“Okay, sounds reasonable. But would all three of you go to the door?” I thought back to some kids I knew who played pranks at Halloween, like setting a bag full of dog poop on someone’s front porch and setting it on fire. Several of them would be involved, but only one would actually go to the front door, knock, and run away before anyone answered. The other kids would hide behind bushes and wait for the person to come outside and stomp on the bag. After they got caught, they turned to pumpkin smashing when all the lights were out. In the morning we would see smashed pumpkins up and down the street.
“Good point,” Parker said, “but it didn’t seem fair to let Willy go by himself.”
“What happened?” I said, thinking it must be a guy thing: they all had to go to the door to show how brave they were.
“The dead bolt slid back, or that’s what it sounded like, and the door opened a few inches. No one came out.”
“And you guys just stood there?”
“I was about to say we shouldn’t go in, but Willy shoved the door, enough so Justin stuck his head in. Then Willy squeezed past Justin and went in.”
Parker stopped, took a quick breath, and waited.
“And?”
“The door slammed shut behind him.”
“Behind Willy?”
“Yep.”
“It didn’t lock him in, did it?”
“Sure did.”
“What happened to him?”
“We tried to open it, but it was locked. It’s a big door. You probably know since . . ..”
—Since we had been in the same place and knew how impossible it was for anyone to get through the door without a battering ram.
“We couldn’t start shouting and yelling because we didn’t want to get caught trespassing. If the police saw the car and asked who it belonged to it would be Willy’s parents’ car. He had a driver’s license, but he got a three-day suspension from school. His parents took away his license, so he was driving without one. If they found out they would have killed him.”
Parker didn’t mention it, but at that time he didn’t have a license either. As far as I knew, he had only driven once before when he was fourteen, and that was a tractor. He’d been on his uncle’s ranch in Texas. He drove the tractor without permission, ran over a fence and into a barn. What I didn’t understand was why Justin had never told me about his trip to Glasspool.
“Was Justin supposed to be spending the night at your house?” I asked, thinking how unfair it was that Justin got to do everything when he was young, but I had to wait a year longer to do the same things.
“Right. But we weren’t there. I told my mom and dad I was staying at Willy’s, but his parents were away.”
“What happened to Willy? How did he get out of the mansion?”
“We stayed outside for like three hours, searching around, looking for another way in. We thought Willy was hiding inside—you know him—or maybe he got murdered.”
Murdered? And they just waited there? And I think I’m immature sometimes.
“We were afraid to call the police because we didn’t want to get in trouble.”
“Well, if Willy was dead, at least he wouldn’t get grounded.”
“Ha, ha,” Parker laughed, somewhat artificially. He took a deep breath and continued. “We tried the windows on the first floor, but they all had bars, except one, but it was locked. Justin ended up climbing a tree. He needed a boost to reach the lowest branch, so I gave him one.”
That made sense. With him being heavier and Justin slimmer, it would be easy enough for him to lock his hands together and hoist him up, the same way I had done with Abigail.
By now we had reached the parking lot at the Twenty-Sixth Street Lifeguard Station. It’s an outdoor lot on a hillside with two separate levels and it overlooks the ocean. Near the sand there is a wide bike path where a number of people bicycling or rollerblading were passing in and out of our view.
“Justin climbed pretty high before he found an open window,” Parker went on, “and then he disappeared. There was no way to know how far inside he went.”
He saw my puzzled expression and added, “I mean, for all we knew the rooms inside could have been locked, and Justin was just wandering from hall to hall trying the doors. I was about to look around again when I saw him come back out the same window. It took him a lot longer climbing down than going up. He jumped from the last branch and twisted his ankle. He was rolling around in the dirt holding it and I thought maybe he broke it. He wouldn’t open his eyes; his face was white.”
“Poor Justin.” I remembered him having a swollen ankle and limping around with an Ace bandage and cold packs.
“He finally stopped, and we helped him up. He could hardly stand, but after a few minutes he said he was okay.
“Did he see Willy? What did he say about him?”
“He said he could only look around on that one floor. He went through halls trying to get downstairs but never got there. The same thing happened when he tried to go up.”
“He spent all that time on one floor?”
“That’s what he said.”
“It’s odd they lock the doors on the inside. Maybe it’s to keep trespassers from stealing anything—if they can get in.”
I had never gone on a tour of Glasspool mansion but I had gone on field trips to historical haciendas, like Dominguez Ranch where you can walk through parts of the main house but there are rooms with a velvet rope across the doorway.
It’s a polite way of saying off limits, stay out. Other rooms at Dominguez have iron bars, so there is no chance someone will accidentally go inside. But Glasspool was never a working ranch, it’s an elegant and well-kept mansion—or had been—and did not seem like the kind of place to have iron doors on the inside.
“I don’t think that was it.” Parker frowned. “Justin didn’t really explain, he just said he couldn’t get past the first floor and he couldn’t find Willy. He looked kind of spooked, Justin did, so I didn’t ask him about it. We just wanted to leave before someone called the cops on us for trespassing. It was an outside chance, but we thought Willy might have gotten turned around, went the wrong way, and did the same thing once he got outside.”
“And gone back to the car by himself?”
“Sure.”
It seemed illogical to me, but Willy is hyper and when it gets bad, he does odd things. I don’t know what meds he takes, but they don’t seem to help him. In fact, he’s gotten worse.
“There was a full moon,” Parker said, “and once we were away from all the trees and bushes around Glasspool we could see pretty well. When we were, oh, I don’t know, forty-fifty feet from the car I could tell no one was there. The windows were up; he wouldn’t have left them like that if he was inside.
“So, I went to the ledge to see if he was climbing the cliffs and that’s when I saw a body halfway between the cliffs and the surf. Good thing it was low tide. When it’s high it covers the sand. That scared the shi—the crap out of us. We went as fast as we could, but it was still slow. The stairs are narrow, and the steps are kind of short, like for little kids. You can’t put your whole foot on them without turning sideways.”
“Was it Willy?”
“Yes.” Parker exhaled shakily.
“What did you do?”
“We thought he was dead, he wasn’t breathing. We were afraid to sit him up or shake him. If he’d fallen and hurt his neck, we didn’t want to make it worse. Junior Lifeguard training, you know.”
I nodded. “Me and Justin have had it.”
“We did CPR,” Parker said, “but nothing worked. There was a board and we used it like a stretcher. We put Willy on it really carefully and carried him back up the stairs. When we were near the top, he woke up. It happened fast. Justin still couldn’t put all his weight on his leg, so when Willy started to sit up, Justin kind of tripped and we almost dropped Willy. There’s no room on the stairs to move around. Then he passed out again. We carried him the rest of the way and wh
en we were at the top, we set him down.”
“Geez, Parker.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but he was too lost in his thoughts to notice. He exhaled shakily and said, “Yeah, it was crazy.”
“Did he wake up?”
“He sure did. He started struggling again. We kept talking to him real calmly. At first it was like he didn’t know what we were saying. He was too scared. He said someone was after him and she was going to do something to him, and to Logan, something about a float tank.”
“For relaxation, you mean, to help with him being so hyper?” I had heard of float tanks. Sixty minutes floating in one in the dark is supposed to be a stress reliever. Was it used as a treatment for other things?
“Who knows?” Parker said. “It didn’t make sense. I still don’t know what he was talking about. He just sounded crazy.”
“How did you calm him down?”
“We kept saying, ‘It’s okay, Willy, it’s okay’ and I think he realized no one was coming after him. He said we had to leave before we got in trouble. That made me think he was back in the real world—sort of—so we left.”
Parker paused; his arms draped over the steering wheel. He seemed to be watching the sunset, but I think it was the quiet that follows reliving something you’d rather forget.
“After that I’m pretty sure he was all right.” Parker spoke quietly, as if he were trying to convince himself. “I tried to check on him at school, see how he was acting, without him noticing. I never saw anything odd except for one thing. His ADHD got a lot worse after that.”
I did not want Parker to feel more responsible than he already did so I kept my thoughts to myself. Willy was not officially diagnosed as having ADHD until after he went to Glasspool.
“I’ll take you home, Olivia. Sorry for everything that’s happened. I know you’ve been through a lot. I didn’t want to add to it, but . . .”
It wasn’t like Parker to leave a sentence unfinished. He needed to talk about it, and I needed to hear it. The first victim of this Lady in Red was not Abigail or Pamela, it was Willy—or Logan. What could she have wanted from them?
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s good you told me.”
Chapter 29. Messaged
Parker stopped the jeep in front of my house.
“I appreciate the ride,” I said. He had been keeping a lot to himself and must have needed to talk about it, but I hoped he had nothing else to say about my recent run-in with the law.
“Would you like to go out again?” he asked.
“Oh, sure,” I said, hesitating.
“I know I’m not the most exciting guy, not like . . . James, but I think we can have a good time.”
James?
I felt my blood pressure rise. A hot flush crept up my neck. I should have ignored his comment, but instead I said, “Have you seen him around?”
“No, of course not.” Parker gave me a curious look as though I should already know the answer. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You probably haven’t used your phone much.”
“What should I know?”
“Jade and James are both out of school, something about a family emergency. Maybe they’re out of state or in another country. With everything that’s happened, I guess their parents—or their father—I don’t know if their mom is alive or if they got divorced or what—but their father didn’t think they were safe here.”
“I can see how he’d think that,” I said, trying to hide my shock.
Were they forced to leave? And what had they done with Pamela? Did they have time to help her or was she forced to go, too?
“Nothing new on Pamela either?” I asked. “The last I heard she was still missing. Like you said, I’ve been off the grid.”
“No one has seen her. There’s a Surf Reporter link I can send you. I think it has the latest.”
It would be easy enough to find it online, but Parker wanted to help; it was an offer of friendship, and I needed it.
“I would love that.” I smiled at him. It was the most enthusiastic I had been in a long time. Parker and I were opposites—at least that had been my first impression—but the more I thought about it the less it seemed to matter.
Parker smiled back at me and said he would send it. Before he could get out of the car, I opened the door and said I would see him later. He nodded and drove off. He looked up at the rearview mirror once and waved.
As soon as I opened the front door, I remembered what it was I wanted to say before he left. I ran back outside but he had already reached the end of the street and was turning left; he would not have heard me if I called out to him.
Besides, this was not the time for me to run around hollering about anything. I would scare the neighbors. They had all heard at least one version of what happened at Glasspool mansion. Every time they saw me from their front yards, they turned and went back inside their houses and slammed the doors. They did not want anything to do with the weirdo who just happened to live on the same block.
They seemed to have no memory of that same kid from whom they once bought Girl Scout cookies every March and Christmas gift wrap every October. Or maybe they did remember and were too embarrassed to admit it.
On the way to my room, I sent Parker a text, “Do not use Ghost Hunter goggles. I don’t know who sent them, but it wasn’t me!”
A few seconds later my phone pinged “? (big-eyed emoji) K.”
I texted Mindy. After a few minutes she replied, saying she was at a candlelight vigil for Pamela and would get back to me later. I wanted to text in bold, italicized caps Pamela is not dead. But how could I be sure? With James and Jade gone, there was no one else to ask. I hated how everyone was convinced Pamela had been murdered, and that it was only a matter of time before they found her body.
Justin wasn’t home or I would have asked him why he never told me about going to Glasspool mansion, but sometimes it’s better to wait rather than start asking questions. I don’t tell him everything and if I pestered him now, he might have felt like I was accusing him of something. There is no other way to think of it either: knowing that you did something—and are trying to keep it secret—can make you defensive. I knew that well enough.
What’s more, Justin could ask me the same kinds of questions, and what would I tell him?
I had to think about Parker, too. He hadn’t asked me to keep it to myself, but I got the impression I was not supposed to tell anyone.
The light on my phone faded but before it went out, I saw a new message from an unknown caller. There was no name, just a string of numbers. I get lots of calls from people I don’t know, and when I do, I ignore them. But three people were missing and it might be one of them.
I tapped the conversation icon and saw a devil’s face. There was no message, but a large file was slowly downloading. I touched start and the video showed a nighttime view of Palos Verdes cliffs.
The camera panned down the cliffs, then went slowly across the sand, and came to rest on a body.
My heart hammered. I suddenly felt drained. I could not see the face, but I knew it was Pamela. I started to call emergency when another text came through. It had the same devil icon but a different number. Another file was downloading. It was bigger than the first and took over a minute to download.
I wished I had closed the app before it finished. Lying in the trough of a wave were James and Jade. They were facedown, their hair floating around them, as if they were trying to see underwater.
Bright green light flashed blinding me the same way it had when I saw the post about Logan being found dead.
By the time the afterimage faded, the screen was black, and I had a stabbing headache. Fumbling with my phone, I called 911. But as the dispatcher answered, I got another text.
“If this is not an emergency, please call”—I ended the call before the dispatcher finished.
The text was from Willy. It was not written in normal language, but it sounded like him: half-correct and with several out-of-place q
uestion marks. It meant I need to see you.
I thought of calling the police, but they were already suspicious of me and a call from me might make everything worse. Answering questions—or I should say trying to answer—without getting my story mixed up, would take too much explaining and in the end they would not believe me.
The Peninsula is only twenty minutes by car, but the problem was how to get there. My second thought was a matter of desperation. I didn’t have a credit card, so I could not call Uber, and I did not have enough money for a cab.
If I walked, I would arrive sometime tomorrow; hitchhiking was not an option.
Spare car keys are kept in a kitchen drawer. Justin’s were easy to find: the fob is a miniature wooden surfboard with one key hanging from a chain. I paused, thinking I should leave a note, but what would I say? Gone to Palos Verdes to investigate a murder? I could have said I was going to the mall, but with the list of lies growing longer, I would probably forget what I wrote and later say something different—if I made it back.
It had been months since I had driven Justin’s woody. I had never been that good at driving a stick shift and hoped I remembered how. I went to the garage, and after getting in the woody and starting it, I double-checked to make sure it was in Reverse, then backed out of the driveway. I was extra careful about that because our neighbor had backed her Suburban into her driveway and forgot to take it out of Reverse. The next time she drove it, she crashed into her closed garage door. I didn’t want to give my parents one more reason to disown me.
The glove box had a pair of large sunglasses. I put the woody in first gear, slipped the glasses on, and drove down the street to Sepulveda Boulevard. My shifting was more than rusty, it was terrible. That’s what I get for thinking Mindy’s was so bad. Of course, even if I could drive like a charm, there was still the unpleasant fact that if I got caught—which was likely—I could say good-bye to ever getting my driver’s license.
The woody does not have power brakes, but worse than that the windows are clear, not tinted. I don’t have celebrity delusions and was not trying to hide from my public, but there are not that many woodys in town. Everyone who knows Justin—and that’s a lot of people—recognizes his car; and if they saw me driving it, they might wonder why. Even if they mentioned it casually, word would get back to someone’s parents and sooner or later mine would find out. If the police caught me, I would be arrested for sure, but if I could help Pamela it would be worth it. That’s what I told myself anyway.
One of Us: The City of Secrets Page 21
