Stalker Girl (21 page)

Carly couldn’t bring herself to look at her sighing mother or her bewildered, sleep-deprived father or Nick, who kept trying to catch her eye.

She lifted her head and, looking only at Susan G. Whitman, Esq., said, “I know what I did.”

“But stalking? Why stalking?” Nick asked. “I thought this was about trespassing. That’s what the police said—”

“Doesn’t there have to be a pattern for stalking?” asked Isabelle. “A threat of some kind?”

“Why would she want to stalk this girl? Who is she?” her father wanted to know.

Carly kept her head down, but she could feel them all looking at her, waiting for her explanation.

Susan broke the silence. “Carly?”

Carly studied the wood grain in the table. Now that she looked closely, she could see it wasn’t solid wood but veneer. Some of it had chipped away at the edge, revealing particleboard underneath.

“Carly,” Susan said once more as she reached out and touched Carly’s upper arm. “I know this is hard. But if I’m going to help you—and I think I can help you—you’re going to have to help me.”

She stopped and waited. Outside the closed door, phones rang and rang. Carly wondered what the people on the other end of those calls had done that needed the services of Babcock & Whitman.

Susan pushed the manila folder that had been sitting in front of her into the center of the table and opened it to a faint black-and-white picture from a printer in need of toner. Without lifting her head, Carly studied the picture.

At first all she saw was trees. There was no color, but the shades of gray and the partly empty branches told her it was fall. And then, through an opening in the trees, a bench.

She recognized the hat. Even in black and white it was still ugly and still too big for her. You couldn’t see her face, because she was looking down, at her lap, at her Harriet the Spy notebook.

“What’s that?” Carly’s mother asked, peering into the center of the table.

Susan tried to get a response. “Carly?”

Now it was no longer a matter of refusing to speak. Carly couldn’t speak. Her heart was pounding, and a strong tingling sensation ran through her whole body. She wondered if this was what a person felt like before fainting. She hoped so. She would have liked nothing more than to black out right then.

But Carly never was the fainting type.

Her mother reached for the picture and lifted it to her eyes, so she didn’t see what the rest of them saw. Another picture beneath it. Same bench, same girl on the bench, but from a different angle. And close-up. Though she wasn’t facing the camera directly, Carly’s face was fully visible. She was looking at something. What? Oh, the swinging baby and her distracted, newspaper-reading father.

It was only a blur. If you didn’t know you might think it was a bird, or a spot on the camera lens—but Carly knew, as the photographer had, too, that it was a little red shoe caught just after it slipped from the baby’s foot. Which meant it was right before Taylor swooped in to retrieve it for the pervy father, saving him whatever grief his wife would dispense if he came home with a one-shoed baby.

Carly’s father reached for that picture and held it to his eyes. There was another beneath it. “Who took these?”

“Taylor Deen took these pictures, Mr. Finnegan.”

“The girl who—?”

“Yes.”

Carly herself reached for the next picture, of the firemen showing off for Taylor. She remembered the look on the guy’s face when Taylor burned him with the fake phone number and wished she could tell Nick the story. He would have loved that one.

But the firemen were beside the point. The reason this picture was in this folder was in the upper left corner. There she was again.

She thought back to that moment in the park. She’d had no idea what to do with herself when Taylor stopped to take pictures of the firemen. And so she’d stood there just kind of staring until she remembered to look busy. Just after that picture was snapped, she’d gotten out her phone and made the first of the many fake calls she’d make that day.

Carly’s mother asked, “How many of these are there?”

Susan laid the rest out on the table.

In a shot of a crowded fish market in Chinatown, there was a close-up of Carly gazing into a tank of live fish and turtles. There she was again, surveying the mystery vegetables at Mean Vegetable Lady’s store. There she was, placing stalks of bok choy in her brown bag.

Passing by a bodega later in the day. The ugly hat replaced by the trucker cap, the turquoise reading glasses replaced by the Paris Hilton sunglasses.

“Wait. Wait,” Isabelle said. “This is someone else. Carly doesn’t have a hat like that.”

“Carly?” All four looked at her.

Her mouth and throat were dry, but she managed to croak out. “It’s me. I bought the hat in Chinatown.”

The last picture was a close-up of the bok-choy bomb that had ended Carly’s adventure in spying.

“I don’t know why that one’s in here.” Susan shrugged.

Carly didn’t know, either, but she found the picture fascinating. The bok choy was strangely beautiful with its dark leaves splayed out against the grainy sidewalk, surrounded by dark circles of ancient spat-out gum and a lone, lipstick-stained cigarette butt. It was like Taylor had taken Carly’s craziness and made it into art.

“Eight so far. The girl says she thinks there may be more. She hasn’t looked at all of them from that day.”

“But”—Carly’s father shook his head as he spoke—“it looks to me like Carly is the one being stalked here.”

“Yeah,” said her mother, happy for a straw to grasp onto. “All I see here are pictures of my daughter walking around Manhattan, minding her own business, and somebody keeps taking pictures of her.”

Her father reached for the one of her in the fish market. “How is this inducing fear in anyone?”

The room went quiet again while everyone stared at the pictures, then at Carly, then back to the pictures.

Finally Susan broke the silence. “Carly? Is that what’s going on here? Are you following or being followed?”

Carly didn’t answer. Didn’t even acknowledge the question. She was still looking at the bok choy.

“Carly.” Susan was losing patience. “Your parents are suggesting that maybe you were the wronged party here. Is that the case?”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath in through her nose, and said, “No.”

Susan explained that these were parts of larger photographs that had been zoomed and cropped to show Carly. “Apparently, after what happened Friday, she and the boyfriend noticed Carly’s presence in this series, all taken on one day last week.”

“But I never meant to—I wasn’t planning on . . .” Carly tried to explain how she’d never planned on following Taylor for the whole day. “I wasn’t planning to follow her at all. I just wanted to know what she looked like. I thought it would help me.”

For the first time that morning Carly looked directly at her mother. Expecting anger and annoyance, she was surprised to see teary eyes and trembling lips.

“I thought if I faced it, I’d get over it. If I saw her in the flesh, it would help me to finally move on.”

“Then why follow her all day,” Susan asked, “if all you wanted was a glimpse?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I found her interesting. I wanted to know what she was like. I didn’t want her to see me. I didn’t want to hurt her. I kind of wished we could be friends.”

“Let me stop you right there,” said Susan. “What you just said, about liking her and wishing you could be friends?”

“Yeah?”

“That stays in this room, okay?” She pointed at Carly and repeated, “Okay?”

Carly nodded. “Okay. I didn’t mean I thought we
could
be friends. I wasn’t going to try to make her my friend. I just thought that if we knew each other some other way, then maybe we’d be friends.”

“Got it. End of subject. Don’t repeat that. Any of you.” She went around the table with her index finger and stern look until she’d gotten a nod from Carly’s mother, Carly’s father, and Nick. “Not to the judge, not to the social worker when she interviews you. And this is probably the most important thing: not to their lawyer. Later, after we’ve gotten you diverted to treatment, and you have your own shrink and you have doctor-client privilege, then you can talk all you want about how you—‘just wanted to be friends.’ But—”

Carly’s father broke in. “Hey—is that really necessary?”

“Is what necessary, Mr. Finnegan?”

“The whole tough-talking New York lawyer act.”

Susan brought out the pointer finger again. “Is that what you think this is? An act?”

“Come on,” said Carly’s father, looking across the table to his ex-wife. “Our daughter needs help. You said it yourself. I don’t think it helps for you to be making fun of her.”

Susan shot Nick an
is-he-for-real?
look and then turned to Carly’s father.

“Okay, let’s get something straight here. This is serious. Your daughter could end up with a criminal record. It’s unlikely, but she could even see a few months in Rikers.”

Carly’s mother gasped. Susan put her hand on Carly’s shoulder and squeezed. “That’s not going to happen. I just need you and your parents to understand this is serious. There’s some pretty damning evidence against you, and these are some well-connected people you’ve messed with, and it’s still an open question whether I can get you diverted into treatment. So I need you to be a big girl and help me understand what happened, okay?”

Carly just nodded this time. If she opened her mouth, she’d start crying, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

Susan kept her eyes on Carly and spoke calmly. “If the judge hears you say anything about wanting to be friends with Taylor, he might decide he needs to keep a closer eye on you. People have gotten hurt—killed, even—by deranged people who wanted to be their friends.”

Judge. Social worker
.
Diverted to treatment
. Carly couldn’t believe she was hearing these words spoken about her. She lowered her eyes and tried to lose herself tracing the wood grain.

“Carly!” Nick yelled.

She looked up. Nick never yelled. “Stay with us. We need to know that you understand what Susan is saying here.” She hadn’t seen a look like that on Nick’s face since he caught Jess fooling around with his blowtorch. He was seriously worried.

“I understand.”

“Good, because you’ve got more explaining to do, young lady.” Susan reached for the briefcase she’d placed on an empty chair next to her. She pulled out a single sheet of paper and put it in Carly’s father’s hands.

“What’s this?”

“Read it,” she said. “They just handed it to me. I only have the one copy. But it’s out there on the Internet for anyone to see.” Isabelle and Nick moved their chairs closer to Tim’s, where they could read along.

Carly saw the banner at the top of the page and recognized the font.

“Their lawyer is saying this is more evidence of your obsession with his client. A desire to be her. And possibly to do her harm.”

Carly watched the blood drain from her mother’s face as she read about what happened at Bittersweet. When she got to the bottom of the page, Isabelle looked at her and in a voice barely above a whisper said, “That’s you? Little Miss Psycho Fan?”

Carly nodded. “But it’s not what it sounds like. I didn’t want to be her. I was only doing it so I didn’t have to wait on line. It was cold.”

“What night was this?” Carly’s mother looked over her father’s shoulder at the printout.

“Last Sunday,” Carly said.

“And where was I?”

“You were asleep.”

“Wait a second,” her father said. “Didn’t I talk to you that night?”