Dust to Dust (20 page)

“I take it you’re not Jimmi’s cousin,” said Kingsley.

“No. We made that up for the police. I was so freaked out and Jimmi was, well, she was, I mean, Stacy was her friend since middle school.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police who you are?” asked Kingsley.

“I knew my parents would find out. I couldn’t let that happen. They would take my car away. And Mother would have some kind of screaming fit if she knew I was hanging with Stacy Dance. I showed the police one of my fake IDs.”

Kingsley rolled his eyes. “You what?”

Samantha reminded Diane of Star, Frank’s daughter, the girl he adopted at sixteen when her parents, Frank’s best friends, were murdered. Like Samantha, she had multicolored hair, was defiant, and used kid logic to make decisions.

“They didn’t care. They hardly questioned me,” she said. “I told them I lived in Ohio and was going home and that Jimmi could get in touch with me if they needed me.”

“They bought that?” said Diane.

“I told you, they didn’t care. They were like my parents. I’m invisible. I think it’s my superpower,” she said.

“Why were you hanging with Stacy? How did you meet?” asked Kingsley.

“Both of us were auditing a class at Gainesville State College. She wanted to transfer there and was trying it out. I’m going there until I can transfer to UGA. I recognized her last name, but there are lots of Dances, so I didn’t think anything of it. Of course she recognized mine and kind of avoided me.”

“How did you finally meet?” asked Kingsley.

“I found out she was in a band. A real successful band. They played lots of gigs, and people in class knew them. See, I play the guitar and I’m really good. I wanted to be in the band and they needed another guitar player. I talked to her and that’s when she told me who she was. She was kind of freaked about it,” she said.

“You weren’t?” asked Kingsley.

“No.
She
didn’t do anything to my family. And she said her brother was innocent and she was going to prove it,” Samantha said.

“Did you believe her?” asked Kingsley.

“Why not? I’ve been blamed for stuff I didn’t do. My parents still think I took money out of my aunt’s purse when I was ten. It was my cousin who did it, but he’s a really good liar. So why couldn’t it have happened to her brother?” she said.

“What about all the evidence?” said Kingsley.

“Evidence doesn’t mean anything. It can be anything people want it to be. I mean, look at
Jurassic Park
. The dinosaurs looked real to me,” she said.

“It must be hard, living in a world where everything could be an illusion,” said Diane.

“We all do. It just means we can make the world the way we want it. That’s what Stacy’s band did. They wanted to be successful and they are making it real. Or, they were,” she said.

“You need to tell your parents you found her body,” said Kingsley.

“They’ll just yell,” she said. “They’ll tell me I betrayed El. You’d think they would want to be really close to me, with El gone and all, but they don’t. All Mother does is sit in front of that painting. And Dad . . . he just pays lip service to telling me not to be late. He doesn’t even know when I come home. He stays in his games. That’s how he’s remade his world,” she said.

“Games?” asked Diane.

“
Warcraft
and
Second Life
. He fights demons, rescues princesses, and builds his own world to live in.”

“I’m sorry,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged. “They gave me a cool car, clothes, telephones, and money. It’s not so bad. I don’t want that to stop. It’s all I have.”

“You need to talk to someone,” said Diane. “The police are likely to be coming around and they’ll recognize you. Your parents need to know what happened to you. Maybe this will jolt them into the real world. At least go to a counselor at college.”

Diane took one of her cards and wrote her psychiatrist friend Laura Hillard’s name and number.

“Dr. Hillard is a friend. Tell her I sent you. If you don’t want to talk to her, she can send you to someone here who would be good.”

“Shrinks can’t take things out of your head,” Samantha said.

“No, but they can teach you how to cope,” said Diane.

“I cope,” Samantha said in an uncertain voice, her eyes downcast.

“Are you having nightmares?” said Kingsley.

She nodded. “They’ve started back again. I had bad nightmares after El died,” she said.

“Take Diane’s advice. See someone, just to talk to, at least,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, sticking the card in her purse.

“Have your parents been like this for nine years?” asked Kingsley.

“It comes and goes. It gets bad around Christmas and El’s birthday. It’s worse when Mother is drinking. Sometimes she takes a cure for a while, but sooner or later she goes back to it. She likes vodka in tea. Can you imagine? If she put it in orange juice, she’d at least get some vitamin C.”

“By ‘takes a cure,’ what do you mean?” asked Kingsley.

“She goes to visit my grandmother for a while. They don’t have any alcohol around and she stays in the house. Sometimes she goes to a clinic in Atlanta. She comes back and starts falling back into bad habits. I told them we should move, but they won’t. They don’t want to go to a house where El has never been. They think it’ll make her disappear, and I’m like, hello, she’s gone. She’s already disappeared.”

“You seem to have supportive neighbors,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged. “Kathy Nicholson is pretty nice. I go over to her house some. She gets kind of lonely. We talk about things. But it’s not like she can do anything about my parents. Wendy Walters means well, but I think Mother wore her down. She used to try to discourage her from drinking, but now she just helps her. You saw when I brought the tea.”

“Why did Stacy want to speak with your parents?” asked Kingsley. “If she knew you, you could give her a lot of the answers she wanted.”

“Not really. I was nine when El died. I didn’t know a whole lot that was going on in El’s life. Stacy thought they could tell her about the day El disappeared. I didn’t really know much about that. Except, I think my parents think it was my fault.”

“How is that?” asked Diane.

“We’d been fighting that day and El said she didn’t want to ride all the way to Grandma’s house with me and she was just going to stay here. She wasn’t home when we got back,” she said.

“That wasn’t your fault,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged again and took a sip of drink. “Maybe not, but still, if we hadn’t fought . . .”

“You think she might have wanted to stay home for reasons of her own?” said Diane. “And the argument with you was just her excuse?”

Samantha raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” asked Diane.

“She always had boyfriends. You saw her portrait. That’s pretty much what she looked like. But it would have been in her diary,” said Samantha.

“She kept a diary?” asked Kingsley.

Samantha nodded. “I loaned it to Stacy to copy.”

“Your sister kept a diary?” said Kingsley.

“Yes, like forever. I mentioned it to Stacy one time and she begged me to let her see it. I told her it wouldn’t help. See, El caught Mother reading her diary when she first started writing one and she was really pissed. That’s when she started writing in this code she made up. El was really smart. Mother wanted to read her diaries after she died, to be close, I guess. But she couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Dad packed them in a box when he packed up El’s room. Mom wanted to keep it the way it was, but it was a little too creepy for Dad. They saved her things in the basement. I took her last diary so Stacy could copy it.”

“Did she copy it?” asked Kingsley. He leaned forward in his chair slightly. Diane knew what he was thinking. Diaries can be loaded with just the best clues.

“Yes,” said Samantha.

So, the copies were probably in the file that was missing, thought Diane. “What happened to the diary?” she asked.

Samantha Carruthers hesitated and was quiet a moment. Then, quick as a mouse, she slipped her hand into her backpack, pulled out a book, and handed it to Kingsley.

“Stacy returned it to you?” asked Kingsley.

“No, not exactly. When I found her . . . like that, it was in her bookcase. The spine was facing out, but I saw it right away. So, well, I took it. After all, it was mine. Or, at least, my family’s. I’ve been carrying it around, hoping maybe I could figure out how to decipher it,” she said. “Jimmi said Stacy’s dad told her Stacy’s folder disappeared . . . the one full of stuff about her investigation. I figured something in the diary might be important.”

The front of the journal had been découpaged with magazine cutouts from the television series
Charmed
.

Kingsley opened it up and he and Diane looked at the writing. It was a mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols.

“See,” said Samantha. “You can’t read it.”

“Will you let us copy it?” said Diane.

“Sure. There’s a place in the mall where we can go,” Samantha said.

They took the last bites of their oversized cookies, washed them down with their drinks, and threw the trash away. Samantha led them to a Mailboxes Plus store where Diane copied the entire diary. When she finished, she handed it back to Samantha.

Sam stood for a moment, looking awkward. “You aren’t going to call my parents, are you?” she asked.

“As you said, you are an adult now,” said Diane.

“Yeah, but . . .” She hesitated, looking at her watch. “I guess I’d better get to the library.”

“Thank you, Samantha,” said Diane. “Seriously, you should talk to your parents. They need to know what’s going on in your life.”

“I’ll think about it, but you don’t know them like I do,” she said.

“You may not know them as well as you think,” said Diane.

Diane and Kingsley left the mall with Samantha. They watched her drive off before they got into Kingsley’s Prius.

“She needs help,” he said.

“Yes, she does. And her parents need to wake up and realize they have another daughter to care for. She’s old enough to be out on her own. If she decides to make the break, it will be harder on all of them.”

Kingsley glanced at the package of copies Diane held in her hand. “So, how do we go about deciphering that?” he said as he left the parking area and headed back to Rosewood.

“I’ll ask Frank to do it,” said Diane.

She removed the first several pages of the diary from the store bag. The writing looked like gibberish to her—a lot of stars, squares, wavy lines, letters that didn’t make sense, and numbers scattered throughout.

“He can do stuff like this?” said Kingsley.

“He and Jin too. They love codes, but—and if you repeat this, I’ll have to kill you—Frank is better at it,” said Diane.

Kingsley laughed. “He can really decipher that?”

“Sure. I’ll have to see if he has time. If not, I’ll ask Jin to do it,” she said.

“I think the thing I appreciate most about working with you—aside from your brilliant mind, of course—is that all the people around you have such unusual talents that are terribly useful and interesting.”

“That’s true. I have a great appreciation of them myself,” said Diane.

They rode in silence for a while, Diane still trying to make sense of the writing. She gave up and slipped the pages back into the bag. Her talents simply didn’t run to encryption.

“You know I have to reinterview all of Stacy’s band members,” Kingsley said after a while. “I was completely fooled by Samantha and Jimmi. I thought they were telling me the truth.”

“They probably saw themselves as telling you the truth. You heard her. Samantha makes her own reality. It’s apparently the way she copes,” said Diane. “It’s apparently the way her parents are coping.”

“Perhaps, but I’m a pretty bad detective when I can’t tell if kids are telling me lies,” said Kingsley.

“They aren’t kids. They’re nascent adults. They’re always a challenge. But, yes, I agree you will have to talk with them again.”

The rest of the way to Rosewood, they discussed what they had learned, which, other than the spectacular revelation that Samantha Carruthers discovered Stacy Dance’s body, and that Ellie Rose Carruthers kept a diary, wasn’t a lot.

They both believed that Kathy Nicholson, the neighbor across the street, did not, in fact, see the face of Ryan Dance. But at this point, she believed she did, and probably could not be shaken from that belief.

“Do you think the father, Dr. Carruthers, could have killed Stacy?” asked Kingsley.

“I don’t know. He has a temper.”

“Yes, but it was mostly verbal,” said Kingsley.

“Mostly verbal? What about his charging up to the car and banging on the roof?” said Diane. “That seemed pretty physical.”

“But when I was facing him, he could have been much more threatening and in my face, but he wasn’t. I think he is basically a timid man. That’s why he works out his bravery in the games. He never has to face anyone.”

“What does he do for a living?” asked Diane.

“He’s a podiatrist,” said Kingsley. “Works mainly in sports medicine.”

“Still,” said Diane, “if he thought Stacy might be able to free her brother, what would he do? I think just the possibility of it might enrage both Samantha’s mother and father.”

“I don’t know if the mere possibility would make him go over the edge,” said Kingsley. “But I think the police should look at his alibi—assuming they reopen the case. I hope Dr. Webber comes through.”

“I wonder how it’s going. Lynn should have the body by now. . . . In fact”—Diane looked at her watch—“she should have had the body for several hours.”

“If she finds that it’s a homicide, my boss and I—he likes to be in on these things—will take the evidence you collected to the detective in charge and ask him to reopen the case.”