And When I Die, page 20
“So, what do you have planned today?” Erica asked, stroking the girl’s hair.
“Well, now that I have my car back, I think I’ll go to the mall. I need some new gym shoes. Maybe go to Coffee City for a little bit.”
“All right, well, be home in time for dinner.”
“Sure. Thanks, Mom.” Jordan scooped up the keys and phone, smiling as she turned on her heel to leave.
“Jordan?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
“Have fun today.” Erica kissed Jordan’s cheek and watched the girl skitter out the front door, the muffled sounds of her liberated car pulling out of the driveway.
Erica drained her coffee, then picked up her own phone and tapped the app connected to the tracker she put on Jordan’s car yesterday afternoon. The little red car zoomed along the route to the mall and the app tracking her texts remained silent, putting her instantly at ease.
Always have a plan.
46
AVA
Ava lifted the chicken out of the marinade with her good hand before dunking it into the bright orange sauce again and swishing it around the bowl. She narrowed her eyes as she watched Carly methodically chop stalks of broccoli for dinner. Both the bloody sweatshirt and the bloody X-ACTO knife were now locked in a drawer in her home office. She’d take them to work with her in the morning, though she knew the geographical change would still plague all of Ava’s waking and sleeping moments. After finding the X-ACTO knife yesterday, darkness had closed in around her as she struggled to come to grips with the discovery. Her daughter, a murderer. Her daughter. All last night, she’d watched Carly as she munched on pizza and laughed at Reese Witherspoon sashaying her way through Harvard, searching for some sign, some clue about just who her daughter was.
Each day that passed with no arrest in Whitney’s murder made Ava that much more nervous. She knew she wasn’t the only one chewing her fingernails, anxiously watching the news for a ripple of movement. The private Lake Forest Facebook page swelled by the hour with more anger and bewilderment over the lack of any real progress toward an arrest. Leading the charge of course was that loudmouth wannabe activist Regina Knowles, who slapped up seething posts about the ineptitude of the police department seemingly every fifteen minutes. When she wasn’t staging ill-advised protests to get stupid ordinances passed, she was a chronic petition starter, many of which went nowhere. The woman reveled in hopped-up indignation.
The story had all but fallen out of favor with the local media, having moved on to other tragedies, other calamities. But the stain remained on their community, becoming more stubbornly entrenched each day, threatening to become a permanent, unbreakable thread in their fabric.
“Mom?”
The sound of her daughter’s voice jerked Ava back to the present. She looked down at her hand still submerged inside the bowl of marinade.
Her head snapped up. “What?”
“The broccoli?”
“What about it?”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Oh, um, just add some olive oil and salt and pepper then mix it around with your hands, then put them on the sheet pan to roast,” Ava said as she pulled her own hand out of the marinade and quickly ran it under the tap.
“Wait, what?”
Ava reiterated how to season the vegetables, then watched as Carly doused them in olive oil and spices then tossed everything together, the suspicions, the uncertainty, the fucking terror around the possibility that her daughter was a murderer squeezed against her like a vise. What could possibly drive her daughter—or anyone—to such a heinous and horrific act? What could be so bad as to elicit that kind of response?
A weird, unsettling jolt of memory pulsed beneath her skin as the ghost of an incident when Ava was in junior high swarmed around the kitchen. During the middle of her seventh-grade year, a new girl transferred into the eighth-grade class. Laney. A girl whose last name she didn’t know at the time and couldn’t remember now. They weren’t friends, Ava only seeing her in the halls on occasion. In their predominantly middle to upper middle-class school, Laney was hard to miss. Her family obviously struggled, given the stained, ripped, ill-fitting clothes Laney repeatedly wore week after week. Worse, Laney never wore bras. She kept her books pressed against her overdeveloped breasts to keep them from jiggling when she walked down the hall, head bowed in shame as she plodded from class to class.
She couldn’t hide behind books in the girls’ locker room while changing for gym class, though. Teased and tittered about mercilessly by malicious, immature junior high girls, awkward, timid Laney lugged around a hefty bullseye from day one. Her street clothes stolen from her locker one time forced her to spend the rest of the school day in her gym shorts and t-shirt. Nasty scrawls in the restrooms about what Laney would do for blowjobs. Slam book pages shoved through the vents of her locker, the vitriolic jabs decrying everything from the ratty state of her generic, dollar store sneakers and near-tattered clothing, to her lopsided, homemade haircut, the vicious sneers written in loopy, girlish swirls of purples, pinks, greens, and blues.
Laney took the blows in silence. Never fought back. Never said one word. Not even one tear shed.
Until one day, when she calmly walked up to the ringleader of her bullies in the cafeteria and smashed an empty Coke bottle into the girl’s face.
Laney was expelled. Her tormentor lost an eye.
Ava never knew what happened to either girl, as neither came back to school. There had been a rumor during junior year that Laney overdosed on a bottle of pills and died, but that’s all it was, a rumor.
She snuck a glance at Carly again. Which one was her daughter?
The tormentor or the tormented?
“Mom? Did you hear me?”
For the second time that evening, she was jolted back to the disquieting reality of the here and now.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if you wanted me to set the table?”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah, thanks.”
Carly nodded and Ava bit her bottom lip as she watched her daughter silently take down placemats and plates for the table. “Carly?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you been volunteering lately? At the shelter?”
A noticeable stiffening of the back as she straightened up awkwardly. “Why?”
“It’s just that I haven’t heard you talk about volunteering since … since the day of Whitney’s murder.”
“I—I’ve just been busy, with school and pom and stuff.”
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
Carly dropped the handful of forks in her hand on the table and whirled around, her dark eyes blazing with irritation and the shimmer of tears. “God, Mom, why are you asking me all these questions?”
Ava decided to come right out with it, stop dancing around the elephant. “Where were you that day, Carly?” she asked calmly.
“I already told you, I was volunteering with the shelter.”
“The whole day?”
“Yes, the whole day.”
Ava took a deep shuddering breath as she narrowed her eyes. “Did something happen to you that day?”
Carly fidgeted with the edge of her sweater sleeve, yanking it over her wrist. “Like what?”
Ava edged closer and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Did you get into trouble that day?” she whispered.
Mother and daughter stood locked in suspended animation, Carly seemingly on the verge of spilling her guts about something. Ava’s breath still and heavy in her chest as she waited. Behind her, the hot oven groaned quietly as it too waited.
“Mom, I—”
“Hey, what smells so good?”
The bang of Kyle’s entirely unwelcome entrance into the room shattered the fragile moment. Carly retreated away from Ava, whose chin plummeted to her chest at being so close to extracting something.
“Chicken,” she said flatly as she returned to the counter and slapped the bird on the stovetop grill, both hissing in angry response.
“Hey, Lamb, how are you?” Kyle asked, kissing Carly’s forehead, totally oblivious to what he’d just ruined.
“Fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Ava and Carly both glanced at each other, Carly’s eyes the first to flit away as she finished setting the table. Father and daughter continued chatting about the sort of nothing stuff people chat about at the end of the day until dinner was on the table.
Meanwhile, Ava alternated between genuine worry and silent fuming at being so close to getting to the bottom of what was going on with her daughter.
And one way or another, she would.
47
RON
Ron closed the door of his classroom and collapsed into his desk chair, spent. It seemed like every period today was fraught with students who either didn’t care that they hadn’t bothered to read the material for class or who were so terrified of being called out for not knowing anything, talking in wild, preposterous loops instead.
Corralling dispassionate students only made the knife edge he was teetering on that much sharper. Everywhere he went around town, Whitney’s smiling face stared out at him, courtesy of the fliers dangling with the carrot of a reward courtesy of a band of concerned parents. The pink pages were posted on seemingly every community bulletin board, beseeching the public to share any information they may have had about the killer. Adding to his anxiety was the late afternoon buzz across seventh period that Whitney’s public memorial was at the end of the week, her family apparently having had a private ceremony in the days immediately following her death. He’d be expected to go, of course, as one of her teachers.
But he couldn’t possibly go, images of his bowels loosening and betraying him in the middle of all that mourning and wailing floating across his brain like flotsam. No way.
He jumped as his phone pinged with a voicemail. He licked his lips as he took note of the blocked number, his heart racing as he tapped the voicemail icon on his phone.
“Mr. Byrne, it’s Detective Diehl with the Lake Forest PD. Was calling again because I wanted to ask you a few questions about Whitney Dean, who I understand was in your class. Please call me—”
Ron deleted the message and dropped the phone on the desk. She was persistent, he’d give her that. This was the fourth time she’d called him and Ron knew she was a step away from paying him a visit. He just couldn’t face that, knowing he’d never withstand the pressing interrogation, hard-nosed stares, or psyops tactics designed to pry words from his lips. As his ruddy, hard-bitten father had always been fond of telling him all throughout his childhood, he was a sensitive type, disdainfully declaring he was too much like his mother, a woman gleefully free of guile or subterfuge of any kind. All the detectives would have to do was ask him the right questions and he’d spill like a kicked over garbage can.
And he just couldn’t do that.
He jumped as his phone blared again, the sonic boom of his heart reverberating through his body. His stomach plummeted to the floor as he realized this was a call he had to answer.
He said a quick prayer.
“Hello?” he said, his voice shaky, wondering just how cool he could play it.
“Byrne.”
“Yes. Speaking. Who’s calling?”
“Stop pretending you don’t know who this is.”
Ron cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t recognize your voice right away.”
“Did you know this girl who was murdered, this cheerleader?”
Straight to the chase as always. “Um, yes, sir, she was in one of my classes.”
A long heavy pause. “Because that’s how it always starts with you.”
“Sir, I swear I had nothing to do—”
“I hope you’re telling the truth, that you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Blisters of sweat exploded across his forehead. “No, sir, no, I promise you, I didn’t.”
“Because I promise you, there won’t be any more cushy jobs at East Lake Forest courtesy of my good friend Jay Mitchell.”
“No, sir, I know, I know—”
“You fuck up one more time, I will personally put your balls in a vise and squash them like grapes.”
Ron winced and forced back a strained yelp. “I understand, sir.”
“I thought you might.”
The phone went dead and Ron sat in his chair for a good five minutes, his entire body clenched tight as a fist, sopping wet with flop sweat. Slowly, he allowed each body part to release themselves one by one from the grip of the not-idle threat. He gently placed the phone on his desk, a strangled exhale seeping from his lips.
If what happened that Saturday night came out, what he did—
Ron slammed his hand against the desk shaking his head. He didn’t want to have to do this, but the choice seemed crystal now. He had to leave.
His brother would whine and put up a fuss, but he’d let him stay at his place, at least for a few days. The flash of an old college buddy up in Toronto raced across his memory. That would be even better. Just get in the car and go.
Whatever it took to save himself.
48
AVA
“Ava?”
Her head flipped up. “Huh? What?”
Kyle put his after-dinner coffee down on the table and frowned. “You okay, Mate?”
She ran her tongue across her bottom lip. “Fine.”
He gave her a knowing look. “Seriously?”
Ava inhaled sharply. Days had passed since finding the X-ACTO knife in Carly’s car and she still hadn’t figured out how to tell him that their daughter had potentially stabbed another girl to death. Every day that ticked by and she kept this horrible secret locked inside her, it made things worse not only for Carly, but for their marriage.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Mate, come on, tell me what’s on your mind.”
She sighed softly. Dear God, she couldn’t put this off any longer. “Kyle—”
“Ewings!”
Ava flinched at the thunder of Jay Mitchell’s voice behind her as she swiveled around to find him and Erica approaching their table. Kyle stood up and did a bro back slap and handshake with Jay, while Ava hesitated a second before rising to do a dual cheek kiss with Erica.
“Well, isn’t this funny? I was just telling Jay that you and I have been trying to get together for a drink for a little while now,” Erica said, pointing her gaze in Ava’s direction.
“I can’t keep up with this one myself, Erica,” Kyle said as he took his seat. “I might have to put one of those tracking devices on her.”
“It’s been a busy time,” Ava said weakly. “Always on a plane to somewhere.”
“Kyle, I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ve got a potential business opportunity for you,” Jay said.
Her husband’s eyes lit up like winning slot machines. Anytime Jay Mitchell dangled the possibility of anything in front of you, jumping like a dog after a treat was a standard response.
“Well, that sounds absolutely brilliant,” Kyle said. “I’d love to hear more.”
“Darling, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone and have Kyle and Ava over for a nightcap?” Erica asked. “Ava and I can have our glass of wine while you two discuss business.”
Jay slapped his hands together and murmured his agreement while Ava panicked in silence. She’d finally worked up the nerve to open the door to the conversation about Carly with Kyle and now she’d have to wait, because there was no way Jay or her husband were going to let her wiggle off this hook.
Kyle gave Ava the expected look and she plastered on a fake smile. “Sure, since it’s early, that sounds great.”
“All right!” Jay bellowed. “We’ll meet you back at the house in about twenty minutes?”
A ripple of agreement went up around the group and Ava sank back down into her chair, the waves of nausea rising once more.
“I still can’t believe the police haven’t made any progress with Whitney’s murder,” Erica said as she took another sip of wine.
“Are you serious?” Jay snorted. “They don’t get anything more dangerous than parking tickets around here.”
“They’ll have to call in some outside help, then, right?” Kyle asked. “If they haven’t already.”
Ava drained her wineglass, hoping she wouldn’t be expected to contribute anything to the conversation. They’d been here an hour already and between Jay’s eleven-decibel stories, Erica’s chattering about Ava wasn’t even sure what because she’d tuned it out, and now, the perpetual hot topic of conversation around town, her head was about to split open like a cracked nut.
“You’re going to the memorial service tomorrow, aren’t you?” Erica asked.
Ava flicked her head up. “That’s tomorrow?”
“Eleven,” Erica said. “Regina told me they had a private service for the family some weeks ago. I guess they just weren’t up for planning anything publicly before now.”
“Jesus, I forgot,” Ava shook her head in stunned disbelief. The conversation with Kyle would now have to wait until tomorrow night.
“You all see what I mean then, right?” Kyle asked. “Busy bird, this one.”
“Ava, when does the cast come off?” Erica asked.
She looked down at the dingy plaster on her wrist. “Maybe another week or so. Can’t come soon enough.”
“I broke mine years ago playing tennis. Sucked ass, man,” Jay said. “What happened with you?”
“Tripped and fell.” A bead of sweat inched its way down her back. “And yes, it does suck ass.”
Everyone laughed and Ava took the distraction to excuse herself to the powder room. On her way back to the living room, the cascade of family photos spilling across the wall above the staircase caught her eye. She wandered over, a melancholy smile tugging at one corner of her lips as memories of a gap-toothed Jordan in her tutu and tight ballerina bun came flooding back. The Mitchells were an unusual-looking family. Jordan wasn’t what could be called pretty or beautiful—cute, even—but attractive in an arresting sort of way. Little Kennedy had Jay stamped all over her and it was true that sometimes, little girls could look too much like their fathers. Jay was hard to ignore of course, as much for his quivering size as the perpetual smile. Jovial had Jay in mind when it was deciding to be a word. And Erica—
