East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  That had been Jill’s only contact with Julie Leonard. On the other hand, she had spoken to Logan Gansevoort on numerous occasions, once when drugs were found in his locker and again when a younger boy complained that Logan had snapped him with a wet towel in the locker room.

  “I have to say,” Jill confided, “it seemed pretty clear to a lot of us at the time that Logan’s father applied some sort of pressure on the principal or the school superintendent. He got probation where other kids would have been suspended.”

  “Do you think he’s capable of violence?” Dani asked.

  “He certainly has a sense of entitlement,” Jill said. “And maybe impunity too. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me he keeps pushing the limits precisely because his parents never set any. It’s not that he wants to get caught, but he wants them to set boundaries. Kids who grow up without any think their parents don’t care.”

  “Unfortunately, sometimes they’re right.”

  “He’s definitely the G-Money around here,” Jill said.

  “Speaking of which … ,” Dani said, then described how she’d come into contact with Tommy Gunderson after not seeing him for nearly a dozen years. He seemed the same, Dani said, then corrected herself. “Actually, he seems better. More mature. ’Course, most of us are more mature at thirty than we were at eighteen … one hopes.”

  “He had such a crush on you,” Jill said. “When he told everybody he knew they had to vote for you but that you’d kill him if you ever found out, I was sure you guys were going to end up in a big house on Willow Pond with lots of little homecoming princes and princesses.”

  Dani thanked the guidance counselor and left before she blushed red enough to set off the smoke alarms. Outside, she took a moment to recover. It had never dawned on her that Tommy Gunderson had felt anything but sorry for her in high school, if she ever crossed his mind at all. He’d asked people to vote for her? Really?

  Today Tommy was wearing hiking boots, khaki cargo pants, and a leather bomber-style jacket over a white shirt. She wondered if he even owned a tie, and suppressed a fleeting desire to take him shopping.

  He was sitting on the curb outside the gym, but jumped to his feet when Dani pulled up. He ran a hand along the hood of her car as he walked to the passenger side.

  “Where we going first?” he asked, getting in her car.

  “To see the Kasdens. Amos’s parents. Then Julie’s mom,” she told him. “Phil Casey talked to her, but he thought it would be a good idea if we did too. The Kasdens live right in town.”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “Mitchell Kasden is my dad’s dentist. Dad was having a good night last night, memory-wise. He said he remembered once when Mitchell came into the nursery. He had a kid with him who kept pulling the heads off the flowers. That was Amos.”

  “Interesting.”

  “How so?” Tommy asked, pausing to shut off his cell phone.

  It occurred to Dani that none of the men she’d ever seen socially did that. She had Tommy’s undivided attention.

  “Kids who torture animals often turn into very troubled adults,” Dani said. “I’m not sure if decapitating flowers counts. It’s not dissimilar.”

  “She hates me, she hates me not,” Tommy said. “I was actually at the library looking up stories about people who tortured dogs. Did I tell you I walked the back trail up Bull’s Rock Hill last night and found a tree stump full of blood?”

  “Excuse me? No, you didn’t tell me.”

  He explained his findings of the previous night, the blood and the nail in the tree, drawing an imaginary map on the dashboard to show her approximately where each event took place.

  “I called my cop friend Frank and told him what I’d found out,” Tommy said. “He said he’d make sure Detective Casey got it. Frank thought the blood was probably from some animal, which made me think. Where I parked the car, there was a sign for a lost dog. I heard George Gardener once shot a dog that wandered onto his property, but maybe that was just one of those local legends kids make up. I asked my Aunt Ruth to look through the archives of the East Salem Courier. No luck. I thought of George because of the double G.”

  “What double G?”

  “The symbol,” Tommy said. “The one they found on Julie’s stomach.”

  “This?” Dani said, reaching into the backseat as she drove and fishing in the side pouch of her briefcase to show Tommy the drawing of the she’d shown the girls the day before.

  Tommy took it and stared at it. He turned it upside down once, then right side up again.

  “Never mind,” he said, putting it back in her briefcase. “I thought maybe if George was a suspect, he was signing his name. That’s all.”

  “You thought it was a double G?”

  “Never mind,” Tommy repeated.

  Suddenly she had a reasonable diagnosis. “Tommy,” she said. “Are you dyslexic?”

  He didn’t answer at first. “Maybe a little,” he said. “I spent a year at a special needs school relearning how to learn. That’s why fourth grade took me two years. Not three. As per your earlier comment.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, remembering the joke she’d made. She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Tommy, I had no idea …”

  That explained why he was so observant. People with dyslexia had to look harder at the details surrounding them and overcome a dysfunction of the visual pathways, decoding what information was meaningful and what wasn’t. It was like trying to hear what someone was saying at a really loud party. For dyslexics, the world was full of visual noise.

  “It’s all right,” Tommy said. “I’m not ashamed of it. I just don’t talk about it much because people look at you funny. Or they feel sorry for you.”

  “I admire anybody who overcomes it,” Dani said. “For the record.” She changed the subject. “Do you remember Jill Ji-Sung?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Who wouldn’t remember her?”

  Dani couldn’t deny that Jill had been cute as a button, but Tommy’s words stung slightly. “What do you mean by that?”

  “We only had one Korean cheerleader,” Tommy said. “Right? Did I miss one?”

  Dani had to laugh. “Well, she’s now the guidance counselor at East Salem.”

  She related what Jill had told her about Logan Gansevoort. He was finishing his education at a public high school because he’d been thrown out of two private schools. He had a variety of problems, most of them involving substance abuse. He’d been arrested once for getting into a fight in a bar during a winter vacation his family had sent him on to Nevis/St. Kitts.

  “Sent him?” Tommy said. “They didn’t go with him?”

  “They figured he was old enough,” Dani said.

  “How old was he?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Sheesh,” Tommy said. “Seems a little young to be getting into bar fights. Can you put people in jail for bad parenting?”

  “Not until somebody actually gets hurt.”

  She wondered what kind of parenting she’d find as she drove to the Kasden home. The neighborhood was one of the newer developments, if you could call it a neighborhood when no house was visible from any of the other houses. The Kasden home was a large colonial, set back from the road behind a wall of shrubs and a gated driveway.

  Dani used her cell phone to call the house, and the gate opened. She usually assumed gates at the ends of driveways were there to keep people out. When she saw a yard filled with skateboards and bicycles, pitch-backs and soccer balls, discarded sweatshirts and stray footballs and baseballs and basketballs, she decided that the Kasdens’ gate was probably there to keep the wildness in.

  Jane Kasden apologized for the mess before letting them in. Dani estimated, by the quantity of detritus strewn about, that the Kasdens had either twenty girls or four boys. The latter turned out to be correct. In addition to Amos, they had sons twelve, eight, and four. The oldest child was African-American, the middle child was Asian, and the youngest had Down syndrome
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  The mother escorted Dani and Tommy into the study, which was as orderly as the rest of the house was messy. Mitchell Kasden was at his desk, paying bills. He rose from his chair and invited Dani and Tommy to sit on a large leather couch.

  “I like your man-cave,” Tommy said.

  “The boys aren’t allowed in,” the father said, “and yet I regularly find Lego blocks and Pokemon cards in my files. How could that be?”

  When Dani asked them to give her a little background on their unusual family, they explained how they’d learned, after losing their first child to Tay-Sachs disease, that they were both carriers of the recessive gene that caused it. The chance of losing a second child to Tay-Sachs was too high. They decided they could afford to adopt a family.

  Amos was the first child they’d taken in, adopted at age six through an accredited agency in the former Soviet Union. He’d attended East Salem Elementary despite not speaking a word of English on his first day, did well academically but began developing behavioral problems. Mitchell Kasden thought it started the day he taught Amos to play chess.

  “We knew he was extremely bright,” he said. “Within a few months he was beating me regularly, and I’m pretty good. But then he couldn’t stop thinking about chess. We had to take the board away from him, but he kept playing games in his head. We wondered if it had something to do with his coming from Russia. Chess is almost the national game there.”

  “And then he started speaking Russian again,” Jane said. “It was the strangest thing. You’re not supposed to be able to retain your native tongue if you don’t have anybody to speak it with.” She looked nervously at her husband.

  “Sometimes we’d find him in his room, speaking Russian,” Mitchell said. “Frankly, it frightened Jane. And me. As if he were having conversations with someone who wasn’t there.”

  “Did you ever get a Russian-speaking person to tell you what he was saying?” Dani asked.

  “Once,” the father said. “But Amos refused to talk.”

  “He knew someone was listening?” Tommy asked.

  “We don’t see how he could have,” the father said. “We didn’t tell him the man we brought in was fluent in Russian. Anyway, we did some research and learned that St. Adrian’s is one of the most highly regarded schools in the world for boys with emotional or developmental impairments. And here it was, right in our own hometown.”

  “They’ve done wonderful things for him, I have to say,” Jane said. “He has tutors for every class. He has friends. He was home for two weeks last summer and he played so nicely with his brothers. We really couldn’t be happier.”

  “It’s not cheap,” Mitchell said. “But it doesn’t matter if it helps him.”

  When Dani asked about the night that Amos had gone to the party, they said they didn’t know much. The Kasdens had talked to the dean of students and the assistant headmaster. The school had a policy of strictly controlling contact between students and family, “since so often it’s the family relationships that are causing the behavioral problems,” Jane explained.

  “Amos had off-campus privileges that night,” she continued. “He’d gone into town. He told us he’d known a few of the kids at the party from elementary school but he’d lost touch with them.”

  “He found them again on Facebook,” Mitchell said. “He ran into Logan and Terence downtown the night of the party. That Gansevoort boy is just a bad kid—” He stopped himself and apologized, then added, “Rayne Kepplinger is a piece of work too. I did her retainers. I’ve never had a patient complain as much as she did.”

  “The point is,” Jane said, “yes, Amos went with them to Logan’s house, but when he realized there was going to be drinking, he left. He walked back to campus. The surveillance video shows him brushing his teeth in the bathroom in his dorm. We saw it.”

  “What time was that?” Dani asked. “I haven’t heard of any surveillance video.”

  “The school told us they just sent it over to the police this morning,” Jane said. “It was taken a little after one in the morning. The police said it would have taken Amos at least half an hour to walk from Logan’s house.”

  Meaning, Dani realized, that Amos would have been in his room at the time of the murder. The look Tommy gave her told her he’d done the same math.

  “We heard they were drinking,” Mitchell said. “Amos knows he can’t combine alcohol with his medications.”

  “What are his medications?” Dani asked.

  “His doctor could tell you exactly,” Jane said. “It’s a combination, but it’s strictly monitored.”

  “The school won’t release his medical records without your permission,” Dani said. “In writing.”

  “You’ve got it,” Mitchell said. “I’ll send it today. You understand why they’re so concerned with security, don’t you? There are children of nine world leaders enrolled there. And six from royal families. They have to be careful.”

  Dani thanked them and said they’d been very helpful. On their way out, she and Tommy were stopped by the three other Kasden boys, all carrying magazine covers and footballs they wanted Tommy to autograph with a black marker. One had a poster for the New York Giants. Tommy explained that he’d never played for the Giants, but the boys wanted him to sign it anyway.

  “What’d you think?” Dani asked once they were in the car again.

  “I think they’re good people,” Tommy said. “I’m liking Logan Gansevoort less and less.”

  “I’m liking him more and more,” Dani said. “As a suspect.”

  From the Kasdens’ house it was a ten-minute drive to the Lake Kendell community, a cluster of small Craftsman homes and three-season cottages on the southern shore of the lake where Westchester County abutted Putnam County. This was East Salem’s response to the New York State Housing Reform Act, which required every town to develop a percentage of housing for low-income families. In the rest of East Salem, the minimum lot size was four acres. At Lake Kendell there was no minimum. Some cottages were built as little as ten feet apart. Some dwellings, on waterfront lots, were well-kept and afforded a pleasant if not luxurious lifestyle with boating and water-skiing and fishing opportunities. The houses farther back from the lake were less well kept and had gardens that needed weeding, siding in need of painting, rusted gutters, fences with missing slats.

  The wealthy considered Lake Kendell an eyesore. Those who lived there considered it home, a place to drink beer on their porches and put pink plastic lawn flamingos in their gardens if they had a mind to.

  The house where Julie Leonard had lived was at the end of Sunset Lane, set back from the lake without a view of either the lake or the setting sun, as best Dani could tell. It was painted a muted periwinkle blue with off-white trim. She saw three pumpkins at the end of the porch, uncarved, and a bird feeder hanging above the railing. There were home-crafted dream catchers and stained-glass sun catchers hanging inside the picture window. The brass door knocker was in the shape of a horse’s head, and Dani decided to give it a try.

  Connie Leonard let them in and, after they’d introduced themselves, immediately offered them coffee. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said, referring to the basket of unwashed clothes on the kitchen counter and the dishes in the sink. “I’m still not quite myself.”

  Connie was in her forties, her thin light brown hair teased and brushed back. She was wearing a beige cardigan over a light blue cotton turtleneck and gray sweatpants, with sheepskin slippers on her feet. She wore no makeup and looked tired, defeated, spent.

  “That’s all right,” Dani said. She noticed a framed portrait of a girl on the mantel and recognized the face and the signature as Julie’s. The portrait was neither self-flattering nor self-deprecating. It was honest, and it was good. The eyes were particularly well done and seemed to be looking straight at the viewer.

  “That’s my Jules,” Connie said, noticing where Dani was looking.

  “Pretty,” Dani said. “If this is a bad time …”
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  “No, no,” Connie said. “I mean, the last few days have been one nonstop bad time. I’m not sure I have anything more to say than what I already told the detectives.”

  “The lead detective asked me to follow up,” Dani said, handing Connie her card.

  Connie looked at it, gesturing for Dani and Tommy to sit in a pair of armchairs opposite the couch, where she then sat.

  “I was wondering what you could tell us about Julie,” Dani began. “She sounds like a great kid.”

  “She was the best,” Connie said. She sounded hoarse.

  “Was she popular at school?”

  “She had friends,” Connie said. “I imagine she could have wanted more. All kids want more friends. You know how kids are.”

  “Enemies?” Dani asked.

  Connie shook her head. “That’s the weirdest part. There’s just no … nothing logical about it. There’s just no reason anybody would want to do something like this. I can’t make any sense of it.”

  Dani wondered if she’d ever heard a voice so lost.

  “Maybe the police can make sense of it,” she said. “The kind of person who could do something like this doesn’t see the world the same way we do. We can’t understand it because we can’t see through their eyes.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Connie said, grabbing a fresh tissue and drying her eyes.

  “Do you know if Julie was friends with Rayne Kepplinger or Khetzel Ross or Blair Weeks?” Dani said.

  Connie grimaced.

  “Were they ever over here to visit? Did she ever go to their houses?”

  “They were never here,” Connie said, looking around sadly, staring at a spot on the rug before looking up. “Julie would have been too embarrassed to ask any of them over. But I know she was in the Kepplingers’ and the Weekses’ homes because I have service contracts with them. Julie started helping out after I had to let two of my girls go. I just couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. Since the recession.”