East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  “I don’t know. I guess,” Liam agreed, scratching his ear again.

  “So what happened?” Casey said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth,” Casey persisted.

  Liam said nothing.

  “Okay,” Casey said. “In that case, I’m going to show you some pictures. I’ll show you what happened, and then maybe you can tell me what the pictures mean.”

  Dani rose from her chair, crossed to where the detective was standing, and whispered in his ear. Casey looked annoyed, and then the two of them left the room.

  “What do you suppose that’s about?” Claire asked Tommy.

  “No idea.”

  A moment later Dani returned to the conference room alone. Tommy had seen the good-cop/bad-cop gimmick played out a thousand times on television. This bore a resemblance, but he assumed Danielle Harris was more sophisticated than any stock TV character.

  “Detective Casey had to make a phone call,” she told Liam. “He’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Okay,” Liam said.

  “You don’t much care for Detective Casey, do you?”

  “He’s scaring me.”

  “Maybe we can get this over with before he gets back,” Dani said. “Here’s the deal, buddy. There was a terrible crime committed last night. A girl was murdered. And the only clue the police have is that they found your cell phone near the body.”

  In Room 2, Claire gasped.

  Liam said, “They did?”

  Dani nodded. “Do you remember what you did with your cell phone?”

  “I lost it,” Liam said.

  “That’s true,” Claire told Tommy. “I asked him this morning if he had it, and he said it was lost.”

  “When was the last time you used it?” Dani asked.

  “Before the party,” Liam said. “To call Terence to come pick me up.”

  “What time did you get home last night?”

  “About three, I guess. I walked home.”

  “You got drunk at Logan’s house and passed out, and then you woke up at Logan’s house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was anybody else there when you woke up?”

  “I don’t know. I was on a lounge chair by the swimming pool,” Liam said.

  “What woke you up?”

  “I was cold. It got windy. I didn’t go back inside. I just went home.”

  “When did you notice your phone was missing?”

  “This morning,” he said, “when my mom asked me if I had it. I called it from the landline so I could find it, but I didn’t hear it ringing.”

  “Okay,” Dani said. “Let me see if I can go find Detective Casey to see if he has any other questions.”

  “Danielle,” Liam said, and she paused. “Are you going to tell the others that I gave you their names?”

  “We won’t,” Dani said. “But you did the right thing. Now we know where to go next. That’s going to work in your favor.”

  She disappeared off camera, and a moment later Tommy heard a knock on the door.

  Dani stuck her head into Room 2. “Why don’t you go in and sit with him for a second?” she said to Claire. “I think we’re finished, but I have to check.”

  Tommy stepped out into the hall, where he heard the district attorney tell Dani she wanted to coordinate their schedules. A large portrait of the current governor of New York hung at the end of the hall.

  Tommy waited until Dani was alone, and then he had his chance. “That was impressive,” he said. “I think you passed the audition.”

  “What do you mean, audition? How did you know it was my first time?”

  “I didn’t know it was your first time,” he said. “I just thought you looked nervous. You kept touching your hair. That’s a tell. According to the guys I play poker with.”

  “I was doing that?” Dani said. “Gosh. I’m so hungry, I can’t think straight.”

  She asked him not to talk to the media.

  “We want to keep the kids’ names out of the papers for as long as possible. The reputable media know not to publish the names of minors, but there’s no way to control the digital media or the blogosphere,” she said.

  “Gotcha,” Tommy said. “What was the deal when Casey left the room?”

  “I asked him not to show Liam pictures from the crime scene. He wanted to see how Liam would react, but if he’s innocent, it would scar him for life. I asked him to let me try to talk to him.”

  “Looks like it worked,” Tommy said. He worked up his courage. “You wanna get something to eat? It’s lunchtime.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not really hungry. I still have work to do here. They found an old woman wandering in the woods who might have seen something.”

  “Abbie Gardener,” Tommy said. “Don’t get your hopes up. She’s mad as a hatter.”

  “Abbie Gardener?”

  “Crazy George’s mom,” Tommy said. “Author of all those scary books.”

  “I know who Abbie Gardener is,” Dani said. “How did you know she’s the one they picked up?”

  “They found her at my house,” Tommy said. “In my yard. Talking to a frog. But I didn’t recognize her. I remember when she came to our fourth-grade class. She must have been a hundred years old then.”

  “So she would have been a hundred and three by the time you finished fourth grade,” Dani said.

  Tommy laughed. “Good one.”

  “Why do they call him Crazy George?”

  “Probably because when we were kids, he’d go crazy if you stepped on his property.”

  As he drove back to the gym, Tommy reviewed their closing conversation. He had no idea what it was he said, but apparently he’d put his foot in his mouth. When he asked her out to lunch, she’d said she wasn’t hungry. A minute earlier, she’d told him she was so hungry she couldn’t think straight.

  Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Yet some part of him believed she’d come back into his life for a reason. Seeing her again, he realized the one word that described how he had felt about his friendship with Danielle Harris all those years before: unfinished.

  8.

  “No thanks, I’m not really hungry.”

  She hadn’t really said that, had she?

  Right after telling him she was so hungry she couldn’t think straight. How a mature, sensible, educated, professional woman could become so tongue-tied was beyond her—and for what? A guy she knew half a lifetime ago?

  “He must think I’m an idiot,” she said out loud.

  Dani spent the afternoon in her office researching Alzheimer’s to prepare to interview Abbie Gardener and certify whether or not the old woman was competent to give reliable testimony or speak in her own defense. She’d read Abbie Gardener’s books as a girl, particularly The Witches of East Salem, which told hard-to-believe stories about some of the very houses and places Dani rode past on the bus on her way to elementary school. Kids called her “the witch lady.” No one dared go near the Gardener Farm on Halloween where, according to local kid lore, three trick-or-treaters had once rung the doorbell and been so frightened by what they saw next that their hair turned white. Parents knew better, but they still steered clear of the farm on Halloween.

  Like everyone else in East Salem, Dani had driven past the hundred and fifty acres of Gardener Farm, demarked by ancient stone walls, and fantasized about someday buying the place and renovating the big Queen Anne–style house. Visible from the road only in winter, the house, with its detailed turrets and gables, pitched slate roof, and elaborate gingerbread trim, might make a friendly “painted lady” if coated in brighter colors and if, perhaps, there were children’s toys scattered across the front lawn. But with its reddish brown siding and black trim and wild ivy crawling from the ground all the way to the widow’s walk at the top, covering the windows with dirt and leaves, the house seemed to forbid any guests
or visitors. In all the times that she’d driven past it, she’d never seen a light on. Rumors had circulated for years about any number of billionaires and celebrities who’d stopped by to make Abbie or Crazy George an offer, only to be chased off. It was hard not to imagine that the house was hiding something.

  She was nearly home for the day when her phone rang.

  “Just letting you know,” Detective Casey said, “we ran down all the names that Liam gave us of the kids who were at the party. The only one who didn’t show up to school today is Julie Leonard. Seventeen. We’re bringing the mother down to the ME’s to make the ID. Like that’s something a mother should ever have to see. Hopefully there’s a birthmark on a hand or foot, and we won’t have to show Mrs. Leonard any more than that.”

  “The girl had a red-and-black friendship bracelet around her right ankle, didn’t she?” Dani recalled gently. “The kind kids tie on at camp and wear until they fall off.”

  “I forgot about that,” Casey said. “Maybe that will be enough.”

  “Do you need me there?”

  “No,” Casey said. “But I’m gonna tell the mother we’re gonna catch whoever did this. I’m gonna need you to help me keep my promise.”

  Dani hung up, pulled over to the side of the road, then typed the name “Julie Leonard” into the search box on her Google screen. She was about to hit enter, but changed her mind.

  Tomorrow, she decided, and logged off.

  Just before getting home, she stopped by the A&P Plaza where she bought a new HD radio/alarm at RadioShack for her bed stand. The radio also featured digital samples of various soothing sounds to help the listener fall asleep … a summer thunderstorm, a spring meadow full of birds, waves crashing on the beach, crickets chirping on a warm summer night. She was looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep.

  Three miles from her house, she saw flashing red, blue, and yellow lights ahead and slowed her car. Her first thought was a car accident, but as she drew closer she saw a police car, a fire truck with its ladder partially extended, and an electric company utility truck with a bucket lift. She parked and got out of the car to see if she could be of any medical assistance. As she rounded the rear of the fire truck, she saw that a fireman and two electrical workers were working on something above the road. She took a few steps farther and gasped.

  Somehow a deer had become entangled in the wires fifteen feet above the asphalt, snagged and bleeding and hanging by the antlers. To her further horror, she saw the deer suddenly kick its hind legs, trying to free itself.

  She watched an electrical worker, unable to free the animal, shake his head. The bucket lift was lowered to the ground. The electrical worker opened the bucket gate, and a cop climbed in. He unholstered his service pistol as the bucket rose. Dani wanted to look away but couldn’t. She watched and listened as the officer fired two bullets into the deer’s brain from point-blank range and put the poor animal out of its misery.

  When a second cop advised her to step back, she asked him what happened.

  “I work for the DA’s office,” she told him, as if that had anything to do with it.

  The cop said he’d seen deer get hit by cars and thrown a hundred feet. This was probably a truck, moving at high speed, hitting the deer just as it was trying to jump from harm’s way, causing the animal to fly up into the wires.

  “The driver didn’t stop?” Dani asked.

  “He might not have noticed. Coulda walked back and not found what he hit. Who’d think to look up?”

  She watched again as a fireman, using a small power saw, cut through the dead deer’s antlers, and then the carcass fell to the ground.

  “Fresh one for the wolf sanctuary,” the cop said, referring to a nearby wildlife rescue operation where all the local roadkill went.

  Once the fire truck blocking the road moved, Dani was allowed to proceed. When she got home, she opened a can of chicken and rice soup and heated it in a pan—her mother’s “recipe.” She missed her parents. They belonged in this big old house where she now lived without them.

  She changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, washed her face, drank a glass of warm milk, and went to bed. When she tried to read the instructions to program her new clock radio, she concluded that the manual had been written by someone for whom the English language was a second if not a third tongue. What happened to the good old days, when a radio was just a radio and a clock was just a clock?

  Finally she set the alarm for seven and instructed the clock, she hoped, to wake her to the sound of a spring thunderstorm.

  As she closed her eyes, she thought of the deer hanging from the power lines. It was the sort of thing that might give a person nightmares, but she knew from a lecture on dream analysis in med school that it was uncommon to dream of something you saw the same day you saw it. Usually it took about a week.

  She fell asleep, but instead of waking at seven, she sat up in the middle of the night, thinking she’d left the water running somewhere. The clock read 2:13.

  Rising slowly to a fuller state of consciousness, Dani remembered her dream. She’d seen her mother standing under a tropical waterfall … then the water had turned to blood.

  She remembered the dream from the night before, her father holding a stone.

  It occurred to her that she’d woken the night before at the very same time: 2:13. Weird.

  She sat up in bed, found the remote, turned on the television, and channel-surfed, watching as many different shows as she could to drive the disturbing image from her consciousness. The news channels told of oil spills and environmental catastrophes, local crimes and tragic car accidents. She turned the television off and picked up Moby Dick.

  “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” Melville wrote of the whiteness of the whale, “and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depth of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning … ?”

  But it wasn’t the color white or the lack of all color that kept Dani awake. It was the vivid red of the blood that fell on her mother’s head, and the feeling she had that she was the cause of it.

  9.

  Tommy had two reasons to go see his friend Carl. One was because he wanted to do anything he could to help Liam. The other was that he saw helping to solve the mystery as a way to score points with Dani. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted to do that. Perhaps just to dig himself out of the hole he was in and get back to zero.

  Carl Thorstein was one of the most learned men Tommy knew. They’d met at the local gas station, where they’d both stopped to fill the tanks of their motorcycles. Talking about Harleys and Indian Aces and 1952 Black Vincents had quickly led to friendship and talk of deeper things. Carl was a theologian and a scholar, and he had helped Tommy at a time when the younger man needed sage advice. Tommy came to believe he’d met Carl at the gas station that day for a reason. It was Carl who told Tommy it would be all right to walk away from football—much to the consternation of Ham Jeffers, the multibillionaire team owner. Carl had encouraged Tommy to do what he needed to do, which was not play a sport where he could kill a fellow human being.

  Before the accident, Tommy had taken the sport he played seriously. Afterward, it seemed meaningless. How could he say, “A man is dead, but we scored two more touchdowns than the other team, so it was worth it”?

  Ham Jeffers thought Tommy should be able to shake it off. “Get it through your thick skull,” he shouted at Tommy. “It was an accident!”

  Carl told Tommy it was indeed an accident, but it was also a turning point, a crossroads. There was a reason it happened, or at least a way to give it a reason. Carl didn’t try to soothe him with pat answers.

  “You may never know why God allowed it,” he told Tommy, “but ma
ybe God wants you to ask that question. If life has meaning, then death has meaning, even if it seems senseless to you at the moment.”

  Tommy was still asking. In the meantime, to make sure it would never happen again, he took the necessary steps. On a personal level, he’d walked off the field in the first quarter of the next game he played before he hurt somebody else, and because he knew he didn’t belong there anymore. He’d always played with an equation in mind: (mass x velocity) = force, and the greater force prevailed. Some players hit the brakes in the split second before impact. Tommy accelerated. After the accident, he found himself shying away from hits and decelerating. His heart was no longer in it.

  The other thing he knew he had to do was open a fitness center to train athletes and teach them how to be strong. He took full responsibility for the consequences of his actions, but he also knew that Dwight Sykes, although a gifted natural athlete with blinding speed, had also been lazy. He rarely used the weight room and spent his off-seasons pursuing television acting opportunities and chasing girls. If Sykes had been stronger, he might have been able to take the hit Tommy delivered.

  The fitness center was a way to make everybody who used it stronger. It wasn’t something Tommy wanted to do with the rest of his life, but it was what he needed to set in place before transitioning to the next thing.

  The morning sun was still rising in the east when Tommy pulled up to Carl’s home and found his friend working in his garden, ripping out his withered tomato plants. Carl had lived alone ever since losing his wife to breast cancer. Tommy tried to set him up on dates whenever he met single women of an appropriate age, but Carl never called the numbers Tommy gave him.

  Carl got to his feet when he saw Tommy and held his muddy hands out to his sides in a gesture that said, To what do I owe the pleasure? He had a salt-and-pepper beard, full-faced but closely trimmed, and was bald on top.

  “What are you doing?” Tommy asked him. “Planting season is spring.”