Last Seen Leaving (25 page)

“She will,” he said tiredly, pouring more scotch into his tumbler, “eventually.” He took a sip, closed his eyes, and exhaled. “This has all been … exceedingly difficult for her, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'm afraid she hasn't been herself since January disappeared. Her outburst on Tuesday was just the tip of the iceberg.”

It was both an apology and a rebuke of his wife, and I squirmed uncomfortably. “I think she's calmed down now.”

“She'll start up again.” He rubbed his mouth ruefully. His hand looked raw and chapped from repeated washings, and I wondered if he was a germophobe. “The election is Tuesday. What am I going to do with her?”

The question was both crass and rhetorical and, once again, I found myself disappointed to see Mr. Walker's selfish priorities cast in such sharp relief. I didn't have the balls to call him on it, though—especially in light of what he might well have done to the last teenager that pissed him off. “Maybe she needs some help? Like, professional help, I mean.”

“That reminds me,” Mr. Walker said suddenly. Putting down his glass, he reached into his pocket and withdrew an orange plastic vial. Popping off the cap, he turned it over into the palm of his hand and a cascade of blue capsules tumbled out. “She'd better take some of these, too.”

“What are they?”

“Sedatives,” he replied. He noticed my reaction and, with a faint smile, added, “I know, I know, you shouldn't mix pills and alcohol. Believe me, though, Mrs. Walker can handle a lot more than this. She'll be fine, don't worry.”

“What if she won't take them?”

“Good point.” With obviously practiced skill, he broke two capsules open and emptied their contents into the whiskey I held in my hands. “Swirl that around a bit—she won't even notice.”

I did as I was told, my stomach feeling unsettled and queasy, and then carried the concoction back into the kitchen. Stiffly, aware that I was being watched, I slid the drink in front of January's mother. She looked up at me with a feeble smile.

“Thank you, Flynn.” She downed the whiskey in two gulps, then closed her hand over mine on the counter and expelled a breath that rattled like an old car with a busted muffler. “You're a sweet boy. January was lucky to have met you.”

“I…” I blushed, feeling miserably unable to accept the compliment.

“The truth is,” she admitted, letting out another sigh, “I wish it
had
been yours.” There was absolutely nothing to say to this, so I sat stock-still and allowed her to continue. “I was young when I had January. Too young. Everyone told me it was a big mistake, to have a baby at seventeen, but I thought I knew everything. Kids always think they know everything. Sure, I understood that childcare was challenging—I had younger siblings, I'd been a babysitter—but I never had any doubt that I could hack it as a mom. I'd always landed on my feet before, why would this be any different?” She was staring at the black windows of the morning room, our faces reflected in the overlaid glass. Tammy's voice was already starting to get soft around the edges. “I didn't use to believe in having regrets, but maybe I should have listened. Maybe I was selfish.”

“Don't say that,” I offered weakly. “January loved you. She said you weren't just her mom, you were her friend, too, you know?”

Tammy sobbed a little, then squeezed my hand. “Such a sweet boy.”

Her eyes were dreamy and unfocused, her movements becoming lethargic, and Mr. Walker seemed to take this as his cue to reenter the scene. “Come along, Tammy, let's get you to bed.”

“Flynn is a sweet boy,” she told him faintly as he pulled her up from the barstool and put his arm around her waist. “A good boy.”

“Of course,” Jonathan responded, his tone perfunctory and meaningless, and the smell of bullshit seemed to have an adverse effect on his wife.

Pushing out of his grasp with an unsteady stumble, she snapped, “You don't care. You only care about yourself, about your
election
.”

“Tammy—”

“You want everything to be perfect, and even then it's still not good enough!” Her words ran together like watercolors. “The more I try to do what you want, the less shits you give. My unhappiness is an ‘inconvenience'! My contributions are
unappreciated
! Look, sweetheart,” she announced, with a sadistic cackle, “I fixed the kitchen for you!”

“I noticed.” Mr. Walker's tone was as remote as the surface of Pluto.

“
Where were you when I needed you?
” she demanded accusingly.

His face turned beet red. “We have been over this at least a dozen times: I had an important meeting with some people from the PAC, I had too much to drink, I got a hotel room—”

“I'm talking about tonight!” Tammy slurred furiously. “Where were you
tonight
?”

Something rippled across her husband's face and disappeared, leaving him rigid and icy. “You're confused, and it's time for you to go to bed.” He took hold of her again, roughly this time, and hauled her purposefully toward the stairs. Tammy didn't look happy, but she didn't have the strength to fight him. Over his shoulder, he called back in an unfriendly manner, “You'd better go home now, Flynn. And I trust you'll have the sense not to discuss this sordid little scene publicly.”

They were halfway up the stairs, and me halfway to the front door, when Tammy's broken whisper echoed in the airy foyer. “I was talking about
tonight.…
”

*   *   *

The next day was Saturday, and I got up late—not only because that is a teenager's primary moral imperative on weekends but also because I'd spent the night tossing and turning, thinking about Jonathan Walker. I was starting to see that he had married Tammy McConville not out of love but out of strategic necessity. She was young and still beautiful—“the quintessential MILF,” Micah had once dubbed her—so she looked good by his side, and with her he'd leveled up from being a Divorced Single Parent to being a Family Man, thereby increasing his political cachet.

If he'd truly cared for Tammy, it wouldn't have been his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter's ex-boyfriend that he'd have called to the rescue when his wife had a mental breakdown and started renovating the kitchen with a claw hammer. Again, he'd thought strategically, using unimportant me to defuse the problem, and then casting me out indifferently once I had served my purpose. He viewed the people around him as either resources or problems, and acted accordingly.

I already knew he thought of January as a “problem,” and that he had no issue with resorting to devious means when it came to controlling difficult McConville women. I also knew he'd made at least one mistake.

On Tuesday, during the first argument I'd witnessed between him and Tammy, he'd said that the night January died he'd been having “drinks with some boosters”; but last night, when Tammy shifted from self-destruct to attack mode, the alibi he'd spit out was “an important meeting with some people from the PAC.” I didn't know much about politics, but I knew from my U.S. government class that a political action committee raised money through donations and then funneled it to a candidate, while boosters were more like goodwill ambassadors dedicated to promoting said candidate. Unless Jonathan Walker had said “boosters” when he meant to say “donors,” I was pretty sure I'd caught him in a discrepancy. Not that I could do much with it. It was circumstantial, a slip of the tongue, and hardly enough to incriminate a man with Mr. Walker's level of power and influence.

Still half-asleep, I got out of bed and started down the stairs, surprised when I reached the ground floor and heard the indistinct bleating of the television. Typically, my parents are never around on Saturdays, choosing instead to get up at some ungodly hour so they could exercise, run errands, and do whatever it is parents do before finally coming back in time for dinner. When they
were
home, it was invariably so that they could engage in some conspicuously constructive activity and pressure me to join in. The only time they watched television in the afternoon was on Sunday, a special dispensation issued for the sake of college football.

The second my footsteps sounded in the hallway, the television went off. When I entered the living room, I found my mother staring at me from the couch with the worried, guilty expression of a little kid who's just been caught drawing on the walls.

“You're up,” she informed me with a painfully false attempt at cheer.

“Yeah.” I scratched my head, my hair a stiff mass in its usual state of morning disarray. “So are you.” We stared at each other some more. “So … what's going on?”

“Nothing,” my mom responded automatically, and then squeezed her eyes shut, embarrassed by the obviousness of the lie. “There was—” She stopped herself, shook her head. “Something awful has happened.”

“Oh, shit, what now?” It was a testament to the seriousness of the situation that she didn't even offer a cursory cluck of the tongue in response to my four-letter word.

“Sweetie, they found a body today,” she began, and I felt the room do a complete barrel roll, my stomach going as cold as the ocean floor. My vision fogged over, and my mom's voice was hollow and far away when she added hastily, “Not January.” I was still frozen stiff, trying to process this, when she delivered a piece of news that was even more shocking. “It was another student from Dumas. A girl named Reiko Matsuda.”

 

TWENTY-ONE

MY MOM SAID
some things for a while, all of which were drowned out by the clamoring buzz that filled my brain, and then she turned the television back on so that I could see the news program she'd been hiding from me.

The gist of things was this: Early that morning, two kayakers had discovered the body of sixteen-year-old Reiko Matsuda floating in the Huron River. A gifted student and talented artist, the Dumas Academy junior had been “stabbed and mutilated” before being dumped in the water. She had been last seen leaving school, where she was involved in the drama club and frequently stayed late for rehearsals. Police were still seeking the whereabouts of her car, as well as anyone who might have knowledge of her movements.

Dazed by the time the report ended, I then numbly endured my mother's delicate questions about whether I had known this Reiko Matsuda, who was reported to have been a “friend of January McConville's.” It was impossible not to connect what had happened to the two girls, and silly to pretend like they might not be linked. Two Dumas students, both sharing the same secret, meeting tragic fates within as many weeks? The odds of that being a coincidence were so slim they weren't even worth calculating. As my mom's sympathetic probing continued, though, I was thinking:
Is
that
what happened to my girlfriend?
Had she been “stabbed and mutilated” and dumped in the river? Is that why they still hadn't found her? And what, exactly, did “mutilated”
mean
, anyway? Or maybe I didn't even want to know; just thinking about it made the room swim around me.

And through the din of my morbid thoughts, I kept hearing Tammy's insistent voice in my head:
I'm talking about tonight. Where were you
tonight
?

I was still sure Mr. Walker was guilty, but the news gave me pause nonetheless. If he had indeed forced himself on January and gotten her pregnant as a result, he would have the strongest motive out of anyone for wanting her gone; a powerful man on the cusp of gaining national importance, what would happen to him if the story came out? Reiko had known the truth, and had promised to consider going to the authorities, which would have made her a serious threat as well. It all fit. The only catch was, I couldn't figure out how the man could have possibly gotten wind of a conversation that had transpired in the lobby of the Dumas theater building the previous afternoon.

I tried to expand my thinking. Eddie? Anson? Same catch applied.
Tammy?
It seemed far-fetched, but … she'd never exactly been the steadiest boat in the harbor, and her assault on the kitchen had not only revealed a mania I never knew existed in her but also made it clear she was capable of doing real damage when she wanted to. Anson had implied that January tried to seduce Jonathan; no matter what the facts were, if Tammy had believed it to be true, could she have killed her own daughter in a fit of manic rage? I rubbed my temples; it sounded like a soap opera—and
still
there was the issue of how Tammy could have known that Reiko was a potential problem.

Maybe Jonathan had known or suspected that January had told Reiko about what happened, and maybe he'd been planning to kill her all along. Or maybe Reiko, believing she could intimidate him into confessing, had confronted the man, and he had seized the opportunity to silence her.

How it had happened almost didn't matter; obviously I couldn't prove that Mr. Walker had killed Reiko any more than I could prove he'd killed January, but I had to tell the police about the conversation I'd had with the pink-haired girl, regardless. I'd been seen with her at Dumas the afternoon of the day she was murdered, and they were bound to find out about it, so I had to report it first and trust that they would eventually nail the man, even if I couldn't.

Taking the initiative, I called the station and, after explaining myself, was directed to Detective Garcia. I left out my speculation about Jonathan Walker, even the stuff about the changing alibi—the police would already be checking into the whereabouts of the Walker family, and I was pretty sure that hearing the theory from a breathless teenager would make them less inclined to take it seriously—but I explained that I had spoken to Reiko the day she was killed, what it was that the girl had revealed to me, and how I had tried to convince her to come forward.