Natalie skipped her morning run and went downstairs to start the coffeemaker, grab a Pop-Tart for breakfast, and load the dishwasher. She’d inherited this sunny, drafty hundred-year-old house from her parents. She let the sadness wash over her as she glanced around the old-fashioned living room. She’d taken a stab at renovating last year, sanding and repainting the walls, but the end result was a mixed bag of awful. She’d donated some of the ugly-ass furniture to the Goodwill and had moved the rest of her parents’ belongings up into the attic, big orchestrated piles of boxes and scarred sticks of furniture she couldn’t bear to part with. Now she could feel her mother’s resentment boring into her—That’s a perfectly good chair, why aren’t you using my hutch?
Deborah Lockhart had been a smart, well-educated woman stuck in a domestic role she both relished and resented. Raising three girls had been fun for a while—until it wasn’t. According to Deborah, she’d fallen in love with Joey at a friend’s graduation party. Joey had a cleft in his chin she was tempted to push the tip of her finger into. He wore a look of intense introspection, and his piercing blue eyes, elegant face, and wolfish ears made her heart skip a beat. She had a fleeting desire to lose herself in him, or at least to misplace herself for a little while.
“A little while” turned into a lifetime of housekeeping and motherhood. On her deathbed, Deborah told Natalie, “When you girls were growing up, the days just flew by. I was always doing laundry or shopping or housework, and three times a day, seven days a week, I had to figure out what to feed the hungry people who showed up at my door. You girls and your father. Four hungry mouths.” To make life simpler, Deborah had assigned each girl a color: Willow was pink, Grace was purple, and Natalie was as blue as her father’s uniform. They all had plastic dishware in their own color, socks and pajamas in their color, headbands and sweaters in their color. Even the walls of their bedrooms were painted pink, purple, and blue. Deborah encouraged her daughters to pursue a career in the fine arts, since her dream had been to become a dancer. Therefore, it was decided early on that Willow would be a ballerina, Grace a writer, and Natalie an artist (since she’d shown talent for it early on). Deborah believed all her girls were gifted, and it upset her deeply when Natalie chose Joey’s dangerous profession over her own preference.
Now Natalie chewed on her Pop-Tart and noticed the cardboard box in a corner of the living room, gathering dust. It was full of Zack’s stuff. She kept finding little things he’d left behind and tossing them in there—cutesy trinkets, an old sweatshirt that smelled just like him, a coffee mug that said SH*T HAPPENS, a disposable razor, stray socks. Eight months’ worth of crap.
Put a fork in us, we’re done.
Okay. She put down her Pop-Tart and carried the box outside, where she upended it into the trash. Her relationship with Zack Stadler hadn’t just happened—he’d hunted her down, if hipsters could hunt. More accurately, Natalie had let herself be captured. Big mistake. She was drawn to him initially because of his bookish levelheadedness. She thought it was cute how studious and argumentative he was. They met at a juice bar, and it was love at first sight. Zack was teaching art history at the local community college, and he used a lot of big words and was truly impressed by her gun. He detested her world, and yet he couldn’t stop asking her about it. Of course they argued. There were tears. Every couple had their meltdowns. But it was his tendency to behave like a petulant child instead of an adult that finally got to her, as if he’d been pushed halfway out of the nest by his parents but somehow managed to cling to the sides and never let go. She grew sick of his self-absorbed tirades over the years.
What was worse, Zack hated Burning Lake. He called it a “bucolic fucklet,” but Natalie loved this town, warts and all. Neither one of them was strong enough to endure the final stages of their relationship, and so it had collapsed like a poorly constructed building. All that was left was a smoking cloud of dry rot and regrets.
She remembered the day it was over—her birthday last year. The memory of her ex-boyfriend’s aloofness hit her with a soft impact—Zack in his Clark Kentish glasses, dressed in flannel like a throwback to the golden age of Seattle grunge. They celebrated her birthday in a restaurant that had the best shrimp pad thai in town. He leaned in for a kiss, and their lips bumped together. There was a stiff formality about the way he moved that disturbed her and put her on edge.
“Natalie?” He sat down opposite her in the booth, and she noticed his heavily lined forehead—evidence of sleepless nights. “Don’t say anything for a second. Let me talk. I’ve been thinking about us lately.…”
As he spoke, he kept glancing beyond her into the depths of the bar. He told her things that she’d been thinking about herself but had never said aloud. Basically, what it came down to was that Zack wanted to run away, from this place, from her, from the things he no longer felt—that initial excitement, that spark, that sizzle, the tingle that had once driven them both physically crazy. Lust. Desire. It’d gradually evaporated until all that was left was a bunch of excuses. I’m busy, I’m exhausted, it’s my job, I’m sorry. Plenty of sorries.
It all boiled down to the fact that they’d fallen out of love. That each of their habits had become so annoyingly familiar, there was nothing left to explore. “You could’ve been anything you wanted to be,” Zack told her one night. “You’re an exceptionally talented woman—those drawings you showed me from your childhood. You were so gifted. Why did you throw it all away?”
If you wanted to get psychological about it, Zack was too much like Natalie’s mother. Deborah was a snob, an elitist, who wanted the girls to follow a certain narrow path in life. An artist—that’s what Natalie’s mother wanted her to be, not the choice she’d ultimately made. But Natalie’s early passion for painting had been smothered by the actual study of art. So boring—color charts, perspective, acrylics, stretching your own canvases. She used to look at her drawings and wonder what on earth she would do with an art degree? Teach? Ugh. Please.
Joey used to leave Natalie little made-up mysteries to solve—notes at the breakfast table; a message on the answering machine at home. She loved solving puzzles. She could see patterns everywhere—patterns of behavior, patterns of ritual and habit. Soon she began to observe people on her own. She caught Grace hiding condoms in her backpack. She found out Deborah had wanted only one child, not three—and that Grace and Natalie were accidents. She found out about Willow’s relationship with Justin Fowler before anybody else. The art—sure, Natalie was good at it, but her passion lay elsewhere. Besides, her artwork sort of embarrassed her, it was so nakedly revealing of her innermost secrets. What good was that? Natalie had felt forced and pressured into taking art classes by her mother, and so naturally, as a wildly independent teenager, she’d rebelled against this manufactured “destiny” and decided to follow in her dad’s footsteps instead. Despite Deborah’s heavy-handed pushback.
Natalie’s relationship with Zack seemed to reflect a similar tension—whether to become a cop or an artist, two radically different things. Zack represented her mother—refined, intellectual, judgmental. But Natalie sided with her father—down-to-earth, loyal, funny, ironic, always wanting to help out. Not that she didn’t appreciate art, music, books, culture. She adored the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan, and she’d inherited Joey’s love of music—jazz and classical, Motown and Mozart, Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker, 1970s punk and 1990s grunge. She still sketched sometimes—absently, while thinking about a case. But she hadn’t chosen art as her profession, and Deborah and Zack would never forgive her for it.
Now Natalie felt a strong sense of closure and relief as she clamped the garbage lid shut. Good riddance. She rubbed the morning chill off her arms and looked around the property. This modest plot of land was isolated, bordered on three sides by thick woods. Some mornings, a doe and her fawn would step out of the shadows to nibble at the crab apples on the edge of the lawn. The fruit fell off and rotted on the ground, attracting honeybees in the summer. The forsy
thia bushes were in desperate need of pruning. The Creeping Jenny had spread into her mother’s old garden. A plastic watering can hung upside-down on a branch Deborah had pushed into the lawn thirty years ago. Her mother’s old gardening gloves were around here someplace, buried under countless fallen leaves.
Natalie’s parents had had an old-fashioned, blond-wood relationship with clearly defined boundaries and a cemented sense of duty. Just like the furniture that wasn’t pretty but lasted forever. Her mother had names for all the houseplants, which infuriated Grace, because Grace thought Deborah should love her children a thousand times more than she loved her stupid plants. And Deborah couldn’t seem to get rid of the girls fast enough, always kicking them out of the house to go play so that she could have a little peace-and-quiet time—nothing wrong with that—listening to her favorite Broadway musical soundtracks and eating vanilla yogurt mixed with fresh blueberries. “As if us kids were a burden, and not a privilege,” Grace said petulantly at their mother’s funeral. “Willow was her angel, and since God lets children die, then the two of us weren’t worth the trouble of loving and possibly losing.”
Natalie’s parents weren’t exactly what you’d call happy, but they were settled and comfortable. They nested together. Happiness was for other, more frivolous people.
Now her phone buzzed. It was Luke.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m heading over to the high school now.”
“Okay.”
“Meet me in front of the bulletin board.” He hung up.
She went back inside and turned on the dishwasher.
9
John F. Kennedy High School consisted of three large buildings—a field house gymnasium, a science center, and an imposing three-story main building constructed in 1972. Natalie parked her car in the school lot and retrieved her notebook and pen from the glove compartment. Today they were tasked with gathering as much information as they could, while people’s memories were still fresh.
She got out and crossed the courtyard, where discarded wads of chewing gum filled the cracks between the stones. The flag was at half-mast. She entered the 300,000-square-foot main building and found herself gazing into a hundred pairs of distracted eyes as she walked through those all-too-familiar doors. She’d arrived between classes, and the corridors were clogged with kids. Roughly 1,500 students went to school here, and nothing had changed since Natalie was a freshman.
Today, the entire student body appeared to be in shock. The atmosphere was subdued. The PA system issued a bunch of fuzzy announcements—grief counselors were available, a school assembly was planned for later that afternoon, memoriam speeches for Ms. Buckner were being prepared, and volunteers were welcome.
Natalie’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Ellie, texting her.
Mom stayed home sick today. Where are you?
At JFK. Interviewing witnesses, Natalie texted back. Can I give you a lift after school?
Okay. We’ll talk then. Sad emoticon.
Natalie put away her phone and found Luke waiting for her in front of the bulletin board, and when he turned to look at her, she felt that zing again. In unguarded moments, Luke’s eyes cupped her like a fresh peach.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked.
“Not great. But I’m upright, aren’t I?”
“Hmm. Hard to tell. I’m still half asleep myself. Coffee?”
“Miracle worker.”
He handed her one. “It ain’t my first rodeo.”
She took a sip. “Any news about Riley?”
“No change in status.”
“Shit.”
“Word of the day. Shit,” Luke said. “Let’s go.”
They walked past rows of banged-up metal lockers that seemed so small to her now. Natalie used to grapple every day with her unyielding, clanking locker with its finicky combination lock. She listened to the familiar slap of feet against the linoleum floor. Every turn down another hallway brought back more memories—art class, chorus, gym, lunch, study hall. Her high school self dogged her like a shy shadow.
On the first floor were the administrative offices, the cafeteria, and the auditorium. On the upper two levels were the classrooms. Natalie could feel the old humiliations throbbing from the cement-block walls. She never used to care what she looked like until she’d entered high school, when the popular girls started snickering about her hand-me-downs. Back then, Natalie radiated a kind of self-possession that garnered instant suspicion. She bought a pair of cheap sunglasses and grew her hair so long, it fell like a plank down her back. She hid behind her shades and long dark hair and ill-fitting clothes until eventually she found her own tribe—a small group of “gifted” misfits who excelled academically and rebelled against their parents’ hopes and dreams by listening to Nine Inch Nails and dying their hair funny colors. She became so enmeshed in this tight-knit clan that it felt like an explosion when Bella ran away, and nothing was ever the same for them again.
Some of the students were watching the two detectives with guarded eyes, their youthful faces registering adult skepticism. “God, it’s like a John Hughes movie in here,” Natalie said in a subdued voice. “You’ve got your jocks, your class clowns, your druggies, your Goths…”
Luke glanced at the impressionable faces swimming all around them and said, “High school felt like it would last forever. Thank God it didn’t.” It was funny, he pretty much had the world by the balls. He was handsome, charming, successful, a decorated detective, and yet he constantly saw himself as the ninth-grade loner he used to be, a moody fatherless boy who seemed destined to crash and burn in the real world. Well, news flash, Natalie thought—just the opposite.
They walked past a mural of the Founding Fathers and stopped in front of the principal’s office. Luke knocked on the etched-glass door and Gilda, the administrative secretary, waved them inside, waddles of fat jiggling under her arms.
“Go right in, he’s expecting you,” she said as she beamed at them.
Principal Seth Truitt had deep-set eyes, manicured gray hair, and the sour disposition of a man who’d spent too much time hunched over his keyboard, dealing with the banality of bureaucracy. “Good morning, Lieutenant. Good morning, Detective.” He stood up and shook their hands.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” Luke said.
“Of course. Whatever you folks need. Please. Have a seat.”
They sat in a pair of matching vinyl chairs angled in front of Seth’s broad, mahogany desk. The office was drafty and sunny, full of period trim and knotty pine built-ins, decorated with somber portraits of past administrators.
“We’re in shock, the whole school,” the fiftysomething principal said. “Daisy was extremely popular with the students. It’s such a tragedy.” He shook his head. “So. How can I help? What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
“Whatever you can tell us about Riley Skinner would be great,” Luke said.
“Of course.” He opened a dog-eared file on his desk. “Troubled kid, into drugs, on the fast track to nowhere.” He sighed. “Riley was brought up in a dangerous household, where the potential for violence is always a risk. Ms. Buckner … Daisy was trying to help him overcome these obstacles. I’m not sure if you know this, but she’d helped other troubled students before, and this time was no different.”
“Did he ever threaten her physically?” Luke asked.
Seth shook his head. “No. But he became verbally abusive about a month ago, and I take any threats to my teachers very seriously. She was upset by the incident, but Riley apologized, and she figured it was just teenage bravado. Daisy was determined to help him pass her class. The boy’s no dummy. He just has issues, that’s all.” Seth leaned forward. “Confidentially, a lot of my teachers are good at crowd control. They’re good at lecturing and hectoring … what I call lifers. They’re in it for the pensions and the summer vacations. But Daisy actually enjoyed teaching, which is why she got some of the highest scores on our student review site at the end of the year.”
&nb
sp; Natalie nodded. “Why was Riley flunking out of her class?”
“He was failing several classes, actually. Let’s see.” Seth thumbed through the file. “Misbehavior, lack of impulse control, absenteeism, failing grades. He was a dropout waiting to happen. His grades were terrible this year. But the deciding factor was Daisy’s class. He was about to flunk out of her humanities course, which is a relatively gut-level course, and if that happened, then we were under tremendous pressure to hold him back a grade. It would’ve been humiliating for Riley, though.”
“Humiliating enough to push him over the edge?” Natalie asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Seth acknowledged. “All of his friends were moving on. When a student gets stigmatized like that, it’s easier to drop out of school. That was Riley’s future.”
“He couldn’t recoup?” she asked. “It’s only April. Wasn’t there enough time to turn things around?”
Seth folded his hands on the desk. “We typically respond to an academic crisis with increased parent-teacher communication. Daisy reached out to Riley’s father, and we were hoping Dominic would get more involved, but he never responded to our phone calls or emails. So I offered her my recommendation.”
“Which was?”
“You don’t pass an underachiever and hope for the best. It’s not good for the school, and it certainly isn’t good for the student.”
“So you recommended he repeat a grade,” Natalie said. “How did Daisy respond?”
“Some of these teachers don’t care enough to think it through. They’d rather take the easy way out. But Daisy wanted to do what was best for Riley. So she offered him several solutions. She handed the boy a lifeline, but he didn’t take it.”
Trace of Evil Page 7
