Fatality

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Did Milton Lofft mention the murder?” asked Tabor. “What was he wearing? Was it bloodstained?”

  Rose felt a sudden surge of wrath toward her brother. All her life, he had assigned her to fetch. Rose, get me my soccer ball. Rose, bring me my laptop. Rose, I’m taking your cell phone. Rose, I’ll have a Coke with crushed ice, not ice cubes. Hurry up, Rose.

  And she had obeyed, loving every moment of his attention—even every moment of his lack of attention. And for what? So he could gang up against her when the whole reason for this was—

  Rose righted herself. Even though ice cream cake was Tabor’s idea of dessert and not hers, she might have some. “Tabor, back when it happened, I told everybody I didn’t see anything. Which I didn’t. And by now, it’s so blank of a memory that I can’t even truthfully say that I didn’t see anything. I can only say I’ve forgotten.”

  There was silence.

  “Sugarplum,” said her father softly, “I could believe that if you hadn’t destroyed the diary for all the days surrounding the murder.”

  “That’s just coincidence,” said Rose, and could have ripped her tongue out.

  Her brother stared.

  Her mother frowned, eyes white and glassy.

  Her father went very still. “With what other event,” he said carefully, “does the murder coincide?”

  Why could she not remember a simple rule like silence?

  Why couldn’t it be bedtime?

  Or better yet, next year?

  “I can’t understand why you have to analyze every syllable,” she said hotly. “It’s against the law to forget things?”

  “Rose!” shouted her mother. “There is no reason for you to protect Milton Lofft! You start talking to us and you start now.”

  Rose hacked off a huge piece of cake, knew she couldn’t swallow it, and set it back down.

  “I assume,” said her father, “that you really did witness the murder. So not only did you spend a weekend with a murderer, but you somehow cherish the experience and believe it should be protected. Rose, that is twisted and terrifying. I’m calling Ellen Klein and asking her to see you.”

  “Ellen Klein! Dad, that’s Chrissie’s mother! I cannot go see Ellen Klein. Anyway, she specializes in anorexia and self-mutilation. What will people think? If you send me to Mrs. Klein, I can’t say anything to her, either, because there isn’t anything to say.”

  Sunday they went to church.

  Tabor had no use for church, but for once he didn’t say so, and Rose was relieved, because there was enough confrontation already.

  The four Lymonds filled a pew, but none of their relatives were there. Lymonds had strong theological beliefs, so the Episcopalian Lymonds were irked by the Baptist Lymonds, and the Presbyterian Lymonds held the Unitarian Lymonds in low regard. In a few hours, however, Nannie from her church, Mopsy and Popsy from theirs, Aunt Laura and her family, Uncle Matt and his family, the Wickham cousins and their steps would gather for Sunday brunch. The adults liked to compare sermons—unfavorably—and share gossip, of which they had a great deal, since among them, they saw everybody who attended any church at all.

  Rose dreaded brunch. She was the gossip.

  Any relative who had decided to sleep late, skip church, and forget brunch had changed his plans. Getting Rose’s story would be the highlight of the week.

  Her father’s sweet tenor rang out on the first hymn and Tabor’s baritone took the bottom line. “It’s the only good thing about church,” he whispered to his sister. “Four-part harmony.”

  It was certainly the only kind of harmony in Rose’s family right now.

  During the prayer of confession, Rose looked at her parents. Dad, of course, had a furrowed brow and cradled his head in his hands, probably agonizing about where he went wrong with Rose. Mom was serene, as though she had nothing on her conscience. This had always been the case. Whatever was said in prayer and sermon, Mom floated through, never considering that it might apply to her.

  After church, they all got in the car and Mom said brightly, “I thought we’d go to that new Vietnamese restaurant. How does that sound?”

  It sounded awful. Rose detested ethnic food. But she said nothing. She braced herself for the younger cousins—Caitlin, Oliver, Joel—who would pester her for details of cop cars and jails. For the older cousins—Grace, Morgan, Michael—who would not know how to treat her. For the aunts and uncles, trying to support Mom and Dad, but visibly glad their kids weren’t behaving like Rose. For her grandparents, who would find Rose’s every move appalling. For Nannie, who even more than Ming believed she should not get the silent treatment.

  Inside the restaurant Rose felt blind. She couldn’t see a single person she knew, let alone the Lymond hordes.

  “Table for four?” asked the maître d’.

  “Thank you,” said her father, following him to a small booth in the back.

  “Four?” said Rose, bewildered.

  Her mother said, “It seemed easier, Rose.”

  The silver was wrapped in a heavy, starched pink napkin. Rose had difficulty extracting it without dropping it to the floor. She could hardly tell the fork from the spoon. She could hardly distinguish which end was the handle.

  They’re ashamed of me, she thought.

  The secret, which had been inside her, swelled up and flourished, like some terrible external cancer.

  Tabor was exhausted from the plane ride, the time changes, and the fact that he had not slept Saturday night, for worrying about what Rose knew. He could not remember ever being glad to attend church. But this morning, he had a feeling of safety. Whether it was being surrounded by family or the impossibility of further talk on dangerous subjects, church seemed truly to be a sanctuary.

  The restaurant, however, was going to be torture. It certainly had not been chosen with Rose in mind, since her idea of good food was still a peanut butter sandwich.

  In a dose of brotherly love that surprised him, Tabor took over the conversation. He talked easily, embroidering one story, enlarging on another, falsifying a third. His eyes came frequently to rest on his silent sister.

  He tried to remember Rose four Novembers ago, but all that came to mind was how he despised her silly friends twittering like birds at a feeder over him and his friends. He couldn’t remember what Rose looked like at twelve, just that he had not wanted her around. That had been the year of being musical. All he lived for that year was applause. He ached to impress other musicians, to impress a crowd, to impress a girl. He had not really noticed the girl who was his own sister.

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ANJELICA 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 c
ountry 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 wo
n’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.