The Unbelievable, Inconceivable, Unforeseeable Truth About Ethan Wilder

by Cookie O'Gorman

  The Unbelievable, Inconceivable,

  Unforeseeable Truth

  About Ethan Wilder

  by

  Cookie O’Gorman

  The Unbelievable, Inconceivable, Unforeseeable Truth About Ethan Wilder

  Text copyright © 2018 Airianna Tauanuu writing as Cookie O’Gorman.

  All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without express permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

  Cover Design © Stephanie Mooney. All rights reserved.

  Formatting by LK Ebook Formatting Service

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To Mema & The Gorman Girls

  CHAPTER 1

  There were only two things certain in the South. The first, of course, was football on Friday nights. The school could be on fire, the credit union being robbed, the weather center issuing a Tornado Warning, but the schools would still play. Down in the South, we didn’t call off a game simply on account of a little rain. That was for those scaredy-cats up north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  The second, and only slightly less important than the first, was sweet tea. I learned very early on that you should never underestimate the power of sugary brown sludge. One day the school ran out, and there was nearly a mutiny, food flung at high velocity, rude hand gestures thrown up like the peace sign, obscenities traded like baseball cards. And that was just from the teachers.

  But nothing got a small southern town going like a good piece of gossip. True, football got people out of the house and into the stands, and sweet tea held some kind of magical sway over whoever drank the stuff, but the rumor mill was what made towns like Bowie tick. Murders, arson, extortion, armed robbery, cheating spouses, promiscuous teens, pick your poison. If it involved scandal and could be passed from one mouth to another, it was public fodder. And, as everyone knows, we Southerners like to eat our fill.

  Born in Bowie, Georgia, the heart of the peach state, I was what you might call “homegrown,” a Southerner through and through, one of the many GRITS (Girls Raised In The South) here in town. Over the years, I’d picked up other nicknames: smarty pants, overachiever, goodie goodie, and my personal favorite, Chunky Cherry. Before you get the wrong idea, the last is not my actual name, and it’s definitely not a reference to my auburn hair. It has to do with this time in the ninth grade when Bruce Diamond dared me to eat a whole jar of maraschino cherries in under sixty seconds. I did it, of course; I had never backed down from a dare and decided long ago that jerk extraordinaire Bruce Diamond wasn’t going to be my first anything. I managed to keep them down for about twenty minutes before blowing chunks all over myself and, unfortunately, my current Chemistry teacher, Coach Rapier. He’s had it out for me ever since.

  He’d already hated me for being my mother’s daughter, but the cherries sealed the deal. I was permanently on his shit list.

  As I picked up my tray and passed the faculty lunch table, Coach glared at me while shoving food into his wide-open gob. I glared right back. He’d said some very rude things about my mother when I’d first joined his class. But then again, so did a lot of people. She was one of the town’s favorite topics.

  Walking over to sit at my usual spot in the cafeteria—the table farthest away from Rapier and his lackeys—I could tell something big was going down.

  There was just something in the air.

  Alexis Walker and Janet Steeple, the queen bees of gossip, were buzzing about, making the rounds, flitting from table to table, spreading rumors like pollen from ear to ear. The atmosphere was thick with anticipation, an unruly excitement that could mean only one thing: There was a brand new, grade-A, extra juicy scandal. I silently prayed that no one had seen Mr. Valencia sneaking out of our house at the crack of dawn this morning. The image of him creeping through our bushes, carrying last night’s clothes and jogging to his car in only socks and red-and-white striped boxers was currently imprinted on my mind’s eye. God, I hoped the memory would fade soon. That kind of thing could scar a kid. At seventeen, I guess I wasn’t exactly a kid anymore, but it was just plain wrong for me to know the type of underwear worn by Bowie High’s assistant principal.

  Mom had been seeing Mr. V publicly for a couple months—her longest relationship in years—so I didn’t think any news on that front was enough to provoke this kind of reaction. Students were talking non-stop; even the faculty looked a little keyed up. As I approached my table and saw my best friend George’s face, eyes bright under her usual cover of way-too-much black eyeliner, freshly painted black fingernails tapping out an erratic rhythm on the paperback in front of her, it was clear that this was much more than a sighting of Mr. V in his skivvies.

  The news had to be big to get her this excited. George was your classic gossipmonger incognito, the unflappable emo chick, totally laid back on the outside. But when it came to anything scandalous, she was like a shark. If there was a new rumor floating around, she’d hone in on it, and instantly go for the kill. She knew everything there was to know about anyone, and she shared the best stuff with me. Her eyes told me there was fresh blood in the water.

  As I took my seat opposite her, she casually leaned forward and said, “Did you hear?”

  I could tell she was dying to tell me, so I mirrored her position. “No, what?”

  “Ethan Wilder’s coming back to town.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  She shot me an incredulous look. “Oh please, D. You know, Ethan Wilder? The guy who killed his sister a few years ago?”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I heard he shot her,” the girl sitting next to us said. I think she was a freshman.

  The blond boy across from her rolled his eyes. “No idiot, she drowned,” he said with certainty. “It was all his fault though. He’s the one who pushed her.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Another kid I didn’t know leaned over to put in his two cents. “She couldn’t swim, and he knew that, so he pushed her into the pool behind their house.”

  “Why?” I asked intrigued despite myself.

  The kid shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “I guess, because he’s a freak.”

  “So,” the girl asked, “where does the gun come in?”

  “Far as I know, there wasn’t one.”

  “Hey,” George interrupted. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so,” the boy said.

  “Delilah, do you know these softies?” Uh oh, there it was. George’s classic underclassmen slam
. I shook my head while eating my yogurt, knowing full well what was coming.

  “Well then,” she said, “let me introduce myself. Hi, my name is Georgiana St. Claire.”

  “Hi,” the poor kid said enthusiastically. “I’m—”

  “Stop.” George held up a hand. “Please, before you embarrass yourself. It is common knowledge that seniors, like us”—she gestured first to me then to herself—”simply do not converse with softies like yourselves.”

  The boy’s face fell.

  “Now don’t feel bad or start crying or anything. You won’t always be a softie,” George soothed. “One day you’ll grow big and tall and get a driver’s license. And when that happens, you’ll graduate to non-softie status. It’s called the circle of life. But until then...”

  “Sorry,” the kid said, “I didn’t realize you were seniors. Don’t you guys usually sit over there?” He pointed to a table behind us, and I turned, already knowing what I’d see.

  A few rows back, there were two tables pushed together, filled to capacity and in prime position to get at the head of the lunch line and salad bar. Bruce Diamond was sitting there, lounged back in his chair, yucking it up with a few of his jock friends. It looked like they might be having an intellectual discussion on the origin of tater tots. Next to them, Alexis, Janet and their leader, Serena “I’m-prettier-than-you-are” Sanchez were primping, glossing, and grimacing at their food like its mere existence was a personal insult. The Populars in their natural habitat.

  George spared a glance over her shoulder. “Yeah, no,” she said. “That’s not our scene. We try to avoid in-depth conversations about Ruby Rose and Crimson Kiss lip gloss.”

  “Hey, that’s what I wear,” the girl smiled.

  George sighed.

  “Hey,” I said to the kid still pointing, “I’d put that finger down if I were you.”

  “Why?” he asked, but it was too late. They’d spotted him.

  I watched as Grant McCreary sent a ketchup packet flying, launching it in an arc across three tables, and nailing the kid in the eye with a loud splat.

  “Ow!” he cried. At the same moment a cheer rose up from the opposite side of the lunchroom. I rolled my eyes as Grant got high-fives from his friends and a nod of approval from Coach Rapier. Of course, the teachers saw the whole thing, but did anyone do anything about it? Heck, no. There was a game this Friday, and McCreary was first-string quarterback. Even if there wasn’t a game, he still wouldn’t have been punished. Athletes in Bowie never were.

  The kid who’d taken the hit was still groaning as he was escorted from the table by his friends.

  “Softies,” George said as if it explained everything. Then, “Come on D, you must’ve heard about Wilder. It was huge news, the biggest thing since Rhonda Simms got knocked up by old Mr. Wheeler.”

  I took a bite of my turkey sandwich, searched my mind. I remembered the Simms-Wheeler Affair like it was yesterday; when a teacher sleeps with one of his students, especially in a conservative state like Georgia, it’s a pretty big deal. But I couldn’t recall anything about an Ethan Wilder. The name, though, sounded vaguely familiar.

  George, obviously exasperated with my lack of knowledge, filled me in. “It happened about four years ago. One sunny afternoon in June, Jim Wilder comes home to find his son, Ethan, drenched in blood. Turns out Ethan’s sister, Anne, was shot in the stomach and drowned in the swimming pool. Ethan’s the one who found her.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said, mentally picturing the gruesome scene.

  “Yeah, it is.” George was on a roll now. “No one knows exactly what happened. At first people thought, maybe she shot herself. But that didn’t make any sense. She’d been blessed with good looks and brains, had a full scholarship to MIT and everything. No suspects were ever charged. They never found a gun. The only thing people knew for sure was that somehow she’d ended up bleeding to death in that pool, and Ethan apparently pulled her out and was found standing over the body.”

  “But that doesn’t mean Ethan did it.” I was confused. There were a lot of sketchy details—no murder weapon and no suspects? Being first shot and then drowned? Forgive the pun, but it sounded like overkill to me. But what confused me most of all was the strange need I felt to defend this guy Wilder. “Where were his parents when all this was going on?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wilder were at church,” she said like it should be obvious. “You know, putting together a new sermon for Sunday.”

  “Wilder,” I said as it finally clicked. “Is Ethan somehow related to—”

  “Yes,” George said smiling, “he’s the preacher’s son. Jimmy Wilder, the biggest, loudest holy roller in the Southeast. I knew you’d remember eventually.”

  “But I don’t remember.” I just knew the name from those gaudy ads they showed on TV all the time.

  “How’s that even possible?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Four years ago, you said?”

  She nodded.

  And then I remembered. I’d been away that summer. Up until August, my mom, aunt and I had been traveling the country in search of the finest ice cream the U.S. has to offer (it’s in North Carolina at a place called Tony’s in case you’re interested). It’d been my aunt’s crazy idea, and strange as it may sound, we actually had a great time.

  “I wasn’t here,” I said, voicing my thoughts aloud. “Ice Cream Excursion, remember?”

  George nodded. “I can’t believe I forgot,” she said. “You wouldn’t shut up about it, went on and on about that place in North Carolina for weeks.” I glared at that, but George didn’t seem to notice. “But how could I not have told you? I’m sure I would’ve said something.”

  I glanced over my shoulder once again. “Wasn’t that around the time when—”

  “Oh my God!” She followed my gaze, eyes widening. “That’s right. You came back the same week Diamond Dave bit the dust.”

  “George,” I said sternly, “you shouldn’t speak that way about the dead. It’s not right.”

  “Sor-ry,” she said, rolling her eyes. “How would you put it?”

  When Bruce Diamond winked at me, I turned back around in disgust. “I would say was killed in a tragic accident when his car stalled out on the tracks and got hit by that train.”

  “Any way you say it, dead is dead,” George grumbled. “And that guy was definitely dead.”

  “‘That guy’ wasn’t all that bad,” I said then added, “…for a football player.” Dave wasn’t the nicest guy, but he’d been alright.

  “Yeah, better than his brother anyway,” George frowned. “Was it my imagination or did that skeez just wink at you?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued, “Anyway, Pastor Jimmy sent Ethan packing almost immediately. I think that played a big role, made people suspect him. Well, that and the fact that he’s a delinquent. Heard he got in a lot of fights at his new school, got busted for underage drinking.”

  “That still doesn’t make him a killer,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t exactly make him a saint either.”

  The bell rang, and we got up to dump our trays.

  “So, why’s he coming back now?” I asked.

  “Got kicked out,” George shrugged. “I guess, for all the fighting. Wilder’s our age, and because of the rezoning, he’ll be coming here instead of Southside.” She chuckled. “I bet the zoning board wishes they could redraw the lines. Just imagine. Bowie High’s going to play host to its first murderer.”

  I sighed; arguing would be futile. George was a tad morbid. Her favorite color was black, she liked reading books about vampires, werewolves, anything supernatural, and her favorite TV show was CSI. We’d been friends a long, long time, so I knew her better than just about anyone. She didn’t actually condone murder; she just found it interesting. Her dream was to be a reporter. Or the next Tim Burton.

  “So,” I said, “final verdict?”

  “Cause of death unknown. The two most popula
r theories are murder or suicide,” George said, “though the good pastor denies that last one. Guess he’d rather she be murdered than spend all eternity rotting in the fiery pits of hell.”

  “Guess so.” The warning bell sounded. “See you after school?”

  “Sure”—George cut her eyes at me—”but don’t you have to save the forest or something?”

  “Oh, I forgot,” I groaned. “Never mind, I guess I’ll just call you later, then?”

  “Fine,” she said, “just be careful. If you get eaten by a Venus fly trap, I’ll never forgive you.”

  #

  School clubs are a joke. The only thing they’re really good for is filling up space on college applications and even then you’re not assured an in. My mom had insisted I get more involved this year, make me look better to prospective universities, set me apart from the crowd. As if being able to speak French or twirl a baton would make me more interesting. It wasn’t enough to have a perfect GPA, completely acceptable SAT scores and graduate in the top five percent of my class. Oh, no. As my aunt said, I needed to add “window dressings” to my academic achievements to make me seem well-rounded.

  Begrudgingly, I’d agreed. I’d signed up for the first club I could find that didn’t involve hacking and spitting or wearing white boots and a gold sequin leotard. That’s why I was currently ankle deep in wildlife, wearing not a leotard, but a neon orange vest—the exact kind prisoners wore to do community clean-up. We, Bowie High’s Elite Environmental Club, were supposed to pick up all the trash the inmates had missed their last time out, and we’d been advised by our club sponsor, Mr. Green, to be on the lookout for belligerent wildlife. In this part of Georgia, I didn’t expect to run into anything worse than a squirrel or deer. The vest was just a precaution...an ugly, hot, itchy precaution that kept falling off my shoulder no matter how many times I pulled it back up.

  My plastic garbage bag was full, an assortment of cans, bottles, fast food wrappers, etc. The thing was getting heavy, and the smell wasn’t exactly Bounty fresh. Neither was I for that matter. My shirt was damp with sweat, my hair a frizzy mess atop my head. I’d been out here a while, and I was ready to go home. I knew this was for a good cause and all, but it was just so darn hot. And I was truly disgusted. Hadn’t these litterbugs ever heard of a trashcan? If I had to pick up one more Coca Cola bottle, I thought I might scream.