Fatality (13 page)

Tabor watched Rose push food around on her plate. He knew she’d much rather have their usual brunch of French toast. He wanted, suddenly, to whisk his sister home, take her to the safety and comfort of ordinary food in their own ordinary kitchen.

Mom and Dad debated whether or not to have coffee, and whether or not the coffee should be decaf. Rose stared at them with a remote sadness that shocked Tabor.

She has a reason for silence, he thought.

He shivered.

A
NJELICA LOFFT WAS THINKING
about Rose. She could picture Rose as vividly as if they had just gotten together last week, but it had been four years.

From the time she was very small, Anjelica had brought girls home for the weekend because her parents were busy. If she didn’t bring a friend, she had only the staff. The staff were generally nice, although rarely English-speaking. They never lasted long because the lake estate was isolated.

Depending on her father’s interests at the moment, the staff would have specialties. At one time he had been in love with antique automobiles and that required two mechanics and a polisher. Three or four years ago, he’d sold most of the cars, having become interested in horses, and last spring he turned to gardens, formal European gardens that looked faintly ridiculous against the backdrop of rough mountains and choppy lake.

And yet, they didn’t often go to the estate. Anjelica’s mother didn’t care for the country and would not have dreamed of getting on a horse. Cities were her passion and she liked to pick one every season.

The lake estate waited, baking in the sun or frosting in the snow, until the Loffts remembered to visit again.

There had been only one year when they went routinely to the lake estate. Anjelica was in seventh, her sole year in public school. Dad was vaguely thinking of running for office and had been advised that his only child couldn’t be in private school if he wanted votes. But he lost interest in the political scene and soon Anjelica was back in private school.

What a relief when she was finally old enough for boarding school and Mother could travel all year and Dad could admit he cared for nothing but work.

But during the fall of seventh grade, Anjelica had been at a plain old public middle school. The building was impressively ugly, slabs of classrooms stacked at inconvenient angles. The student body, in Anjelica’s opinion, closely resembled their school. They needed redesign and a better budget.

The girls traveled in packs. They were wrapped up in their own uninteresting world, as if their own little lives mattered; as if anybody cared.

Anjelica entertained herself by inviting only one member of a clique to the lake estate, and upon arrival she’d totally ignore the girl in order to demonstrate that nobody in dumb old middle school was desirable.

Her actual intent had been to show her parents a thing or two, but her parents did not notice. “How delightful to have you,” they would say graciously to the little houseguest, and then they would vanish. Actually, it was usually Dad who vanished. Mother generally wasn’t there to start with.

Perhaps she remembered Rose so clearly because Rose had not been interested in her, either. Rose had climbed into the car in a sort of stupor and was not roused by anything. When they arrived at the lake, Rose had hardly been able to find the front door, never mind notice whether Anjelica was in a room or out of it.

“She’s like a grocery bag,” Anjelica said to her father on that Saturday afternoon. “She’s upright, she holds things, but that’s all you can say of her.” Anjelica had been worried about her father. He had not stopped pacing since they arrived at the mansion. He had the news playing on televisions throughout the house and kept going to the front door of the mansion, staring down the long, long drive that attached them to a remote mountain road.

What was he waiting for?

What did he want to know?

Who did he expect to appear?

“Just get through the weekend, Anjel,” her father said tiredly. “On Monday we’ll look for a good school, where the girls will measure up and be worthy of you.” He flicked the remote and another news channel came up.

Sunday, having abandoned Rose for hours, Anjelica wandered back to see what the grocery bag was doing and found Rose writing page after page in a little leather-bound book.

Anjelica had to laugh.

A journal? How pathetic. Rose was lifeless. She could have nothing to write. But maybe Rose didn’t think so. Maybe she was having a wonderful time. Maybe she was putting exclamation points after every sentence. Fun! Fun! Fun!

Anjelica dragged Rose outside, had the stable hands stick her on a horse, and sent them out for an hour. Rose bounced painfully and anxiously. Anjelica imagined her writing later in her journal, “Oooooh, I rode a horse! Anjelica has such a neat, neat, neat life. I’m sooooo lucky to be here.”

Anjelica Lofft walked back to her house, dug through Rose’s duffel bag, and took out the diary.

She read the entries at the back, and then she read them again. She had no idea how much time had passed, whether Rose had been out riding for ten minutes or two hours. The words on the page paralyzed her.

She almost cut out that page, but no matter how carefully Anjelica removed it, Rose would notice.

Anjelica Lofft was only twelve. She had never made an important decision by herself. How would her father handle this?

Milton Lofft loved to gamble. The higher the stakes, the more excited he got. Every aspect of his huge business was a gamble. That was what he and Frannie fought about. Frannie was careful; Milton Lofft despised being careful.

Anjelica gambled.

She gambled that Rose herself would destroy the diary. She gambled that nobody else would have a chance to glance at the diary—and if they did, Rose’s secret would so appall them that they would have no eyes for other information.

The week following Rose’s visit was hideous. The shock of Frannie’s death was very great Anjelica had been fond of Frannie. She grieved for months. She could still weep, wondering how frightened Frannie, had been, how long it had taken, how much it had hurt.

Four years blurred her memory of Frannie but not of Rose. Whenever she thought of Rose, she shut her thoughts down. That memory had to be wrong.

Her father had been using the lake estate quite a bit this year, and many weekends Anjelica left boarding school to stay with him. Mother came more than once. It was nice to be a young woman with her parents instead of a kid.

When the police showed up at the lake estate wanting to discuss the murder of Frannie Bailey, Anjelica was stunned. Surely they had given up, stuck the paper file in some storeroom and the computer file on some unused disk.

Her father did not allow her to be present for the questioning, nor did he allow them to question her. Afterward she said, “What did they ask about?”

He shrugged. “Same as before. Was Frannie alive when I left. They actually implied that I’m paying the Lymond child off. Buying her silence. Can you imagine? I told them to check her bank accounts. Then they implied that the girl herself had something to do with Frannie’s death. I said, Don’t be insane, she was just a little kid! Leave the poor girl alone.”

Dad went back to work, visibly unworried. His computer sucked him in, because for Milton Lofft, the world was virtual and the screen was real.

But the police came back.

It was only two weekends later.

Her father was in his office, dealing with business problems in Asia. Dad would not have let the police in a second time, but Anjelica was desperate to know what had made them reopen the case. “What else is there to ask?” she said, trying to look mildly puzzled instead of frantic.

The police said, “Is your father here? Would you ask him to join us?”

“Certainly.” Anjelica’s knees were shaking. She left them in the vast stone foyer and walked down a long, sweeping corridor to Dad’s office. A wall of windows faced the mountains while the interior wall was lined with the sculptures Dad bought the year he was interested in Mayan culture.

But in his office, Dad burst out laughing. “The funniest thing,” he said. “I meant to tell you, Anjel. That little girl—Rose Lymond, remember?—she kept a diary. My attorneys found out about it. They called me the other day.”

Anjelica Lofft had lost her gamble. Rose Lymond had not thrown away the diary.

It had had little hot watercolors on each page; flowers in scarlet or leaves in orange. Rose’s neat, curly script had disintegrated toward the end and she had not even seen the illustrations but written right over them.

How could her father be laughing? Unless Anjelica was wrong about what she had read. Or Rose had been wrong when she wrote.

“The Lymond kid was so worried the police would read it,” said Milton Lofft, “that she actually stole the police car where they’d put her diary. Is that crazy or what? I still remember you called her a grocery bag. I loved that phrase, Anjel. You’ve always been so good with words.”

It was Rose’s words that were going to count now. Anjelica couldn’t even breathe. She felt as if she had asthma. In seventh grade there had even been a little girl who died of asthma. Middle school and memory closed in on Anjelica. She was sick with anxiety.

“So then,” said Anjelica’s father, “the kid rips up the pages and flushes them down the toilet in some Burger King. I’d hire this Lymond girl in a heartbeat. She doesn’t fool around. I bet the police won’t tell me they never read the diary.” He got up from his computer screen. “I bet they’ve come to imply that in her diary, Rose Lymond tells all.”

Anjelica walked dazedly after her father, who entertained himself by stonewalling the police. He was good at it. By the end of the twenty minutes he allotted for this, Anjelica had decided that the police had no shiny new piece of evidence. The case had been reopened for splash value. Milton Lofft was a big fish. Be a kick to reel him in. The police were dangling a worm in the water to see if anything bit.

But it was Rose Lymond who had bitten when she destroyed her diary.

In a sense, therefore, Anjelica Lofft was free. The entries were gone as if they had never been. She could set her worry down.

But Anjelica was no longer twelve. She was sixteen. Her worries were older and heavier, and her need to know was far more acute. What had Rose Lymond actually seen?

It doesn’t matter, Anjelica told herself a thousand times.

It does matter, she said another thousand.

Anjelica called her boarding school to say that she was ill and would return a day late. She took a spare car and drove ninety miles south to the city, past the house they had once lived in and the ugly middle school.

What a selfish little rat she had been at age twelve.

She imagined herself showing up at high school, running into the girls she had treated so badly in seventh. It was not a pleasant thought.

I’ve turned out quite well, she told them silently. You might even like me now. I’m nice a good deal of the time and make an effort to be kind. I’m hardly ever sarcastic and now I know what it is to fail, and be unpopular, and get hurt.

She ate in a restaurant even Mother had thought adequate. From there she telephoned Rose’s friend Chrissie. That had been stupid.

Twice she tried to talk to Rose. Also stupid.

Anjelica had to laugh when she thought of Rose.

She and Rose were blundering down the exact same path, saving their secrets, maintaining their silence.

On Monday after school, Alan Finney was aware the moment Rose Lymond joined the small crowd on the bleachers on the west side of the baseball diamond. Baseball always gave you time to look around. The sunny, slow pace of baseball never failed to seduce him. It was a game that could explode at the crack of a bat or drift aimlessly, inning after inning.

He was not surprised to see Rose.

The Lymonds were big sports fans. They followed high school sports, local minor league teams, and distant major league teams. They followed baseball and basketball, football and golf, soccer and tennis. He had the impression that Rose attended games because her father did. She liked being with her father.

Alan liked being with his father, too, but Alan’s father had a long commute and a demanding job and wasn’t around much. Rose’s father got to more games than Alan’s, and Mr. Lymond didn’t even have a kid playing this year.

Now that he knew Rose was in the crowd, Alan stopped looking at the crowd. If he let himself think about Rose, he wouldn’t be able to play.

Tabor had called Alan a second time. “Stop her from doing anything dumb, Alan,” he’d said anxiously.

Rose isn’t the one doing anything, thought Alan.

But to Tabor, he said, “Okay. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

It was obvious to Chrissie that Rose did not know what she was doing. And it was possible that the Loffts did.

So Monday after school, Chrissie told her coach she’d be late for practice.

“You’ll what? You will not! You will—”

But by chance, Mr. Burgess, the vice principal, was passing by.

“I’m behind in my research,” said Chrissie loudly, looking down on her five-foot-seven coach. “I have to spend an hour in the library or fail.”

Her coach didn’t give a fried doughnut whether Chrissie failed but could hardly say so in front of Mr. Burgess. Smiling falsely at both of them, Chrissie left fast, before the situation changed.

The school library was silent except for the clicking of keys, the humming of printers, and the churning out of paper. Nobody looked at anybody, being far too involved with their screens. At hers, Chrissie pulled up the local newspaper and keyed in the school account to pay for access. In moments, she had found that November of four years ago.

The Friday morning paper would have been printed and distributed by dawn, twelve hours before Rose was picked up by Milton Lofft. It was the Saturday regional section that would actually tell what had happened on Friday.

Darn little.

OFFICIALS WANT SECOND OPINION ON COST OF NEW ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Well, they never had built the new elementary school, so presumably the second opinion had been negative.