And When I Die, page 36
The pad of Ava’s index finger burned as she kept attacking the screen, until she landed on the first one.
Hey, @itsJordanBaby Who’d you bang?
Tweet after tweet after tweet of the vilest words, the most horrific of attacks. Red danced in front of Ava’s eyes as she read the evidence of girls turning on girls, friends attacking friends.
Ho. Skank. Slut. Trash.
She kept scrolling, rage tearing through her like a bullet.
Ava grabbed the chair next to Carly and swung it around until she was face-to-face with the girl. “Who or what started these tweets?”
“Mom—”
She held up her index finger and took a deep breath. “Carly, so help me—”
“It was because of me, okay?” Carly sobbed. Ava and Kyle glanced at each other, their jaws slack.
“What does that mean?” Ava asked.
Carly sniffed and grabbed her napkin from the table and blew her nose. She continued sniveling for several more minutes before she gulped and took a deep breath. “Whitney said that Jordan couldn’t be trusted and I told Dionne and I don’t know who Dionne told and the next thing I know, it was all over Twitter. I swear, that’s all I did.”
Ava let this information sink in. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Her daughter, the fucking ringleader. The class A instigator.
“So, you went gossiping to Dionne about some stupid comment that Whitney made and she started this smear campaign against Jordan on social media. Right?”
“I mean, I didn’t think Dionne would do something like that—”
“Yes, you did.” Ava slammed her hand down on the table, causing Carly and Kyle to jump. “That’s exactly why you did it.”
“Mom—”
“Why?”
“Dad—”
“Don’t look at him!” Ava screamed. “I asked you a question!”
Carly sniffed a few more times before blowing her nose into the linen napkin again. “I didn’t want Whitney and Jordan to go back to being friends. And if Jordan came to Whitney’s party, then they’d—that’s what Mrs. Dean said, Mom. She said Whitney and Jordan would probably make up at the party. And I couldn’t let that happen. Then Mrs. Mitchell had to go and make Jordan come to the party and if she’d just stayed away from Whitney, if she’d just stayed home, none of this would have happened. Whitney would still be alive. She’d—”
Bile forced its way up to Ava’s mouth, but she swallowed it back. She slumped down in her chair, her skin tingling, words and images sweeping across her brain like errant, swirling debris.
“Go upstairs,” she whispered.
“Am I in—”
“Up. Stairs.”
“Can I have my phone?”
Ava’s jaw fell open in disbelief and indignation, and Carly, who, it seemed, thought better of pushing back against her, instead slunk out of her chair to scurry upstairs.
And the social media, the tweeting. You wouldn’t believe some of the tweets I’ve seen. Absolutely disgusting. Teenage girls can be so vicious.
This was it. That night out with Erica, she’d mentioned tweets.
She knew about these tweets.
Believing they originated with Whitney.
And if she knew Carly was the one behind it—
The bile pushed its way back up. Except this time, Ava couldn’t swallow it back. The faint tickle of Kyle’s voice in her ear receded as Carly’s phone dropped from her hand and clattered to the ground. She bolted for the powder room just off the kitchen and threw up in the sink.
85
RUTHIE
The police first called to talk to her eight days after the murder.
Ruthie wasn’t scared when that detective called and asked if she could come down to the station to answer a few questions about Shannon Kendall. They were talking to all the junior class, along with most of the seniors, so she knew it was coming.
She wasn’t even nervous about it.
Shannon’s murder had made the front page of both daily newspapers, topped every half hour on the news radio stations, and was the lead story on all the newscasts. Probably because Shannon’s mother was a celebrity in town.
Probably because it was so vicious.
Ruthie’s mother had been the one to tell her, having heard it on the radio as she was getting ready for work that Sunday morning. With teary eyes, she knocked softly on her door and sat on the corner of her trundle bed as she stroked Ruthie’s leg and relayed the stunning news. Ruthie couldn’t explain it, but it was as though she didn’t have any idea, as though her mother telling her was really the first time she knew something horrible had happened to Shannon Kendall. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gasped, a raspy, “What?” pushing past her lips. Her mother slid her arms around her shoulders and held her as she cried, soothing utterances slipping from her lips. She didn’t want her to go to school on Monday, but Ruthie had to be there. She had to be at her locker, watching and waiting, assuring herself Shannon wouldn’t come floating down the hallway.
And indeed, as she stood at her locker that morning, her heartbeat quickened a little as she looked for Shannon, bizarrely forgetting momentarily she wouldn’t be walking down that hallway anymore. Lyz and Sharla were absent that day, and Skip Lane and Mikey Gold leaned against their lockers in a daze. Tears actually ran down Mikey’s face. The whole school was in a trance of grief, clouds of disbelief and sorrow hovering over all of their heads.
There was no school that day. Students went to class and teachers stood in front of chalkboards, but there were no lessons scrawled across the blackboard, no meaningful discussions about symbolism in literature, no pop quizzes, no reminders about papers due. Instead, there were clumsy invitations from shell-shocked teachers for students to share their thoughts and feelings in class or to visit their guidance counselors instead. Classes were turned into study halls. Girls who’d never shared so much as a hello with Shannon Kendall wept. Boys whose teenage dreams starred Shannon Kendall sat sullen and stunned at their desks.
Ruthie didn’t cry. Her eyes got a little misty and a hard lump of panic lodged itself in her throat for most of the day. She commiserated with her friends at lunch. Sandwiches were left wrapped in baggies, cartons of milk grew warm, and apples sat smooth and untouched as they all huddled together shaking their heads, disbelieving utterances slipping out of someone’s mouth every few minutes. She fielded a few questions from the group, since she’d sort of been friends with Shannon. That made her special somehow in their eyes.
But she never cried. Not one time.
The whispers in the hallways over the ensuing days were that the police were on the hunt for any enemies Shannon may have had. Girl fights, love triangles, boy troubles. She’d say the same thing as everyone else. Everyone loved Shannon. No, of course she didn’t have any enemies. Who in the world would want to hurt Shannon the Beautiful, Shannon the Sweet, Shannon the Most Popular Girl in School?
The interrogation room was a lot nicer than she thought it would be. She guessed she imagined it would be like the Barney Miller reruns her father laughed his way through every night at eleven on channel thirty-six, or Hunter, which her brother obsessively watched on Saturday nights if he wasn’t out with one of his buddies or on a date.
No, the room was clean and small, marked only by a rectangular wooden table, two metal chairs with padding on the seats, the plain white walls, stark and bare except for a clock whose numbers peeked out between sturdy metal strings. One detective brought her in and told her to have a seat, smiling as he offered her a paper cone of water, while another detective joined them, bearing a yellow legal pad and black pen.
The questions were all as she expected:
How well did you know Shannon?
We had some classes together and then we were in the spring musical together. Well, she was the star and I had a nonspeaking role.
How long have you known Shannon?
Since junior high.
Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt Shannon?
No, nobody. I mean, she was really popular. Everybody loved her.
When was the last time you saw Shannon?
In class on Friday.
Where were you on Saturday night when Shannon was murdered?
I was at a party across town. It was kind of boring, so I came home early.
As Ruthie dutifully answered their questions, she didn’t think about the orange-handled scissors and how she’d washed the bloody blades in her bathroom sink that night, scrubbing at them with the same dark green scouring pad she used to clean the bathtub. She didn’t think about hurriedly wiping Shannon’s blood from the steering wheel of her mother’s car with a dish rag. She didn’t think about how she snuck into the house, tiptoeing past her father snoring on the couch, the end of the ten o’clock news droning in the background, and hurried to her room to strip out of the blood-encrusted jeans and top, stuffing them into a plastic bag she threw in the dumpster behind the Whataburger down the street the next day.
She only thought about how she got away with it.
86
AVA
Ava flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head as she exited her car and inserted her credit card into the gas pump, shoving the nozzle into her greedy tank. She wasn’t usually one to ride on fumes, but she was beyond distracted. It shook her foundation to its singular core to realize that her daughter was a mean girl, cut from the same cloth as her own schoolmates from decades ago, the ones who’d tortured Laney into lashing out and taking a girl’s eye.
She’d convinced herself she was well aware of Carly’s problems and had thrown platitudes at them to solve them. In reality, she’d done precious little to address the issues plaguing her daughter.
The stark white reality was that Ava had to accept a modicum of responsibility for this version of Carly, a girl who bullied, a girl she could even believe to be capable of murder. She wasn’t around enough, her job consuming all of her emotional bandwidth, leaving next to nothing for her daughter.
If Carly was going to change, Ava had to, too.
Of course, Carly wasn’t all that was keeping Ava up at night. Even after compiling her notebook on Ruthie Stowers, combing through the mountain of paper and pictures, she was still only able to draw a wobbly, jagged line between Erica and Whitney’s murder. She needed an undeniable link of steel before she went waltzing into the police department, pointing a finger at Erica Mitchell. Besides being laughed out of the building, if Jay Mitchell caught wind of what she was prepared to accuse his wife of, he’d come after her with the force and venom of a bull seeing red. It wasn’t so much that Ava was afraid of Jay, though his deep pockets and mean streak were certainly reasons enough. It was that she was smart enough to know that if she came after one of his own, she’d better have all her ducks lined up with military precision. She couldn’t stand on a leg of jello; she needed a pillar of stone firmly beneath her feet.
“Ava?”
She glanced up at the sound of her name, the source Marcy Samuels, the Dean’s across-the-street neighbor having pulled up to the pump next to her. The passenger door spit out Britt, Marcy’s surly pre-teen dressed in black leggings and a ripped black shirt, alternating stripes of hot pink running down the length of her jet-black bone-straight hair. She never looked up from her phone or said a word as she walked into the gas station.
“How are you?” Marcy asked Ava as the two women met in the front of the pump.
“Okay. Busy. You?”
“Same, same. How’s Carly?”
Ava bristled internally at her daughter’s name. “Um, she’s fine.” She cocked her head in the direction of the gas station. “Looks like you’re about to enter my world.”
Marcy rolled her eyes. “I might have been nicer to my mother had I known.”
“Have you talked to Lauren at all?”
“Just a wave over the mailbox on occasion. They’ve been keeping a pretty low profile over there.” She shook her head. “All these months. I still can’t believe they haven’t arrested anyone yet.”
Ava ran her tongue across her bottom lip. “Were you home that day?”
“No, with the power and the Internet being out, I took the kids to Old Orchard and we went to the movies. I wish I’d either been home or that the storm hadn’t knocked the cameras out, because they might have caught something, or maybe I would have seen something. Nobody’s cameras were working that day.”
“Oh, my God, Mom.”
Ava jumped at the silent, sulky reappearance of Britt, a look of incredulity on her face.
“What?” Marcy asked.
Britt rolled her eyes. “We don’t run our cameras through the home router. We do it through the cloud on our phones. It stays backed up for a year,” she heaved, her own exasperation pouring from her. “Like, why don’t you know that?”
“Wait.” Ava turned to Britt, the realization hitting her like a blast of bricks. “You mean it’s possible you might have footage from the day Whitney was murdered?”
The girl made a face and shrugged. “Probably.”
Ava’s heart leapt. “Can you show me?”
“Sure.” The girl shrugged again as she started scrolling, swiping, and tapping across her screen. “Mom, I totally can’t believe you didn’t ask me.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Marcy asked, looking just as stymied as Ava would have in her shoes.
“What day was it?” Britt asked, as she calmly bit into a protein bar she’d purchased in the gas station. The same brand Carly ate. The same brand Whitney ate.
Ava gave her the date and she waited, her eyes flipping back and forth between Britt and the phone. Britt nodded as she came to a stop and held the phone out toward Ava.
“This is everything from that day if you want to look at it,” she said.
Ava had to refrain from snatching the phone from the girl’s hand in eagerness, instead taking it calmly and tapping the screen. The camera was pointed almost directly at the front door of the Dean’s house, allowing her to see all the comings and goings of the family on that fateful Saturday. The kind of mundane entering and exiting that happened with a busy family on the weekend: Lauren walking outside with Parker, loaded down with swim gear, to meet an SUV likely filled with his teammates in the early morning darkness. Lauren and Steve leaving two hours later, she dressed in Chanel, no doubt for a long day of showings, he wielding a briefcase, but clad in khakis and a polo, the corporate man’s standard weekend uniform. Ava gasped silently at the sight of Whitney dashing out late that morning, climbing into her brand-new car and backing out of the driveway.
Whitney was the first to return, a Coffee City cup in her hand. Ava fast-forwarded past where there was no movement at the Dean house.
Then. Two o’clock. At the timestamp of two o’clock in the afternoon, Ava saw exactly what she needed to nail Erica Mitchell to the wall.
87
DETECTIVE MAGGIE DIEHL
Detective Maggie Diehl set her pen down while she stretched and cracked her cramped, stiff knuckles. She rolled her head around, the joints in her neck popping like firecrackers. Fortunately, it had been a quiet day, allowing her to catch up on reports and files and not think about the stalled Whitney Dean case.
Cold cases were part of the job. Witnesses disappeared, evidence was inconclusive—it went with the territory.
It didn’t make it suck any less.
The Whitney Dean case was as big a puzzle as Maggie had run into in her fourteen-year-career with the PD. Not that you got much practice (read: none) with homicide in Lake Forest, crime in the quiet, tranquil suburb mostly confined to people attempting to pass bad checks at Starbucks, DUIs, a multitude of folks driving on suspended licenses. The occasional pot bust.
Murder was not in the Lake Forest wheelhouse.
Still, the circumstances of this girl’s murder were baffling. Worse were the logjams. Her phone was missing, her carrier only keeping text message logs a period of three days (Maggie was still kicking herself for not having jumped on that right away). They kept calls for a year, but that didn’t do any good because she hadn’t talked on the phone to anyone that morning. That wasn’t something teenage girls did a lot of these days. So different from her own adolescence.
And then there was the thunderstorm. The pounding, relentless thunderstorm that Saturday that knocked out surveillance cameras, Internet, and electricity for a good chunk of the day across many parts of Lake Forest. No video doorbell footage in Whitney’s neighborhood. No red-light cameras. No physical evidence, no sexual assault, no witnesses, no discernible pattern matching any homicides committed in any of the surrounding suburbs—the city, even.
Everywhere she turned was a dead end. No pun intended.
The pressure to solve this case was like a vise around her hand. Pretty young girl from a wealthy, high-profile family in an affluent community. The constant community and media chatter wondering why there hadn’t been an arrest. The girl’s mother upping the ante with her explosive TV interview. The social media conspiracies.
The vise squeezed itself tighter every day.
Out of the gate, her money had been on Jordan Mitchell, the former best friend. She’d leapt for joy when they found the one working surveillance camera that Saturday capturing Jordan leaving the library that morning (seriously, she’d wanted to cry because finally, she had something). Except, the five different people backing up her rock-solid alibi that day had smashed that theory to pulp. It was a simple story, one as old as time. Her boyfriend had picked her up from the library that day, a blue-collar boy Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t approve of and she didn’t want them to know. Case closed.
Then there was the Ron Byrne debacle. She hadn’t wanted to bring him in, but her Lieu had pressed the issue, desperate to show movement, progress being made toward closing this case.
For all the good it had done.
She jumped when her phone rang internally. “Yeah?”
