Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “I thought he was supposed to be a stand-up guy. Don’t tell me he’s—”

  “It’s not him; it’s me. I’ve sort of been keeping him at arm’s length lately. And don’t bother asking me why, because I’m not sure myself, okay?”

  “Hey, it’s none of my business.”

  “I’m glad you realize that.”

  “So what do you say? Do we break this or what?”

  “What do you want, my blessing?”

  “For lack of a better word…yeah.”

  “But how are you going to back it up, attributionwise? Are you finally going to interview Trike Ford?”

  “Tried,” he said. “No go. He pretty much played dumb, then told me asking questions like that could get a guy’s ass kicked.”

  “When was this?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “Jesus, Ochoa, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Figured you had enough to worry about.”

  “Come on, you saw what happened to Melissa. These aren’t the kind of people you want to screw around with.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got Madison watching my back.”

  “But if he’s denying it, which of course he would, who are you attributing this stuff to?”

  “I’ve got sources of my own in the police department, you know. Between that and all the paperwork—the payoff lists, the account info, the stuff you found from the Melting Rock lawsuits—it ought to be enough to satisfy Bill and Marilyn.”

  “Not to mention the lawyers.”

  “ ‘According to documentation provided to the Monitor by anonymous sources…,’ ” he said with a grin. “Don’t you just love it?”

  OCHOA’S PAGE-ONE STORY ran the next day. And from what I hear, its appearance pissed off not only Gordon—who was apoplectic to learn that he’d missed a big chunk of the Mohawk Associates story—but local law-enforcement officials, who were forced to move on the arrests several days earlier than they’d planned. But sure enough, the following morning’s paper featured the banner head ARRESTS MADE IN MELTING ROCK PAYOLA—which, if nothing else, satisfied Bill’s long-held yearning to use the latter word in a headline.

  The most prominent occupant of the paddy wagon was, of course, Rosemary Hamill. Probably out of spite at the Monitor, the county sheriff had tipped off Nine News to the arrests—meaning that viewers of their six o’clock broadcast were treated to the sight of her, gigantic hat askew, swearing up and down that she “hadn’t broken any tax laws.”

  The arrest of Trike Ford was less comical. The Nine News cameras captured him unleashing a torrent of bleeped-out words at the officers as he was taken in handcuffs from the family trailer, with both his infant daughter and Jo wailing on the rickety front porch.

  Mrs. Hamill, predictably, hired a lawyer and started fighting the case tooth and nail. Trike, on the other hand, immediately offered to turn in each and every one of his coconspirators—up to and including the two burly Melting Rock security guys who had assaulted Melissa.

  A casual observer, therefore, might have assumed that the whole sorry mess was coming to an end. It wasn’t.

  Because, you see, two things were conspicuously absent from Trike’s confession: He didn’t admit to framing me, and he swore up and down that the Mohawk Associates scam didn’t have anything to do with any of the murders—not of the boys, and not of Axel Robinette.

  That he’d lie to avoid a murder rap might seem entirely predictable; the problem was, there was nothing to prove otherwise. In fact, according to Ochoa’s cop sources, Alan Bauer swore he’d never even heard about the scam; the female members of the Jaspersburg Eight backed him up, saying that as far as they knew, Tom, Shaun, and Billy hadn’t known about it, either.

  So…were they lying? Were they just mistaken? Or was there something else going on, something nobody even suspected?

  And, at the risk of sounding excessively narcissistic… what about me?

  That was the question I posed to Ochoa, who’d come over to my place to consume vast quantities of pizza to celebrate his big scoop. Melissa, who’d just gotten back from Toronto, had eaten half a slice and pleaded exhaustion; Ochoa and I had camped out in the living room, consuming the rest of the pie and trying to figure out how to keep me out of jail.

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s the bottom line. Raise your hand if you have any idea how I go about finding out who put goddamn Sturdivant up to this.”

  “Well,” Ochoa said, “the way I see it, there are three possibilities. Either he did it by himself in the hopes of staying out of jail, or somebody paid him to do it, or somebody forced him.”

  “Forced him how?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Well, what does Cody have to say about it?”

  “I told you, things are kind of weird on the Cody front lately.”

  “Let me guess. You’re acting like a typical female.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re pushing him away, then getting pissed at him for not being there.”

  “Jesus, Ochoa, that ex of yours sure did a number on you.”

  “And I let her. But don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay, fine, I…I’m totally humiliated about this whole thing. I got busted, cuffed, indicted, the whole nine yards. And I guess… maybe the only thing that’ll let me walk upright in the sunlight ever again is to get my own damn self out of it.”

  “That’s perverse.”

  “Yeah, well, so am I.”

  “So fine, you’re the superhero; what’s your plan?”

  “I told you, I’m stuck.”

  “Bullshit. I bet you’ve got some scheme running around in that twisted little head of yours.”

  “No, I…Well, okay. I have been thinking… maybe I ought to go back to the beginning.”

  “Which is?”

  “The thing that got me into this mess in the first place,” I said. “Melting Rock.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I went back to the scene of the crime—not the one I’d been accused of, but the one I’d actually committed. This time, though, I went in via the front door of Groovy Guitar rather than through a back window. But it didn’t matter; even the owner’s dog looked at me like I was a felon.

  I went in and headed straight for the back, past rows of instruments hanging from the ceiling like sides of beef in an abattoir. I had no guarantee anyone would even be in the Melting Rock office; it’s hardly the kind of place that’s staffed nine to five. Luckily, though, there was Jo Mingle—still hugely pregnant, and with her other baby whacking wooden blocks together in a playpen.

  Jo didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me; she did, however, look completely miserable.

  “Look, Jo,” I said, “I’m really sorry about what happened with Trike.”

  “Not your fault,” she said, sounding utterly exhausted. “Not anybody’s fault but his.”

  “You really didn’t know, did you?”

  “Nah.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “Yeah, I guess. At least I’m not going to jail, right? At least my kids’ll have one of us to raise them.…” I had no idea what to say, so I just stood there. “So,” she said after a while, “what are you doing here, anyway? You still writing about Melting Rock?”

  “Sort of.”

  She bit her lip, fingered her thick blond braid. “Then… sorry, I can’t help you. After what’s happened and all…”

  “Um, Jo…I’m not actually working for the paper right now. I just”—I tried to think of a way to explain it—“I was there, okay? I met those guys who died, and I’m just trying to figure out …I need to know what went wrong.”

  “The cops said some sicko sold them bad acid. And Trike …he swears he didn’t know a single thing about it. And I believe him, okay? He’s a bad guy, but he’s not that bad.”

  “Right, but…I guess what I’m trying to do is understand the plac
e.”

  “Understand Melting Rock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. That’s cool, I guess.”

  “So what can you tell me?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just what I told you at the fest, only it goes double now. It isn’t the same place it used to be. It’s too bad, too. Back in the day, Melting Rock was really something special.”

  “Special how?”

  “Why don’t you have a look for yourself?” She waved toward the lone bookshelf, which was stuffed with albums I’d glanced through when Mad and I broke in, each oversize volume covered in multicolored cloth.

  “What are those, exactly?”

  “Scrapbooks. There’s a couple for every year. Not this year, though. Nobody’s got around to it yet. Probably never will, either.”

  “But what—”

  “Oh, man, I have to go.” She consulted the antique watch hanging from a chain around her neck, then stood up, tummy first. “I have an appointment at the clinic at two….Hey, could you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “If you’re gonna stay here and look at the books anyway, could you watch Happy for me? I’ll only be gone for, like, twenty minutes. I just have to get my weekly exam. Could you?”

  “Listen, Jo, I—”

  “She’s a really easy baby, no problem. She’ll just sit there and play with her—”

  “It’s not that. I, um…” For some reason, I felt the need to come clean. “Look, believe it or not, I just got accused of dealing some ridiculous amount of cocaine, okay? I got arrested and everything. So you probably wouldn’t want me to—”

  She blinked at me. “Just dealing? Is that it?”

  “Um…yeah.”

  “All righty, then,” she said. “If Happy fusses a little, there’s a box of organic zwieback on the desk. Just give her one. She’ll beg you for two, but you gotta—”

  “Wait,” I said. “You mean it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Drugs ought to be legal anyhow.”

  With those words and a friendly smile, Jo took off—leaving me with a pile of papers, several rows of scrapbooks, and one very fat baby. The kid watched her mother walk out the door, then screwed up her face like she was fixing to bawl. But she didn’t; she just opened her eyes wide and stared at me like I was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen. Then she went back to her blocks.

  Thus dismissed, I pulled the first scrapbook from the shelf and settled on the dusty hardwood floor next to the playpen. I flipped through the pages, which brought me back thirteen years—when I was at boarding school, and Melting Rock was just getting off the ground.

  Sure enough, there were pictures of ragtag groups of music fans, maybe a hundred or so in all. The only person I recognized was a teenage Jo Mingle, though I did notice that many of the shots included a scraggly-bearded guy handing out thick slices of brown bread and passing around a ceramic butter crock. Fascinating.

  I went through a few more like this before it occurred to me that it might be more profitable to work backward instead of forward. So I squatted at the bottom of the shelf and took the most recent volume, which was covered in purple velvet with appliquéd gold stars.

  I flipped it open, and right away I saw some familiar faces; Melissa was even there, boogying it up in a crowd shot. Eventually, I came across a photo of Lauren, looking flushed and happy—and, of all things, sitting on the lap of one Axel Robinette. He was holding her around the waist and, in his predictably suave fashion, grabbing one of her breasts.

  What the hell was that all about?

  A couple of pages later, I hit the jackpot: two full spreads devoted entirely to the group I’d been calling the Jaspersburg Eight. At first I was blown away by my good fortune, but then I figured it wasn’t really that unlikely. After all, the reason I’d found the teens in the first place was because Jo had told me they were a Melting Rock institution.

  And there they were, looking a lot like they had when I’d first met them—hanging out on the grass, clowning around, giving the general impression that they didn’t have a care in the world. They were younger, of course; the difference between sixteen and seventeen can be acute, especially for boys. I noticed that Tom’s hair was shorter, and Billy had just started cultivating those ridiculous sideburns; Shaun looked basically the same, skinny and with serious acne issues, though Alan wasn’t nearly as well muscled as when I’d met him.

  As for the girls: Cindy hadn’t changed much from fifteen to sixteen, though the previous year her hair had been electric blue. Lauren seemed as grown-up and confident as ever; Trish, on the other hand, was maybe twenty pounds heavier than she was now—making her almost normal.

  But when it came to the prize for Most Transformed, there was no contest: Dorrie was the winner, hands down.

  In fact, if she hadn’t been with the rest of the gang, I probably wouldn’t have recognized her. She looked…well, normal.

  Her hair was still short, but it was nicely styled. She was wearing a sundress akin to the ones that Lauren paraded around in, a flower-print spaghetti-strap affair that showed off her tanned shoulders and budding cleavage. Other than a pair of loopy earrings, there was nary a piercing to be found. On her ankle was a rose tattoo just like Trish’s, and I realized I hadn’t noticed it before. Every time I’d seen her in person, she’d been wearing pants and long sleeves.

  I scrutinized the picture for a while, my first reaction being intense sympathy for Dorrie’s parents. Call me uptight, but the idea of a daughter of mine running around looking like an East Village rent-a-boy made me nauseous.

  My second thought, though, was even more dramatic.

  What the hell happened to her?

  What could possibly prompt a girl to make such a dramatic identity shift her junior year of high school? What had made her go from what appeared to be a typical teenager to a morose kid bent on self-mutilation? Was it really just normal adolescent angst? Or was there something else going on?

  Those queries prompted me to ask another, one that I’d been pondering for weeks now. Then I put the two together, and suddenly everything seemed to fall into place.

  I’d wondered what the boys had done, what could be awful enough to make someone want them dead. I’d thought it was connected to the payoff scam, but it appeared that I was wrong.

  And now I was wondering what had happened to Dorrie.

  With everything else out of the picture, didn’t it make sense to ask, What had they done to Dorrie?

  And what was the most obvious answer? What was the most likely thing that a group of boys could have done to leave a girl traumatized, maybe even change her overnight? I thought about how I’d found Melissa, naked and brutalized, and what everyone had assumed had happened to her until she told us different.

  Oh, my God, I thought. They raped her.

  OKAY, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe, as my mom would say, I was assuming facts not in evidence. But…I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was finally on the right track.

  I was about to run out in search of more information when I remembered that I was responsible for the well-being of a tiny human. By the time Jo got back fifteen minutes later, I was practically hysterical with curiosity.

  I went straight from the Melting Rock office to the Walden County Public Library, where I headed for the reference section. I grabbed the previous year’s Jaspersburg High School annual and flipped to the photo of the junior class. It took some searching to find Dorrie in the crowd, but there she was—hair shorn, nose pierced, not having totally adopted her present look, but well on her way.

  From my previous incarnation as the Monitor’s schools reporter, I knew that student portraits were taken at the end of September, so the kids could give them to their parents for Christmas. That meant that when the scrapbook photos were shot the previous August, Dorrie looked normal; a month later, she’d been transformed. If my theory was right, whatever had happened to her had gone down sometime in the co
urse of those few weeks—maybe even at Melting Rock itself.

  Son of a bitch.

  So how could I find out more? Asking Dorrie herself didn’t seem like a great idea, considering how she’d freaked out and slugged me the last time I’d spoken to her. Trish and Cindy had their own stability issues—which left Lauren, the long-haired nymphet who may or may not be schtupping my best friend.

  I called her on her cell just as school was getting out, and she agreed to meet me on the grounds that it was “way more fun than studying calc.” So I went over to Café Whatever and read the Times while I waited for her, taking some pleasure in the discovery that, even in the wake of his Mohawk Associates scoop, Gordon’s latest assignment involved the bitter politics surrounding the closure of an Elmira tampon factory.

  Lauren walked in half an hour later, looking rather schoolmarmish in a skirt and lightweight sweater, hair again up in a bun. She ordered an espresso and a thin lemon biscotti, which she dipped into the tiny cup with the precision of a chemist at the bench.

  “So,” she said through a smile, “how’s Jake doing?”

  “Um…okay, I guess. I haven’t seen him that much.”

  “ ’Cause you got suspended from the paper?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “It was in one of the stories about you getting busted.”

  “Oh. Listen, Lauren, I didn’t do it, okay? Somebody set me up. They planted those drugs in my—”

  “Well, duh.”

  “You believe me?” Between Lauren and Jo, I was starting to feel like something less than a pariah.

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re totally not the type.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  “So how come you wanted to talk to me?”

  “Well…I came across these old photos from Melting Rock last year, and I was kind of wondering about them.”

  “What photos?”

  “Just of you guys, and…First of all, there was one of you and Axel Robinette, where you two looked kind of… intimate.”

  Another eye roll. “Yeah, we kind of hooked up that year. Nothing big. Just your typical M.R.F.”

  “Your what?”

  “M.R.F. Didn’t you hear that before?” I shook my head. “It stands for Melting Rock”—she leaned in, her smile turning naughty—“…if you’re in front of a grown-up, you’d say ‘Fling,’ but we’ve got another word for it.”