East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  “Julie helped you clean the houses of her friends?” Dani asked.

  “Kara too,” Connie said. “I know how that must have felt to her. She never complained. We tried to do it during hours when they weren’t home, but that wasn’t always possible. You know, the newspaper quoted me saying I think the rich kids are going to get away with murder, but I didn’t say that. I said if you’ve got money, you can do whatever you want, but I was half out of my mind. I’m sure they get special favors sometimes …” She let the thought go.

  “Actually,” Tommy said, “it’s sort of the opposite. I know most of the East Salem cops, and they’re all townies. They pop the preppies every chance they get.”

  Dani looked up when Julie’s sister, Kara, came down the stairs and sat on the couch next to her mother, hugging a decorative pillow to her chest. She was fourteen or fifteen, Dani guessed, wearing an oversized East Salem High sweatshirt. Dani wondered if it belonged to Julie. Where Connie seemed lost and forlorn, Kara looked angry.

  “Is it all right if Kara joins us?” Connie said. “We’ve decided there aren’t ever going to be any secrets between us anymore.”

  “Were there secrets between you and Julie?” Dani asked.

  “I’m sure there were,” Connie said. “Girls always hide things. But nothing important. Smoking in the garage. Just normal stuff.”

  “Did she ever talk about the supernatural?” Dani asked. “Was she into vampires like the rest of the kids are these days?”

  Connie looked at Kara.

  “She liked ’em,” Kara said. “But there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “What did she like about them?”

  “She just liked how the people in the books were totally in love with each other spiritually but they could never consummate their love physically because one was a vampire and the other wasn’t,” Kara said. “She didn’t believe in vampires, but she believed you could love people who weren’t necessarily lovable.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” Dani asked.

  Connie again looked at Kara.

  “I don’t know if you could call him a boyfriend,” Kara said, “but about a year ago she had a huge crush on one boy. I don’t know if they ever went out.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “Liam Dorsett,” Kara said.

  Dani looked at Tommy, who gave no indication that he knew anything about a relationship between Liam and the victim. She knew he would have said something if he’d known.

  “She was upset because he dumped her,” Kara said. “Why? Is he involved in this?”

  “Kara,” her mother said, “Dr. Harris is trying to help us. Please dial it down.”

  “Had Julie ever sneaked out of the house before?” Dani asked.

  Kara nodded.

  “Do you know what she did or who she was with? Did she ever sneak out to see Liam Dorsett?”

  Kara shook her head. “I think Julie was embarrassed,” she said. “I don’t know what he did to her. She wouldn’t talk about it.”

  Dani asked questions to reconstruct Julie’s last night. Connie had fallen asleep on the couch. Someone had thrown a blanket over her, presumably Julie. The police found the clothes Julie had changed out of in the garage. She’d changed into a party dress.

  “It sounds like she was really looking forward to the party at Logan’s house,” Dani said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how excited she was,” Kara said. “She made me promise not to tell.”

  “Did she know who was going to be there?”

  “She mentioned some girls from school.”

  “How did she get there?” Dani asked. “It’s pretty far from here. Did she have a car?”

  “I think someone picked her up. I was asleep,” Kara said.

  “Did you know what kind of party she was going to?” Dani asked.

  Kara hesitated. Then she said, “It was a passage party. They’re—”

  “I know what they are,” Dani said. “Did she know? Did she think she’d be safe?”

  “It’s only dangerous if you don’t believe,” Kara said, taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it. “I told her not to go. I told her it was stupid. I was worried.”

  “Why were you worried?” Dani asked.

  “Because you’re not supposed to mess with stuff you don’t understand.”

  “Do you mean the drugs?”

  “Any of it,” Kara said. “But I never saw Julie drink anything. Or smoke pot. I swear.”

  “Do you know why she went?”

  Kara gave her mother an apologetic glance, then said, “She was hoping she could talk to our dad.”

  Dani was aware that Tommy was resting his hand on the back of her chair, but now she felt him touch her reassuringly.

  “We don’t know what happened to him,” Connie apologized. “Julie was convinced her father was dead, because otherwise she was sure he would have tried to find her. Kara thinks she just wanted to know for sure, one way or the other.”

  “She tried to track him down online,” Kara said, again glancing at her mother. “We both did. We Googled him and used the different websites, but we never got a hit.”

  As the conversation continued, Tommy asked if he could use the bathroom. While he was gone, Dani showed Kara the picture taken of Julie and Amos the night of the murder. Kara didn’t recognize Amos, but that didn’t mean anything. Julie sometimes chatted with people online, she said, or went to the Facebook pages of other people from school and fished their listed friends to invite kids to become her friend too.

  Dani recalled what Casey had told her they’d learned after his team had gone over Julie’s laptop. Julie had eighty-seven Facebook friends. Only one kid from the party was on her friends list, Rayne Kepplinger, who had over three thousand friends. Most of the messages posted on Julie’s wall were prosaic exchanges like I’m really worried about today’s test, or Does anybody know what pages we’re supposed to read tonight from Hamlet? Only one seemed relevant to the crime, a brief exchange with Liam, almost a year old.

  Julie Leonard: One question. Why?

  Liam Dorsett: It just wasn’t going to work out.

  Casey had also discovered that Julie had deleted her browsing history. All her stored e-mails had been deleted as well, and her recycle bin was empty.

  Dani asked Kara if clearing her caches was something Julie did on a regular basis. “Do you think she wanted to hide something?” Dani asked.

  “She would have told me,” Kara said. “We talked about everything.”

  “Can I ask you one last question? I hear a lot of anger in your voice. You said you didn’t want her to go to the party, that you were worried, and yet you also said you were asleep when she left. How was it that you fell asleep? If I’m worried about something, it keeps me awake.”

  “She promised me she wasn’t going,” Kara said. “She lied to me …”

  Now Kara’s anger gave way to tears. Her mother went to her and hugged her.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Dani said as she turned the car back onto the main road away from the lake.

  “I was thinking that was hard,” Tommy said.

  “It was,” she agreed.

  “And I think Julie Leonard was a very lonely girl,” Tommy said.

  “It’s such a hard age,” Dani said. “There’s nothing more important than having friends.”

  “Or a father,” Tommy added.

  “I’d never say single mothers can’t raise happy children,” Dani said, “but it’s twice as hard when someone has to be both mother and father. Kids without fathers are significantly more prone to violence and underachievement than kids with active dads in their lives.”

  “I see it at the gym all the time,” Tommy said. “Speaking anecdotally. I’ve had trouble over the years with six kids, and all six of them came from households without dads. I’m batting a thousand.”

  “But not all kids with single moms give you trouble,” Dani said.

  “No,” Tommy sai
d. “But all six who did were.”

  “The one thing I know,” Dani said, “is that kids without dads look for them. Or seek them in someone else.”

  “I think I might have found something interesting in the bathroom,” Tommy told her. “I looked in their medicine cabinet.”

  “You can’t go looking in other people’s medicine cabinets.”

  “What planet do you live on?” he said. “Everybody looks in medicine cabinets. Besides—I’m a professional private detective.”

  She gave him a look.

  “In training,” he corrected himself.

  “Without a search warrant,” she reminded him. “Nothing you found is anything we can use in court.”

  “Which is fine,” he said, “because I didn’t find anything.”

  “I thought you said you found something interesting.”

  “I did,” he said. “What was interesting was that I didn’t find anything.”

  “Do you want to help me understand that?”

  “Who do you know who doesn’t have medicine in the medicine cabinet?” he said. “They had nothing. No little orange bottles. Nothing for allergies. No over-the-counter painkillers. Just toothpaste and soaps and moisturizers.”

  “Maybe they keep the medicine somewhere else?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because … ,” Dani said.

  But he was right. Why would they do that?

  When she got home, she put a potato in the microwave, made a mental note to go to the grocery store because the potato was all she had to eat, then booted up her father’s old computer.

  “I’ve seen the bare bottoms of over half the people in this town, kiddo,” he’d once said. “It gives me a whole new perspective whenever I vote.”

  Both Julie and Kara Leonard had been patients, according to his medical records. Dani found the recorded dates for all the standard vaccinations but no record for any office visits. No earaches, sore throats, fevers of causes unknown, rashes, bruises, insect bites—nothing. It wasn’t a matter of keeping a sick kid home because she couldn’t afford the co-pay; Connie Leonard had maintained full health coverage.

  Dani opened her laptop in the kitchen and logged into her work files. She reexamined the crime scene photographs of Julie’s body, enlarging the images to the maximum before they pixilated. She could find no blemishes on Julie’s skin, no acne on her face. Julie’s dental files had been included as part of the information Baldev Banerjee had used to confirm the body identification. The dental files showed that Julie had perfect teeth as well.

  What were the odds of that?

  Dani desperately needed to sleep. She tried one more time to figure out how to set the alarm on her new clock radio. Then she had a better idea. She found her parents’ old alarm, the kind with a dial face with hands on it and a knob on the back that pulled out to set the alarm and pushed in to shut it off. She moved the hands to the correct time and set the alarm for seven, pulled the knob on the back, set the clock atop her dresser so she’d have to cross the room to shut it off, and plugged the cord into the wall. Satisfied, she turned off the light and fell asleep.

  She awoke when she heard the phone ring. The morning light pouring in through the window told her she’d slept through the night. According to the clock radio, it was 6:41. The phone rang again, and then she heard her assistant Kelly’s voice, leaving her a message:

  “Hi, Dani, it’s Kelly. I hung out where you asked me to and I couldn’t come up with anything, but I guess somebody figured out I was snooping because they drew the symbol they found on Julie Leonard’s body on my windshield. Sam said I could take my vacation, so I’m going to spend a week with my brother in Philadelphia because I’m really freaked out.”

  At first Dani thought it was a copycat, but how could it be? The police hadn’t released any information about the symbol. The only one who would know about the symbol was the killer. Or, she suddenly realized, Rayne or Khetzel—Dani had shown it to them. A rookie mistake, but she should have known better.

  Dani laid her head back down and pulled the covers over her face. When she did, she remembered the dream she’d had.

  It had been an apocalyptic dream. A flood had washed out New York City. Millions of people were fleeing the city in white vans, white trucks, white cars, while she sat on a hillside watching helplessly. People were jumping from the windows of tall buildings.

  “You can’t dream of something you’ve never perceived consciously,” her med school professor had once said. “Dreams recombine data, but they do not import data. It’s more than sorting and moving data from temporary to permanent storage—the unconscious is writing the scripts that give our lives meaning.”

  In the dream it made no sense for people to jump from tall buildings. They were safe. The water could never reach that high, and yet they jumped anyway, like lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff. The people in the dream were gripped by a compulsion for self-destruction. Millions of people dying. And then she’d gotten into a boat. She’d raced upstream to the headwaters of the flood, hoping to stop it.

  Dani found her BlackBerry and Googled the words “flood” + “Noah’s ark.” She read:

  The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

  “Why did God want to blot out the birds, Daddy?” she recalled asking her father after he’d read her the story when she was young. She could understand why God might have been angry at man, but why would he be angry at birds?

  “I think he wanted to wash the whole world clean,” her father had answered, but it still didn’t make sense, because the ducks and the seagulls wouldn’t need an ark to survive. Nor, for that matter, would the fish.

  In the dream she’d seen her father, standing like Noah, wearing a physician’s white lab coat, though in life he’d treated patients wearing only a blue oxford dress shirt with his necktie tucked between the second and third buttons. She’d raced upstream in her white speedboat until she’d reached a waterfall. Her parents were standing beneath it, her mother in a white dress. Then, as Dani watched, they began to dissolve. Her father was holding a stone, offering it to her. Then he and her mother disappeared, washed away by the water.

  Suddenly she was standing atop a tall building, looking down at the roiling waters of the sea. A voice said, “It’s your turn.”

  Whose voice? Her turn for what?

  Her turn to jump.

  And then she jumped. She was flying.

  Dani sat up in bed, trying to clear her head. It was not unusual for her to have unpleasant or frightening dreams, but they’d never been as intense as they’d been since the murder, or as frequent or as hard to delete from memory once recalled.

  She felt a breeze, a soft movement of air across her cheek. She remembered closing the windows before going to bed because of the wind. She thought she’d closed the French doors, too, that led from her bedroom to the second-floor deck, but they were opened a crack. When she went to close them, she saw a puddle of water on the deck, just beyond the French doors, and a set of human footprints leading from the puddle to the edge of the deck. When she stepped outside in her bare feet and walked to the edge of the deck, Dani was able to confirm her suspicion.

  The footprints were her own.

  She’d sleepwalked again.

  “This is too strange,” she said, returning to her bedroom and closing the doors behind her.

  She went to turn off the alarm she’d set atop her dresser, but when she reached for it, she saw that the red second hand wasn’t moving. When she looked down, she saw that in her sleep she must have unplugged the clock. And when she looked at
its face, she saw that she’d unplugged it at exactly 2:13.

  But if she had been walking about at 2:13, how was it that the footprints on the deck were still wet? They should have evaporated. Either she’d sleepwalked twice, or she’d been somnambulant for hours.

  She quickly found a piece of paper and wrote down her dream and her interpretation of the night’s events. She didn’t want to wonder later how accurate her memory was.

  In the kitchen, she turned on her father’s old computer and went to his medical records. Turning on his computer was as close as she could get to having a conversation with him. As a doctor’s daughter, she’d grown up believing her father could fix anything. Maybe all little girls think that about their fathers.

  In the box labeled Search Medical Records, she typed “2:13 AM.”

  Her search produced three hits. One was a reference to an article in the Journal of American Pediatrics, volume 2, issue 13. The second was a note about a patient who’d been hospitalized on February 13 in Amherst, Massachusetts. The third was a citation in her own medical file, where she learned she’d been born in Northern Westchester Hospital.

  At 2:13 in the morning.

  Which was crazier, she wondered, seeing patterns when they weren’t there, or ignoring patterns when they obviously were?

  How was it possible, and more to the point, what did it mean?

  Think, Dani. Think harder.

  21.

  Tommy made pasta e fagioli with homegrown tomatoes and herbs and a smidgen of Naga Jolokia peppers for zest, with a mushroom risotto and a garden salad. As the son of a nursery owner, he’d been spoiled with fresh produce all his life and had been delighted when he learned the house he wanted to buy came with a greenhouse. He made enough food to serve four because he was cooking for himself, his father, and Lucius, who had the appetite of two.

  After dinner Tommy drove to George Gardener’s house. He brought along, as a housewarming gift, presuming George would let him in the house, a dozen dark brown eggs from his henhouse. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he was certain George knew more than he’d let on in the basement of the hardware store.