Blood Red

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  The office is unbearably hot and stuffy despite the window being cracked open a few inches. Snow is falling outside.

  In the distance, a salt truck rumbles, but the room is so silent he can hear the two men breathing and swallowing. By comparison, his own breathing and swallowing sound deafening.

  He wishes they’d say something, or even interrogate him like they do in movies, but they seem to be waiting for Mom to get here.

  He keeps wondering if he should just come right out and proclaim his innocence. Or maybe ask for a lawyer.

  But that might make him seem guilty of . . .

  What? What the hell is happening?

  Where’s Brianna?

  The dread that something terrible has happened to her mingles miserably with terror over his own predicament, so acute that any second now he might pass out or throw up, or—­far worse—­start to cry.

  At last, the phone on the desk rings. Mr. Goodall answers it, says, “Okay, good. Have her wait right there,” hangs up, and looks at Mick. “Your mom is here.”

  He can only nod mutely as a surge of emotion mixes with the lump of nausea threatening to burst from his throat. If anyone can fix this, it’s his mother. She’ll set them straight, whatever it is that they’re thinking.

  “Let’s have a word with her alone,” Chief Calhoun tells Mr. Goodall. “Son, you can step out and wait there with Officer Greenlea.”

  Mr. Goodall opens the door, gesturing for Mick to make his exit. As he steps over the threshold, he sees Mrs. Dunlop, the young cop, and his mother clustered in the small reception area.

  “Mick! What’s going on?” Mom is windblown, red-­faced, wide-­eyed.

  He finds his voice. “I don’t know, but I—­”

  “Officer, this young man is going to sit here with you,” the chief cuts in.

  This young man—­as if Mick is some juvenile delinquent off the street instead of the kid Coach Calhoun affectionately called Striker because of his skills on the soccer field. Bile pitches and rolls in his empty stomach.

  “Mick, are you okay?”

  There’s no easy way to answer his mother’s question. He shrugs and bows his head to avoid the confused concern in her eyes, afraid she’ll see the tears that have sprung to his. All he wants is to escape this overheated little room, but it’s his mother who gets to do that, ushered away into the principal’s office.

  Hearing the door close, Mick lifts his head at last. Mrs. Dunlop is back at her desk, shuffling papers around as if she’s suddenly very busy, or just pretending to be. Officer Greenlea gestures at a chair.

  “You can have a seat.”

  “Can I . . . I don’t . . .” Vomit is pushing into his throat. “I’m going to . . .”

  He lurches toward the wastepaper basket beside the desk, lowers his head into it, and retches as Mrs. Dunlop cries out in dismay.

  Miserable, he looks to see Officer Greenlea wordlessly holding out a handful of tissues. He accepts them and mops his mouth, and then his eyes. If he could speak, he’d probably feel compelled to explain that they’re watering because he’s sick. But you shouldn’t lie to a cop and anyway, another tide of bile is pushing ominously at his throat.

  “Here . . .” Mrs. Dunlop pulls a key out of her desk drawer and hands it to Mick. “There’s a faculty restroom right outside the door. You can use it.”

  “Come on, kid.” The officer puts a hand on Mick’s shoulder and propels him away from the offending wastebasket, toward the hallway.

  He’s relieved to see that the corridor is deserted. Everyone is in class right now, so there’s no one to see him let himself into the faculty restroom as a police officer stations himself right outside.

  Locked inside, he tosses the key on the sink, kneels in front of the toilet, and vomits again. Then, racked by dry heaves, he thinks about what’s waiting for him beyond the door, and he thinks about Brianna.

  This is crazy. If he could just find her, everything would be okay. More than okay: he’d be her hero—­hers, and everyone else’s.

  He stands on shaky legs, reaches out to flush the toilet, and hesitates with his fingers on the handle, noticing something.

  There’s a window above the sink.

  It’s propped open with a stick and it’s large. Much larger than the high, small windows in the boys’ restrooms in the building’s newer wings. Large enough for someone to climb through?

  Conscious of the police officer stationed outside the door, Mick makes another loud retching sound as he walks over to examine the window. In his own house, they use propped sticks to keep some of the old windows from crashing down, and others are almost impossible to open at all.

  Mick tugs to see if it will open wider.

  It does.

  Without stopping to consider the wisdom of his newfound plan, he scrambles onto the sill, climbs out, and hits the ground running.

  Either Rick’s stepson forgot about his promise to check in on him, or he did check in on him, but forgot to update Bob afterward.

  Those are the two conclusions Bob drew as he spent the morning on the endless errands that are necessary after a long absence. He went from the bank to the pharmacy to the post office to the dry cleaner, with long lines at every stop, then met a ­couple of friends for a late breakfast that stretched past lunchtime.

  Now he’s home again, checking the voice mail in the futile hope of finding a message that will put his mind at ease.

  Frustrated, he tries—­yet again—­to call Rick. No answer.

  Bob scrolls through his recent calls, finds the number he dialed last night, and hits redial. So what if Rick’s stepson thinks he’s a pain in the ass?

  The phone is answered with an automated outgoing message.

  At the beep, Bob says simply, “Casey, it’s Bob again. Did you check in on Rick? Call me back as soon as you can.”

  The Gravitron spins on.

  An hour ago, Rowan would have bet her life that there was nothing—­absolutely nothing—­that could make what had happened with Jake, and with Rick Walker, seem insignificant.

  She’d have lost.

  Visiting the high school principal’s office for the first time in thirty years, she’s reverted right back to the bad old days: full-­blown denial.

  “No,” she says, shaking her head vehemently. “No way. Absolutely not. There’s just no way.”

  “Rowan, we have a witness,” Ron Calhoun, the chief of police, gently tells her. They’ve known each other all their lives; he graduated with her brother Danny and was both Braden and Mick’s soccer coach. He doesn’t want to believe this any more than she does, and yet—­he seems to. So does Joe, who is saying very little and nervously toying with a pen.

  Beyond the closed door, Mick is waiting in the reception area with Officer Greenlea, who was once a fourth-­grader known as Ryan G. There were two other Ryans in Rowan’s class that year: Ryan K. and Ryan L. Ryan G. was the round-­faced one who lisped and smelled like Fritos.

  Now, in a bizarre twist, he’s armed with a badge and standing guard over her son.

  Of course, Rowan didn’t realize that when she walked in. Her heart lurched when she saw the cop, but she assumed Mick had done something mischievous, not . . .

  Not what they think.

  This is crazy. There’s no way.

  “One of the neighbors was out walking her dog,” Ron is saying, “and she saw Mick lurking around the Armbrusters’ house late Monday afternoon, looking suspicious.”

  “He has other friends who live on Prospect Street. It doesn’t mean that he—­”

  “He was on their driveway, and when the neighbor spoke to him, he was acting strange and evasive.”

  “He’s a sixteen-year-­old boy! They all act strange and evasive around adults.”

  “Look, no one is saying that he’s responsible for Brianna’s d
isappearance,” Ron says. “But a clerk at Vernon’s confirmed that he bought the beads that were anonymously left for Brianna.”

  Spinning . . . faster . . .

  Back against the wall . . .

  “But you said yourself that they were from a Secret Santa!” she protests.

  “As far as anyone knows, Brianna wasn’t involved in any kind of Secret Santa exchange.”

  She remembers the day she explained to Mick what a Secret Santa is; remembers the bizarre gift supposedly left by her own Secret Santa . . .

  What if . . .

  Can Brianna’s disappearance possibly be connected to Rick?

  It seems crazy, but right now, what doesn’t?

  Spinning . . . faster . . .

  She’ll have to tell Ron about Rick Walker. Just in case. Privately. Now that Jake knows.

  Oh God. Jake knows. He knows about her and Rick—­but not about Mick’s trouble at school.

  She’d tried calling him as she drove over here from the elementary school parking lot. It went directly into voice mail every time. She didn’t leave a message, not wanting to tell him there was a problem with Mick until she knew how serious it was.

  Dammit. It may be more serious than she ever imagined.

  Spinning . . . spinning . . .

  She needs to be with her son. She needs to hug him and let him know that someone is on his side, and . . . yes, and hear what he has to say for himself. And after that, she can pull Ron aside and tell him about Rick.

  Rick, who’s on his way to her house right now.

  Noreen can deal with it.

  She can deal with anything.

  So can you.

  “All right,” she says abruptly, “I think it’s time we get Mick in here and hear his side of the story.”

  “He admitted he was leaving gifts for Brianna.”

  Okay. Deep breaths.

  “That doesn’t mean he had anything to do with her disappearance.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Ron nods. “But—­”

  There’s a sharp knock on the door, and then it jerks open. A voice—­Mr. Goodall’s secretary—­calls, “He’s gone! Hurry! He took off! Ry—­ Officer Greenlea went after him. Hurry!”

  After letting himself into the Mundys’ empty house with the key hidden beneath the flowerpot, Casey picks up the orange prescription bottle sitting on the kitchen windowsill.

  He noticed early on in his surveillance that the first thing Rowan does every single afternoon when she walks in the door is take her ADHD medication.

  Casey has been sneaking capsules out of the bottle over the last few months. Not enough for her to miss, but enough to suit his purposes.

  Now, he dumps the contents of the plastic bottle into his pocket and replaces them with the identical capsules he’d stolen from her. He’d emptied their contents and refilled them with the same medication—­the so-­called date rape drug—­he’d slipped into Rick’s drink the night he died, to make things easier on both of them.

  He’d been caught off guard when his stepfather left him a message on Sunday wanting to talk. He was certain Rick must have somehow figured out what was going on, and he knew he’d have to do something about it.

  He didn’t want to kill Rick. But he had no choice.

  Rick sounded glad to hear from him on Monday night and claimed he only wanted to reestablish the connection that had been lost in the year since Vanessa had died. He said he’d been on his way to meet a friend for dinner but his plans had changed last minute, and suggested that they connect for a drink.

  Thinking quickly, Casey lied that he was in Jersey City on a local job and offered to meet Rick at his apartment.

  He arrived at the building just as Rick did, and his stepfather greeted him with a warm hug. He didn’t seem suspicious . . . but maybe he was covering up.

  Casey proceeded with the plan, but there was no joy in it.

  When Rick had passed out, he dragged him to the tub, ran a bath, and slit both his wrists with Rick’s straight razor from the medicine cabinet. It wasn’t the one Vanessa had used, though Casey had kept that.

  Casey had kept a lot of things.

  One memento he’d preserved in Vanessa’s scrapbook had come in especially handy.

  Rick had left her a note when he walked out on her the first time. She’d crumpled it and thrown it away, but Casey had plucked it from the trash.

  I can’t do this anymore. You’ll be better off without me. I’m so sorry.

  It was the perfect suicide note. Rick had written it himself.

  Casey hated to part with that keepsake.

  But now he has an even better one: Rick’s cell phone.

  Fleeing the school, Mick has no idea where he’s going, exactly. He only knows that he has to find Brianna.

  He starts out running at top speed. A safe distance away, he slows to a trot and then a walk, feeling weak and still a little nauseated. He’s panting, and his heart seems to be beating in time to the mantra in his head.

  Find her . . . save her . . .

  He pulls his phone from his pocket to see what he can learn from social media.

  Great. His phone battery is almost dead—­again.

  At least it lasts long enough for him to find several links to an official missing persons bulletin that features a photo of Brianna and a physical description. She hasn’t been seen since she went to bed on Monday evening. A few of her friends mentioned having heard from her late that night. The presumption is that she got up and went jogging as usual.

  Find her . . . save her . . .

  Where does she go when she runs? What if she fell and hit her head and is wandering around with amnesia? Worse yet, what if she’s lying unconscious somewhere?

  He shoves his dead cell phone back into his pocket. As he strides along Highland Street toward town, Mick realizes two things: he has no idea where to start looking, and it’s snowing even harder than it was when he first glimpsed it from Mr. Goodall’s office window.

  She’s going to freeze to death if he doesn’t find her.

  Find her . . . save her . . .

  Rowan tells herself she shouldn’t be alarmed when Mick’s phone, like Jake’s, rings directly into voice mail. She knows too well that her son frequently forgets to charge it. The battery could have run down.

  Even the fact that he skipped out of school wouldn’t be alarming under ordinary circumstances. Not if he felt trapped, and sick to his stomach, and if he thought he was in trouble.

  Ordinary trouble—­the kind of trouble ordinary teenagers get into. Because her son, of course, is an ordinary teenager.

  Then again, what does she know?

  She had no idea he was buying gifts for a girl or visiting her house when he was supposed to be at basketball practice. Apparently, Mick has a whole secret life.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree . . .

  Regardless of what she doesn’t know about him, though, Rowan is positive of one thing: he isn’t responsible for Brianna Armbruster’s disappearance. Not in the way the police chief and principal are insinuating.

  That Mick is suddenly nowhere to be found—­with Rick Walker here in town—­strikes her as ominous.

  It’s time to tell the police chief the rest of the story.

  Clutching her cell phone tightly, praying it will ring and she’ll hear her son’s voice, she looks at Ron Calhoun.

  “I need to speak to you,” she says urgently. “In private.”

  When Steve Lindgren saw the security camera footage of Rick Walker coming home on Monday evening, it took him a moment to recognize the man beside him. He was bearded, and wearing glasses . . .

  But it was Rick’s stepson, Kurt Walker.

  Kurt Walker, who—­according to the neighbors who heard his screams—­was distraught when he discovered R
ick’s body.

  When Lindgren last saw Walker, he claimed to be on his way to notify his siblings of their father’s so-­called suicide. He never did.

  That was evident after a few phone calls. All three—­Derek, Liam, and Erin—­were stunned and devastated by the news. Steve broke it as gently as he could.

  Now, trying to piece together the rest of the story, he sits across from Derek Walker, Kurt’s brother, in the Brooklyn loft he shares with a roommate.

  Steve was taken aback, meeting Derek.

  Kurt Walker had struck him as intense and socially awkward, but he’d attributed that to being in the midst of a personal crisis. Derek, while he didn’t walk in on his stepfather dead in a bathtub this morning, is dealing with the same loss. But he’s much more likable, and comes across as an average Joe.

  Of course, he most likely has nothing to hide, and he doesn’t seem to realize that his brother does. Steve hasn’t told him yet that Kurt not only already knows about their stepfather’s death, but might very well have caused it.

  “This is going to be really hard for Casey,” Derek says.

  “Casey?” Steve makes a mental note. “Is that what you call him?”

  “Yeah. He was named after our father. He’s Kurt Clark, Junior. But he hated that. He hates him. We both do, and so did our mom.”

  That part of the story rings true, and understandably so: Steve’s earlier search revealed that the elder Kurt Clark is a convicted felon now serving twenty years for first-­degree assault.

  “So Casey was your brother’s nickname.”

  “Yeah. It’s his initials. K.C.—­Casey. Rick came up with it. He even made the teachers in school use it when we were little, because my brother would get so upset whenever anyone called him Kurt.”

  “So they got along pretty well, your brother and Rick?”

  “Always. I mean, he was the dad we never had. My brother worshipped Rick like a superhero and they were inseparable, even after the divorce, until . . .”

  “Until . . . ?”

  Derek’s blue eyes cloud over. “Until, you know . . . Mom died. She killed herself, too. My brother almost lost it.”