“And you’re not sure where he’s camping now?”
She shook her head. “It was just this thing he did, and now I can’t find him.…”
She started to cry, fat tears streaming down her face like something out of a comic strip. She’d obviously been crying plenty of late, because she didn’t even bother to swipe at them.
“Have you talked to the police?”
“I tried, but they’re all busy, and everything’s so crazy with the festival getting canceled and everybody leaving….”
“Did you talk to the chief? To Trish’s dad?” She shook her head again, and this time one of the tears that had been poised on the edge of her cheek flew off and landed on my shirt. “Who’d you talk to?”
“I don’t know…some deputy or something.”
“What about Melting Rock security?”
“They said he’d probably turn up once everybody got moved out. And I tried to tell them I hadn’t seen him since Wednesday night, but—”
“You haven’t seen him since Wednesday?”
Her drowning eyeballs took on a wounded look. “I told you that already. We had our first-night thing at the Rock and then we all split off to do our own thing, and Tom—”
“Has anybody else seen him since then?”
“Nobody. And I’ve been asking and asking….”
“Come on. We’re going to find Chief Stilwell.”
“How…How come?”
“If nobody’s seen him in forty-eight hours,” I said, “then Tom’s officially a missing person.”
MY MOM HAS A FRIEND who’s so disorganized, she’d lose her head if it weren’t physically attached to her neck. She’s gone through at least twenty pairs of eyeglasses in her lifetime, and once (no kidding) managed to fly to Europe without her purse. On more than one occasion, she’s gone to a classical concert at Tanglewood and completely forgotten where she parked her car—and then had to wait until the other five thousand people went home so she could find it, the only one left in the lot.
I mention this for no particular reason, other than to explain what was on my mind when they finally found the tent. One by one, several hundred others were collapsed and folded into bright piles of nylon, and by the time dusk fell, there was only one left standing. It was forest green, brand new, with a rain fly expertly staked above it and a DO NOT DISTURB note pinned to the front flap.
And inside, as you’ve probably already guessed, was the corpse of a skinny young kid named Tom Giamotti.
CHAPTER7
I didn’t actually see the body; whatever gods govern such things must’ve decided that two dead boys in as many days was enough for this girl. But since it was my job to describe the scene to the paper-buying public, I did gather a fair amount of details: the fact that by the time they found him, he’d been dead so long that rigor mortis had come and gone; that he had his knees up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them in a pose that sounded both defensive and childlike; that, nature being what it is, several generations of insects were born and died with his body as their entire universe.
By the way, we didn’t print that last one.
I finally left Melting Rock just as night was falling on Saturday. Although the bosses would probably have loved to have me file more updates for the goddamn Web site, I decided they could go screw themselves. After failing to get in touch with Cody either at home or on his cell, I went to my house and made haste to the shower. Lacking the melodrama of extreme youth, however, I opted to take off my clothes first.
Although crawling into bed definitely had its allure, I was in severe canine withdrawal; there’s nothing like viewing corpses to make a girl long to snuggle up with her dog. So I got myself dressed and went over to Cody’s, where I found two excellent pooches but no boyfriend. Both dogs—my Shakespeare and his Zeke—jumped all over me, which (for me, at least) was a pretty good substitute.
I spent some time rolling around on the living-room floor with them, then tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening. I could stick around at Cody’s and watch TV with the dogs until he showed up, but despite the recent Melting Rock mob scene, I wasn’t craving solitude. When I really wanted, I decided, was an old-fashioned debriefing—preferably one that included copious amounts of alcohol. So I left Cody a note to call me on my cell when he got in and headed over to the Citizen Kane.
The Citizen is located on the Gabriel Green, a pedestrian mall that (despite its name) has not a single blade of grass within two blocks. The bar itself is located toward the middle, so its window seat has an excellent view of the various freaks and slackers who congregate on the concrete at all hours and in every kind of weather.
Sure enough, the plate-glass window framed its usual occupants: Mad, Ochoa, and their third musketeer, sports editor Xavier O’Shaunessey. The three of them make one hell of a motley crew: Mad is six foot four and resembles an ad for either Norway or the Abdominizer; Ochoa is Mexican American, wiry and dark like I used to like them in my pre-Cody days; O’Shaunessey tips the scales at around two hundred and fifty flabby pounds, never cleans his glasses, and is as white as a nurse’s panty hose.
They might’ve seen me coming, but they were too absorbed in whatever they were arguing about. When I got within hearing range, I realized Mad was holding forth on his familiar diatribe about how Joe Cocker sang Beatles songs better than Lennon and McCartney. I was glad I’d missed it.
“You got room for one more?”
Mad stopped in midtirade. “Hey, Bernier. Made it out of that place alive, did you?”
I pulled a chair out from under his feet and sat down. “Hardy har-har.” On the table were three beer mugs and a nearly full pitcher. It was undoubtedly not their first, though at least the evening hadn’t yet degenerated into tequila.
“Girl needs a drink,” O’Shaunessey said. “On me. Whatcha want?”
“Tanqueray and tonic. A really big one. Two limes.”
“You got it,” he said, and headed for the bar.
Mad stood up too and announced he was going to “the head.” That left me with Ochoa, who hasn’t always been my biggest fan. That’s partly because he’s been damn possessive about the cop beat since he got to the paper a few months back. Unfortunately, it’s also because (for reasons beyond my ken) his long-distance girlfriend decided we had the hot potatoes for each other and dumped him on his attractive Latino ass. Lately, though, things had thawed a little—possibly because he hasn’t seemed to have time to make any other friends.
“So it was pretty wild out there, eh?” he was saying. “Must’ve been a blast to cover.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why did you two head for the hills when Marilyn was looking for somebody to send out there?”
“Hey, come on. I never said I wanted to cover the damn thing before those kids went and got themselves dead.”
“Yeah, well, it was kind of a drag.”
“You ladies are so sensitive….”
“Jesus, Ochoa, you’ve been hanging out with Mad too much. You’re starting to sound like him.”
“Ay, pobrecita…”
“And would you stop with the Speedy Gonzalez thing?”
“Hey, I’m a proud Mex—”
“Give me a break. You’re about as white bread as they come, Calvin.”
He shushed me and looked around to see if anyone was in hearing range. “Hey, you promised you wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“Tell them what? That Cal is really short for Calvin and you went to boarding school and your father’s a brain surgeon and you’re—”
“Would you shut up?”
I was starting to feel better already. Then O’Shaunessey showed up with a giant gin and tonic, and my life improved even further.
“Okay, Bernier,” Mad said once he’d returned from the loo, “tell us just what the hell happened at that freak show.”
I filled them in on all that had gone down since Wednesday night. It took me the entire first G & T and halfway into the next.
&
nbsp; “So let me get this straight,” Mad said. “You did a feature story on eight kids. Now three of them are dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Just goes to show you,” Ochoa offered. “You talk to Bernier, it could cost you your life.”
“Nice,” I said. “Really nice.”
O’Shaunessey topped off his mug. “So what are the cops doing about it? Or… what, the county health department? I mean, if these kids are OD’ing on something, it’s—”
“It’s what I call natural selection,” Mad said with a lupine smile.
I rolled my eyes and turned back to O’Shaunessey. “To answer your question, I’d say they’re going out of their gourd. It was bad enough after the first kid died, then after the second…And Jesus Christ, once they found Tom Giamotti…”
Ochoa leaned in. “So what did they take?”
“Damned if I know. Jaspersburg cops sure aren’t talking, and neither’s the coroner. Can’t blame them for flipping out—this is probably the worst thing that’s happened in the village since… well, since ever.”
“Come on,” he said. “You hung out with these kids. What’s your guess?”
“Honestly, I’ve got no idea. I can barely tell one drug from the next.”
Mad raised his mug in my direction. “You mean there’s more than one?”
“Out there, there were plenty. Like, I’d barely been there five minutes when some guy with a goddamn ring through his nose took me for a dealer. And by the way, what the hell is ‘Oxy’?”
“Oxycontin,” Ochoa said. “Heavy-duty prescription painkiller. People grind it up and snort it and get addicted in about ten seconds.”
“Wonderful.”
“So what was up with these kids?” O’Shaunessey asked. “You get the vibe they were a bunch of—”
“Self-destructive morons?” Mad interjected.
I punched him in the shoulder. “Look, I agree with you. What they did was idiotic. But like I told Cody, it’s not exactly a capital crime, okay?” Mad opened his mouth. “And don’t say it was this time, because Cody already beat you to it.”
“Smart guy.”
“Whatever. So to answer your question…Hell, I don’t know. These are definitely not the kind of kids I would’ve been friends with in school. They’re too messed up and way too cool. I was pretty much a big square.”
“Hard to believe,” said Ochoa. I decided to ignore him.
“Oh, hey, I forgot something,” I said. “Three guesses who I ran into out there.”
“The Doobie Brothers?” Mad offered. I shook my head. “Ghost of Jerry Garcia?”
“Not even close.”
“Timothy Leary?”
“I think he’s dead too.”
“Oh. Who then?”
“Try Gordon.”
“Band?”
“The one and only.”
“Wait. You mean before the kids started keeling over or after?”
“Before. Long before.”
“Jesus,” Mad said, “poor bastard must’ve been suicidal.”
“Yep.”
“I’d have paid money to see it.”
“It was the high point of my weekend.”
“He find out you interviewed those kids before they died?”
“Only if he looked at my Thursday story and put two and two together,” I said. “Which, knowing Gordon, he probably did.”
“And which must be driving him nuts with envy.”
“I can only hope.”
“So who are these kids, anyway?” Mad asked. “Damned if I can tell them apart.”
“Well, like I said, there were eight of them all together. Four boys and four girls. Now only one of the guys is still breathing.”
“Whoa,” said O’Shaunessey. “When you put it like that, it sounds pretty bad, eh?”
“Jesus,” I said, “how else is it supposed to sound? So the first one who died, his name was Shaun Kirtz. I guess he was some sort of a computer genius, had a summer job at Benson. Kind of the least hunky of them, but this one girl really seemed to like him—this girl named Cindy, who’s the only junior in the bunch. The rest were all seniors.
“Next was Billy Halpern. One of those kids you see walking around who looks like he just dropped in from the seventies—really big sideburns and all that. Kind of arrogant, obviously thought of himself as a real ladies’ man. Picked on Shaun, but so did everybody else.
“The last one was this kid I only met once, but I thought he was really sweet. That was Tom Giamotti—sort of looked like he hadn’t grown into his own feet, you know? I think he was best friends with the girl who basically ran the group, Lauren Potter. Kind of the queen bee.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Mad. “You need a scorecard to follow all these kids. How did you even keep them straight?”
“They’re kind of all different, actually. The group’s a goddamn Breakfast Club. In fact, I was just thinking how this is probably the only time in their lives they’d really be friends.”
“High school makes strange bedfellows?”
“Exactly. Take the guy who’s still alive—Alan Bauer, who’s Cindy’s older brother. He’s a big jock, says he’s getting a college scholarship. Seemed like a pretty decent kid, kind of the Melting Rock version of a Boy Scout. Then there’s Dorrie Benson, who’s got this hideous crew cut….”
Mad put down his mug with a whack. “Dorrie Benson? You gotta be kidding me.”
“Don’t tell me you know her.”
“Not exactly, but… Jesus, Alex, you cover the university as much as I do. Didn’t you recognize the name?”
“Benson? It’s not exactly an unusual… Holy shit. You mean she’s one of those Bensons?”
His Nordic skull bobbed up and down. “If I remember right, her real name is Constance Dorchester Benson, or something equally obnoxious. Direct descendant of Simeon Benson.”
“As in the founder of the college.”
“You got it.”
“Yikes. Go figure.”
O’Shaunessey reached for his Beer Nuts, housed in a helmet-size bowl kept behind the bar for his personal use. “So that’s”—he counted on his meaty digits—“seven. Who’s the last one?”
“That would be Trish Stilwell. Her dad is the Jaspersburg chief of police—”
“Sucks to be her,” said Mad. His companions nodded.
“She seems like a nice kid, kind of quiet. So skinny it hurts to look at her. I think she and her dad are pretty close, actually, though she tries to make herself out to be the rebellious teenager. Cody told me her mom’s been dead a while, so I guess he pretty much raised her.”
“Tough,” O’Shaunessey said. More nodding from the peanut gallery.
“So,” Mad said with a familiar waggle of eyebrow, “which one was the foxy babe who ran on page one? You know, the one with the long hair and the perky little gozongas?”
“Jesus,” I said, “you ever heard of the term jailbait?”
“Hey, she’s seventeen. You ever heard of the term age of consent?”
“I swear to God, Your Honor,” O’Shaunessey said at top volume, “she told me she was sixteen.…”
The three of them howled and pounded the tabletop, which was structurally unsound enough to make beer slosh from Mad’s recently filled mug. He grabbed a napkin and wiped up the stinky brew with a surgeon’s precision.
“To answer your question,” I said, “that would be Lauren Potter. Kind of the cruise director of the bunch. Really good manners for a seventeen-year-old, though I got the feeling she might be a bitch if you crossed her.” Mad made a meowing sound. The other two found this the height of cleverness. “Seems like a pretty smart kid, though. I guess her parents are both profs at the Benson med school.”
Mad stopped yowling. “Must be Mike Potter’s kid. He’s in pediatric oncology. So’s his wife. Linda …no, Lindsay. Lindsay Sherman. That’s their kid?”
“I don’t know. If you say so. Why?”
“Neither one of them is mu
ch to look at.”
“Call it a genetic mutation. So I take it you guys’ve heard about the emergency edit meeting?”
“Yeah,” said Mad, and turned to the perplexed Irishman at his left. “Don’t worry,” he told him, “it doesn’t have fuck-all to do with you.”
“Fine thing,” O’Shaunessey said, and stood up. “Who’s for another round?”
Hearing no dissent, he toddled off in the direction of the bar. “You got any idea what Bill’s got going?” Ochoa asked. “Like, are we each getting assigned to a kid or something?”
I drained my second G & T in anticipation of a third. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, think about it. We’ve got a shitload of stuff to cover.”
“Yeah,” said Ochoa, “you’ve got your standard teen memorial service, times three.…”
Mad rolled his eyes. “Crying chicks, autographed coffin, blah-blah-blah. If they play the theme song to Titanic, I’m gonna hurl.”
“I think that time is mercifully past,” I said. “But you’re right about covering all the funeral stuff. Plus, there’s the news obits. I already filed a profile of the first dead kid before all hell broke loose. Now I gotta come up with something on Billy and Tom by deadline tomorrow. Which, hopefully, you guys are gonna have to help me with.”
Mad put up a hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Hey, I’m gonna be all over the public-health stuff. County must be going crazy trying to warn everybody off taking this shit, whatever it is. You can bet your ass they’re gonna want to be getting the word out. Plus, maybe the CDC’ll get in on it. Christ only knows how much of this stuff ’s floating around out there, and it don’t exactly respect state lines, if you know what I mean.”
I turned to Ochoa. “Fine. You can help me out with the—”
“Not so fast, chiquita. I’m the cops reporter, remember? I already got my hands full.”
“With what?”
He stared at me like I was playing dumb, then realized that I was being straight with him. “What are you, dense?”
“Apparently.”
“Jesus, Alex,” Ochoa said. “Three kids are dead from bad drugs. Don’t you think the cops might be just a little bit interested in who sold it to them?”
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