Winter and Night (24 page)

I stopped to buy coffee, and tea for Lydia, and caught up with Lydia on the street in front of the school. I parked behind her and we walked to the playground that filled the lot between the school and a baseball field. A fence surrounded it but the gate was open. I dropped myself onto a picnic table bench, leaned back against the table. I stretched my legs, stared across the street at the neat little houses with their windows glowing an inviting yellow. Lydia sat on the table itself, arms around her knees, sipping her tea.

"Her name's Kate Minor," Lydia said. "She's a senior at Warrenstown High. She thinks I'm an investigative reporter for New York One."

"She's seen your business card," I said.

"I used the reporter ones," she said, lifting her eyebrows as though I should have known that.

"You had them with you?"

"I always do. You never know."

Never, I thought. You never know.

It was ten minutes before Lydia's contact showed up and we spent it in silence, sipping from cardboard cups, watching the evening. I wanted to tell Lydia where I'd been that afternoon after she left for Warrenstown, what I'd been thinking about on my slow walk downtown. But I couldn't, right now. Right now all I could do was drink coffee and smoke a cigarette and try to push away the images of Stacie's face, and Gary's, the echoes of their voices asking for help, the echoes of Macpherson's voice and Scott's and Hamlin's and Coach Ryder's telling me to go to hell, and my sister's small bewildered voice saying she didn't understand.

At one point Lydia reached a hand out, kneaded my shoulder. Even through the thickness of my leather jacket I thought I could feel her warmth. I don't know why she did that, but when she did the faces and the voices faded, and the fence and the streetlights and the night became, again, what was real.

Finally an Audi a few years old pulled around the corner, parked behind my car. The driver got out and headed through the playground fence. Lydia slipped down off the table, stood and waved. The figure walked slowly toward us, and now I could see it was a girl, large and heavy; as she neared us I saw the spiky black hair, the moon-pale face, the ring in her nostril and the one in her eyebrow. She came to stand before us, hands in the pockets of her army-surplus jacket. She scowled, and she shifted from foot to foot, looking as though at any second she might turn and leave.

"This is Bill Smith," Lydia said. "My partner. We're working this story together. Bill, this is Kate Minor."

I put out my hand and Kate Minor's scowl deepened. I didn't move and finally she offered her hand, withdrew it after a perfunctory shake.

"Sit down," I suggested, as though this were my office and I was trying to be hospitable. After a moment she did, straddling the bench, hands thrust deeply into her pockets. I sat on the end, where I had been, and Lydia perched on the table again, between us.

Lydia took out her small notebook. "I asked Kate and her friends," she said, "whether they could tell me anything about Tory Wesley, or the party, or the boy who disappeared. Gary Russell?" She said that as if to refresh my memory. "Or anything they think viewers would be interested in. Things people should know."

Kate Minor looked down at her feet, at the tufts of grass drained of color by the streetlights at the playground's edge. Looking back up, her eyes belligerent slits, she said, "I don't want anyone to know I'm doing this."

"Of course not," Lydia said. "Our sources are confidential, always."

"Because I could get in trouble."

"I understand."

Kate looked at me and I nodded.

"It's only— I mean, it's always been really shitty, but now they finally killed someone. I mean, they killed someone."

Her eyes wore heavy rings of coal-black makeup and her lips were painted a dark-outlined brown. She looked at me, and then at Lydia, and behind the toughness I thought I saw, in her eyes, a little girl asking us to say this all hadn't happened, no, everything's all right, you don't have to do this, go home. But we couldn't say that. Lydia asked instead, "Who did, Kate?"

"The jocks did," Kate said, her tone suspicious, as though if Lydia and I didn't know something that obvious, maybe there was no point in talking to us. "Those fucking jocks. They own Warrenstown and we all live with that, but they can't just kill people."

"Tell us why you say they did."

"Killed Tory? Who else do you think was at that party?"

"Were you there?"

Kate Minor stared at Lydia. "I'm fat, I'm a freak. I get straight A's in honors calculus and computer science. Do I seem like someone who'd go to a jock party?"

A cold wind swept the playground, ruffling Lydia's hair, though it made no impact on the spikes Kate wore. Lydia's hand touched my shoulder again, and it was a good thing, because a hot wave of impatience had swept through me as though embers I'd been trying to ignore had been fanned into flame by the wind. This girl could tell us nothing: She thought it was news that the jocks in Warrenstown were capable of murder. She was here to persuade us with her hate, but it was all she had. I wanted to go. I wanted to move. This was useless.

Lydia, her hand still resting on my shoulder, said to Kate, "There must have been seventy-five kids at that party. If one of them killed Tory Wesley, do you know who?"

Kate Minor shook her head. "No," she said bitterly. "But I know why."

Fifteen

Kate Minor kicked the dirt beneath her feet at the playground picnic table and told us what she thought.

"When they don't get what they want," she said, "it's totally fucked."

"The jocks?" Lydia asked.

Kate nodded. "It's, like, this famous tradition in Warrenstown. It goes back years."

"And it's still true?"

Kate didn't look at us. "Like, last year, this one senior, Cody Macklowe? He wanted me to do his algebra homework for him."

"When he was a senior and you were a junior?"

"Yeah, but I'm in honors and he was in, like, last math."

"Not his subject?" Lydia tried a smile, and I knew it was to tell Kate, relax, it's okay. But Kate didn't smile back.

"Whatever," she said. "He might have done okay in it, except half the time he never went to class or took notes or anything. He was a big football star."

"He didn't get in trouble for cutting classes?"

"He started both ways," Kate said, offering this as an obvious reason a kid wouldn't get in trouble for delinquent behavior. "We only had one other player that did that."

Lydia nodded, asked, "What happened? About the homework?" as if she had any idea what it meant to start both ways.

"I told him to shove it. He kept telling me to and I kept saying no." Kicking the dirt again: "So he beat up my dog."

"He beat up your dog?"

"Lucky, my dog. We got him when I was eight. He came home all bloody one day, he couldn't walk right. We thought he was hit by a car. The vet said he almost died. In the morning I found a note on my locker that said, 'Next time, I'll beat his fucking brains out.' It was stapled to Cody's homework assignment."

"What did you do?"

From inside her army jacket Kate took out a pack of American Spirits. I lit a match, held it for her. She seemed slightly surprised, like when I'd offered to shake hands. Exhaling, looking away, she said, "I did his homework for the rest of the semester."

"You didn't tell anybody?"

"If I told somebody," she said, "and Cody got in trouble and couldn't play, the whole fucking town would be pissed at me. And Lucky," she said, took another long drag on her cigarette, "Lucky would be dead."

The wind gusted, lifting thin veils of dirt from the baseball diamond, herding them across the outfield grass along with a few stray gum wrappers, a sheet of newspaper, a Styrofoam cup. Over in Warrenstown, the park was kept clean by jocks in trouble: You'd never find this kind of trash there.

Lydia spoke. "Kate? What did you mean, about Tory Wesley? The jocks wanted something from her and she said no?"

I had a pretty good idea what Kate meant and I guessed Lydia did, too: What a teenage boy wants from a teenage girl. But as it turned out, I was wrong.

Kate Minor shifted on the bench. "The jocks. They can't— couldn't— stand Tory. She's too smart, and she dresses wrong, and she has zits." Kate switched back and forth between the present tense and the past when she talked about Tory Wesley. I'd seen that before, when a death is too fresh, too new, not yet worked into the pattern of your life. "She was like, young. I mean, not really, but she acted like it. Kind of clueless. She didn't get it, you know?"

"Get what?"

"How things are. How they work. She doesn't— she wasn't cool at all. You know?"

"And that was a problem for the jocks?"

"Well, sure. They say what's cool and then if you're not that way, you're just, like, totally nobody. But Tory, she wanted them to like her so much she'd do anything. It was pathetic. Especially last year. They used to tell her to do stuff just so they could laugh at her, like carry their books to class, or get their lunches from the cafeteria line and stuff."

"And she'd do it?"

"Last year she did. At least they were paying attention. But this year she thought she found something better, that really would make them like her."

"What was that?"

Kate took a hand from her pocket, rubbed her mouth. Looking away from us, she said, "Dealing."

I hadn't said anything yet and I didn't now. After a moment Lydia asked, "Dealing drugs? Tory Wesley was dealing drugs?"

"I wouldn't tell you," Kate said insistently, as though we needed, all three of us, to understand that, "except…"

"I know," said Lydia. "It's okay."

Kate lifted her black-outlined eyes to the playground again. "It's not that hard to get drugs in Warrenstown. Everyone does grass and hash, I mean, it's no big deal. But trippy drugs, acid and things, it's a little harder. Jocks are into those because you can drop them after the Friday night game, party your ass off, and by Monday practice you're cool again." She glanced at Lydia. "What?"

"I guess I'm just a little surprised. That jocks would do drugs during the season."

"Are you serious? They party harder than anyone else. They're used to it, they've all been juiced on andro and shit for years."

"Andro?"

"Steroids," Kate said impatiently. "To make them big."

"Where do they get them?"

"Andro, that one's legal. You get it at the health food store."

"Androstenedione," I said. "Mark McGwire was taking it."

Kate nodded. "And prescription ones, they get them from dealers. Jocks'll drop anything that'll get them high or make them big. You didn't notice them, how huge they are? They think it makes them hot." Her lip curled.

Lydia asked, "And Tory was dealing those drugs?"

"Not the steroids. The trippy ones."

"I'm sorry, but I have to ask this," Lydia said. "Is this something you know firsthand, or something you heard?"

Either Kate missed the implication, or she didn't care. "A guy I know. A friend of hers," she said. "He tried to make her stop. He said it was dangerous, the people you get mixed up with. But she was into it."

"And you think she got mixed up with people who were dangerous?"

Kate shook her head, snapped, "I'm not finished."

"I'm sorry."

Kate tossed her cigarette on the ground, mashed it with her toe. "She'd been dealing since school started. I don't even think she was making any real money, either, but anyway she had the jocks coming to her all the time."

"Do you know which jocks? Their names?

"Not really."

I doubted if that was true, but we were talking about a place where it was dangerous to refuse to do someone else's homework.

"Anyway," Kate went on, hands back in her pockets, coat pulled around her hunched shoulders, "anyway, for that party? She went around telling everyone she'd have ecstasy." Kate darted an unsure glance at Lydia and one at me. "That's a club drug. You know, a designer drug? You know about it?"

"Yes," Lydia said. "I've heard of it."

Kate seemed relieved, maybe that she wasn't going to have to explain what happened when you took ecstasy. "It's hard to get around here," she said.

"Harder than acid?"

"You can only get it in New York. I mean, maybe Newark, but nobody goes to Newark."

"But people do go to New York."

"Not a lot. Tory never went. I don't know where she was getting it from. But she promised. Everyone was psyched."

"And did she?"

Kate kicked at a clump of grass, over and over. She finally uprooted it. "No," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Paul told me. He told her she'd better leave town and forget about the party. He said she'd be fucked if all the jocks came looking for ecstasy and she didn't have it. But she was so into that party. She so thought it would make her cool. She had acid and crystal meth and coke and she thought they wouldn't care."

"But you think they did?"

For the first time, Kate Minor looked directly at Lydia as she spoke. "Totally. It was what they wanted. They went over to Tory Wesley's and didn't get what they wanted. When the jocks don't get what they want, it's totally fucked."

Kate held Lydia's eyes for a few silent moments. The wind had stopped and no one moved. From a distance, the three of us could have been any group of friends, lingering at a picnic table on a playground, reluctant to end the evening, not ready to go our separate ways to the pleasant houses with their glowing yellow windows.

Or we could have been the last people left in a vast, hostile waste-land, each one afraid to go out into the night alone.

Kate suddenly stood. "I hope you can use this," she said. "I hope you can fry them." She started to walk away, turned back. "But remember, anything you heard about anything in Warrenstown, you didn't hear it from me."

She turned, strode toward the fence. I stood. "Wait," I said.

She pivoted around, her black-rimmed eyes wide. "What? What do you want?"

"Who's Paul?"

"What?"

"Tory's friend, the guy who told her she should leave town. You said Paul. Paul Niebuhr?"