by J. M.
Copyright © by J.M. 2013
All Rights Reserved
Contents
Prologue
Panes of Solid Grey
Are You Horst?
Out of the Blackness
We’ve…Segued
Is Someone Punking You?
She’ll Break Your Heart
Don’t Go, Dana
The Truth Is Scary
Dark Water
The Black Queen
Flat, Flawless Faces
Affect or Effect
Hostessly Duties
Sleep Raid
CR
Lies Number One Through Five Hundred and Forty-two
A Three-Minute Murder
You Don’t Get This by Clicking
What if I’m Pregnant?
Have They Tried to Make You, Phil?
What Happened That Night
A Dagger Made of Pixels
More Than You Wanted
Time to Act
Death Sentence
Please Help Phil
A Kindred Spirit
How Do You Like Me Now?
Golden Air Over a Powder-blue Ocean
My Own Darling Phil
A Change Coming Over Her
The Jadallah
PROLOGUE
Let me wake up dead.
A thousand times I’ve watched her say those words, her face pale and gazing out from behind the glass plate of her cell phone, her expression dulled by the pixelation and distortion of the electronic eye. In my mind’s eye, her cheeks are ivory petals, and her eyes are jewels that shine deep, brown, liquid, bright, startled and startling. Her dark brows swoop up across her forehead, her hair falls in platinum pleats around her shoulders. I hear her voice, fresh and clear. She is seventeen.
Cell phones, hard drives, surveillance clips, Polly’s endless diaries and notes, and interviews conducted by me and Marcellus form the story—the parts of it I don’t know personally. I met Dana Hamlet in school four years ago. I avoided the mistake of talking about her, because I knew how people would have talked about me. Well, of course they would have been right in a way, but I admired her, too—I admired her above all. She was intuitive about science, I love that in a girl. I beat the hell out of my speed bag every night when she started going out with Phil Polonius, the son of Mr. Hamlet’s operations manager—but every morning I’d brighten to another day of her boundless trust and arm-punching affection.
To get one mystery out of the way, I’m—well, I know I’m not bad-looking, especially from the waist up. I’m buffed to the max because I need upper-body strength, and I’d be over six feet tall standing up. Everyone in my family has nice features. A vertebral bone fragment that broke off under the pressure of my motorcycle (hurtling down on me from an insane height after I skidded up an embankment) crushed my spinal cord just above my belt the summer before I met Dana. I’ve been in a wheelchair since. My name is Horst.
PANES OF SOLID GREY
It was dim at noon as the ocean came into view on the Santa Monica freeway. I had all the company I wanted—no music, no passengers, no trafficandweather, just the squish-squash of my wiper blades and the impact of watery arrows on my windshield. As I took the wide turn north onto the Coast Highway, the cloud of solitude and grief was comforting, even sexy.
I was on my way to a wake. The shock of the death was fresh. Dana’s mom had passed away suddenly, just twelve days before we were going to graduate. She hadn’t been sick, or idle, or unhappy. She always argued and laughed with a cool, wicked intensity, she was a thousand steps ahead of you on any brilliant idea you thought was your own, and she was eternally knocking you mute with opinions that seemed contrary to everything she stood for. She worked as a lawyer for the Hamlet Family Foundation—in fact, that was how she and Mr. Hamlet had met. Some people said she took the Foundation to the top by flying straight and inside the radar, and some said she was the craftiest, most opaque operator that an opponent ever despaired of beating. Whichever was true, she was definitely one half of a beautiful power couple: Danielle and Garth Hamlet. It was hard to believe such people could die.
I searched the scrubby roadside for landmarks. On Google maps, Elsinore Canyon is a green polygon north of Malibu, west of the Pacific Coast Highway. The satellite view reveals that it is, in reality, civilized, the furze of treetops seen from overhead covering steep hills where you can pick out one-lane roads that snake among acre-sized rooftops and helipads. I turned off at the tiny exit you have to know about in order to see, and tapped my speed down to a crawl as I maneuvered my car onto a steep uphill road. I flinched as a pair of yellow eyes flew at my windshield—they were gone in the same instant.
The road leveled out as I reached the house, which loomed on a summit overlooking the shore. The graveled field out front was serving as a parking lot today. I joined a line of idling cars that were waiting for valet service. A dull rapping on my window, and I turned to see Marcellus, the Hamlets’ security guy. He looked at me unsmilingly under layers of dripping Gore-Tex and motioned me to roll my window down.
“Marcellus!”
“Good to see you, Horst. Pop your door, I’ll get you inside.”
I drive an ancient Chevy sedan convertible built with a big back seat and equipped with hand controls, easy for me to drive and get my wheelchair in and out of. Today I had the top closed and Marcellus wanted to assist. We made a wheeling dash for the imposing front of the house while he held an umbrella. In the entrance, I lifted a towel off a pile of heated stones and rubbed my head. Thanks to touches like that and the bareness of the service staff, the place always made me think of a medieval castle. The massive rump of the building was anchored in the cliff, with its belly and stilts jutting and creeping down and out over rocky terrain. Lower floors opened endlessly below you, and giant bow windows scanned the Pacific in the saucer-like curve of the western wall. That day they were panes of solid grey.
I wheeled among knots of acquaintances and strangers, keeping my eyes low as I looked for Dana or her father. A patch of floor opened in front of me and I found myself in a forest of smooth saplings—tall girls in short skirts. That’s how it looks when you’re waist-high in the world. Rosie and Gale, two of Dana’s childhood friends, lingered in front of a love seat sizing up the crowd, their legs swaying gently as they shifted from one spike-heeled foot to the other.
“Hey, Horst.” Rosie surprised me by moving towards me with both arms extended. I had no choice but to extend mine, but it turned out she was holding a cigarette away with one hand and offering me a handshake with the other, which caused an awkward nanosecond as I drew my arms back. Even crossing those few steps was oversized for her. Gale gave me a restrained smile-and-nod by way of compensation. They both settled onto the loveseat.
“You’re looking good,” Rosie said. She made that cigarette look tasty. “Want one?” She reached into her purse.
I was about to say “Yes.” Two Real Housewives types, Rosie and Gale’s mothers, appeared at that moment bearing between them a weeping beauty, Dr. Claudia Black. Everyone knew her, and not just because she was Mrs. Hamlet’s sister. She was seldom seen in Elsinore Canyon but she had a high profile elsewhere in town. They lowered her onto a chair and sandwiched themselves against her with tissues and water. “Gale, go make a plate of food,” Gale’s mother instructed softly. I couldn’t help thinking Dr. Claudia looked sweet and a bit alluring with her pale, tight dress and sad eyes. Her eyes were always sad, but today, sadder. They got her a lot of television. Her plummy warble got her the radio.
Her head came up slowly. “I know you,” she said to me in a wandering voice.
“Horst von Wittenberg,” I said. “Dana’s friend. Sorry for your loss.”
“Of course. I remember you. I�
�m so glad you’re here.” Her gaze drifted. “Dana needs her friends’ support.”
“We’re here to support all of you,” said one of the mothers. “But don’t forget yourself.”
“Has anyone seen Dana today?” I asked.
“She was in the receiving line but she disappeared,” said one mother.
“Are we talking about Dana?” said Gale, who was back with a plate of food. “She mentioned you, Horst.”
“Maybe I should go look for her.” I hadn’t seen or heard from her since it had happened.
“Try to comfort her,” Dr. Claudia whispered.
I excused myself and rolled off, at a maddeningly steady pace. My arms were primed with oxygen, ready to sprint. People stood in solemn packs, forcing me to pause and acknowledge them as I steered through. Hello. Am I in your way. How are you. Isn’t it sad. (For Christ’s sake, Dana was suffering alone somewhere.) While I inched through the human obstacle course, the receiving line unraveled. I glimpsed Mr. Hamlet in a wing chair, all GQ perfection and helpless, sodden grief. I’d talk to him later. I couldn’t see Dana anywhere—she must have gone off alone. I finally reached the edge of the crowd, steered wide around a buffet, and aimed for the mouth of a narrow hallway. I knew the house: the long hall led to an outdoor viewing platform. Around a tight corner, a free stretch ahead of me at last. I gave my rims a massive push and coasted. A turn around the last bend, to the top of a short tunnel, and down at the end, on the other side of a thick glass door—there she was.
Staring out at the misty air through wide eyes, biting her knuckles, the wind lifting her hair in pale wisps. With her non-bitten hand she gathered a dark cloak around herself. She looked like a tall black candle with a white flame.
I had known nothing of her grief. I had selfishly fallen to remembering my own. Her mom was dead. My eyes stung and my breath came short.
I took a second to exhale, rolled forward. And stopped. My eyes and mouth dried up as I watched Phil Polonius step onto the platform next to her. He cupped her elbows, and she turned and folded herself into his arms. They were one. I stared at them like a freeway wreck.
Get out of sight, get back to the crowd. He was holding her—holding her, one of the few things I could straight-up do as well as any other guy. I whipped a U-turn and wheeled back up the tunnel, through the hallway and towards the crowd. I had never told a soul, but what I really wanted to do—and this was before the fact that I couldn’t thrust—was fall asleep with Dana at night and wake up with her in the morning. Hold her in my arms in the dark and whisper, “Good night, princess.” Guys don’t tell each other things like that. “I want to sink my dick into that dopey white ass of hers” was fine, but anything tender, anything lasting would get you laughed into the ground. Okay, yes, I also wanted to do a few of those dopey girls in the crudest way imaginable, but it’s that guys can’t talk about anything else. That’s why guys need girls. We can say those things to them. That’s also why girls need guys who know they need girls. We’re the ones who’ll protect them.
I hung around a while, but I never got to speak to Dana or her dad that day. Near sunset, I joined the crowd on a terrace to watch far below as Mr. Hamlet, Dr. Claudia, and Dana were rowed a short way out from the rocky shore at the foot of the summit, to scatter Mrs. Hamlet’s ashes into the sea. Before I left, I heard that Dana was going to finish out the semester at home and skip the graduation ceremony.
ARE YOU HORST?
Our school was small, a place where everyone knew everyone and a private moment of grief would be impossible. St. Maroveus Academy was located two canyons east of Elsinore Canyon, nestled in farms and hills. The air itself seemed to flow through grooves of tradition and ritual—adobe walls and cool pathways smelling of stone and incense—before it reached your nostrils. Prayers before class, Penance and Mass the first Friday of every month, dressing up as our patron saints for Halloween, “Saint Nicholas” and not Santa Claus, wearing grey smudges on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, daily Stations of the Cross during the last two weeks of Lent. Girls on the left side of the church, boys on the right, with the lower grades in the front rows and seniors at the back. The place had once been poor, and every kid, whether seven years old or seventeen, was required to do maintenance or office work. We tended an old cemetery and a garden of gaunt rose trees that twisted out of a pale green lawn. On warm days the giant blooms hung in the air and the perfume made you drowsy.
Although Maroveus taught one through twelve, a lot of kids started at ninth grade, after graduating from schools that stopped at eighth. Many of those kids already had reputations at Maroveus, because everyone talked about their brothers and sisters and the kids in their neighborhoods, and kids from all the schools mixed at diocesan ceremonies and CYO events. Dana was one of the ones coming in at ninth, from St. William of Bourges, where she had been a star volleyball player, May Queen, and “A” student—another school, other stories, but the point is, Dana blossomed gloriously upon her entrance at Maroveus as the smartest, prettiest girl in class and one of the best girl athletes.
That was the fall after my accident. I returned to school on schedule despite my doctors’ advice to wait another two weeks. All summer long I’d felt I was trying to fight my way out of a wet paper bag—and losing. The physical rehab and the sentencing to life in a wheelchair were almost the least of it. What ate my energy and filled me with rage was those pious voices and faces telling me to set aside thoughts of girls and adventures, and turn to a life of prayer and sacrifice. The message was clear. Leave society, leave the world—most important, leave our sight! They don’t want to look at you, so they tell you to go to hell, more commonly known as “heaven.” Blessed and lucky are you, for you’ll be abstinent all your life! But I was now immutably attached to my leaden lower half and I couldn’t help facing them with it. Turn to God. You’ll find a way by helping others. A way of what? This from people who never went to church. This from people who thought of nothing but sex.
But give them credit, the holy frauds gave me something to do besides die. My clawing, digging defiance of them was the last thing I thought of when I fell asleep at night and the first thing I dedicated myself to when I woke up in the morning. To turn the irony yet another notch, I was secretly starting to feel my own way towards a future in a wheelchair. It was that summer that I decided to become a doctor. It’s an infamous bid among crips, but I secretly resolved to find a cure for spinal cord injuries or die trying.
I had steered my wheelchair gingerly through school, looking up now at friends whose shoulders I used to bump with my own, rolling through halls and rooms where I had formerly strode, slouched, and danced. I felt tentative and shrunken as I went about familiar tasks. Dana and I were paired for work duty in the first week, hand-writing aid requests to donors. It was after class, and I was in a room with a few other people and a female teacher we called the Gargoyle.
“Are you Horst?” came a musical voice.
“Yes.”
“I’m Dana.”
I looked up. My view filled with a pair of large brown eyes and incredibly long, translucent lashes, widening to a beautiful, inquisitive face and blonde hair. Her white shirttails drooped over her skirt (the uniform plaid), and her arms and legs were covered with freckles. She was neither friendly nor unfriendly. She took the desk next to me, sitting on the table instead of the seat. I’ve wondered how things would have gone with Dana and me if it hadn’t been for a sort of cave girl aversion she had to indoor spaces and furniture. She pulled up her legs and put a binder on her lap to write. “You’re not going to tip over there?” I said.
“It feels steady.”
“Miss. Hamlett,” came the salivated voice of the Gargoyle. “Gett off thatt desk. You’ll break itt.”
Dana slid down to the seat with a sigh and wedged her work onto her lap. “I like writing on my lap,” she murmured.
I smiled at her. “I can’t feel my lap.”
I had no idea why I said that or what it meant, b
ut she smiled back. “Do you want to sit in a desk?”
I had no earthly reason to follow this nonsequitur, but from her it sounded genius. “I could try.” The Gargoyle had gone to another classroom. We started laughing as I pulled a desk next to me and popped the tray-table off my wheelchair. “Someone’s gonna get sued,” I said—I think it was the first time I joked about my plight since the accident. Other people in the room started talking and giggling. Someone shouted, “Go, Horst!” Dana bustled back onto the top of her desk in her excitement while I tried to get balanced between my chair and the desk I was aiming for. SLAM. BANG. Suddenly, both of us were on the floor. I had fallen, and she had broken her desk.
We were still shaking minutes later as we sat in the principal’s office. “You two deaf?” came the gritty voice of Father Henry. Dana and I “umm’d” where we sat, I in my wheelchair and she in the straight-backed one she now occupied properly, her knees glued together and her feet flat on the floor. We had failed to answer his previous question because of the numbing effects of the twin death-rays he beamed at us over the rims of his glasses.
The rays got colder and the voice grittier as he repeated: “What are you here for?” His face, always shaven to an eye-watering pink and working slightly as if he was rolling a ball-bearing around in his molars, gave no clue to what might come next—a sigh, a chuckle, or an explosion of wall-shaking anger.
“Oh!” Dana fluttered as if the question was totally unexpected. Her brown eyes were serious and large. “Um, we were sent to report a broken desk, Father.”
Blue death-rays. Metal rims. “When did the desk get broken?”
“Oh, um, today, Father.”
“I mean what time.”
Dana looked down at her watch. Her head bobbed back up. “Just now.”
The death rays scanned down to Dana’s wrist, then back to her face with growing incredulity. “How?”
Earnest and helpful was Dana. “Oh, ahm, a girl sat on it, Father.”
