Redemption Lake

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  A giant wave of guilt hit Matt hard. “If you want to go to school, we need to get some sleep.” He reached over and turned off the light.

  “I keep expecting to dream about her,” Travis said. “I really want to.”

  Matt’s hands curled into fists. “Don’t be so sure. In my dream, she had a gun.”

  Travis was quiet for a moment before he whispered, “My mother wouldn’t kill herself.”

  “Dreams are fucked up,” Matt said.

  For a moment, Travis said nothing. “I know, but at least you got to see her again.”

  Matt was glad it was dark in the room. “I did want something from her,” he whispered. “I wanted her to live.”

  After a quiet minute or so, Travis got back into bed and pulled the comforter over him. “Before she started drinking so much, I thought I had the best and coolest mom in the world.”

  “Back then,” Matt said. “I used to…”

  “You used to what?”

  Matt swallowed and forced himself to finish the sentence. “I used to wish she was my mom, too.”

  * * *

  Matt sat on a kitchen barstool and watched his mother pack lunches. She wore a short yellow robe over her nightgown and a pair of ridiculous duck slippers Sedona had given her. Karina stopped spreading honey mustard on rye bread and turned to Travis. “I wish you’d reconsider and stay home for a couple days, honey.”

  Travis sat on the other stool, his hands cupped around a mug of coffee.

  Karina busied herself picking out apples from the fruit bowl on the counter.

  Travis shuffled his uneaten scrambled eggs around on his plate. “I know you want to help. But I…” He hung his head.

  The silence in the room was a ticking clock.

  Karina cut the ham sandwiches in half and dropped them into Ziploc bags. “You want life to feel normal again.” She shot Matt a raised-eyebrow look that said watch out for him.

  Matt gave his mom a quick nod. “I’ll drive.”

  Travis slipped off the bar stool, picked up one of the lunch bags, and headed toward the back door. “No thanks. I want to drive the Escort.”

  “I’ll ride with you.”

  “Dammit,” Travis said. “Stop stalking me. I still have a life.”

  Karina touched Matt’s shoulder. “Give him a moment,” she whispered.

  Halfway to the door, Travis stopped and turned toward Matt. “I have baseball practice after school. I know you’ve got exams to study for. You don’t need to wait around for me.”

  “I like to watch you practice,” Matt said. “And that way I’ll be around if you need…”

  Travis stared out the back door into the desert. Once again, the clock on the stove ticked into the silence. “Just leave me alone,” he finally said, keeping his eyes on Matt a beat too long.

  Matt walked a few steps toward Travis. Words dangled on his tongue. He wanted to say something that would make the distance between them disappear. No matter what, he and Travis had always found a way to talk to each other.

  “I’m not some pathetic orphan,” Travis said, carefully examining Matt’s face. “Don’t you get it? Every time you look at me like that, Crystal dies again.” Travis raced through the back door, across the porch and down the steps. The redwood gate slammed.

  Karina handed Matt his lunch, then draped her arm around his shoulder and gave it a hard squeeze. “Give him some space,” she said. “But not too much.”

  * * *

  Matt pulled his Mustang into the Canyon del Oro student parking lot next to Crystal’s Escort, and turned off the ignition.

  When Travis didn’t get out of the car, Matt hooked his backpack over his shoulder, picked up his lunch, and hurried over to the driver’s side window.

  Travis sat, stone-faced and unmoving.

  Matt tapped on the glass.

  Travis lowered the window.

  “I can drive you back home,” Matt said.

  Travis repeated the word home, then shook his head.

  Matt bit the inside of his cheek. They walked across the parking lot in silence.

  Inside, the pale yellow hallways smelled like apples rotting in old lunch bags, and hair gel. They were walking toward their bank of lockers when Chad Rawlings marched right up to Travis and stopped just inches from his face. He wore a CDO jacket that announced he’d lettered in football. The all-star quarterback. King of the senior class. “I heard about your mom,” he said. “Gruesome.”

  Travis shrugged and looked at his shoes.

  Matt grabbed Chad’s arm and pulled him aside, trying to get him away from Travis. “What did you hear?”

  “Have you been out of the country, Garrison? It’s all over the morning news. Some old guy who said he’d seen the bathroom.” Chad clenched his fist and lifted it high into the air, making a stabbing motion. “Norman Bates does Tucson.”

  Travis ran down the hallway toward his locker, a sea of students parting to let him pass.

  Matt reeled back and punched Chad hard in the face. “Shut your fat-assed mouth.” The words were little more than croaks, but Matt forced them out.

  Chad put his hand to his nose, then stared at his bloody fingers. “You’re a fucking psycho, Garrison.” He wiped the blood from his hands and face. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Me?” Matt said. His already injured hand—the one he’d punched through the drywall in his closet—throbbed. “His mother just died, asshole.”

  Chad gave Matt a disgusted look and then allowed a girl to take his arm and walk him toward the nurse’s office. He left a trail of blood on the floor behind him.

  Matt stared at the drops for a moment, then quickly turned away. Chad weighed a good twenty pounds more. Matt was lucky Chad hadn’t beat the shit out of him. Until this morning, Matt thought he hated fighting. But it felt damn good to slug that asshole. He stood in the hallway for a moment, breathing hard while the other students lost interest and headed toward their lockers.

  Mr. Baker, the vice principal, rounded the corner and headed directly toward Matt. “Everything okay here, Mr. Garrison?”

  “Just fine, sir,” Matt said, and headed toward his locker.

  The lockers at CDO were half-sized, painted bright yellow and green, the school colors. They stacked one on top of the other in neat rows along the first floor corridor. Matt’s was on the upper tier, directly across the hall from the one Travis occupied. Matt twisted the dial. The lock didn’t open. His fingers felt too thick. He tried again, hand shaking. Failed. With the third try, it popped open.

  On the inside of the steel door, Matt had taped a photograph of Danni sitting on the hood of his Mustang. He stared at it for a moment, wanting to go back to that day, to press his forehead against hers. He wanted to smell her hair.

  He looked away, grabbed his English lit book, put his lunch bag on the top shelf, and then closed the door. The warning bell rang and he hurried to catch up with Travis. They had first period AP English together. Danni was also in their class.

  “I hear you decked Chad,” Travis said.

  “He’s an imbecile.” Matt tried to open his fist. It wasn’t happening.

  Travis stepped into the classroom, Matt at his heels. Everyone froze, like when the music stopped in that stupid kid game they once played at birthday parties. Travis straightened his shoulders.

  Danni was the first to move. She walked over to Travis, looked him in the eyes for a long moment, then hugged him hard. She wore a pair of blue jeans with sequin flowers on the back pockets and a pale yellow T-shirt tucked in at the waist. When she released Travis, she kissed him on the cheek and returned to her seat.

  Like magic, the room started to buzz with conversation again.

  Almost everything Danni did got to Matt. If they walked across the schoolyard and she fitted her hand into the back pocket of his jeans, he felt the caress of her fingers all the way down to his toes. When she tossed a glance at him as they passed in the hallway between classes, they’d lock eyes in a way tha
t excluded everyone else. Danni had been the first and only girl he’d ever made love to. The only one before Crystal.

  He hung his head for a moment, unable to breathe or move.

  Travis sat two rows in front of Danni.

  Matt took his usual seat next to her, then leaned into the aisle. “Can I talk to you at lunch?”

  She leaned away. “It’s not about my mother,” she said. “It just isn’t a good idea.”

  “Please,” he whispered. “I need to talk to you.” Danni and Travis were the only people he’d told the entire truth about what happened to Justin. And she’d made him feel better, made him consider his motivation for the push, made him believe it could have been an accident. It probably wasn’t a smart thing to do, but he thought his head would explode if he didn’t tell Danni about finding Crystal.

  Before she could respond, the bell rang.

  Mr. Singleton, a short and stocky man with gray springy hair and round wire glasses, clapped his hands—his usual call to action—and class began. He gave them a warm-up exercise—“pretend you are Raymond Carver, and write the first three paragraphs of a short story using his blue-collar characters and minimalist style.”

  Matt, typically one of the first to begin, wrote nothing.

  Mr. Singleton walked around the room, his rubber-soled shoes making farting sounds against the linoleum.

  The girl behind Matt giggled.

  Singleton checked journals to see homework assignments had been completed, making little red pencil marks in his grade book. He smelled like garlic and Irish Spring soap. “I’m giving you some slack, Garrison.” His gaze found Travis. “But I expect you to complete that Carver assignment by tomorrow.”

  After Mr. Singleton reviewed the material for the final exam, he dismissed the class with an assignment to rewrite their Raymond Carver paragraphs into their journals.

  Matt stood outside the doorway for a moment, watching Travis head to their second period, history, then turned in the opposite direction, following Danni to her French class.

  She was about ten feet in front of him with her best friend, Lindsay. The sight of Danni’s hair, the golden brown flag that waved across her back, released something inside him and his muscles loosened. He’d be okay if he could tell her what happened. He’d leave out the sex with Crystal, but he’d tell her everything else.

  As if Lindsay had sensed his presence, she turned and glared at him, then stuck her arm out in front of Danni. “It was her cousin, asshole.”

  Matt opened his mouth and then closed it. That football player from Tucson High was her cousin? He thought about that for minute. Danni had mentioned something about her mother’s brother moving to Tucson last summer. But she’d said they weren’t close. Matt saw himself ripping the necklace from her throat. Lindsay was right. He’d behaved like an asshole.

  Melanie Abrams and her posse of cheerleaders stopped to watch—their heads swiveling from him to Danni and back again. Most everyone in the senior class knew them. Matthew Garrison and Danielle Warren had been voted the senior couple most likely to marry.

  Danni’s whole body tensed. She reached out with both arms, fingers up, as if to stop him from coming closer.

  He tried to take her hands.

  She pulled away. “I don’t know you anymore. You scare me.”

  He saw the red mark on her neck where the chain had scraped her skin as he’d ripped it off. He wanted to reach out. He wanted to kiss her throat.

  Lindsay tried to take Danni’s arm and lead her down the hallway. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  Danni jerked away, grabbed Matt by the elbow and pulled him into an empty classroom. “I think you’re an asshole. You humiliated me in front of my cousin. And didn’t give me a chance to explain.” Her face and ears were red. She touched the scraped band on her neck. “I loved that heart pendant and everything it stood for. I wanted to keep it forever.” Danni started to cry. She covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I think I’m an asshole, too.”

  Danni’s face softened—a hint of a smile in the slight deepening of the dimple on the left side of her mouth.

  The late bell rang. Neither of them moved.

  He stepped toward her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I need to talk to someone. You’re my person, Danni,” he said, pulling her head against his chest. Her breathing grew slower.

  “If I’m your person, why didn’t you give me time to explain on Saturday? And why didn’t you tell me about Travis’s mother? I had to hear it on the news this morning.”

  “I didn’t call you, because I thought you never wanted to see or talk to me again.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Then you don’t know me very well.” She slipped out of his arms and left the classroom, closing the door softly behind her.

  Matt headed toward his history class, then changed his mind and started out in the opposite direction. He hated being late. Hated the way it felt to have a classroom of eyes looking into him, watching his every move. Someone, no doubt that busybody new nurse, had probably reported him to the principal by now for decking Chad.

  With all the blood rushing into his head, Matt took off, running down the hallway and out the closest set of doors. He didn’t stop until he stood beside his Mustang. His hand hurt. The knuckles were already red and swollen. He unlocked the car and sat for a few moments, flexing his hand on the steering wheel, then started the car.

  Hitting the speed bumps going at least forty miles an hour, he ignored the crossing guard at the front gate who tried to wave him down. He drove without thought of where he headed and then turned into Danni’s neighborhood as if the car had a plan of its own.

  He thought about the necklace, his tenth grade Valentine’s Day present to her, and how the tiny gold heart had balanced in the shallow cave between her collarbones for more than two years. He liked the idea of Danni wearing that symbolic heart, carrying a vital piece of him with her always. He had to find it.

  When he believed he’d traveled about the same distance from her house as he had on Saturday night, Matt parked his Mustang. He searched the desert for more than an hour and had nearly given up when he spotted the necklace with its broken clasp, dangling from a prickly pear cactus and sparkling in the morning sun. For a moment, he believed in God’s existence—believed this was a sign Danni would forgive him and they’d be together again. He picked up the necklace, clutched it in his left hand, then tucked it carefully into the empty pocket over his chest.

  Chapter Twenty

  Radhauser stopped at the Tucson mall and picked up the tuxedo Matt Garrison had rented. To his relief, the garments hadn’t been cleaned. Though wrinkled and obviously worn, there were no visible stains on the black trousers or jacket. When he pulled out the shirt, it was spotlessly clean and smelled like it had been recently bleached. Someone had washed it.

  Though he was pretty certain they’d find nothing of value, he dropped the tuxedo and shirt at the forensic lab and headed to Catalina for another look at Crystal’s house.

  The blinds were closed. He flipped on the lights and looked around the living room. Everything appeared to be just the way he’d left it. He hurried into the kitchen to check the sliding glass door. It was unlocked. That would explain how the neighbor he’d seen on the news had gotten inside. Radhauser had talked to the old man. He thought he’d seen a moving light that might be a prowler inside the house.

  Killers sometimes returned to the scene of their crime. Whatever had happened that night, Radhauser remained positive he’d left the sliding door locked. There wasn’t anything he could do about it now.

  He didn’t know what he specifically looked for; anything he might have missed the night Crystal was found. He studied the candles on the coffee table, wondered why she’d burned them the night she died. He took the CD out of her player—love songs from the sixties. Maybe she’d been entertaining a man—or just nostalgic, half drunk, and looking back on happier times. Radha
user could certainly identify with that behavior.

  Looking through a dead person’s home and possessions always made him feel a little guilty, like a peeping tom, and so he tried to make up for his invasion by being respectful and diligent in leaving things the way he’d found them.

  From a bookshelf in the living room, he picked up a pair of bronzed baby shoes that must have belonged to Travis. For an instant, Radhauser was back in the hospital with Laura, the night Lucas was born. The nurse, a big woman in surgical scrubs, had a voice like warm, thick molasses. He remembered the delivery room, Laura bearing down for one last push, and the way Lucas’s head had appeared, his fine hair matted with blood and milk-colored mucus. Radhauser could recall every detail, the purple umbilical cord he’d cut, the first high-pitched angry wail—the way Lucas had stared, open-eyed and unblinking, into his father’s face. The moment his entire world changed and he metamorphosed into a father.

  Radhauser swallowed, set the shoes back on the shelf. He had to stop letting everything remind him of his family. He had to focus on the job. The captain wouldn’t keep him around if he failed again.

  He slowly examined every room, pulled out each drawer in the living room and kitchen. Re-checked the pantry shelves and the cabinets, then moved on to Travis’s bedroom, where he searched his closet, bookcase and dresser drawers.

  He stood in the bathroom doorway for a few minutes, glanced at the bloody water and the spatters on the tile surrounding the tub, then stepped carefully inside and opened the small medicine cabinet slowly, hoping what was left of the mirror would remain intact. He searched for the scissors Crystal had used to cut her hair. The cabinet held the usual cough medicines, Vicks VapoRub, aspirin, Excedrin, a prescription for an antibiotic Crystal must have been taking for an infection. A tube of toothpaste, bottle of mouthwash—nothing to indicate Crystal had any serious medical problems that may have led her to take her own life. And no scissors.

  She’d cut some of her hair while in the tub, but there were no scissors in the water either. It seemed unlikely she could do that much damage to her hair with a razor blade. Radhauser closed the door and continued down the hallway to Crystal’s bedroom.