, that’s the only person we’ll be able to protect.”

  “Protect from what?”

  “Let’s start with staying in college,” DeMarco said. “Not having to explain to your parents and friends why you were expelled. And then there are always the criminal charges to consider.”

  She jerked her eyes up to Jayme; they were desperate, pleading.

  Jayme said, “I can’t help you until you help us.”

  Becca said, “I thought you were supposed to be trying to find out who killed Sammie.”

  Jayme told her, “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with that! We all loved her! She was always so sweet and kind to me.”

  “All right,” DeMarco said. “Tell us about your group meetings. Who supplies the drugs?”

  She would not look at him. Kept her eyes fixed on Jayme. “Why does he say that?”

  “Because he’s good at putting two and two together,” Jayme said. “And because we know that Connor sells drugs. And sooner or later, sweetie, we’re going to know everything. And when that happens, people will go to jail.”

  There were tears in Becca’s eyes now. Tears on her cheeks. “It’s just weed and chocolate suckers,” she said. “Everybody does it.”

  “You need to be careful,” DeMarco told her. “Mushrooms are dangerous.”

  She turned quickly, looked at him with glittering eyes. “No they’re not! They’re not dangerous or addictive at all. And they’re teaching me so much! You don’t understand.”

  It was the first time he’d seen her assertive. He said, “What are they teaching you?”

  “All about myself and who I really am. About reality, and how there’s so much more to it than we think there is. And that we can learn about past lives and even talk to beings from other worlds.”

  DeMarco felt awash with concern for her, but also anger that she was being exploited. He stared into her eyes.

  She said, “I told you you wouldn’t understand.” And she faced the water again, shoulders limp, and leaned against the rail.

  “I guess I don’t,” he told her. “But I do know this. There’s something else going on in those meetings too, isn’t there, Becca? Maybe something you’re not so sure about? Something you don’t like?”

  For several beats the girl did not move, only sniffed, swallowed, sniffed again. Then suddenly she turned to Jayme and collapsed sobbing in her arms.

  And DeMarco felt a punch in his stomach, felt the breath rush out of his lungs, and knew that his suspicions were true. He thought of Gillespie, so smug and narcissistic.

  Tense with anger, he turned and moved away from them, shaking his head, reaching for his phone. A minute later Sheriff Brinker answered the call. DeMarco said, “We have a young woman here you’re going to want to talk to, Ben.”

  Sixty-Eight

  DeMarco, Fascetti, and Olcott stood in the hallway outside the interrogation room in the Sharon Municipal Police Department, only a few miles from the casino. Through the one-way mirror they watched and listened to Sheriff Brinker interviewing Rebecca Sadler. Jayme leaned in the corner of the room, smiling and nodding at Becca each time she spoke.

  They all had secret names, given by Gillespie: he was Dashwood, Samantha had been Venus, Kaitlin was Flora, Becca was Daphne, Griffin was Priapus, and Connor was Dionysus. All but Dashwood were names of gods and goddesses, just as members had been named in the original Lord Dashwood’s London Hellfire Club in the 1730s, where members of British nobility and visitors such as Ben Franklin had engaged in political discussions, the intellectual dissection of society, and drunken sex orgies.

  The espoused philosophy of Gillespie’s group came from Aleister Crowley’s doctrine of Thelema, which, Gillespie claimed, was derived from ancient mystery religions, such as the Essenes and Gnostics: to subvert tyrannical authority at every turn and to engage in acts contemptuous of that authority, and to above all else exercise free will, because only through the exercise of that will could a person come to know her True Self.

  And yes, Becca admitted, the students had noticed their physical similarities, and the boys had even questioned Gillespie about it, but he waved it off as a coincidence. They were chosen, he assured them, because of their responses to class essays and discussions in which they displayed a great capacity for independence and individuality, a staggering potential to take their rightful plac
es among the world’s movers and shakers, their intellectual honesty and passion for life. The drugs and sex were necessary, he explained, to break down inhibitions and cultural programming, and to prove their contempt for the cabal of conformity, and to display their devotion to the mantra of “Do what thou wilt.”

  Both DeMarco and Olcott were saddened and more than a little staggered by what they heard. Fascetti, on the other hand, seemed almost happy. “Way to go, DeMarco,” he said. “You broke up a college sex ring. Which, incidentally, has nothing to do with anybody’s murder.”

  “You track down Costa’s girlfriend yet?” DeMarco asked, and was answered with a scowl. “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  Sixty-Nine

  “It’s a difficult situation,” Brinker explained later in the conference room. The students were all over eighteen, and apparently had participated willingly in the bimonthly “meetings” in Gillespie’s remodeled basement. If the students all testified to that willingness, any charges concerning sexual misbehavior would be impossible to prove. The drugs were another matter. Who brought them to Gillespie’s place? Who paid for them? Becca refused to name names, and would concede only that, although she had felt some pressure from both Gillespie and her peers, the choice to participate had been hers alone.

  “There was wine too,” DeMarco said.

  “Which is illegal in Ohio for anybody under twenty-one without parental permission. But it’s a slap on the wrist.”

  Jayme sat there shaking her head. “The man is scum.”

  “I’m sure the university administration will see it the same way. Thing is, he’s tenured. It will be a fight to get rid of him. Officially, nothing happened on campus. And nobody is going to want any of this to go public, least of all the university.”