by Becky Durfee
Stopping the tape, Elijah turned to Jenny. “Is Lena telling you anything?”
Jenny responded with a reluctant shake of her head. “No, I’m sorry. She isn’t reacting.”
“Well, that doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” he admitted. “I’m not really focusing my attention on Nick. I think if any one of those three guys did it, it would have been Adam. He was the one who got humiliated in the back seat, and he was the one who was so drunk he may have done something out of character.”
“Did you interview him?”
“Yes, last night,” Elijah verified. “I want you to watch it next.” After fiddling with the equipment, Elijah turned on the video featuring Adam DeWalt in the hot seat. “Let me know her reaction,” he instructed, then remained quiet while the video told its own story.
“State your name.”
“Adam DeWalt.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
Adam sighed. “To finally tell the truth about the night Lena died.”
“So do you agree that this time you’ll tell me what really happened?”
Shrugging and shaking his head, Adam replied, “I wish I could. To be honest with you, man, the whole night is just a blur. I don’t remember much after leaving the card table.”
“Around what time was that?”
“I don’t even know. Early.”
“So what did your friends tell you about that night?”
“Mark called me the next morning in a panic. I was still sleeping, and he woke me up to tell me Lena’d been shot. I had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, I knew who Lena was, but I didn’t even remember her being at the party that night. At first I thought he was calling just to tell me the news, you know? I didn’t realize it involved me at all. But then he told me that we had given her a ride the night before, and that I’d been a complete jerk to her.” He rested his elbows on his knees and shook his head with remorse. “Apparently I was all over her, pressuring her to fool around with me…saying shit like you know you want it.” He leaned back in his chair, running his fingers through his hair, looking like he would gladly fidget his way out of his own skin if he could. “I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember hitting on her. I don’t even remember her being in the car. I don’t remember getting home. I don’t remember getting into bed. Nothing. It’s like I went straight from playing cards to waking up in the morning.
“Mark insisted that we come up with a story and stick with it. We established what time we were going to say we left the party, what time he dropped everyone off. He even went out and drove it to determine exactly how long it would take to get from one place to the other so our times would seem reasonable. I agreed to go along with his story, and so did Nick. Before I knew it, the police were knocking at my door, and I was reciting the story I’d agreed to. But to be totally honest with you, I have absolutely no idea what happened that night.”
“Do you have an alibi for after you got home?”
Adam released a slow breath. “My parents, maybe? I don’t even know.”
“What kind of car did you drive back then?”
“I didn’t have a car.”
“What about your parents? What did they drive?”
“I have to think about that for a minute.” Adam did some calculations in his head while he talked through them. “Senior year I worked at Minute Mart…I guess my dad drove a Toyota Corrolla and my mom drove a Ford Taurus.”
“What color was the Corrolla?”
“Gray.”
Once again Jenny’s nerves tingles, but she believed them to be her own.
“Did you have any reason to dislike Lena?”
“No,” Adam said emphatically. “I never even talked to her.”
“But she shot you down that night.”
“Apparently,” he agreed. “But I don’t remember it at all.”
“Do you have a temper, Adam? Are you the type of guy who might get really angry at a girl who leads you on and then doesn’t act on it?”
“No.” Once again he was emphatic. “In fact my wife gets upset with me because I don’t get angry. She tells me I’m too laid back.”
“What about after you’ve been drinking? Have you ever been known to get into a bar fight?”
“Never.”
“And if I look into that, people will verify that for you?”
“Go ahead…ask anyone you want. I’ve never been a fight, period.”
Elijah stopped the video again. “You get the idea,” he says. “So what is Lena doing?”
Jenny made a face. “Nothing.”
Elijah rubbed both of his hands over his bald head. “Damn.”
“Could it be that she just doesn’t realize I’m watching a video of her killer? Maybe she’s only aware of when I’m in his presence.”
“Could be,” Elijah said, somewhat distracted. “I’m new at this.”
“Sadly, I’m kind of new at this too.” Sensing his frustration, Jenny changed the subject. “What about their alibis?”
“All of their parents insist the boys came home and stayed there all night. Like I said before, these are weak alibis at best, but we have no evidence to disprove them.”
“I guess no parents are willing to believe their children are capable of murder.”
“Well, somebody’s child did this.” Elijah looked at Jenny. “And somebody’s mommy is about to get a swift wake-up call.”
“I want to try something,” Jenny suggested. “Can we go look at your computer for a minute?”
“Sure,” Elijah agreed. The two of them walked back to Elijah’s desk, where he opened his laptop. “What do you want to see?”
“Can you call up that picture of Lena? I haven’t looked at it yet. I wonder if I’m going to have a reaction if I see her picture on a computer screen. That might help answer our question about whether looking at an image is enough for her to respond.”
“Good idea.” Elijah typed and clicked until a photograph appeared on his monitor.
Jenny locked eyes with the beautiful young woman on the screen. She was indeed striking—a natural beauty. Her skin was flawless and even, her blond hair fell loosely around her face, and her dazzling green eyes seemed to gaze straight through Jenny. Lena’s smile looked genuine, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. What a beautiful mask, Jenny thought, hiding all of that pain.
Despite Jenny’s personal reaction, Lena failed to stir within her. “I’ve got nothing,” Jenny said. “Maybe she doesn’t know what I’m looking at? Do you have any of her personal belongings that I could hold? She may react to something like that.”
“The only personal belongings I have from her are evidence, which I can’t take out without jumping through hoops. Unfortunately her parents were a little less cooperative that I would have hoped, and they up and moved shortly after this incident, taking everything with them.”
“Do you think maybe they had something to do with it?”
“That isn’t my impression, based on the original investigation, but it’s possible,” Elijah explained. “Her mother was apparently distraught when she died, and her father was furious. When I say they were uncooperative with the first officers to handle the case, I’m not saying they were emotionless. I think they were just angry and mistrusting of the police.” He rubbed one of his eyes with his knuckle. “They expected more from this country than this, and they were disappointed to say the least.”
“Is it strange that they moved so suddenly?”
“Not really,” Elijah said. “It’s often one of the first things people do when they lose a loved one. It’s too painful to walk past the bedroom of someone who doesn’t exist anymore. They often take solace in moving to a place where there are no memories to haunt them.”
For a moment Jenny thought about her mother’s pain, looking at her father’s things everywhere she went. She quickly forced that thought out of her head. Now was not the time for her own personal sadness.
Jenny and Elijah remained
quiet, both looking as if their wheels were turning in their heads. However, nothing of value came to light.
“Well,” Elijah finally said, “the reunion is tomorrow night. You can still come, can’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Hopefully that will be a little more telling. If you are actually in the same room as the killer, perhaps you will have a reaction again.”
“Let’s hope,” Jenny said.
Jenny spent the rest of the day shopping for a reunion-appropriate outfit, as well as looking online for Christmas gifts. This year she was going to have to have most of her gifts shipped; she wasn’t sure how long she’d be in Richmond. As she sat on her hotel bed, scanning the Internet for the perfect gift for Zack, her phone rang. Excitement surged through her. Perhaps there was a break in the case.
She looked at the screen of her phone and saw that Greg was calling. “Ucch,” she said as she immediately turned off the ringer and threw the phone on the mattress next to her. Greg was the last person she wanted to talk to.
Suddenly Roddan’s words echoed through her head. Your soul knows what it wants. Perhaps there was an element of truth to that, and this knee-jerk response to Greg’s call was her soul reacting before her conscience had the chance to guilt her into a polite conversation. Jenny sighed heavily; the notion was both saddening and enlightening at the same time.
Either way, Greg would have to wait until she was in the mood to deal with him. She was having a perfectly pleasant time Christmas shopping, and she didn’t want that ruined by one of Greg’s snide comments, which would have inevitably had an exaggerated effect on her mood.
Sadly, his comments always did affect her far more than they should have.
Jenny drove separately to the reunion, just in case she had to make an early exit like she did at the restaurant. As she approached the venue, once again she heard Lena create a commotion inside her head. She listened, trying to see if she could make out any of the words for an attempt at translation, but unfortunately Lena was speaking too quickly for her to discern anything.
In the parking lot, Jenny sat behind the wheel of her car, pleading with Lena. “I hear you,” she said. “I hear you loud and clear, but you need to give me a break tonight. I have to be able to think.” Jenny looked around, wondering if Lena understood; Lena’s voice quieted to a low murmur between her ears.
With a quick exhale for strength, Jenny exited her car and approached the building. Sure enough, she saw Lena’s picture at the sign-in table next to a plea for information about her murder. She noticed two other framed photographs with names written beneath them, complete with the years these people had been born and had died. Jenny shook her head; thirty-three year olds shouldn’t have been mourning three of their classmates.
She noticed the name tags with the familiar, “Hello, my name is…” written on top. Jenny smirked as she took pen to paper, unpeeling the backing and slapping the sticker on her new dress. With another silent appeal for Lena’s cooperation, she marched into the main room of the facility and began to look for Elijah.
Before long he approached her, greeting her with a kiss on the cheek. “You look lovely,” he said in a tone that made Jenny feel like his compliment had been obligatory.
“Thanks,” she said. “You look nice yourself.”
“Any word from our friend Lena?”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “She’s at it again. Who is here?”
“Nick, Adam and Mark are all here,” he noted. “I was hoping they’d show up one at a time and you could see which one started her talking, but I should have known they’d come as a group.”
“Maybe I’ll be able to catch each of them alone before the night is over.”
“Let’s hope.”
Since the trio was still standing together and showing no signs of separating, Jenny walked over to the table where Pam was sitting with her feet up on a chair. “Do you mind if I take a load off?”
“No, please do,” Pam said. “I would love the company.”
“Where’s Jacob?”
“Oh, he’s around. He’s catching up with some people he hasn’t seen in a while. I just needed to sit down. My feet are too swollen for me to stand for that long.”
Jenny smiled at her sympathetically. “When are you due?”
“Three weeks,” Pam replied. “But who’s counting?”
“Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?”
“A boy,” Pam beamed. “Owen Elijah.”
“Oh, that’s so cute! Is that Elijah as in Elijah Murphy?”
Pam nodded. “Elijah and Jacob have been friends since the second grade. I’ve always liked the name, so it just made sense.”
“Elijah must be flattered.”
“He is. Don’t let his gruff exterior fool you; he’s actually a big old teddy bear deep down inside.”
“I’m learning that,” Jenny said. She glanced at Mark, Nick and Adam, who were still standing together having a few beers. She noticed how relaxed their conversation was; if only they knew they were under such scrutiny.
Turning back to Pam with one eye still on the men, Jenny asked, “Is this your first baby?”
“Yup,” Pam said. “We started trying about five years ago, but it took us forever to conceive.”
Fear gripped Jenny with that comment; that was exactly why Jenny wanted to start trying to have a baby yesterday. “Well,” she said with a forced smile. “It all worked out for the best.”
“It sure did.”
“So how did you and Jacob meet?” Jenny always loved a good romantic story.
“We actually met in high school, but he doesn’t know that,” Pam said with a laugh. “He was a senior when I was a freshman, and boy did I ever have a crush on him. It was your classic worship-from-afar scenario.” She shook her head and covered her face with her hand. “I was so pathetic. We would pass each other in the hall, and I would do my best to get him to notice me. I’d make eye contact and smile.” She continued to giggle. “I’d even do my hair and freshen up my make up when I knew I was going to see him. And you know, he never looked my way. Not once. All that effort and I got nothing.” Pretending to be angry, she added, “Asshole.”
Jenny found herself joining in the laughter. “Well, apparently it did eventually work.”
“Not really,” she confessed. “We didn’t meet for real until college four years later. We both went to VCU, and we ended up having a class together. I was less pathetic at that point in my life, so I introduced myself, mentioning that I remembered him from high school. I left out the part about having a merciless crush on him.”
“Naturally.”
“But even then we didn’t start dating. That didn’t start happening until the following semester when we ran into each other at a party. We spent the whole night talking, and the rest is history.”
“I bet the fourteen-year-old you would have been delighted to know you’d actually end up married to him.”
“Delighted, yes, but not surprised,” Pam noted. “I was positive I was going to marry him. I just needed to get him to notice me.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I swear, you couldn’t pay me to be fourteen again. It was such a painful age.”
“Amen to that,” Jenny replied. A thought occurred to Jenny. “Is your sister here? She was in Jacob and Elijah’s grade, wasn’t she?”
Pam nodded. “She was, but she didn’t come. She lives out in Arizona now, and she’s really busy with work and her kids. Besides,” she added, “I’m not sure how much she’d care to be here anyway. I think I told you, she was a bit of a social outcast in high school.”
“Were kids mean to her?”
Pam made a face. “I’m not sure I’d say they were mean. She was just…invisible.”
Once again Jenny found herself feeling sympathetic to this stranger. She, too, had spent a good deal of her life feeling invisible. “But she’s married now, and has kids?”
“Yeah, she’s happy now,” Pam assured her. �
�But I don’t think she’s in any hurry to come back here and relive her high school days.”
“I can relate to that,” Jenny confessed. “I don’t think I’ll be going to my fifteen year reunion either.”
“I won’t be at mine,” Pam added. “I’m only here for Jacob. High school wasn’t painful for him; he was quite popular. He and Elijah both. On a different note, how’s the investigation going?”
“Elijah is looking deeper into Mark, Nick and Adam. In fact, that’s why I’m here; he wants to see if Lena has anything to say about them.”
“Does she?”
“She’s talking in a low murmur,” Jenny replied. “She had started to get agitated when I pulled into the parking lot, but I said that I needed her to be cooperative. Since then she’s been quieter. Not silent, but quiet.”
“So she understood you?”
Jenny thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I guess she did.” Not bad for a girl who supposedly didn’t speak English.
Pam glanced over in the direction of the three suspects and then shook her head with disgust. “I just hope you can figure out who did this. This whole thing has haunted me ever since it happened. There had been rumors that it was a guy from school who was in love with her, or even a Russian mobster—but a lot of us girls feared that it was random. Perhaps Lena hadn’t been an intended target; maybe she’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the shooter was some lunatic who was just picking off girls who were by themselves. My friends and I all panicked that we were going to be next. We never went anywhere alone after that. We never walked or rode our bikes anywhere. My best friend lived around the corner from me, but our parents drove us to each other’s houses.” She hung her head. “It really changed everything when she died. It’s like the innocence of a whole town was lost.”
“Well, if Lena is sending me the message I think she’s sending, then the killer is one of those three guys over there, not some serial killer.”
“Eventually we figured that out, but only after a lot of time went by and no one else was killed.”
