CHAPTER ONE
“Erin . . . sweetie, eat your waffle,”
Jeff Dennehy told his six-year-old daughter.
There were four curved-hardback chairs
around the circular, pine table with a lazy Susan in the middle of
it. On top of the lazy Susan was a hand-painted vase with a bouquet
of pipe-cleaner-and-tissue daisies. The creator of that slightly
tacky centerpiece was seated beside Jeff. The cute, solemn-faced
blond girl gazed over her shoulder at the TV and a commercial for
toilet paper—something with cartoon bears. They’d been watching the
Today show on the small TV at the end of the
kitchen counter.
“C’mon, Erin,” Jeff said over his
coffee cup. “Molly made the waffles from scratch, and you haven’t
even put a dent in them.”
With a sigh, Erin turned toward her
plate, curled her lip at it, and pressed down on the waffle with
the underside of her fork. “It’s mushy,” she murmured. “I want
waffles from a toaster.”
Dressed in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and
slippers, Molly had her strawberry-blond hair swept back in a
ponytail. She leaned against the counter and sipped her coffee. She
thought maybe if her stepdaughter hadn’t drowned the waffle in a
quart of maple syrup, it wouldn’t be so mushy. But Molly bit her lip, set down her coffee cup,
and retreated to the refrigerator. She opened the freezer in search
of some Eggos, anything to put an end to the father–daughter
standoff. She didn’t need the aggravation this
morning.
“You know, peanut,” Jeff was saying
patiently. “Fresh waffles are better than ones from the toaster.
Good waffles aren’t supposed to have the consistency of old
drywall.”
Of course, Jeff wouldn’t touch a
waffle—fresh, toasted, or otherwise—if his life depended on it. He
was having his usual bran flakes to help maintain his lean,
muscular build. Molly’s husband was a bit vain—and had good reason
to be. Dressed for work in his black Hugo Boss suit, crisp white
shirt, and a striped tie, he looked very handsome. He was
forty-four, with a light olive complexion, brown eyes, and black
hair that was just starting to cede to gray.
“C’mon, just a few bites,” he coaxed
his daughter. “Molly cooked this breakfast, special for you and
Chris. You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you?”
Molly couldn’t find any Eggos in the
freezer, so she fetched a box of Corn Pops from the kitchen
cabinet.
She and Jeff had been married for ten
months. Whenever Erin and her seventeen-year-old brother, Chris,
returned from a weekend with their mother, Molly felt extra
compelled to show them what a great stepmother she was. So she’d
cooked bacon and homemade waffles for their breakfast this Monday
morning.
Molly had her theories, but still
didn’t know exactly why Angela Dennehy had moved out of her own
house, surrendered custody of her kids, and settled for visitation
rights. One thing for certain, Angela didn’t want her kids warming
up to their dad’s new and younger wife.
Molly was thirty-two and still
adjusting to stepmother-hood. Obviously, her breakfast strategy
wasn’t scoring points with Jeff’s younger child. Molly poured some
Corn Pops and milk into a bowl, took away Erin’s plate, and set the
cereal in front of her. She patted Erin’s shoulder. “Eat up, honey.
You don’t want to miss your bus.”
Jeff gave his daughter a frown, which
she ignored while eating her Corn Pops. On TV, Matt Lauer announced
that Today would be right back after a local
news break.
Molly set Erin’s plate in the sink, and
then unplugged the waffle iron. With a fork, she carefully pried a
fresh waffle from the hot grid. “Chris!” she called. “Chris! Your
breakfast is ready!”
Her stepson hadn’t yet emerged from his
bedroom. This elaborate breakfast—at least, elaborate for a
weekday—was mostly for him. One of the first breakfasts she’d
cooked in Jeff’s house had been waffles, and Chris had proclaimed
they were “awesome.” Maybe he was just being polite, or perhaps
Jeff had told him to say that. Nevertheless, Molly always unearthed
the waffle iron when she wanted to get in her stepson’s good
graces.
“Chris, breakfast!” Molly set the plate
in front of his empty chair. “I made waffles. . . .”
“Okay, in a minute!” he shouted from
upstairs.
On TV, Molly glanced at the pretty,
thirtysomething Asian anchorwoman with a pageboy hairstyle.
“Seattle’s Arboretum became the site of a grisly
murder early this morning,” she announced.
Molly reached for the coffeepot and
refilled Jeff’s cup.
“Thanks, babe,” he said, wiping his
mouth with his napkin. “C’mon, Chris, your breakfast is getting
cold!” he yelled. “Molly’s gone to a lot of trouble this
morning!”
She didn’t want him browbeating the
kids on her account. That was no way to win them over. “It’s no
biggie,” Molly murmured, moving to the counter, and topping off her
own cup of coffee.
On the television, they showed an
ambulance and several police cars encircling a small parking lot.
Yellow police tape was wrapped around some trees at the edge of the
lot. It fluttered in the breeze. Paramedics loaded a
blanket-covered corpse into the back of the ambulance. “The victim, according to early reports, was robbed and then
shot execution-style after his car broke down along Lake Washington
Boulevard,” the anchorwoman explained with a somber
voiceover. “He has been identified as
forty-two-year-old, Raymond Corson, a former guidance counselor at
James Monroe High School . . .”
“Oh, God, no,” Molly murmured, stunned.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
She forgot she was holding the
quarter-full coffeepot. It slipped out of her hand and crashed
against the tiled floor. Glass shattered, and hot coffee splashed
the front of her sweatpants. But it didn’t burn her. Molly glanced
down at the mess for only a moment. Then she went right back to
staring at the TV—and that covered-up thing they were shoving into
the back of an ambulance.
Ray Corson had been Chris’s guidance
counselor at the high school—until he’d been forced to leave last
December. Chris still blamed himself for that. He blamed her,
too.
She was barely aware of Jeff asking if
she was all right or of Erin fussing about the glass and coffee on
the floor. All Molly really heard was the anchorwoman on TV:
“Ray Corson left behind a wife and two children. .
. .”
“God, no,” Molly whispered again,
shaking her head.
“. . . Corson
telephoned Triple-A, reporting car trouble shortly after one
o’clock Monday morning,” the handsome blond-haired TV news
correspondent said into his microphone. He was in his mid-thirties
and wore a Windbreaker. He stood in front of a parked police car;
its red strobe swirled in the early morning light.
On the TV in Chris’s bedroom, another
local station covered the same news story Molly had viewed down in
the kitchen just two minutes before. She recognized the crime
scene, a small parking lot by the Arboretum.
Molly stood in his doorway. With the
curtains still closed, Chris’s bedroom was dark. Swimming trophies,
graphic novels, and waggle-headed Family Guy
figurines occupied his bookcase. On his walls were movie posters
for Old School and Inglourious Basterds. One wall panel was corkboard—on
which he’d tacked college pennants, pictures of him with his swim
team buddies, and about a dozen family photos. Of course, while his
mother was in several of the snapshots, Molly wasn’t in any. She
often had to remind herself this was his
bedroom, and he was free to decorate it any way he wanted. Still,
would it kill him to put up one lousy little photo of her? It
didn’t even have to be one of her alone, either. She’d be happy if
he tacked up a photo of her and Jeff, or her with Erin, or even one
with her in the background, for pity’s sake. Throw
me a bone here, Chris, she wanted to
tell him. Then again, she wasn’t in his bedroom much—except
briefly, to put his folded laundry on the end of his bed every few
days. Molly told herself that he was a nice kid and certainly
polite enough to her.
The TV glowed in one corner of the
room, where Chris had a beanbag chair close enough to the set to
ensure he’d go blind by age fifty. But he wasn’t sitting in that
chair right now. He stood barefoot by his unmade bed, his eyes
riveted to the TV screen. He was tall and lean, with unruly brown
hair and a sweet, handsome face. His rumpled, half-buttoned blue
striped shirt wasn’t tucked into his jeans. He didn’t seem to
notice Molly in his doorway.
On TV, they showed a station wagon—with
the driver’s door open. Two cops lingered nearby, discussing
something. “According to Brad Reece, the Triple-A
responder, he pulled into the parking lot here off Lake Washington
Boulevard at the Arboretum at 1: 45,” the reporter was
saying. “He found this empty station wagon. Reece
tried to call Ray Corson’s cell phone, but didn’t get an answer.
Then he noticed something down this trail. . . .” The camera
tracked along a crooked pathway, through some foliage until it
reached a strip of yellow police tape stretched across the bushes.
In bold black letters, the tape carried a printed warning:
CRIME SCENE—DO NOT PASS BEYOND THIS POINT.
The image froze on that police barrier—and the darkness that lay
beyond it. “Reece discovered the victim a few feet
past this point. Ray Corson had been shot. I’m told the police
found his wallet in a field just north of this spot. The cash and
credit cards were missing. Investigators are still searching for
the cell phone Corson used to call Triple-A.” The
solemn-faced reporter came back on the screen again. “Reporting from Seattle’s Arboretum, I’m John Flick, KOMO
News.”
At that moment, Chris seemed to realize
someone else was there. He turned and gazed at her.
“Are you okay, Chris?” she asked, still
hesitating in his doorway.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice raspy.
He started making his bed.
“Listen, if you don’t feel like going
to school today, I can call and tell them you’re sick,” Molly
offered.
“It’s okay, I’m fine,” he murmured,
straightening the bed sheets. He looked at her again and blinked.
“What happened to you?”
She glanced down at the coffee stains
on the front of her gray sweatpants. “I dropped the coffeepot. Your
dad’s still cleaning up the mess. There might still be some glass
on the floor. So—ah, put your shoes on before you come down to the
kitchen, okay?”
He just nodded, then pulled the quilted
spread over his bed. He stopped for a moment to wipe his eyes
again.
“I made waffles,” she said, suddenly
feeling stupid for mentioning it.
“Thanks, Molly, but I’m not really
hungry,” he murmured.
She wanted to hug him, and assure him
that what happened to Mr. Corson last night had nothing to do with
him—and it had nothing to do with the messy business at school five
months ago. But the front of her was soaked with cold coffee, and
besides, Chris wasn’t big on doling out hugs—at least, not with
her. So Molly just tentatively stood in his doorway with her arms
folded.
He finished making the bed, then sank
down on the end of it, his back to her. “I’ll be down in a minute,”
he said, his voice strained. “Could you—could you close the
door?”
Molly nodded, even though he couldn’t
see her. Stepping back, she shut the door and listened for a
moment. She thought he might be crying. But she only heard the TV,
and the weatherman, predicting dark skies and rain for the day
ahead.
In a stupor, Chris wandered downstairs
to the kitchen.
Molly was still up in the master
bedroom, changing her clothes. Erin sat at the breakfast table,
finishing a bowl of cereal and staring at the TV. Chris’s dad was
cleaning up the broken glass and spilt coffee. He had his suit
jacket off, sleeves rolled up, and tie tucked inside his shirt to
keep it from getting soiled. One faint streak of brown liquid
remained on the tiled floor. You missed a
spot, Chris wanted to say, as his dad straightened up and
set a soaked paper towel on the counter.
He wiped his hands and gave Chris a
hug. “Molly said you were watching the news about Ray Corson,” he
whispered. Obviously, he didn’t want Erin to hear. “How are you
holding up? Are you doing okay?”
“I’m fine, thanks, Dad,” he muttered,
starting to back away.
But his father held on to him and
looked him in the eye. “You know I wasn’t a big fan of his, but
still, I’m—I’m sorry this happened. Do you want to talk about
it?”
Chris shook his head. “Not
really.”
I don’t want to talk to
anybody, he felt like saying. I just want to
be left alone. He still couldn’t believe his former guidance
counselor and friend was dead. If it weren’t for Mr. Corson, he
never would have made it through last year. The only person he
wanted to talk to right now was Mr. Corson, and he
couldn’t.
His dad hugged him again. He always
smelled like the Old Spice cologne Chris gave him every Father’s
Day. “Thanks, Dad, I’m okay,” he murmured. He grabbed his books and
his jacket.
He heard the car horn honking—four
times. That was Courtney’s signal. His ride to school was here.
Molly called to him from upstairs to take a couple of her Special K
breakfast bars “to keep body and soul together” until
lunch—whatever the hell that meant. She had some weird
expressions—like that one, and beats having a sharp
stick in the eye, and six of one, half a
dozen of the other, and a bunch more.
Maybe they were Midwestern expressions or something. He wasn’t
sure.
His dad had married Molly less than a
year ago, and it had seemed way too rushed for Chris. He’d still
been adjusting to his mother moving out and his parents divorcing,
and then wham, his dad got remarried.
Suddenly, this pretty artist was taking his mother’s place. Nice as
Molly was to him, Chris still couldn’t get used to her constant
presence in the house.
He yelled upstairs to her that he
wasn’t hungry; then he hurried out the front door.
“Did you hear about
Corson?”
It was Courtney calling to him from the
open window of her red Neon.
Chris was halfway up the driveway, but
he could see the iPhone in her grasp. Courtney Hahn was always
texting or Twittering. That damn iPhone was practically glued to
her hand. It didn’t matter to her that it was against the law in
Washington state to operate a handheld phone while driving.
Courtney considered herself the exception. Her and her iPhone—it
was one of several things about her that drove him crazy for the
two months they dated last year. Still, she was blond, pretty, and
popular—so for a while, he’d convinced himself that he was damn
lucky to be her boyfriend. Well, maybe not that lucky. Except for feeling her breasts on a few
occasions, and three intense make-out sessions during which he’d
come in his jeans, they’d never gotten very far in the sex
department. They’d had a pretty amicable breakup, probably because
they hadn’t been all that crazy about each other in the first
place. But Courtney was a good kisser—and a good sport. As part of
her campaign that they remain friends, she still gave him a lift to
school in the mornings.
“Did you hear the news about Corson?”
she repeated, glancing up from her iPhone keypad for a moment.
“Somebody shot him. . . .”
Chris nodded glumly, and then he opened
the passenger door and scooted into the front seat.
“If you ask me, it just proves Corson
was a major perv,” Courtney’s best friend
forever, Madison Garvey, remarked from the backseat. “The
guy probably went to the Arboretum last night to have sex in the
bushes or something. Ha! He went there to get blown, and got
blown away instead.”
Chris buckled his seat belt and sighed.
“Gosh, Madison, think maybe you could wait until lunch—or at least
third period—before you start making bad jokes about our guidance
counselor getting murdered last night? I don’t think his body’s
cold yet.”
“Yeah, Maddie, shut up,” Courtney said.
With a tiny smirk, she glanced in the rearview mirror at her
friend.
“Oh, kindly remove the sticks from your
butts and get over yourselves,” Madison muttered, eyes on her cell
phone. Like Courtney, Madison was blond, but almost albino-pale
with a slightly goofy-looking face. She had her feet up on the back
of Chris’s seat. She wore her bright orange Converse All Star
high-tops today. She’d made that brand of gym shoe her trademark,
sporting it in several different colors and patterns. Madison
didn’t wear any other kind of shoes in public. She’d even worn
Converse All Star high-tops—silver—to the prom last
year.
Madison lived with her divorced mother
in the three-bedroom house next door to Chris. Courtney’s family
was across the street and two houses down. Along with two more
families, they all lived on the same North Seattle cul-de-sac,
which had been part of an ambitious development that started two
years ago—and never got finished. A dozen beautiful, distinctive,
modern houses were supposed to go up, but only five were completed.
Construction halted when the recession hit. So several lots on the
cul-de-sac were bare—or occupied by half-finished skeletons of
houses. There still weren’t any sidewalks yet, and not quite enough
streetlights. At night, it was always dark and slightly sinister,
because the cul-de-sac lay in the shadow of a forest. The street
was named Willow Tree Court, which Chris thought was pretty lame,
since they never got around to planting the willow trees on the
barren divider strip down the middle of the curved, dead-end
roadway.
Chris glanced at the NO OUTLET sign as Courtney came to a stop at the end of
the block. It amazed him that she managed to navigate the road with
only one hand on the steering wheel and her eyes on her iPhone
eighty percent of the time. Whenever he rode in the car with her,
Chris figured they’d end up dead poster kids for the dangers of
driving while texting. Then people at school would be making the
bad jokes about them—rather than about Mr. Corson.
“Tiffany thinks one of Ian’s wacko
parents shot Corson,” Courtney announced, glancing up from her
phone for a few seconds while she turned left at the
intersection.
“Shauna agrees with me,” Madison said,
consulting her phone from the backseat.
“She thinks Corson was meeting another
guy there at the park for some kinky sex thing. I mean, really, his
car just happens to break down at a park at night—with a ton of
bushes. Major perv alert! Corson was just asking for
it.”
“C’mon, shut up,” Courtney said,
slowing down to a stop at a traffic light. “You’re talking about
Chris’s hero.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Chris used to
think Corson peed perfume.”
Both girls laughed. But Chris remained
silent. He kept his head turned away and stared out the window—at a
dead gray cat on the side of the road.