“No wonder I what?”
I reached over and pulled her sleeve back up. She pulled it down again and just said, “Fuck you.”
“You really ought to see a counselor.”
“Like it’s any of your business.”
“Tell me something,” I said. “When it came out that those guys didn’t die by accident, didn’t you think it might be connected? Didn’t you think you should say something?”
She stared down at her lap. “Trish swore me to secrecy.”
“For chrissake, didn’t it occur to you that maybe the reason they were killed was—”
“I didn’t really think about it.”
“Well, you goddamn well better think about it now.”
“Hey, where do you get off—”
“Dorrie, those three guys are dead. So’s Axel. Alan’s probably crippled for the rest of his life. And what about that poor girl in Baltimore? She almost died too, and she didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of this.”
She lit another cigarette, hands less than steady. “So?”
“So who the hell is responsible? Lauren?”
“Lauren? Are you crazy?”
“Think about it. She’s really protective of Trish. She knows chemistry. She can get into the labs at Benson. She slept with Axel. She—”
“She what?”
“You didn’t know?” Dorrie shook her head. “I don’t think it was anything serious, just—”
“For Axel, there was no such thing as ‘serious.’ ” She laughed, again without a trace of humor. “Can you believe I gave it up for that guy?”
“You—”
“He was my first, okay? I thought he was this supercool musician, and… this year, right after the fest, I let him fuck me in the goddamn dugout at the JHS baseball field. He said he saw it in a movie once and he wanted to try it in there, said it would be all romantic.” Her voice rose an octave. “And you know what? It wasn’t romantic. It fucking hurt. And I didn’t even make him use a rubber or anything. I was lucky I didn’t… I was just lucky, okay?” She shook her head. “What difference does it make? Sex always sucks for girls anyway. And besides, what happened to me was a hell of a lot better than…”
She let the sentence dangle. I finished it.
“Than what happened to Trish?”
She took another drag, hand shaking on the way to her mouth. “Yeah.”
“Dorrie,” I said after a minute, “did you get Axel the key to Deep Lake Cooling?”
She exhaled a plume of smoke. “Fine, all right, yes. How the hell did you know?”
“I figured since you’ve been around campus all your life, you probably know your way around.”
She suddenly flashed a thin smile, and it struck me that it was the only time I’d ever seen her look remotely happy. “I’ve got a key to the room where they keep all the keys. And Axel… he said he found out some people got paid off a while ago not to fight Deep Lake, but he didn’t get a penny of it. So he and some of his buddies… they wanted to do something really wild, something that’d get everybody’s attention even more than the Jell-O thing. So I helped him out.”
“Listen, Dorrie… about Lauren. Do you think there’s any chance she—”
The smile disappeared. “Killed those guys? Are you serious?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Look, Lauren’s never been my favorite person, okay? The princess act gets old after a while. And lately… she kind of treats me like I’m some sort of sad freak, you know? But I can’t picture her ever doing anything like that. I mean, how would she even know about what happened to Trish in the first place?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Trish probably told her.”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, Trish is in total denial about the whole thing. She won’t even admit it to herself, okay?”
“So who—”
“Look, I gotta go.”
“But—”
“Christ, I just spilled my guts to you. Do you have to get me in deep with my parents too? My curfew’s in, like, five minutes. So can I please have my car keys?”
“Okay.” I handed them over and got out of the car. “But we’re not done talking about this.”
“Maybe you aren’t,” she said, “but I sure as hell am.”
I’d barely shut the door when she peeled out of the parking lot. I went back to my own car and grabbed my cell to call Cody—and was intensely frustrated to discover that this far out in the hinterlands there was no service.
So I headed back toward Jaspersburg. I’d barely gone two miles when I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror. Damn.
I pulled over, rolled down the window, and was summarily blinded by a high-test flashlight beam.
“Hey, what the—”
“Get out of the car.”
“What for?”
“Just get out of the car.”
I put a hand up to block the glare. “Did I do something wrong?”
The next thing I knew, the car door was being yanked open and I was being hauled out by somebody strong enough to do it with one hand. Before I could even start to figure out what was going on, my hands were cuffed behind my back and I was tossed into the back of a squad car—something that had been happening to me far too often of late.
It wasn’t until we were speeding down the road that I recognized the man behind the wheel.
“Chief Stilwell? What’s going on?”
“You’re under arrest for violating the terms of your bail agreement.”
“What? How?”
“The nature center’s on the wrong side of the county line.”
“But how…”
I’d been about to ask him just how the hell he knew where I’d been, but something in his tone made me keep my mouth shut.
We kept going, him never once taking his eyes off the road to look at me—and me starting to wonder if I’d been very, very wrong about Lauren Potter.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“To the station.”
“In Gabriel?”
“Jaspersburg,” he said.
He still didn’t look at me, not even a peek at my reflection in the rearview mirror. The icky feeling in the pit of my stomach was starting to spread.
He must’ve been driving damn fast, because it was only a minute or so later that we got into town. I guess I expected him to pull up in front of the town-hall-slash-police-station, but he drove around the back. He left me inside the car for a second while he unlocked the door, then hauled me up again and propelled me inside.
The place was deserted. Stilwell led me down a hallway, through another door, and down a flight of stairs. We went through yet another door, beyond which was pitch blackness.
He flicked a switch and some fluorescent lights came on, giving the place a sickly greenish yellow glow—and, by the way, revealing a pair of jail cells.
He opened one of the doors, shoved me inside, and clanged it shut behind me. Then he told me to turn my back to him so he could unlock the handcuffs. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I complied; imagine my relief when he actually liberated my wrists.
By the time I turned around again, he was gone.
I looked around the cell, which offered exactly one place to sit: the bare mattress of the spare steel bed. I plunked myself down and tried to figure out just what the hell I was supposed to do.
Was there any chance I wasn’t in the gigantic amount of trouble I thought I was? Could Stilwell have actually picked me up on some stupid technicality? But then …how did he know I’d been at the nature center unless—at this point, the icky feeling kicked in again with a vengeance—unless he’d been following me?
The nasty thoughts I’d been entertaining in the backseat of the squad car went shooting across my brain.
It wasn’t Dorrie whom those boys raped.
It was Trish.
And
who’s the most likely person on the goddamn planet to want to punish them for it?
I heard Stilwell’s footsteps coming down the hall.
Play dumb, I thought. If he knows you’re on to him, you’re screwed.
As it turned out, I was screwed anyway.
WHEN STILWELL CAME BACK, he was carrying a stack of grayish white linen. He handed them to me, which doesn’t sound particularly threatening. But when I went to put them on the bed, he said this:
“Make a noose.”
I’m serious. That’s what he said—but at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
“Make a what?”
“A noose.”
“Like…”
“Like what a person hangs himself with. A noose. Got it?”
I stared at him. “Are you kidding?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
I stared at him some more. Then I said, “No.”
“Then do it.”
“Uh…no way.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. Then he pulled the gun out of its holster, pointed it at me, and said, “Don’t make me do this the hard way.”
It was such a cliché I would’ve laughed—if the gun weren’t so big and shiny and aimed right at my gut.
I decided stalling was in order.
“I don’t understand,” I said. I hoped the expression on my face was as stupid as I’d actually been over the past few weeks.
“Take the sheet,” he said, jerking his gun in the direction of the bed before aiming it right back at me. “Rip it into strips. Braid them up to make a rope, then tie it into a slipknot. It’s called a noose. Then you’re going to tilt the bed frame against the wall and tie it on.”
“I…Why?”
“I think you know why.”
“No, I—”
“You’re not stupid, Alex, and neither am I.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry it’s come to this. I can’t even tell you how sorry. But at this point”—he shook his head—“right now, it’s either you or me. I’d gladly go to prison for what I did, but…Trish needs me. After all she’s been through, I’m not going to leave her without a father. I hope you can understand that.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed and sat in a folding chair a few feet from the bars, the gun never wavering a damn millimeter. But though his hand was steady, the rest of his body radiated exhaustion. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them saggy and loose, and his Parris Island shoulders were somehow both slumped and tense at the same time. If someone had told me this wasn’t really Chief Stilwell—that it was, in fact, his clinically depressed older brother—I would’ve half believed him.
When Stilwell finally spoke, the misery in his voice made the whole package seem even more pathetic.
“I tried to get you off this,” he said. “I thought once you got busted with all that coke, once I made Sturdivant testify against you, you’d get the message—or even if you didn’t, you’d have enough to worry about that it’d keep you from digging into it. So why did you have to keep going?” I thought it was a rhetorical question; it wasn’t. “Answer me.”
If there was a point in trying to keep up the pretense, I couldn’t see it.
“I… guess I had to know why those boys were murdered.”
“What difference could that possibly make to you?”
“I was there. I met them.”
“So?”
“They were just so…young.”
“Not that young. Not so young that they couldn’t”—something dark flickered across his face—“do what they did.”
“I know, but…why not just have them arrested? Why go through this whole convoluted plan to poison them?”
He seemed to be debating whether to answer. “Just make the noose,” he said.
“No.”
“Do it.”
I lost my temper, probably not the best survival tactic. “What are you gonna do, shoot me?” I said. “How are you going to explain killing an unarmed woman locked in a goddamn jail cell?”
“You wouldn’t be found,” he said. He sounded detached, but also, weirdly… kind of sad. It didn’t stop my mouth from going dry. “Now do it.”
Since stalling remained the only promising strategy I could think of, I did as I was told. I took the worn top sheet and ripped a six-inch strip down one side. It seemed to placate him.
“You know,” I said, “nobody would ever believe I’d kill myself.”
“Are you so sure? A woman facing drug charges serious enough to put her away for thirty years gets caught jumping bail, then hangs herself in her cell?”
“Nobody who knows me would ever buy that.”
“They’re not going to be able to prove otherwise. It’s my word against”—he thought about it for a second—“no one’s.”
I decided to try a different tack. “Come on,” I said, “this is completely pointless. You know there are other people out there who know what happened to Trish. Eventually, someone’s going to put two and two together, and…”
“And?”
“And people may not even blame you for it. Anyone can understand how you’d want to get back at those boys for what they did to your daughter. They could even see why you got rid of Axel—”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“What?”
“I said, I’m not responsible for that little creep’s death. I’m not sorry about it, but I didn’t do it.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “and I surely don’t care.”
“How did you get him to sell the drugs for you?”
He gave the gun an ominous jerk. “You need to be working right now.”
“Not unless you tell me how it happened.”
“You’re not exactly in a position to make demands.”
“If you’re gonna kill me anyway, what difference does it make?”
He almost cracked a smile. “That’s original.”
“It’s also true.”
He thought about it, then said, “I busted him.”
“What?”
“Robinette. I’d busted him before, when he was a juvenile, so I knew what a weak-willed scumbag he was. And I needed someone to sell the drugs, so I tracked him until I caught him with some coke, more than enough to be sale weight. He knew he was up a creek under the Rockefeller laws, so—”
“So you told him to do you this one favor and you’d let him off the hook.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s right.”
“Is he the one who made the LSD?”
Stilwell shook his head. “I had some chemical experience in the service.”
I cast about for another topic to keep him occupied long enough for…What? The truth was, I had no idea—but talking was a hell of a lot better than hanging.
“There’s something I really don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you admit that you’d been told not to enforce the drug laws at Melting Rock?”
He looked, of all things, confused.
“Because,” he said, “it was the right thing to do.”
“But I don’t—”
“Like I told you in my office, when a person does something wrong, he ought to take responsibility. And I know what you’re going to say next, so don’t bother. If I could admit what I’ve done without dragging my daughter into it, I would. I’d be proud to. But I can’t. And she’s… she’s the only thing I care about. She’s the only thing that matters.”
Lacking anything in the way of an informed response, I dug in my brain for another question.
“But why put so much ergotamine in the tabs of LSD?” I asked. “Why make it so obvious that it wasn’t an accident?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.” Stilwell shook his head again. “I didn’t mean for it to be obvious. But I had to make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
He looked me straight in the eye. “That they got what they
deserved.”
“But why do it in the first place? Why not just arrest them for what they did to Trish? Why go through this whole—”
Another definitive head shake. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then make me.”
“What difference does it make?”
An idea popped into my head; it was simple, but something told me it had to be the truth.
“She wouldn’t testify against them, would she?”
“Just make the noose.”
“She wouldn’t, would she? It’s like Dorrie said. …After it happened, Trish tried to convince her it’d all been some big misunderstanding. She said it was all her fault, that—”
“Trish is a very confused young lady.” His voice was low, but there was plenty of menace in it all of a sudden.
“Did she approve of what you did for her? Did she thank you for it?”
“Trish has no idea, and she never will,” he said. “Now work.”
I ripped another strip of cloth, but I kept talking.
“So if Trish wouldn’t testify,” I said, “that left it up to you to punish them. Is that right? To be judge, jury, and executioner?”
He’d kept his cool up until then; now he lost it.
“You have no idea,” he said, springing to his feet so fast he knocked the chair over. “You can’t even imagine what it’s like to have…to have your little girl come to you so…so destroyed.”
Tears filled Stilwell’s eyes, a wildly incongruous sight on a big man with a very big gun.
“It was like she wasn’t even there,” he said, “like she was gone. You think I shouldn’t have killed them? Well, they practically killed her. For all intents and purposes, they did kill her. A big part of her died that night—the part that could trust people and think the world isn’t full of monsters. And then to have her beg you, to plead with you never to tell anyone. To have those bastards just walking the streets, going to school every day, still acting like they’re her friends, like there’s no hard feelings.…”
He swiped at his eyes, then looked at me like he actually cared what I thought, that for some reason it was important that I understand where he was coming from.
“Do you know that after it happened, Trish didn’t eat for a week? A week.” He stepped closer to the bars. “Finally, she fainted, and I had to take her to the emergency room, and…Look at her now. Just look at her. She looks like the walking dead. I know she does. But she can’t even see herself anymore.
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