by Lis Wiehl
Dani wondered how exactly you “dated” someone in sixth grade. It was her recollection that in sixth grade boys were still covered head to toe in cooties and boy germs. When did that change?
At Dani’s suggestion, Stuart asked Khetzel Ross to step into the sitting room of the Empire Suite. If Rayne was the alpha female in the pack, they might get Khetzel to flip on her. Her mother, the actress Vivian Ross, had called the front desk of the inn to ask them to tell the police she’d been held up and to please wait for her before getting started.
“Who does she think she is?” Casey had asked.
To which Dani answered, “She thinks she’s Vivian Ross.”
Khetzel, proving herself to be every inch the diva her mother was, announced that she wanted to fire her lawyer and represent herself. As her lawyer objected, Dani explained that as a minor, Khetzel was required by law to have representation. Khetzel countered by saying she’d been held back a year before starting kindergarten and was eighteen.
“You can make that decision,” Dani said, “but I would advise against it.”
“Fine,” Khetzel said. “It’s made.” She turned to her lawyer. “You can go.”
“But …”
“Please. I’m sure Mother will pay you your retainer or whatever it is.”
When the lawyer was gone, she dropped a second bombshell.
“Rayne and I want to talk to you,” she said, looking at Dani. Then, turning to Detective Casey, she added, “Alone. And I can’t tell you the reason why until we’re alone.”
“Khetzel,” Dani said, “I’m an officer of the court. Anything you tell me, I’m going to relay to Detective Casey and the district attorney anyway—you understand that, don’t you?”
“I understand that,” Khetzel said. “But you’re a psychiatrist, and you went to East Salem High. We Googled you.”
“I can’t talk to Rayne without a lawyer,” Dani said, “for the same rea—”
“She’s eighteen too,” Khetzel interrupted. “Our moms held us back together. We’ve already agreed. We want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“I can’t say.”
“If you can’t tell me why—”
“People could die,” Khetzel said. “That’s why—okay?”
15.
During the six years that Tommy played professional football, his aunt Ruth, who worked at the town library, had kept him apprised of the local news. She wasn’t a gossip, but as the coordinator of so many town activities, she usually had an inside track on the village scuttlebutt. Tommy found her in the children’s room at the end of story hour, reading to a small group of preschoolers.
She smiled when she saw him waiting for her. “You really should get one of those,” she told him when she’d finished, nodding over her shoulder at the room full of children. “They’re a lot more fun than motorcycles.”
“Someday,” he said. “I need to get a learner’s permit first.”
That his aunt had never married and was childless had always seemed to Tommy to be one of life’s greatest injustices. He couldn’t think of anybody who’d be a better mom. Her hair, which she wore in a dignified braided ponytail, was partly gray and mostly blond. Her face was round, with a bright smile and sparkling blue eyes. So far she’d resisted his efforts to set her up with his friend Carl, but he was still working on it.
“Oh beans,” she said. “You’d be a natural. What brings you here?”
“Research,” he said.
“All yours.” She gestured to the computer room, filled with computers and monitors and servers purchased with money Tommy had donated.
“You’re the only resource I need,” he told her. “What do you know about Abbie Gardener?”
His aunt sighed. She explained that Abbie had once been a vital life force in the town, active in the church, an avid letter writer to the local paper, a favorite dinner guest, and as the town historian a tireless chronicler of the town’s narrative and chairman of the East Salem Historical Society. She’d been outgoing and extroverted until her health began to fail.
“What do you want to know?”
“Who’d she marry?” Tommy asked.
“Who says she did?” Ruth replied. The identity of George’s father had long been the subject of speculation, most of it pointing to a hired man who’d lived on the farm before the war and left shortly before George was born. The rumor was that he had died in World War II, killed on D-day. “I couldn’t say one way or the other. But she was always such an independent spirit. She might have planned to be a single mother from the start. It used to be looked down upon, you know. But Abbie always went her own way.”
Ruth knew little of the Gardener family ancestral history, even though the farm had been held by the Gardener family since the town first started keeping records.
“Abbie seemed to think it wasn’t fitting to talk about herself,” Ruth said. “She never wanted people to think she was in any way different or special. Which is part of what made her so special.
“Over the years, a lot of people have used the library’s archives to research the property itself,” she added. “One hopes the Gardeners have done a bit of estate planning, but if they haven’t and George passes on without naming an heir, it’s going to be a free-for-all. I shudder to think.”
“What’s the deal with her obsession with ghosts and witches?” Tommy asked.
“Folklore,” Aunt Ruth said. “That’s all I ever made of it. She collected stories. Perhaps not what an academic historian might collect, but Abbie was never an academic. If I may ask, why are you interested?”
Tommy explained that he’d found Abbie lost in his backyard the night of the Bull’s Rock Hill murder. “The police wonder if she saw anything. I’m helping Dani Harris look into it. You remember Dani?”
“I do,” Ruth said, looking sadder than before. “She’s part of our book club. So terrible, what happened to her parents.”
“What was that all about anyway?” he asked. “I never heard the details.”
“Dani’s parents went to visit her before she finished her term of service with Doctors Without Borders. They wanted to fly home with her, but she wanted to stay an extra week to be with her boyfriend.”
“Who was her boyfriend?”
“Some brilliant research scientist,” Ruth said. “According to her sister, Beth. Beth brings her girls in from time to time.”
Tommy’s spirits sank.
“The boyfriend didn’t work out, by the way,” his aunt added.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“As I understand it,” she said, “the pilot was unable to obtain fuel for his plane, so Fred and Amelia had to book the only other flight they could get, with another pilot who smuggled guns and such. According to Beth, Dani has never stopped blaming herself for not being more careful. Can you imagine? The plane was never found. Dani spent every last penny she had to keep searching, but it was no use.”
Tommy could only imagine how awful Dani must have felt.
“You know what they say,” Ruth said. “Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes it’s for God to know and us to find out.”
In which case, he wondered, what was the reason Abbie Gardener had found her way to his house the night of the murder? There were plenty of other houses along the way where she might have stopped. Why his? Who or what had made Abbie choose him?
16.
Khetzel Ross and Rayne Kepplinger were willing to tell Dani what she wanted to know, but stipulated that they didn’t want the interview recorded. Dani and Detective Casey stepped into the hall to discuss it. From somewhere down the hall, Dani heard the muffled sounds of a television broadcast of a football game, and for a brief moment thought of Tommy before returning to the business at hand.
“For what it’s worth,” Dani told Casey, “I know girls like this. I think I may have actually been one once. Women talk to women.”
“This one of those women’s intuition things?” Casey
asked.
“That’s sexist,” Dani said. “Or so my woman’s intuition tells me. At the very least, you can use what they tell me if you want to question them yourself.”
“They understand they’re not immunized, right?” Casey said. “They know we can use whatever they tell us?”
“I’ll make sure they do,” Dani said. “I’ll be careful.”
She returned to the sitting room, where she told Rayne and Khetzel that Detective Casey had agreed to let her talk to them in private.
“So what’s going on? How’s that Rogaine thing working out for Mr. Forbes, by the way?” Dani began, referring to the veteran East Salem High science teacher who, in her day, had covered his encroaching baldness with increasingly conspicuous toupees. She’d seen a recent picture of him when she’d visited the school website.
“He looks like a nectarine with mold,” Khetzel said.
Dani laughed.
“Is what we’re about to tell you protected by doctor-client privilege?” Rayne asked. “What someone says to a psychiatrist is just as private as what you say to a priest in confession, right?”
“I’m a doctor, but you’re not my clients,” Dani said. “As I said, I advise the district attorney.”
The girls eyed one another and signaled their agreement.
“We just really have to tell somebody,” Khetzel said, “but we know if we told our lawyers, they’d tell our parents.”
“I can’t promise that what you tell me won’t get out,” Dani said. “I know you know your rights, but I have to remind you that whatever you say can and may be used against you in court. That’s just the way it is.”
“We know,” Khetzel said. “We trust you.”
“I’m glad you feel you can,” Dani said, then looked at Rayne directly. “Particularly after the video clip you sent to Liam, threatening to kill him.”
Dani could tell by the way the girl blushed that she knew better than to pretend she was innocent.
“I am so sorry I did that,” Rayne said. “I wanted to take it back as soon as I hit Send.”
“It sounded pretty angry,” Dani said.
“It was just an expression,” Rayne said. “You know, like saying ‘Get outta town.’ You don’t really want somebody to move. I wasn’t really going to kill him.”
“Unfortunately, you sound very much like you want to, in the video,” Dani said. “If a jury hears that, they’re going to reach their own conclusions.”
“A jury?” Rayne said. “No. I just—I wasn’t angry.”
“If you weren’t angry, what were you?”
“Scared,” Rayne said.
Her statement confirmed the conclusion Dani had reached after viewing the video clip with the pixilation filter removed. She’d asked the technician to make absolutely certain that the colors were as true as possible. A person expressing fear could look very much like a person expressing anger, with one exception. An angry person’s face is generally red. The face of a person filled with fear is generally pale, and that’s what Dani saw on the video clip. She was seeing it now, in person.
“I know you’re scared,” she told the two girls. “Personally, I don’t think you hurt Julie Leonard, but we need to find out who did. Anything you tell me could help. Were you both at the party at Logan Gansevoort’s house?”
The pair nodded. Khetzel reached inside her boot to scratch her leg.
“Did you know Julie?” Dani asked. “Was she a friend? The boys didn’t seem to know much about her.”
“We knew her in grade school,” Rayne said. “Some years she was in my class and some years she was in Khetzel’s.”
“What was she like in grade school?”
“She was so funny,” Khetzel said. “She wrote these skits that were so goofy. That’s what I remember.”
“She was always the peacemaker on the playground,” Rayne said. “And she liked playing wall ball with the boys.”
“Did you stay friends with her in middle school?” Dani asked. “High school?”
“We tried to,” Rayne said. “I mean, we weren’t not friends. We weren’t, like, mean to her or anything. She was a good kid.”
“So what happened?” Dani asked. “Why weren’t you close friends anymore?”
“Well,” Rayne said, “you know how in elementary school everybody is pretty much equal, but then in middle school things kind of move apart sometimes?”
“We wanted to invite her to do stuff,” Khetzel said. “But she couldn’t afford it. It’s not like we held it against her or anything, but we’d ask her to do stuff with us, and she never could because she didn’t have any money.”
“After a while,” Rayne said, “you can’t keep inviting somebody like that to go with you when they can’t afford it because it just makes them feel bad. It’s better to just let it go.”
“I get it,” Dani said. She remembered too well the pain of not being invited to the parties of friends who’d invited her all her life. “So who asked her to the party?”
“We don’t know,” Khetzel said. “We were a little surprised to see her there, actually. And dressed like that …”
“Like how? What was she wearing?” Dani asked.
“Showing a little skin,” Rayne said.
“She had on a party dress,” Khetzel explained. “I think it was from JCPenney. The rest of us were just dressed normal.”
“I think Blair might have invited her,” Rayne said. “Or else put Logan up to it. Blair has a huge crush on Logan and thinks we don’t know, but she’s acting really weird. She won’t talk to us.”
“Did Julie come alone?” Dani asked.
“I think she came with that other boy,” Khetzel said, scratching her leg again.
“Liam?”
“No,” Rayne said. “Liam was with Blair. I think his name was Amos.”
“I thought Blair had a crush on Logan,” Dani said.
“She does, but she was trying to make him jealous by flirting with Liam,” Khetzel said.
“You’re not sure who Amos was?” Dani said. “You don’t know him from school?”
“He doesn’t go to ESH,” Rayne said. “He goes to St. Adrian’s. He went to ESE for a while.”
“Did it look to you like they were a couple?” Dani asked. “Julie and Amos?”
“I don’t think so,” Khetzel said.
“How about the other boys?” Dani asked. “Were any of them interested in Julie? I get the sense Logan’s had a lot of girlfriends. Do you think Julie had been with Logan?”
Khetzel made a face.
“Not his type?” Dani asked.
“Logan doesn’t have a type,” Rayne said. “If it walks and breathes, it’s his type. I don’t think Julie had ever hooked up with anybody.”
“No?” Dani said. “What makes you say that?”
Rayne shrugged. Dani noticed that Rayne had a large Band-Aid on her ankle, visible beneath her dark tights.
“It’s just something you know about somebody,” Khetzel said.
“So you got to the party when?” Dani asked. “What time?”
“Around midnight,” Rayne said. “Logan said not before.”
“He texted,” Khetzel said. “He just said we should be ready.”
“Ready for what?” Dani asked. She waited.
“It was more than just a party,” Rayne said. “It was a passage party.”
“You’ll have to explain that one to me.”
“We’d heard about passage parties,” Khetzel said, “but it’s supposed to be secret. You’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“It’s where you cross over,” Rayne said.
Dani waited again.
“You die,” Khetzel said. “For seven minutes.”
“How do you die?”
“You drink zombie juice,” Khetzel said. “That’s what Logan called it. It’s supposed to be some ancient secret formula.”
“You drank something, but you didn’t ask what was in it?” Dani said.
&
nbsp; “You have to believe in it,” Khetzel said. “It only works if you believe it’s going to work.”
“What happens if you don’t believe in it?”
Rayne looked at Khetzel.
“You don’t come back,” Khetzel said.
“And what happens if you do?”
“First you see a white light,” Rayne said. “And then if you move toward the light you feel … ecstasy. Like a spiritual insight. And the closer you get to the light, the more you feel. But if you keep going, you pass the point of no return and you don’t come back. The zombie juice makes it possible to come back. It’s supposed to change your life forever.”
“We heard that sometimes people who see the light get to talk to their dead relatives,” Khetzel said. “I wanted to see my dog, Rufus. He was hit by a car.”
“What did you want?” Dani asked Rayne.
“I guess I just wanted to see for myself if heaven was real,” she said. “We don’t go to church. My parents … Anyway, I thought if I could just see it …”
Rayne was close to tears.
“So what did you experience?” Dani asked. “You drank the zombie juice. Then what happened?”
“We don’t remember,” Rayne said. “Honestly, we don’t. We’ve tried, but we can’t remember. Khetzel thinks she saw the white light, but she isn’t sure.”
“Khetzel?”
“You can’t talk about it,” Khetzel said. “That’s why we didn’t want you to record us.”
“Why?” Dani asked. “What happens if you talk about it?”
“You die,” Khetzel said.
Dani knew the girl was serious. She looked pale, her breathing shallow.
“And I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel good. I think I’m going to throw up. Oh God. It’s happening …”
“Khetzel …”
“Oh no …”
“Khetzel, listen to me,” Dani said, moving directly in front of the terrified girl and grasping her by the shoulders. “Look me right in the eyes. Okay? Nothing is going to happen to you. I won’t let anything happen to you. Look at me and keep looking at me. Khetzel, I need you to listen. You’re having a panic attack.”
