A Hard Day’s Fright (18 page)

“And when they didn’t?”

In answer to my question, he looked my way. “When they didn’t, there was no reason for Violet to say anything. I left the school soon after, and she went on with her career. There was never any reason to mention it to anyone.”

I glanced at Ariel. “Is this vice principal still around?” I asked her.

She consulted her notes. “She was in Punta Cana last time I tried to call her.”

“Call her again. Right now.” I handed Ariel my cell and she took it and walked away to where it was quieter. “If Violet Beck confirms what you told us before you have a chance to coach her—”

Monroe barked a laugh. “What, you think I’m going to run to the phone and tell her what to say? I wouldn’t coach Vi. I haven’t even talked to her in forty-five years.”

“Love ’em and leave ’em, eh?” It didn’t make me think any less of him. That was impossible.

Then again, his groveling didn’t do much to improve my opinion of him, either. “Look, if word of this gets out…my career…my reputation…”

“Personally, I don’t care much about either. I do care if you threw Lucy in the trunk of a car, then smothered her.”

I was hoping for another appearance of that murky gray expression that had guilt written all over it. Too bad for me. Monroe simply blinked.

“She says she remembers being with him that night, all right.” Ariel came back over and delivered the news along with a glare she aimed in Monroe’s direction. “She says she remembers because the next day, all anybody could talk about was how Lucy had vanished. She says…” Three cheers for the kid, she raised that stubborn little chin of hers and looked Monroe in the eye. “She says that’s why she remembers, not because he was anything special in bed.”

“There you have it.” Monroe backed away from us, his smile so sickly sweet, it turned my stomach. “Now that you know I’m not a killer, perhaps you won’t be so eager to trash my reputation. We can work something out. We can make some arrangement. If you don’t tell anyone—”

“In your dreams, buddy!” Ariel flipped him off.

And at that moment, I had to admit, there were times I actually liked the kid.

S
ince he was a heartless creep who didn’t deserve any better, we left Gonzalo in his car and didn’t tell him we were heading home. We were back in my car, and Ariel was deep in thought.

“We can’t actually prove it, right? I mean, you’re sure Lucy wrote that poem, but there’s no way we can tell anyone because there’s no way we can prove it.”

We were stopped at a red light, and I slid her a look along with a smile. “Monroe doesn’t have to know that.”

She didn’t laugh like I expected her to. Instead, her brow furrowed and her eyebrows dropped low over her eyes. “I was wrong. Patrick Monroe didn’t kill Lucy. But if he didn’t—”

We’d just pulled into Ella’s driveway, and we got out of the car. Ariel trudged to the back door. My steps were more confident.

I pushed open the door and stepped into the kitchen.

“Think of it this way,” I told her. “When a detective finds out somebody didn’t do it, it puts that detective one step closer to finding out who did.”

“Are we one step closer?” Ariel grabbed a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge and cracked the top. “It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like we’re at a dead end.”

“Not so!” It was far too late to be sucking down caffeine, but I didn’t think I’d sleep that night, anyway. My head was spinning with too many possibilities. I grabbed a Mountain Dew, too. “We know Monroe didn’t kill Lucy, and like I told your mom earlier this evening, I don’t think it was Chuck Zuggart, either. He never really was much of a suspect.”

“That leaves only one person.” Ariel’s eyes lit. “So we do know something. We know who did it.”

I slapped Ariel a high five. “You got that right. We know our murderer is none other than Darren Andrews.”

“That’s not exactly right.”

The words came from the darkened hallway that led into the dining room and the living room beyond, and both Ariel and I squealed our surprise and spun around just in time to see Ella walk in the room. Will Margolis was with her.

Ella’s eyes were red. Her cheeks were stained with tears. “Will has something to tell you,” she said. “He thought…” She patted his arm. “He was considerate enough to think you’d want to hear it before he went to the police and told his story.”

I looked to Will to start explaining.

“It’s like this,” he said. He plucked at the sleeve of his black sweater with twitchy fingers. “Darren didn’t kill Lucy. Not all by himself, anyway. We all…” He swallowed hard and lifted his chin. “Darren and Janice and Bobby and…and me. We all killed Lucy.”

I
n the light of the chandelier that hung over the dining room table, Will’s eyes were shadowy pits. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, and he wrapped his left hand around it. Against the cobalt blue cup, his knuckles were the color of skeleton bones, and when we were all settled and he finally started talking, his voice was husky. “That night after the Beatles concert, Lucy was bragging about how brave she was. You remember, Ella.” He glanced to where she was sitting to his right, but he never met her eyes. “You remember how she was showing off.”

Ella rested a hand against the sleeve of Will’s black sweater. “Lucy was excited because she was one of the kids who ran out onto the field,” she reminded me and Ariel. “She made it all the way to the stage, and she jumped up there and kissed Paul McCartney.” Her smile was bittersweet. “I was terrified that she’d get hurt, but Lucy…Lucy was so brave and so daring. She was so…” She hiccupped out a sob. “She was so proud of herself.”

Will nodded. “And all the way home…you remember that, too, right, Ella? All the way home on that rapid, she was telling us—”

“That she was the bravest girl in the world, yes.” Ella’s expression settled, as serious as Will’s. But then, he’d already told her the story so she knew what was coming.

I knew the ending, too. It was the in-between part that had me baffled.

I couldn’t catch Will’s eye so I didn’t even try. I just raised my voice a little and acted as calm as I wasn’t feeling. “So Lucy was bragging. And you and Darren and Janice and Bobby…”

“We got off the rapid and Darren, he said we should teach Lucy a lesson. You know, as a joke. He said we needed to show her she wasn’t as brave as she thought she was.” He took a cigarette out of his pocket but he didn’t light up. Maybe he knew about Ella’s no smoking rule. Or maybe he was just a polite guy. He tap, tap, tapped one end of the cigarette against the cherry table. “We ran over to his house, and we got in his car and—”

“So you weren’t upstairs all night playing records?” It wasn’t what I’d heard or read in the old newspapers articles, and I wasn’t going to let it pass. “Darren’s mother said you were home. She said she heard music. That’s what she told the cops.”

“She did hear the music. Because when we got there…I mean, before we got in Darren’s car…” Will’s green stocking cap was on the table beside him. He scratched a finger behind his right ear. I guess I couldn’t blame him for being confused. Forty-five years of pickling his brain, and the results weren’t pretty. He scraped a hand over his nubby chin. “When we got to Darren’s house, we already knew what we were going to do. I mean, about playing that joke on Lucy. And we knew Mrs. Andrews would have had a fit if we were out late, so we ran upstairs as fast as we could, and we put a stack of albums on Darren’s stereo.” It was the first time since we sat down that Will dared to raise his head. “You two…” He looked from me to Ariel, who was sitting beside me. Yeah, the subject of murder—especially among friends—wasn’t exactly PG-rated, but I figured we owed Ariel this much. Right or wrong, she thought of herself as part of the investigation, and she deserved to hear the truth.

“You two wouldn’t understand because of all these CDs and DVDs and iPods and such that you have these days. But back when we were young, you put a record on a turntable and that’s how you played it. And on some turntables, you could stack the records up on the spindle that went through the hole at the center of the record. Five or six or seven records, one on top of the other. And when one finished playing, the next one would drop down, and then that one would play, too. That’s what Darren did when we got back to his place. He grabbed his Beatles albums and his Stones albums, and he stacked them on his stereo and he turned it on. He said it would make his mother think we were there, and that way she wouldn’t know what we were up to.”

Ariel scribbled this bit of info onto her legal pad.

“We got back downstairs fast, and we got in Darren’s car and raced over to the rapid station. You know, Lucy’s stop.” Will’s Adam’s apple jumped. “We got there just a little bit before the train pulled in and Lucy got off.”

One hand still beating out a rhythm with his cigarette, his other rapped the side of his coffee mug. A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye. Will stared over my head, his eyes unfocused. I was afraid we were going to lose him, and I couldn’t afford to let that happen. If I waited any longer to hear what had really happened that night, I was going to have a coronary. There was no use waiting for Ella to jump in and help out. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she stared into her teacup.

I scooted my chair a titch closer to the table and leaned forward. “You were only trying to scare Lucy. That’s what you said, Will. You said you were only trying to teach her a lesson.”

“Y…yes.” Once he started nodding, he didn’t stop. “Darren, he said we should pretend we were kidnappers. That we should sneak up on her and grab her, and that way, Lucy would get real scared and that would prove she wasn’t so brave after all.” He scrubbed his knuckles across his eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was no louder than a whisper. “We all thought it would be pretty funny.” His focus faded away along with his voice.

“So you attacked her when she got off the rapid and killed her?”

I elbowed Ariel in the ribs to shut her up and went for a smoother approach. “Whose idea was the blindfold?”

Will was too lost in his memories to ask how I even knew this detail, Ella probably couldn’t hear much of anything above the sounds of her own soft weeping, and Ariel was busy taking notes.

They took my question at face value. “The blindfold…” Will thought about it. “I don’t remember. Darren’s maybe. Yeah, it was. He said if Lucy saw us…well, then our joke wouldn’t work, would it? She wouldn’t be scared if she knew it was us. And gagging her…well, we had to do that or she’d scream and somebody would hear her.”

“And tying her hands?”

He lifted his coffee cup, but he didn’t drink. When he set it back down, the cup clattered against the saucer. “We had to do that so she wouldn’t fight back. So she wouldn’t make a scene and so she couldn’t take off the blindfold.”

It was clear—at least to me—that Will had been over this part of the story in his head a million times in the past forty-five years. I could hear the familiar ring of logic in his voice, as if going over the details and justifying every little thing would finally show him the flaws in the plan that had resulted in Lucy’s death. A million and one times, and he was no closer now to figuring out what had gone wrong than he had been then.

“It made sense,” he mumbled. “We were kids and we were stupid, and it all made so much sense to us.”

I couldn’t let the desperation that tinged his voice get a foothold.

I sat back, and as casually as if we were talking about the weather, I filled in the blanks. “So you waited for Lucy to get off the rapid, and when she did, you were ready for her. You came up behind her, right? I mean, it was the only way she wouldn’t have seen you. And since you were all working together, it would have been easy to grab her and blindfold her and gag her and tie her hands.”

Ella choked out a sob.

Will dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders trembled. He sat that way for a long time, and I counted out every painful second, eager for him to continue. But then, I didn’t exactly have the right to hurry him along. It had taken him forty-five years to get this far.

When he finally looked up, there were tears on his cheeks. “It was supposed to be funny,” he said. “We put her in the trunk of Darren’s car, and it was supposed to be funny and we…we drove to the park, and we pulled over and we were trying so hard not to laugh because we were going to go get her out of the trunk, and when we did, we couldn’t wait to see the look on Lucy’s face when she realized it was us. And we were going to ask her…then we were going to ask her how brave she was feeling. Only…”

Ella sniffled. “Will’s never told anyone any of this,” she said. She dabbed her nose with a paper napkin. “Not until tonight when he showed up here to talk to me. He’s spent a lot of years…” The words caught in her throat and she coughed them away. “Will has spent a long time thinking about what happened that night and wondering what he could have done differently.”

I thought back to Lucy’s side of the story and a rush of anger pounded through me like a jackhammer. I clutched the table. What they could have done differently was not held that blanket over Lucy’s face and suffocated her.

But I was getting ahead of myself.

I forced a calming breath that hit my lungs and burned like the devil. Pain was good. It made me focus.

“Was Lucy surprised when you opened the trunk and she saw it was you?” I asked.

Will tugged on his earlobe. “Like I said, we were going to surprise her. Oh man, we thought we were going to laugh so hard. And we parked the car, and Darren, that’s when he said he’d go get Lucy out of the trunk.”

I sat up like a shot. “He opened the trunk? Alone? By himself?”

If Will thought my questions were a little anxious, he didn’t let on. “That’s right. Darren said he’d get Lucy out and we could all be sitting in the car, and when she walked around to the front of the car, we’d pop out and surprise her. But then…” His mouth twisted. He closed his eyes, and his chest rose and fell. “He came back to the car…and…and Darren…he said…” Will jumped out of his chair and shot to the other side of the room.

“I can’t do it,” he wailed. “Ella, I can’t do it. I can’t say it. I told you, and I can’t say it again.”

She went to stand beside him and soothed him, one hand on his back.

“You don’t have to tell us,” I said, because let’s face it, I knew exactly what had happened. “I’ll tell you what I think, Will, and you tell me if I’m right.”

He nodded.

“I think Darren came back to the car and told you there was a problem.”

“That’s right. Yes, yes. That’s what happened.” Will came back and sat down. He balled one hand and rapped the table with his fist. “He said we did something wrong. Maybe…maybe we put the gag on too tight. Or maybe…maybe there was a leak in the exhaust system and the carbon monoxide built up in the trunk. By the time Darren went to let her out—”

“Lucy was already dead.” I felt a breath of relief whoosh out of me. Finally, we’d gotten to the truth. Or at least to part of it.

Because I was the only one who knew the rest of the story.

I thought it over, watching Will’s face to gauge his reaction when I asked, “And you came up with the story about how you were all at Darren’s when Lucy disappeared, and Mrs. Andrews confirmed it.”

“We were scared.” He gulped. “We thought if we told anybody what happened, we’d all get into real big trouble. And Darren, he was the one who said we should all just stick together. That if we kept our mouths shut, everything would be OK.”

“But it wasn’t OK, was it?” Understatement of the year! “Ella has spent all these years thinking about Lucy and worrying. And you, Will, you decided it was better to drown yourself in a bottle than face the truth. And Bobby—”

“He wanted to die.” Will rasped out the words. “That’s what we heard later from his buddies. Bobby just walked into the middle of that battle and never tried to stop or hide or defend himself. He let them kill him. I wish…I’ve spent all these years wishing I had the nerve to do something like that.”

“Do you think Janice felt the same way?”

Will knew better. He read the newspaper, the same as the rest of us. “The cops said Janice didn’t kill herself. Somebody tried to make it look like a suicide.”

“Do you know who?”

He scraped his hands together, but he didn’t answer.

I tried again. “Do you know why?”

“I don’t think it’s my fault. I mean, it couldn’t be, could it? Not a second time.” Will was trying so hard to convince himself by convincing us, it hurt. Ella sat back down beside him. By this time, Ariel was so caught up in the story, she wasn’t even writing anything down. Her nose was red, and I reached for the pile of paper napkins on the table and slid one her way.

“I called them,” Will said. “Janice and Darren. I called them after you came to see me at the rehab center, and I told them somebody was asking questions about Lucy. Darren…he said he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“So that’s why you left rehab.”

Will nodded. “Darren came to talk to me. He told me not to worry, that nobody could ever really find out what we did to Lucy. It was too long ago. And there was no proof. He brought me—”

“Let me guess, a week’s supply of Seagram’s VO.”

“A week’s supply, yeah, and it lasted me exactly three days.” He hung his head.

“And Janice?”

Will was so lost in thought, he flinched. “Janice, she told me to go away and never call her again and not to bother her. She said she didn’t remember anyone named Lucy and she didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Doesn’t that just figure.” Ella sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “They were supposed to be best friends.”

“And they might have been if they weren’t fighting over Darren,” I said. “These days, I’ll bet Janice thought everybody had forgotten all about Lucy. You were a threat, Will.”

“But nobody killed me. Not like…not like Janice.”

“Yeah, well…” I weighed the wisdom of scaring him then decided he needed to hear the truth. “Darren was probably hoping you’d drink yourself to death.”

Will shook his head. “No. Darren has always been my friend. He knew I was thinking about the past. He knew I was feeling bad. He was just trying to make me feel better.”

“The way he made Janice feel better?”

Ella’s face went ashen. “You mean, you think…You think Darren…?”

“Who else could it have been?” I stared at her long enough for this to sink in.

“But Darren…” Ella’s expression was sour.

“Darren was in on it just like the rest of them were,” I said. Only it wasn’t what I was thinking. Because what I was thinking was that he was really in on it more. Because somebody held that squishy blanket over Lucy’s face, and that somebody could only have been the person who went to get her out of the trunk. Of course, I couldn’t tell Will that yet. I couldn’t tell anyone. Not without proof. “Darren had as much to lose as anyone else.”