CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She glanced over the top of her
Vanity Fair magazine as the elevator door
opened. Ensconced in the cushioned love seat across from the front
desk, she’d been waiting forty-five minutes. The W Hotel’s lobby
was all black and gray, with sleek steel and glass. She blended in
well in her black power suit and tan trench coat.
She was there for Jeremy Hahn’s
last-minute “business meeting” that Saturday—the day before
Halloween. Jeremy’s meeting must have ended a few minutes ago. The
person with whom he’d been doing business was just now stepping off
the elevator.
The thin, nubile blonde in the Catholic
schoolgirl’s uniform was a prostitute named Tara. She was sixteen,
but trying hard to look even younger. Lynette’s husband met Tara
once or twice a week in the same room at the W Hotel in downtown
Seattle for an extended lunch hour.
“Why always the same room?” she’d asked
Tara a while back.
“Cuz in that room, he’s got like four
or five porn magazines stashed under the mattress—in the middle,
where the maid can’t see ’em when she changes the sheets,” Tara had
explained. “He likes to take ’em out, look at ’em, and warm up
before I get there. Usually, by the time I come knocking, he’s so
horny and coked out, he practically attacks me.”
It hadn’t made sense why Jeremy planted
his porn in the hotel room—rather than just bring it with him. But
Tara had enlightened her: “If he was caught with that shit
on his person , they’d lock him up and throw
away the fucking key. Jeremy likes ’em young—illegal young, if you
get what I’m saying. I mean, shit, I’ll be too old for the son of a
bitch in a year. Anyway, if anybody finds the porn in that room,
Mr. Hahn can always say it’s not his. Ha! He’s a lot less nervous
about toting around all the coke he puts away.”
Tara wasn’t adverse to a bit of cocaine
herself. That was how the woman in the tan trench coat got her
cooperation. She started out by giving Tara eight hundred dollars
and two grams of quality cocaine for some information on Jeremy
Hahn—and the promise to keep her informed about when these sessions
at the W were scheduled. That had been three weeks—and four
“business meetings”—ago. Tara could be pretty reliable if the
payoff was another gram or two of coke—something the dealer called
an eight ball, whatever that was. She just knew it cost over two
hundred dollars a pop.
The woman in the lobby thought it was
rather amusing that she now consorted with killers, drug dealers,
and prostitutes. Just a year ago, she’d been happily married with
two children, and she made a little money on the side
custom-building dollhouses for people in the neighborhood and their
kids.
She stood up as Tara walked through the
lobby. She wondered if Jeremy liked Tara to stay dressed in the
white blouse, Black Watch plaid skirt, kneesocks, and saddle shoes
while they did the deed. But as she seriously thought about it, she
really didn’t want to know.
She followed Tara into the ladies’
room. Another woman was in there, putting on some lipstick in front
of the mirror. Tara ducked into one of the stalls.
The woman in the trench coat waited
until the other woman left. Then she dug the little Baggie out of
her purse and slid it under the stall door. She watched it get
snatched up. “Anything new to report?” she asked.
“Well, I guess he scheduled me today
because he knew his wife would be busy with some block-party
meeting or something,” Tara replied. “He wants to see me again on
Thursday at one.”
“That’s it?” the woman
asked.
There was a silence on the other side
of the stall door, and then she heard Tara snorting. According to
Tara’s earlier descriptions of her sessions with Jeremy Hahn, the
two of them did quite a lot of coke up in that room. She couldn’t
believe the girl wanted yet another hit of the stuff. She listened
to her snorting again—and then, a long sigh.
“He bought us a bottle of champagne
from room service,” Tara finally said. “It cost like two hundred
and fifty bucks. I saw the bill, and asked how he could afford it.
He said he was charging his company. Isn’t that funny? I wouldn’t
be surprised if he puts me on the company
expense account, too. Some of these executive pricks think they can
get away with just about anything. . . .”
In her head, the woman listed the
possible charges against Jeremy Hahn: Statutory
rape, supplying drugs and liquor to a minor, solicitation,
possession of drugs and illegal pornography, and now corporate
theft.
“Y’know, I was thinking,” Tara said, “I
don’t really understand how you’re friends with his wife, and why
you’re keeping tabs on him. I mean, I remember you saying they had
an open marriage, but still . . .” There was a click, and the stall
door opened. Tara was face-to-face with the woman. Her head cocked
to one side, Tara stared at her inquisitively. For a moment, she
looked eleven years old. “Anyway, I just don’t get it. . .
.”
The woman in the trench coat smiled.
“His wife just wants to make sure he doesn’t get himself into too
much trouble,” she explained. “And besides, dear, you don’t have to
‘get it.’ Just call me whenever he schedules you for a session. See
you on Thursday.”
She gently pinched the girl on the
cheek, and then headed out of the women’s room.
The three murdered teenagers from
Federal Way—that was all everyone talked, Twittered, and texted
about at school that Monday after Halloween. As he walked down the
crowded hallway toward his locker, Chris overheard people
chattering. Apparently, a lot of kids from James Monroe High knew
Rob Sessions, Sarah Manning, and Luke Brosco.
During first period, they’d announced
over the intercom that any students who wanted to attend a group
counseling session led by Mr. Munson in the auditorium during sixth
period had to sign up by lunchtime in order to be excused from
class. Touchy-feely Munson was slated to talk about grief, loss,
fear—and how to cope.
Chris didn’t sign up. He didn’t know
any of the kids who were murdered.
Courtney started texting and Twittering
about it late Friday night, when people first found out about the
latest cul-de-sac killings:
I’m pretty sure I met the 3 kids who
were murdered. I went to a lot of parties w/that crowd from Federal
Way last year. It’s a scary time 4 us people who live on
cul-de-sacs!
Just a few minutes ago, as the school
day ended, Courtney was really milking the situation with her
latest and extremely lengthy Facebook status update:
When I think of my friends Rob,
Sarah & Luke, I just want to cry. Munson’s meeting was no help
at all, a waste of time. Some of us living on cul-de-sacs are
really scared. My dad mentioned over the weekend that he’s thinking
of moving us to a hotel until this killer is caught. But we’re
sticking it out at home. If we moved or changed our lives around,
then the CDS Killer would win.
It was funny about Courtney. She didn’t
seem to realize what a major phony she was. Chris remembered all
her postings on Facebook and all the texts she’d sent when her
“best friend forever” Madison was burying her mother. But once
Madison moved in with her dad and her much-loathed stepmother,
Courtney saw a lot less of her. And Madison’s dad didn’t live all
that far away, either. By the time Madison started senior year at
Roosevelt High School in another part of town, Courtney already had
a new “best friend forever,” Cindy McBride, whom Chris couldn’t
stand.
Of course, why should he have been
surprised? Courtney had gotten over him pretty fast,
too.
Yet he still had a thing for Courtney,
maybe because she was so beautiful—and insecure. She’d admitted to
him once that by the time she’d turned thirteen her dad seemed to
lose all interest in her. “He used to make me feel so special,”
she’d said. “I was his little girl. Now that I’m older, I feel like
I’m turning into my mother, and he hates her.”
Chris couldn’t fathom what that was
like. As screwed up as his parents were, at least he felt
loved.
He walked around a couple who were
making out by his locker and then he stopped dead. The combination
lock was gone. Chris glanced at the number again: 216. It was his locker, all right. “What the hell?” he
murmured. He squinted at some fresh dents and silver scratches near
the handle, where the combination lock had been. Someone had
knocked it off.
Chris carefully opened the locker door,
not sure what to expect. Everything appeared just as he’d left it
before last period. His school jacket hung from the hook. His
backpack was stashed at the bottom of the locker, and on the upper
shelf were his books.
He glanced around the corridor to see
if anyone was watching him. Maybe the culprit was still around. The
couple making out by his locker had moved on, and the crowd of
students had thinned out. But there were still some stragglers by
their lockers.
Chris pulled his backpack out and
rifled through it. Nothing seemed to be missing. He wondered if
maybe the cops had gotten a bad tip, and they’d broken off his lock
to search his locker for drugs or something like that. But wouldn’t
they have told him?
“This sucks,” he muttered. Now he’d
have to clear out his locker if he didn’t want anything stolen
tonight. He stuffed the books in his backpack. Then, as he put on
his jacket, Chris felt something in the inside breast
pocket.
With two fingers, he fished out a
folded-up piece of spiral notebook paper. He unfolded it. In an
almost childlike handwriting, someone had written a brief, cryptic
message:
Ask your stepmother
about Tina Gargullo and Nick Sorenson.
Baffled, Chris stared at the note in
his hand. He slowly shook his head.
Then something else caught his eye. It
was along the red, ribbed cuff of his school jacket.
Someone had cut out a perfect, small
square of the material.
Most of the Google results for
Nick Sorenson were articles about a
Cleveland Browns defense back, Nick Sorensen. It wasn’t even the
same spelling. There was another Nick Sorenson from Des Moines,
Iowa, on Facebook. He had 231 friends, and neither Molly nor this
Tina Gargullo person was listed.
With a sigh, Chris glanced up from the
computer screen. Only a few other students were still in the school
library at this hour, most of them using the computers. There was a
row of monitors and keyboards on a long table by the big windows.
Outside, it had started to get dark already—a typical autumn
afternoon.
He wondered who had written that weird
note about Molly. The only person he could think of was Courtney.
She never had anything nice to say about his stepmother, but she
was always pretty open about it. Why would she break into his
locker to pass along this bizarre message? And why cut off part of
the cuff to his jacket? Already one small thread had unraveled
along the freshly cut edges.
He tried searching for Tina Gargullo on
Google. But a message popped up along the top of the results.
Google asked: Did you mean Tina Gargiulo?
He tried that for two pages, but it
seemed like a dead end. Pretty soon, Chris was aimlessly staring
out the window at the red, brown, and golden treetops. He was
thinking of the other mysterious notes he’d gotten—over the summer,
when he’d been a lifeguard at the Lake Forest Park Community
Pool.
He’d pedaled his bike three miles to
the pool every day. One Tuesday, during a hot, dry spell in late
July it was particularly crazy—with some loud, unruly kids and
their equally obnoxious mothers, who objected to his tone when he
reprimanded their darling little brats over his bullhorn. He was
glad for the end of the day, near twilight. The pool was closed,
and he washed down the lounge chairs and the deck area with a hose.
He looked forward to hanging out with Elvis that night and maybe
going to a late movie. After locking up, Chris headed for his
bike—the only one still at the bicycle rack outside the chain-link
fence behind the pool house.
He stopped abruptly when he saw
something white on one side of his handlebars. As he got closer to
his bike, he noticed it was a piece of paper, rolled up and fixed
on there with a rubber band. He unrolled the paper, and read what
was scrawled across it:
Meet me here behind
the pool house at 9:00. It’s inportant.
Chris looked up from the note and
glanced around the empty parking lot. He figured this was some kind
of prank. Someone was screwing around with him, some idiot who
didn’t even know how to spell important.
“I don’t have time for this shit,” he
muttered to himself. He had no desire to wait around there until
nine. He shoved the note inside one of the pockets of his cargo
shorts, and forgot about it—until the following night.
At quitting time, he found another note
wrapped around his bike’s handlebar—in the same spot as before, by
the left-hand grip.
Why didn’t you meet
me? I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow night at 9:00. It’s very,
very important we talk. I know you are a nice, thoughtful person,
and you will be here.
The next day, as Chris sat on his
lifeguard perch—slathered with sunscreen, wearing his pith helmet,
sunglasses, and red trunks—he looked down at the crowd around the
pool. He wondered who was jerking him around with these weird
notes. Why didn’t they just tell him who they were? Was it one of a
gaggle of girls who hung out at the pool every day? Did one of them
have a crush on him? Maybe he was about to get punked, and they
were all in on the joke. Or was it that overly tanned older-woman
regular who always looked at him kind of weird behind her designer
sunglasses? A bunch of guys his own age hung out at the pool, and
he’d had to discipline a few of them from time to time when they
acted like jerks. Maybe they were setting him up, so they could
beat the crap out of him or something. Finally, there was a guy
about twenty or so, who may have been gay—and he was always
friendly. Was he the one leaving him these notes?
During his lunch break, Chris went out
and checked his bike for another note on the handlebars. But there
was nothing. So he ducked into the pool house office and wrote his
own note, then secured it with a rubber band to his handlebars. It
said:
Who are
you?
For the rest of the afternoon, Chris
kept checking the crowd to see if anyone was watching him. Near
closing, he saw a burgundy-haired girl around his age, hanging
outside the chain-link fence—near the pool house. She had that Goth
look, and wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black wrist-bands.
She was so pale—almost sickly looking. And he imagined she had to
be sweltering as she stood in the sun in those black clothes. She
put a hand up to the other side of the fence, her fingers hanging
on the crisscrossed chain links. She stared right at him—to the
point that Chris became uncomfortable.
He finally had to look away. A few
moments later, when he glanced back toward the pool house again,
she was gone.
She reminded him of Mr. Corson’s
niece—whatever her name was. It had been months before. Sabrina?
No, Serena. He’d been convinced she was the
one whispering to him in the men’s room at the funeral parlor
during Mr. Corson’s wake. Who else but Serena would have left his
lost sunglasses—the pair of Ray-Bans he now wore—on that gate
outside Mrs. Corson’s apartment complex? It would have been just
like her to plant those strange notes for him.
But it wasn’t Mr. Corson’s niece in the
community pool’s parking lot. This girl was taller, and so skinny
she looked emaciated.
At closing time, Chris checked his
bike, and the note he’d left on the handlebars was gone. Nothing
was there in its place. After a bit of deliberation, he jumped on
his bike and pedaled home. He thought about driving back to the
pool at a quarter to nine, but decided to get together with Elvis
instead.
For the next few days, he kept an eye
out for that Goth-looking girl. And he always expected to find
another note on his bicycle handlebars at quitting time every
night.
Pretty soon, Chris forgot about the
girl in black. He didn’t see her again until late August—on another
hot afternoon. He just happened to glance over toward the pool
house from his lifeguard’s perch, and there she stood on the other
side of the fence. She was glaring at him. It looked like she was
wearing the exact same clothes she’d worn last time. And she looked
sick, or drugged out, or both. She seemed to hang on to the fence
to keep from collapsing.
Chris grabbed his bullhorn: “Office?”
he said, holding his hand up. That was the sign that he needed
someone to relieve him. One of his coworkers, Karen Linde, a
pretty, college-age blonde with a boyfriend, hurried out of the
office. “What’s going on?” she asked.
He climbed down from his post to meet
her. “I just need to check on something for a few minutes,” he said
distractedly. “Thanks, Karen. Be right back.”
He hurried toward the gate by the pool
house. The Goth girl started to back up. She weaved a bit, like she
was drunk or about to faint. Chris glanced over his shoulder at
Karen, taking his place on the lifeguard’s perch. When he looked
forward again, the girl was gone. It was as if she’d just vanished.
Chris didn’t have any shoes on, but he ventured out to the parking
lot with its hot asphalt and pebbles. He scoped the area for any
sign of the girl, but didn’t see her.
Before heading back inside the fenced
area, Chris checked his bike. There wasn’t anything on the
handlebars.
For the rest of the day, he kept his
eyes peeled for the Goth girl. But she never returned. Then at
quitting time, he went out to his bike. There wasn’t a note on the
handlebars.
But someone had slashed both his
tires.
Chris never set eyes on the sickly
looking Goth girl again. But he thought about her now. It was
happening again. Another strange, anonymous note; and someone had
broken into his locker to leave it for him: Ask
your stepmother about Tina Gargullo and Nick
Sorenson.
Chris couldn’t help thinking this was
yet another little mystery that would go unsolved. He wondered what
would end up slashed this time.
Hunched in front of the computer
monitor, he noticed most of the other students had left. Outside
the streetlights were on. He glanced over his shoulder at Mrs.
Chertok, who gave him a patient half smile and pointed to her
wristwatch. Chris checked his own watch: 5:23. The library was
closing in seven minutes.
His fingers started working on the
keyboard again. Under the Google subject head, he typed in all
three names—Molly Wright, Nick Sorenson, Tina Gargullo—and then
pressed ENTER.
The first item that came up didn’t show
Molly’s name, and yet Chris somehow knew this was what he was
supposed to find:
3 Dead, 5 Wounded in
Campus Shooting Spree
The gunman, Roland Charles
Wright, 26, was shot by a security guard .
. . a teacher, Nick Sorenson, 32, and a
cafeteria worker, Tina Gargullo, 20, both
died on the scene. Wright fired three
rounds into Sorenson . .
.
www.thechicagotribune/news/1302007.html
All he could think about was Molly’s
younger brother, Charlie, who was supposed
to have committed suicide.
“What?” Molly murmured into her cell
phone.
She sat on the edge of the chaise
longue in her attic art studio. The door at the bottom of the
stairs was closed. Two levels down, on the first floor, Erin was
parked in front of the TV in the family room and Chris was on the
computer in Jeff’s study. Jeff had asked Molly to take her cell
where the kids couldn’t hear her. So she’d come up
here.
She’d been on edge most of the day.
Jeff had kept asking if she wanted him to cancel his trip to
Washington, D.C. But she’d insisted he go, and so he’d gone—at
11:35 this morning. She’d tried to act brave about being alone with
the kids so soon after the latest cul-de-sac murders. It wouldn’t
be for long. Jeff would be back the day after tomorrow—the same day
she’d be seeing her doctor.
Chris had come home late and
immediately barricaded himself in Jeff’s study. He’d emerged for
dinner: sloppy joes, green beans, and fries in front of a
Simpsons rerun in the family room. Molly
kept weekday dinners without Jeff casual. During a commercial,
Chris announced he was spending tomorrow night at Larry’s place.
His mother would be there alone, because Larry was helping
chaperone an overnight field trip to Olympia with his daughter’s
class.
“I think my mom could use the company,”
Chris said, gazing at the TV—and not her. “She shouldn’t have to be
alone in that house. You’ll be okay with Erin, won’t
you?”
“Of course,” Molly said. “If it’s okay
with your dad and mom, that’s fine with me,” Molly continued. “I
can drop you off in Bellevue tomorrow afternoon.”
“Can I stay with my mom, too?” Erin
asked, almost kicking her TV table.
“That’s fine,” Molly said, with a pale
smile.
She wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow
night all by herself—with an empty, dark house next door. And while
Chris’s reason for leaving her alone seemed rational enough—even
sweet, in that he was looking out for his mother—there seemed more
to it. Molly felt him pulling away. He’d hardly looked at her all
night.
After dinner, Chris called his dad from
the phone in the study. He had the door closed. Molly was watching
TV with Erin, but she could hear him down the hall murmuring. He
raised his voice a few times, but the words were indistinguishable.
He was talking in there for twenty minutes, which was something of
a record. He and his dad usually kept their phone conversations
brief.
Finally, Molly heard the study door
click open, and Chris lumbered into the family room with the
cordless in his hand. Eyes downcast, he gave her the phone. “Dad
wants to talk to you,” he muttered. Then he retreated back to the
study and closed the door.
“Erin, honey, could you turn down the
TV a bit,” Molly said. Then she spoke into the phone. “Hi, there .
. .”
“Hi, babe, we need to talk,” Jeff said.
“If you can get away from the kids for a few minutes, I’ll call you
back on your cell. . . .”
It was raining lightly; so instead of
stepping outside with her phone, Molly had retreated up to her
studio. Jeff had called after only a minute or so—and he’d told her
what had been bothering Chris tonight.
“What?” Molly repeated into the cell
phone. She got up from the chaise longue and clutched a hand to her
stomach. “So that’s why he’s been in your study all night. He’s
been holed up in there, looking up articles about my brother. My
God, no wonder he can’t bring himself to look at me.”
“I think his biggest concern was making
sure I knew,” Jeff said gently.
“So—he just assumed I’d keep something
like that from you?” Molly asked. She started pacing around the
studio space. “Is that the kind of person he thinks I
am?”
“Honey, look at it this way. Together,
we kept him in the dark about this for well over a year. You can’t
blame him for wanting to check with me to find out how much I
know.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you who we can
blame for this—Angela!” Molly said, exasperated. “God, she’s a
piece of work. Is she so out to get me that she doesn’t give a damn
about traumatizing her own son? Just the other day, I was starting
to feel sorry for her. I was starting to feel she might be halfway
human. And then she turns around and smashes our pumpkins. It
doesn’t seem to matter that it broke poor Erin’s heart. And now,
she’s pulling this shit with Chris. She’s crazy! Breaking into his
locker, leaving notes. . . .”
“I’ll talk to her,” Jeff
said.
“She’ll just deny it,” Molly shot back.
“The same way she denied smashing our pumpkins on Saturday, and
then using her old key to get back in here and leave that—that
weird smiley-face jack-o-lantern arrangement for me to find on the
kitchen counter. I’m sorry, but I’ve had it with her. She’s
certifiable, she really is.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” Jeff
sighed. “You shouldn’t have to put up with this. I’ll have it out
with her tomorrow. The gloves are coming off, I promise. By the
way, I told Chris that he and Erin are staying home tomorrow night.
You shouldn’t be alone there. Besides, I don’t want them spending
any time with Angela until I’ve talked to her. I don’t think she
realizes how much she’s hurting her own children in her efforts to
hurt us.”
Molly plopped down on the chaise longue
again. “No,” she said resolutely into the phone. “I’ll have it out
with her. It’s high time I handle this. You’re too nice, Jeff.” She
took a deep breath. “I’ll talk to Chris tonight and straighten
things out with him. And I’ll talk to Angela tomorrow. And when you
come home on Wednesday night, this will all be in the past. . .
.”
As she assured her husband that all
their fears and troubles would soon be behind them, Molly almost
believed it herself.
Almost.
There was a knock on his bedroom
door.
Chris had been expecting it—and
dreading it, too. He’d hoped maybe if he came up here and shut the
door, she might not bother him. He really didn’t want to talk to
Molly right now. He just couldn’t wrap his head around the fact
that her brother had shot all those people in that college
cafeteria. One of the articles he’d read online said that Roland
Charles Wright fired nineteen shots from a handgun, which meant the
son of a bitch probably had to stop and reload while people around
him were screaming and dying.
And this creep was his
uncle.
No wonder Molly and his dad had kept it
a secret.
At his desk, Chris turned his swivel
chair. “Yeah, come in,” he grunted.
Molly opened the door. She had a photo
album tucked under her arm. Chris had glanced through it one night
when he’d been bored and alone in the house. Molly kept it on the
bookcase in her art studio—along with those elephant figurines.
Chris had been a lot more fascinated by the nudes in her
figure-study drawing books than snapshots of Molly’s
childhood.
She stepped into the room and set the
photo album on his bed. “So—now you know why I don’t talk about my
family much.”
He frowned at her. “You told me that
your brother committed suicide.”
Molly shrugged. “Well, in a way he did.
I don’t think he expected to live through that—nightmare he inflicted on so many people. Anyway, it’s
easier for me to tell people he killed himself. Usually it shuts
them up and keeps them from asking any more questions—at least out
loud.” With a sigh, she sat down at the edge of his bed. “I’m sorry
I treated you like just people. Your dad and
I should have trusted you with the truth, only—well, it’s been
difficult enough for you to get used to me without me dragging my
family skeletons out of the closet.”
Chris’s eyes narrowed at her.
Family skeletons out of the closet, there
she went with another one of her weird expressions. It sounded
gay-related, but he wasn’t sure.
She opened the photo album and brought
it to him. “That’s Charlie and me when we were about eleven and
twelve. . . .”
Chris glanced at the photos of two
kids, bundled up in jackets, earmuffs, scarves, and boots, playing
in the snow. They were building a snowman that was taller than both
of them. It looked like a scene from the movie A
Christmas Story.
“When I look at these pictures,” Molly
said, “I still can’t believe he did what he did. But I’m sure your
dad explained to you that Charlie was mentally ill. Anyway, if you
have anything you’d like to ask me about my brother or my family,
feel free.”
“Is that why you and your mother aren’t
close?” Chris asked. “Because your brother shot all those
people?”
Molly nodded. “Yes. And it’s a shame,
too, because I really miss her. But I guess we’re both having a
hard time forgiving each other—and ourselves.”
Chris turned the page in the photo
album—to some pictures of Molly on what must have been her
thirteenth birthday. At least, in the photos, there was a 1 candle
and a 3 candle on the cake. She was kind of gawky looking, with
braces and braids. At the dinner table with the cake and the stack
of presents, it was just Molly, her brother, and one parent. In
some photos, it was the mom, in other photos, the dad. The parents
must have taken turns snapping the picture. It was sad. There was
no one else at her birthday. And there was no one else playing in
the snow with them. “Didn’t you guys have any friends?” he heard
himself ask.
Chris noticed the slightly pained look
on her face. Then he cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she murmured. She
sat back down on his bed. “Charlie didn’t make friends too easily,
and I felt responsible for him. It sort of became my job, my role
in the family. Plus, to be honest, I was embarrassed to have people
over to the house, because of him. So as freakish as it sounds, I
guess the two of us were very close growing up.” She glanced down
at the bedspread and smoothed it out with her hand. “You’d think I
would have known him a little better, and known what he was capable
of, but obviously I didn’t.”
“After it happened, did you ever talk
to any of the people he shot?”
She nodded soberly. “I wrote to all of
them. A couple of them wrote back. This one woman who was severely
wounded, God bless her, she said she’d already forgiven Charlie,
and she was praying for me. On the opposite side of that, I visited
the mother of the man who was killed, and she spit in my face. I’m
not sure if I lost a son, I wouldn’t do the exact same
thing.”
Chris said nothing. He was thinking of
his visit to Mrs. Corson.
“Anyway—” She sighed. “I just couldn’t
stay in Chicago after that. So—I moved to Washington, D.C, and
tried to put the past behind me. Then I met your dad, and I fell in
love. I guess you know the rest.”
Chris closed her photo album and set it
on his desk. “So who do you think broke the lock on my locker and
left me that note?”
She glanced down at the carpet and
shrugged uneasily. “I—I really can’t say.”
Chris stared at her. He’d thought she
was being so honest with him, but now he could see she was holding
something back. “You can’t think of anybody? I mean, it’s like they
have it out for you or something. Could it be one of the people
your brother shot—or a relative of one of them?”
“Well, it happened over three years
ago, Chris. I can’t imagine they’d wait this long to try to get
back at me.” Molly got to her feet. “Anyway, whoever’s responsible,
I hope the only damage they did was to the lock on your locker.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Are we
okay, Chris?”
He hesitated, but then nodded
apathetically. “Sure.”
She started to bend forward—maybe to
kiss him on the cheek or hug him. But he turned away in his chair
and reached for the photo album. He handed it to her. “Thanks for
letting me see this.”
“Oh, yeah, you bet,” she said
awkwardly. Clutching the album to her chest, she backed toward the
door. “I—I have a lock on my bike that might fit your locker at
school. Remind me to get it for you tomorrow morning, okay? The
combination should be easy for you to remember. It’s your dad’s
birthday—eight-oh-eight.”
“Thanks, Molly,” he said, unsmiling.
“Good night.”
“G’night, Chris,” she said. Then she
stepped out to the hallway and closed his door.
Part of him felt bad for not being a
little friendlier toward her. But he couldn’t help it. She was
covering something up, just as she’d covered up for over a year now
the fact that her brother was a murderer. He could tell Molly had a
pretty good idea who had broken into his locker and left that note.
That same person had probably been watching him all day—maybe even
longer. They were screwing around with his head, and he didn’t like
it.
And he didn’t like Molly, because she
wouldn’t tell him who it might be.