“I had been encouraging her to go to the police,” says Lansing’s roommate, who was also given a pseudonym in the original article but later self-identified as Jill Jenkins and has been speaking to media in what she calls “an attempt to set the record straight.”
“Julianne did nothing wrong,” Jenkins insists, “other than cross paths with a heartless narcissist. She couldn’t bring herself to go to police, but she thought that by talking to the campus newspaper—she knew and trusted the writer—she might be able to prevent him from doing this to other girls.”
Lansing told the Examiner that her relationship with Daniels ended when she caught him engaged in sex with another student.
“That caused her to see that this was bigger than her,” says Jenkins. “She thought she was doing a good thing by telling her story, but it ended up killing her.”
Jenkins reports that Lansing’s worst fears were realized when the district attorney’s office brought charges against Daniels independent of Lansing’s cooperation. “She didn’t understand that the state could bring charges on its own,” said Jenkins. “Neither of us did.”
Jenkins accompanied Lansing on a trip home to suburban Baltimore the weekend after the charges were brought against Daniels and Lansing’s identity was revealed. The pair traveled eight hours by bus in the hopes of explaining things to Lansing’s family in person.
“They wouldn’t even let her in the house,” says Jenkins. “The last thing she said to me was how much she regretted doing the interview with the Examiner.”
Dawn Hathaway, gossip columnist at the Examiner and daughter of media titan Edward Hathaway, could not be reached for comment.
Chapter Seven
September 1983
Arturo
I had been hoping to catch her alone before I saw her out and about that first week back. Most of the students came back sometime the first week of September, the week before classes started, and I didn’t like the idea of seeing her at a party—seeing her “on the job,” so to speak.
Hell, that wasn’t right. “Hoping to catch her alone” made it sound like I was casually keeping my eyes peeled as I went about my business. That wasn’t it at all.
The truth was, I had been consumed all summer with everything that had happened. With anxiety over how she was doing.
The article ran when I was off, back in Boston sharing angioplasty recovery duty with my mom and brother and sisters. I’d thought I had it bad, marinating as I was in guilt that not only had I not been there with everyone else when my dad had his attack, but that I was perpetually disappointing him by holding out at Allenhurst.
To make matters worse, he didn’t ride me about it like he usually did. Even as he regained strength and went back to being his usual wisecracking self, he said nothing about my employment status. It was like he’d…given up, like I’d disappointed him so irrevocably that he’d washed his hands of me. That was somehow worse than all the years of nagging.
But then, the article. Dawn’s article. Dawn’s glorious, righteous shit-storm of an article. Talk about speaking truth to power. When Fuller called my folks’ place to read it to me over the phone, it was all I could do not to whoop and fist-pump right there in the living room on Bowen Street.
She downplayed herself. She was in it for social power, she’d said. And maybe she had been initially. Hell, maybe she still was, but she couldn’t ignore the real power her words had. Power for good. Power to put away that fucking Daniels predator. As I told Fuller, she was doing our job better than we were. I felt terrible for having told her the column wasn’t worth it when I’d last seen her. Even if she didn’t want to be a journalist, what she was doing was important.
Fuller told me that the Allenhurst city force was working with the DA’s office, and that they were cooperating as needed but that there wasn’t much to do but wait for the arraignment. I thought it best anyway, that whatever role the campus was playing, I stay at arm’s length because of my…involvement with Dawn. Of course, I didn’t tell that to Fuller. I merely asked the chief for another couple weeks off, using Dad as my excuse, and since it was summer and I rarely took any vacation, my request was granted.
Then Julianne killed herself.
Dawn wasn’t on campus when I got back. I wasn’t sure if she had been planning all along to be home for the summer, or if she’d turned tail—not that I would have blamed her—when tragedy struck. Regardless, when I got back to campus, her apartment was empty, and it remained so the rest of the summer. In addition to keeping my outdoor vigil, I’d gone up and knocked on her door several times, eventually running into a neighbor who filled me in on what was happening. Dawn was away, she’d reported, but was supposedly coming back in the fall.
And now it was fall. And I was losing my mind a little bit.
I looked for her in all the likely places, with no luck. I started to wonder if maybe she wasn’t coming back to school at all.
But then I spotted her, in public.
It was at the orientation week barbecue, a giant blowout held on the campus’s central quad on the Sunday afternoon before classes started. The huge lawn was taken over by tables staffed by all the campus clubs, their members selling burgers and brownies and trying to recruit freshmen. Though the event was targeted at new students, pretty much everyone on campus turned out for what functioned as the unofficial kickoff to the new school year. The campus police department always sent representatives, too, both because it was good to get a handle on the new crowd, but also because the event often spilled over into low-level trouble, with bands of drunk kids, reunited after their summers away, roaming around like trouble-magnets.
I was strolling the quad with Fuller when I saw her. She clearly wasn’t “at” the event, though. She was trying to walk through it, and she put me in mind of a movie star trying to avoid attention. She had on a huge pair of wraparound sunglasses and wore a scarf over her head like Jackie O. She walked quickly, or at least as quickly as she could, given that the quad was jammed. There was a purposefulness to her stride that made my heart twist. Normally, she’d be at the center of an event like this, working the crowd, smiling and laughing, the queen bee cementing her “social power.” Now she was hiding. And Dawn Hathaway hiding was…not right.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Fuller, who nodded absently as he eyed a group of football players whipping a small crowd into a frenzy with some kind of chant.
I took off in the direction Dawn had been going, threading my way through the throng, struggling to keep her veiled head in my sights. People got out of my way, though—one of the perks of the job—and I began closing the gap.
The dynamics of a crowd can shift in the blink of an eye. It’s part of why we always attend events like this one. There’s a kind of mass psychology at work in crowds. What starts off as a benign, happy group of people can quickly turn into a sinister mob. You learn to look for the signs: alcohol, a common enemy, like in riots after a loss in a sporting event. But in some cases, there’s no real cause. There’s just a bunch of kids looking for an excuse to turn mean.
It started as whispers. I couldn’t initially make them out, but as I approached, I could tell that they were purposeful, directed at something—or someone.
“…might as well be a murderer…thought she was above everyone else…”
I reared back almost as if one of the kids had physically hit me. Was that how this was playing out on campus? I’d been sick with worry for Dawn because I was afraid she was going to blame herself, but it had never occurred to me that everyone else would too.
I had to get to her. Her head was down, and she was trying to push through the increasingly hostile scrum.
“Two-faced bitch!” someone yelled.
“Are you happy now?” came another jeer.
“You think you’re the fucking queen of this campus, don’t you?”
She stopped, and so did I. Whirling, she removed her sunglasses and ripped off her headscarf, as if she had decided t
o face her accusers head-on. Her usually fluffy hair was flat, stringy, and her face was gaunt, pale. I realized I’d never seen her without her signature brightly colored eye shadow. She looked so utterly unlike herself, I was shocked. I think everyone else was too, because the crowd instantly shut up.
“No,” she said, her voice quiet but strong. “No, I’m not happy.” She swiped angrily at her face, as if to wipe away tears, but there weren’t any there. “Anything else?” she asked as she surveyed the assembly.
The mob stayed silent, utterly riveted by her. It was like she was the conductor in Fantasia, controlling the scene before her.
Her bravery took my breath away.
She turned then and continued on her journey. Those shitheads weren’t wrong, in a way, for calling her a queen, because it did feel like she was dismissing her subjects. But suddenly, as if she’d thought better of it, she stopped walking and turned back to them—no, to me. Her eyes found mine instantly, latched onto my gaze like a heat-seeking missile.
Our eyes were connected, but for a moment, I felt like our bodies were, too. Because my throat ached with the tears she wasn’t shedding, as if her grief was mine.
Then she broke eye contact, shoved her sunglasses back on, and took off.
Dawn
Coming back had been a mistake. I should have done what Daddy said and transferred somewhere closer to home. I could easily have finished my degree at the City University of New York. Yeah, it might have meant an extra year because not all my credits would have transferred cleanly, but what was an extra year in the scheme of things? I had nothing but years. I had my whole damn life ahead of me.
And now that I wasn’t taking that fact for granted anymore, I didn’t know how to be. Because there wasn’t anything left. Underneath all that entitlement I’d worn around for so many years like a heavy cloak, there was…nothing.
“I should go back,” I’d told my father, even as it wasn’t lost on me that he and I were having the longest face-to-face conversation I could ever remember. Ironically, I’d finally—unintentionally—done something big enough to earn his sustained attention. “I only have five more required classes.” I had sketched out a plan, which I showed him, to cram all the remaining credits for my psych degree into the fall semester. It was going to be intense, but I could graduate in December.
He had nodded and agreed and, to my utter shock, suggested that I consider doing a master’s degree in journalism after I graduated. I’d shown a ruthlessness he hadn’t known I’d possessed, he’d said. Maybe I was cut out to follow in his footsteps after all. Stunned, I’d told him I would consider it. And I was. I couldn’t get into the best journalism schools with my mediocre grades, but once I had that master’s in hand, what did it matter which school it came from? Maybe my father was right. Maybe Jenny was right. I did seem to be good at getting people to talk to me, to tell me their secrets. Journalism didn’t feel like the best fit, but what did I know? I had all these smarter, more accomplished people telling me I could do it. I had my father telling me I could do it, which felt like I was starving and he’d placed a feast in front of me.
Anyway, regardless of what came after graduation, I was, at my own insistence, going to be at Allenhurst for the next few months. And as I’d sketched out my plans for my father, I hadn’t told him the truth about why. I hadn’t told anyone the truth, which was that coming back was my penance.
I could crawl home to Daddy’s penthouse and get lost at CUNY, where no one knew my name, or I could come back to Allenhurst and face the truth. I had chosen the latter. I came back so they could say it to my face, because that was what I deserved.
Murderer.
But I was crumbling. I had dragged myself back, but it turned out I wasn’t strong enough to face the consequences of my actions. I’d been back three days; school hadn’t even started yet. I was never going to survive.
It wasn’t so much what other people were saying. For the first time in my life, I honestly didn’t give a shit what other people said about me. It was the idea that she wasn’t here. That Julianne, with whom I’d had a friendly acquaintanceship before our interview, would never again attend an orientation barbecue on the quad. That she couldn’t switch majors yet again and have the chance to fix her GPA. That she would never be with a guy who was worthy of her.
And that it was all my fault. I’d been so wrapped up in the idea of the column, of a big, juicy story to cement my power and popularity, that I hadn’t really thought about what I was saying. About what that power I had so craved could do. “Is it worth it?” Officer Perez had asked me once. I’d scoffed at him.
If only I had listened.
But maybe Daddy was right. Maybe leveraging the explosive story into a career in journalism would make it worth it. Would redeem me somehow.
I shrieked when there was a knock at the door.
This happened now. I’d get so lost in my thoughts, in reliving everything, that I’d completely forget about my surroundings. Consequently, I was always jumpy. Always on edge. Perpetually ready for fight or flight, though I could do neither. It only took the smallest thing to set me off, to send a raging, poisonous river of adrenaline coursing through me.
It was probably Beth, the new editor of the paper since Jenny had graduated. Beth had been trying to get me to come back to the Examiner—yet another foot soldier in the battle to convert me into a journalist. Her persistence would have made me laugh if laughing was something I still did. She’d been calling and calling, saying I had the makings of a totally boss investigative journalist, and in her last message, she’d threatened to come over to my apartment. I was tempted to pretend not to be home, but if Beth was anything like her predecessor, she wouldn’t give up until I made her understand that whatever I decided about my future career path, even if I did decide to pursue journalism, I was never, ever coming back to the Allenhurst Examiner. Dish with Dawn was dead. Forever. Because the Dawn who’d written it was too.
The knocking grew more insistent. I shuffled to the door on legs that felt made of cement.
It was him.
Officer Perez. Officer Artie. Officer Unfriendly. He wasn’t in uniform. Well, he was wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt, which seemed to be his off-duty uniform. The T-shirt this time was pale pink, which set off his light brown skin, but it was as tight as the one he’d worn in the bar last time I saw him, a lifetime ago, back when I was a different person. Back when I’d dismissed him when he tried to caution me about the dangerous game I was playing.
He just stood there, looking at me with those gorgeous eyes, eyes that, remarkably, seemed to be shining with something like compassion.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “Your first name.” I wanted to know, suddenly. Jenny had always called him Artie, but surely that wasn’t his actual given name.
“Arturo,” he said. “My name is Arturo Perez.”
“How old are you?” I asked. I don’t know why I cared so much about all these details. All I could think was that I had never paid attention to details about him before, or at least I’d paid attention to the wrong ones. I’d catalogued his green-flecked brown eyes, for example, but I’d never seen the compassion in them.
He furrowed his brow. “Thirty-one.”
“I’m twenty-two,” I said, because it felt like the logical next line in the conversation.
“I know.” When I didn’t answer, he shot me a lopsided grin and added, “I’ve written you a ticket or two in my day. I’ve seen your ID.”
My brain knew he was teasing. Making a joke. My brain also knew that what people did in response to jokes was laugh. But it was like my mouth didn’t know how to do it.
I watched his face for clues about what should happen next, and when his eyebrows shot up, I followed his gaze to my body—my body, which was covered by the leather jacket he had given me that night after Royce attacked me at the Delta Chi party. I’d worn it around the house pretty much all the time in the days following that event. It was big and he
avy. It had comforted me then, and it did now, too. Its weight anchored me in place, made me feel like maybe I wouldn’t simply dissolve and float away in my grief.
Probably I should be embarrassed, my mind told me, because I was wearing the jacket, but also because I was only wearing a T-shirt and panties beneath it. Instead, my mouth said, “I have your windbreaker, too.” It was true. I had a veritable collection of Allenhurst Campus PD outerwear.
Instead of commenting on the jackets, he said, “Your heart is broken,” because, somehow, he knew.
Four words. Four little words, but it was like they had chiseled a hairline fracture in the invisible shellac that surrounded me, and the air in my lungs was hissing out of that crack. But I guess it shouldn’t have been so surprising that his words had such power. Words had power. I understood that now.
It was becoming harder and harder to breathe, but I managed to answer him anyway. “Not broken. Just gone. It’s like my heart…just isn’t there.”
“No.” He shook his head almost violently, like he was trying to forget something unpleasant he had seen. “It’s there. You can’t see it right now. But it’s there, I promise you. There’s something in the way—something blocking your sense of it, but it won’t be in the way forever.”
The tiny crack he’d chiseled into me opened up then, all at once, into a gaping canyon. It was like my organs, which had been squished together in a familiar, tight jumble, were violently ripped apart and exposed to the cold air, left writhing, blinking in the light like baby birds tipped prematurely out of their nests.
And it hurt. It was fucking excruciating. I felt it almost literally, like an actual chasm was opening up inside me.
But then his arms were around me, putting me back together, and he was saying, “It’s okay. Go ahead and cry.”
Was I crying?
I must have been operating in a vacuum, where sound had been muffled, because all of a sudden it was like someone turned on the sound in what had been a silent movie. My sobs rang out across the apartment and through the hallway, since we were standing in the doorway to my place.
The Gossip: New Wave Newsroom Page 6
