17: Interrogations and Suspicion
I can’t recall ever being excited about sunrise. Not even on Christmas mornings. I simply wasn’t a morning person. Sunday came too soon, and I tried my best to cocoon myself under my covers. It was warm, I was alone, and I could pretend my world was peaceful and carefree.
The night before was the first thing my tired mind wandered to. I fell asleep without answers, though I did try to investigate. The first thing I discovered was my phone’s disappearance. I thought I left it on the end of my bed, but a quick search proved me wrong. I backtracked and tried to find it along the path I took to Josh’s house, but it was dark and the grass was deep. The search for it would be my top priority for the day.
I tried to use the house phone to get in touch with friends. It’s kind of sad how I knew no one’s number without my handy contact list. It was too late to reach them on their home phones. Parents don’t like calls in the middle of the night which wake them up or interrupt their not-so-sneaky middle-of-the-night uglies bumping. I used my email to text Aka and Erin, but got no response. I assumed Sarah was in bed. She wasn’t a night person.
Rigel was useless. He had no interest in what happened, and nothing I said could persuade him to go check it out. He crawled into his laundry nest, and, I presumed, willed the door shut. No sound came from the closet as I lay awake and dreaded the day.
When a knock broke my procrastination, I frowned through the covers.
“Honey?” Dad said. “Are you awake?”
I rolled the covers off my head and they bunched under my chin. “Yeah.”
Dad opened the door and peeked in, then stepped across the threshold. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His snores through the night told me otherwise.
“You need to get dressed. There’s some people here to see you.”
“People?” I said. It was an odd turn of phrase for my friends.
“Yes,” Dad said. He looked uncertain. “A couple of police officers have a few questions for you. No reason to worry,” he added as my eyes flew wide and I tossed my covers aside. “They said it shouldn’t take but a minute.”
“Okay.”
He seemed satisfied and turned to leave, closing the door behind him. I heard his muffled voice as he walked away. Probably telling them I would be down soon.
I was tired of the police. I had to deal with their questions after the Ryan incident. I had to answer a bunch more about my mom skipping out. Now they interrupted my Sunday sleep in.
Dressed in black sweat pants and an old Rob Zombie concert shirt, I headed downstairs. I didn’t bother with my hair or cleaning my makeup off from the day before. If they weren’t polite enough to see me at a decent hour, I wouldn’t be polite enough to come down looking like a caffeinated human.
“Are you Kathleen Hayson?” one of them said. He was squat with beady eyes. I doubted he was the sort of cop that chased down bad guys.
“Yeah.” I thought it was self-evident, but I guessed they were a by-the-book lot.
“A young man’s body was recovered last night,” said the other, much taller one. “We found this in his possession. Does this look familiar to you?”
He held up a large plastic bag with a label and red zip close. Inside it was a piece of paper.
I didn’t believe it, so I snatched it from his hand without permission. I held it with both hands and stared at it. It was the letter I gave Josh. It was mangled and spotted with blood, but my handwriting was easily discernible.
“Josh?” My voice cracked, barely audible.
One officer glanced at the other, and their gazes locked for a brief moment. It was all the confirmation I needed.
The earth stopped spinning. A vacuum appeared within my chest and sucked all my guts into it. The floor was going to open me up and swallow me whole, or maybe it was just my legs shaking like a newborn giraffe. A chubby one, of course. I held my stomach against the threat of vomit.
Josh was dead, and I was blown away by how much I cared. I didn’t roll it off. I didn’t crack a tasteless or inappropriate joke. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe.
“How?” No, I didn’t want to know. It might have been suicide. It might be my fault. Somehow the finger could be pointed at me. In something I did or said, or all of what I did or said. It might have been because of whatever it was he thought I did. I hated ambiguity in my guilt. It left me discombobulated.
“When?” I said before they could answer my first unintentional question. I was not ready to hear the details of Josh’s fate, but curious enough to want to know how long after I’d last seen him he’d died. He’d been so angry. I knew his eyes would haunt me always.
“We are not at liberty to discuss the case,” the short officer said. He held out his hand for the evidence bag. I gave it to him.
Numb disbelief renewed and I turned away, dropping my head to gaze at tile and grout, and I wished for nothing more than to just go upstairs and go back to sleep. There were worse ways to take such news than I had shown. At least I didn’t start screaming and jumping about like some do.
“There are some questions, however,” the taller one said. “We’re going to need you and your parents to accompany us back to the station.”
My dad already had his jacket on and his keys in his hand. A twinge of betrayal twisted my gut at the knowledge he didn’t warn me. I looked like half-nuked death and would be forced to go out into public.
They waited while I got my shoes from upstairs. I entered my room and wanted nothing more than to crawl into my bed and pull the covers over my head. Rigel sat in my closet, anxious to learn what was happening. He had been listening at the bedroom door.
“I don’t know,” I said after repeated questions. “Josh is dead. They want to talk to me. You probably gave him internal bleeding when you tripped him last night. I’m totally ratting you out. You’ll hang from the skunk gallows.”
He ignored my threat. “Josh? The twitchy one?”
“Yeah,” I said, impressed with the economical accuracy of the description. “Look, I gotta go. I’ll tell you more when I get back.”
“Be careful what you say.”
“What? Why?”
“They are police. Just be careful.”
I thought that was a little paranoid, but I said, “I will. See ya, Jeeves.”
***
The police station smelled like gym socks and the strange mystery casserole at school Aka had written a scathing article about weeks before.
Dad and I were led to a small room with a large table and four metal folding chairs. He was offered coffee. They left us there for several minutes. I didn’t speak. I knew people might be behind the large pane of glass to my left.
Dust swirled in the sunlight. Hopefully I wasn’t inhaling tiny particles from convicted sociopaths or grody child perverts who had been in the drab green room before me.
I wasn’t scared. Why should I be? I’d done nothing wrong. I grieved for Josh, and even managed a little pity for Ryan. I would be a mess if I lost my best friend.
Curiosity got the best of me after a few minutes and I whispered to my dad, “Do you know what they want?”
He shook his head as the door opened to our right. A man in a white shirt, slacks, and a tie sat down across from us. He put a notepad and pen on the table.
“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Hayson,” he said. “Miss Hayson. I’m Detective Richards. We just have a few questions.”
“Okay,” I said. What else could I say? No?
“When was the last time you saw or spoke to Ryan Dixon?”
“Thursday morning.” I glanced at Dad. What did Ryan have to do with this?
“Was that during the reported altercation which allegedly took place at your school?”
I hated the use of “allegedly.” It implied an incident didn’t happen until some official document made it real. In the meantime, I was a liar.
“During and right after,” I said. “I saw his back as he ran out.”
&n
bsp; I might have been a little defensive. I hadn’t wanted to push the matter. I wanted to sweep it under the rug and forget it. On my terms. I resented anyone else trying to do it.
“You recognized the letter you were shown earlier,” Detective Richards said. “When was the last time you saw it?”
“When I gave it to Josh,” I said. “A few days ago. I don’t remember which.”
“Joshua Colby?”
“Yeah.”
“And you have no idea how it wound up in the possession of Ryan Dixon?”
“Uh, no.” I looked at Dad again, then back to the detective. “I didn’t know he had it.”
“Not until this morning?” the detective said.
“Not ‘til right now, yeah,” I said. “I thought Josh had it. The cops . . . um, policemen earlier said it was on Josh when they found him.”
“Joshua Colby?”
“Yeah, Josh Colby.” Was this some kind of sick game? Maybe they wanted to make me keep saying his name as some kind of test of my guilt. Or maybe it was just some new legalized form of torture.
He gave me a strange look and was silent for too long.
“There seems to be a misunderstanding, Miss Hayson,” Detective Richards said. “The letter was found in the possession of the deceased, Ryan Dixon.”
“Ryan’s dead?” My guts flip-flopped again. “I thought . . . Ryan? It was Ryan?” I didn’t know why I kept asking the same question without waiting for an answer.
“What was Ryan, Miss Hayson?”
I didn’t like the way the detective worded his question. It had more weight to it than I thought the situation warranted.
“The cops at the house earlier,” I said. “They said the note I wrote for Josh was found on a body. I assumed it was Josh since, you know, he’s the one I gave it to. How’d Ryan get it?”
“That is what we are trying to ascertain, Miss Hayson,” Detective Richards said.
“Well, did you ask Josh?” I said.
“He stated it was stolen from his residence.”
That was the lamest thing I’d ever heard. Someone stole a note to some girl from a boy’s house? What kind of burglars go on crime sprees for (admittedly well-written) notes between teenagers?
“Why would anyone do that?” I said.
“We are not at liberty to discuss—”
“The case. Yeah, the other guys said that, too,” I said. “But you already are, right? You’re asking me questions about it. But it’s just some stupid note. Why does it matter?”
“Mrs. Hayson was reported missing, I understand.” He said this to Dad. I resented that he’d ignored me completely.
“Yes,” Dad said. “Friday.”
“It says in the report that she had been missing since Thursday,” Detective Richards said. “Is there a reason it took so long to report it?”
It was Dad’s turn to shoot me a quick glance. “We didn’t know for sure if she was missing. We just thought she might have forgotten to tell us she had business, or that she needed a break.”
“A break from what?”
“Her and Kathleen have been having some disagreements,” Dad said. “The officers who took the report are the ones who suggested a break might have been the case. They didn’t even want to look into it.”
I did not miss the hard look the detective gave me.
“She grounded me for something I didn’t do,” I said, sure I needed to defend myself.
“Which was what?”
“Stealing.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see,” I said. “I can tell by the way you’re looking at me. You don’t know my mom. She always thinks I’m doing things that I don’t do. She grounds me all the time. It’s not strange. It’s not unusual.” I gave Dad a very nasty look. “And it’s not a recent development. Mom and I have always had problems, but this is the first time she ever left because of them.”
“So, you believe she left?” Detective Richards said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just wouldn’t be surprised to find out she hoarded a bunch of money and ran off to Cancun, is all I’m saying.”
“What does this have to do with this Ryan boy?” my dad said.
“We are just trying to get the full picture,” the detective said.
“Full picture?” I said. “Of what? Mom and Ryan don’t have anything . . . oh.”
It felt like a punch to the throat. Mom and Ryan had one very unfortunate link: me. There was also the other rather damning complication: I admitted to having a bad relationship with both of them, neatly documented on police records. Awesome. Prison, here I come.
“So, Ryan being dead—it’s not an accident, huh?” I said.
“He appears to be a victim of foul play,” Detective Richards said.
Foul play. Who even came up with that term? A foul is when you behave badly in sports. Play is something you do to have fun. If you are playing sports and someone does something considered a foul, there’s usually not a body count.
“Kathleen, don’t say another word,” Dad said. He rose from his chair and motioned me to do the same. “I think we’re done here, Detective. I assume you have no evidence and my daughter is not under arrest?”
“Not at this time,” the detective said. His eyes told me he regretted that.
“Then we’ll be going. Any further questions will have to wait until we’ve retained a lawyer.”
“A lawyer?” I said. “But I didn’t do—”
“Not now, honey. Let’s just go home.”
He motioned toward the door, and I obeyed. I glanced back at the detective. He wrote on his notepad. I wondered what it said. I wondered if it was a cartoon of me in a hangman’s noose.
18: The Unexpected Visitor
I curled up in my bed with my phone off, which Karen had found in the backyard. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and I damn sure didn’t want to deal with texts every three minutes. My door was shut and my light was off. Only the sun intruded. Rigel scampered off after I threw a boot at him. It was just me and my stuffed Eeyore clutched against my chest.
The people who most made my life miserable were either dead or missing, and I was never more scared in my life. There was nothing to rejoice, no sigh of relief, no cause for celebration; my world crashed about my ears and all I could feel was despair.
Well, that and a deep, nausea-inducing fear of prison. The world was full of stories with people who had been wrongfully incarcerated long enough to be someone’s unwilling prison bitch. Just because I was innocent didn’t mean I was safe from a life of forced lesbianism or invasive broomsticks.
My sister and Dad could be heard talking for a while, but soon the television echoed up the stairs. I was glad they left me alone. I wasn’t glad reality television was more interesting to them than my very real impending breakdown. Maybe they just found the mind-numbing shows enough to help them momentarily forget our situation, so I couldn’t fault them if that was the case.
The doorbell rang. I recognized Dad’s voice when he answered the door, but not who he spoke to. The only thing I could discern was that it was male. It could have been the pizza delivery guy again for all I knew, so I didn’t bother to move. The door clicked shut soon after. Must not have been anyone important.
“Hey, psst.”
The hushed voice came from outside my window a few minutes later. I turned and saw Josh crouched on the roof shingles, his hands using the sill for balance.
I hesitated to open the window. He wanted to kill me, after all. Instead I remained where I was, a blank expression on my face to disguise my anxious sense of self-preservation.
“Come on, Kathleen,” he tried again with a deep frown. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Reluctant bare feet planted on the shaggy carpet. I stepped closer and locked the window, then knelt in front of it. A girl could never be too cautious.
“What do you want?” I said. It was a fair question. I should have been the last person he wanted to talk to. That is
unless, of course, he was there to harass me some more.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Josh said.
“You did that already. Good night.” I stood up and reached for the curtains.
“No, wait!” He stood up as well and pressed one hand against the glass. “Can’t we talk for a minute?”
“About what?”
Josh shrugged. “Ryan?”
“No.” I closed the curtains.
“Oh, come on.” Josh groaned and tapped on the glass. “Just for a minute.”
I glared at the shadow on the other side of my curtains. If I didn’t want to speak with anyone else about pretty much anything, why would I talk to Josh about the most sensitive subject imaginable? He had some nerve. My bruises had yet to fade and Ryan’s corpse might just be reaching room temperature, and Josh thought we should have a heart-to-heart about it. I wasn’t interested, to put it mildly.
“I know you didn’t do it,” he said. His shadow looked kind of pathetic with both hands on the glass like a trapped mime.
“I know that, too.” Part of me was a little relieved, but I didn’t entirely trust it. He had seemed pretty sure of my guilt not twenty-four hours prior.
“Please? I’m sorry.”
I opened the curtains and greeted him with a suspicious look. “Why me, Josh? Go find a friend or something.”
“We’re friends.”
Laughter escaped me, but I pulled it back in when he looked more offended than usual. “You’re serious? You do know what a friend is, right?”
Josh’s brows nearly met in the middle. “I’m not stupid, Kathleen.”
I was less willing to make any hasty dismissal of the possibility. I’d known him for years, and the words “clever” or “smart” never entered my mind when I considered his cranial prowess.
“This had better not be a trick.” I unlocked the window but didn’t open it.
Josh knelt down and pushed up the window. He started to climb in, then hesitated. “Can I come inside, or is this just to keep from yelling through the window?”
I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think he would enter until he started to, then I wasn’t sure if I should tell him to stop. Now that he asked, I didn’t know what the right answer was. I waved him in and sat down on my bed. He clambered in and sat next to me. I scooted away. There was no reason for me to feel his body heat during the impending discussion.
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