All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  ALL THE DYING

  CHILDREN

  JAMES HALPIN

  This is a work of fiction. While some real locations and

  long-standing institutions are mentioned, the characters involved are solely the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 James P. Halpin III

  First paperback edition July 2019

  First eBook edition July 2019

  ISBN: 9781070630175

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced

  in any form without the express written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  For Jamie, my biggest critic and my greatest fan.

  I love you always.

  Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

  — Benjamin Franklin

  There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, which does not live by secrecy.

  — Joseph Pulitzer

  The best way out is always through.

  — Robert Frost

  Contents

  PROLOGUE1

  CHAPTER 1 3

  CHAPTER 213

  CHAPTER 322

  CHAPTER 430

  CHAPTER 539

  CHAPTER 649

  CHAPTER 755

  CHAPTER 863

  CHAPTER 970

  CHAPTER 1080

  CHAPTER 1190

  CHAPTER 1296

  CHAPTER 13105

  CHAPTER 14113

  CHAPTER 15123

  CHAPTER 16131

  CHAPTER 17141

  CHAPTER 18152

  CHAPTER 19161

  CHAPTER 20169

  CHAPTER 21177

  CHAPTER 22185

  CHAPTER 23192

  CHAPTER 24200

  CHAPTER 25211

  CHAPTER 26226

  CHAPTER 27237

  CHAPTER 28252

  CHAPTER 29263

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS271

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR272

  PROLOGUE

  When at first the children began dying, life in the rusted and worn coal country of Northeastern Pennsylvania seemed to continue on, much as it always had.

  That is to say that, in many ways, it remained a land out of its time.

  The region never fully recovered from the collapse of the coal industry after World War II, and the residents who remained clung tightly to tradition. On Sundays, abundant Catholics still headed in droves to towering stone cathedrals in the City of Wilkes-Barre. On warm summer evenings, churchyard bazaars fragrant with the smell of frying potato pancakes were all the rage.

  Grandmothers prided themselves on their pierogies and kielbasa, and they still had the rare choice of two competing daily newspapers, the vestige of an era long since past.

  Most nights, corner bars were lined with blue-collar workers — men whose grandfathers worked the mines — stopping in for a pint or two of cool amber Yuengling lager on their journeys home. Downtown shops closed early, and traffic on city streets was usually sparse by dinnertime.

  On warm summer nights, neighbors would sit on the porches of their antiquated double-block homes smoking cigarettes and gossiping about whether anyone had seen the new family down the street. “They had the New York tags, heyna or no?” came the whispers, fraught with apprehension.

  They had good reason to be wary. Metropolitan drug dealers had seen a business opportunity. Selling city drugs at suburban prices made for huge profits. They seized on it, with deadly results. Now the seemingly quaint existence of the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania had been marred by bathroom drug overdoses and the persistent rattle of late-night gunfire.

  So it should come as no surprise that against this backdrop, nobody paid much attention at all to a teenage suicide. They mourned, to be sure. They reminisced and lamented the loss, shed tears and shook their heads at such a senseless tragedy.

  But they were all so fixated upon the encroaching drug menace that all of them missed the terrible danger from within.

  It took a teenage beauty sitting alone at her desk in the dark of night to shift their gaze. Kimberly Foster was an improbable harbinger, neither the first nor the last to die. The combination of her good looks and her frightful death merely ensured she was the first of the sad youths to be noticed.

  CHAPTER 1

  Thursday, March 22, 2018

  1:37 a.m.

  The screen flickered to life, displaying the image of Kimberly Foster’s sad, vacant eyes for the world to see. As Kimberly extended her arms to prop the cellphone against a book on her bedroom desk, the camera view widened to reveal her delicate features and sleek, flaxen hair. She sat back, carefully studying the phone screen to ensure she was properly framed in the shot. At this hour on a school night, most of her friends wouldn’t be on Facebook to follow her live stream. But they would certainly find out about it the moment they woke up.

  The room behind Kimberly was bathed in the soft glow of a nightstand lamp, revealing the typical clutter of a fifteen-year-old girl’s room. On the walls, Kimberly had hung posters of Katy Perry and Imagine Dragons alongside a pilfered one-way street sign. A closet door that was left ajar revealed a closet rod overloaded with flower-print dresses, cashmere sweaters, and short checkered skirts. No fewer than two dozen pairs of shoes were lined up beneath.

  On a shelf next to the closet, awards and trophies Kimberly accumulated over her short life sat on display – achievements for cheerleading, soccer, and an elementary school spelling bee.

  Only the cheerleading stuck with her through the years, and Kimberly had a genuine passion for it. She was a captain of her squad at Hanover Area High School, just outside Wilkes-Barre. The other girls looked to her for leadership, and they respected her as a friend as well. When the girls got to gossiping about who was getting with whom and who needed to keep her legs closed, for God’s sake, Kimberly was never among the subjects of discussion. She seemed to have a rare combination of good looks, intelligence, and kindness that made her one of the most popular girls in her class.

  Which made what she was about to do all the more baffling.

  Staring at the camera lens on her cellphone, Kimberly ran the top of her left index finger under her nose, sniffling as she wiped. Her eyes were glossed over and puffy, as though she had been crying – or as though she was about to. By the time she started her monologue, Facebook was showing her live stream had seven viewers.

  “Hey everyone, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting everyone down and for what I have to do tonight. I didn’t want it to be like this. I just hope everyone I love knows it’s not your fault. This just ...”

  As she spoke, a friend posted a comment to the video.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Kimberly barely registered the remark. A tear dripped down her cheek as she picked up the nine-millimeter Springfield pistol, the one her father kept on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. Kimberly racked the slide to the rear with a reverberating clack, chambering a round as she stared blankly at the camera.

  Her last words came out softly, a suicidal poem delivered in a whispered chant: “They’re watching me always. Nothing can make it stop.”

  Holding her death in her right hand, Kimberly raised the weapon to her temple and jerked the trigger.

  In a sudden, violent burst, red mist exploded from t
he left side of Kimberly’s head, leaving a blood stain on the wall that began to drip to the ivory carpet below. The gun was ejected from her hand as her head whipped to the side and she slumped out of her chair, landing in a pile on the floor. For a moment, there was dead silence in the room.

  The first thing the Facebook viewers heard after the shot was someone, presumably Kimberly’s soon-to-be grieving father Jack Foster calling out, “What was that?” Then came the sound of doors banging open throughout the house, the sound of confusion and chaos in the middle of the night. Kimberly’s phone began to ring; apparently, someone who just witnessed the grisly end of her friend stupidly tried to call her, not knowing what else to do.

  Then the bedroom door opened and Kimberly’s mother looked in, staring uncomprehendingly at the body of her daughter and the bloody Rorschach test left on the wall, one final gift from her first-born child. A dazed moment passed and Sarah Foster ran across the floor, lifting her daughter’s head and looking into unseeing eyes as she called out Kimberly’s name.

  For a moment, Sarah began grasping at the bloody bits of skull and brain matter staining the carpet, a desperate attempt to put the pieces back together and undo what cannot be undone. She began to wail as the other family members raced to the doorway, staring in disbelief. Another second passed before Jack composed himself enough to think to call 911. Then he saw the phone propped on the desk and the video feed on the screen. He slowly approached the phone, wondering what had just happened.

  When he tapped the screen to stop the video, Facebook showed thirteen hundred and eighty-seven people were watching.

  * * *

  Erik Daly sat at his desk in the newsroom, keeping an ear on the noon broadcast of the local news playing on a television hanging in the corner of the room. The police scanner by the window squawked to life as a dispatcher called medics to the scene of a crash on Interstate 81. There was no report of ejection or entrapment. Daly barely registered the exchange.

  As the police reporter for the Wilkes-Barre Observer, he was responsible for covering mayhem — shootings, fires, crashes, and anything else that went wrong on a given day in Luzerne County. The more horrendous, or shocking, or sad the subject matter was, the better the story. Which meant that a good day for Daly was usually a pretty bad one for the people in his articles. Over the years, he’d had to learn to approach his interviews with tact, displaying the right degree of understanding while asking the prying questions he was paid to ask — on what is often the worst day of the source’s life.

  He had gray-blue eyes that looked sharply out from behind wire-rimmed reading glasses, combining with his sandy brown hair — always worn combed to the right — to give him a somewhat bookish look. At forty-three years old, he still had a wiry build, and the white dress shirts with rolled sleeves he wore atop black slacks always appeared a size or two big for his frame.

  Sipping on a cup of black coffee, Daly peered through bloodshot eyes at the online court dockets, skimming through the overnight arrests for anything interesting. He passed over a burglary arrest from out in the sticks near Shickshinny, but stopped at a resisting arrest case from Wilkes-Barre. More likely than not, some dope fiend decided to rumble with the cops when they stopped him for stumbling around. Daly made a note to grab the complaint, thinking it would probably have some juicy details his readers would enjoy. There’s news the reader needs to know and news the reader wants to know. Daly was committed to providing both.

  As he moved through the docket, Daly heard the newscast turn to a story about a seventeen-year-old boy being credited as a hero for calling 911 and getting help when his grandmother fell down. Because of the boy’s quick thinking, the pretty blonde reporter assured viewers, the grandmother survived and lived to tell the tale.

  For Christ’s sake, Daly thought, rubbing his temple. Someone on the cusp of becoming a grown adult knew enough to dial three digits when his grandmother fell? Stop the presses. There should be a ticker-tape parade for this kid with the wherewithal to perform his basic civic duty.

  Daly knew and liked the reporter on the screen, but he cringed thinking about her stretching the story to fit the narrative her producer no doubt wanted. He wished television reporters would let the facts get in the way of a good story, at least every once in a while.

  Daly continued running through the docket when the city editor, John Richardson, called him to editor’s row, a block of cubicles in the center of the newsroom. Expecting to get drafted into chasing the “hero” story, Daly headed over, ready to take a stand. He had no intention of stretching the facts to fit a predetermined narrative, and planned to say so.

  But to Daly’s surprise, Richardson didn’t want to talk about the television story. He glanced up and registered the bags under Daly’s eyes as he waved him around the desk.

  “Jesus, you look like shit,” Richardson said.

  “I had kind of a late night,” Daly said, wishing he’d popped a couple of Advil before leaving the house. “It was a hell of a game. Utah beat St. Mary’s 67-58 in overtime. My money’s on Penn State and Utah for the final.”

  “You think the Lions can do it?” Richardson asked.

  “Why not? It’s been nine years since they last won the NIT. They’ve had plenty of rest,” Daly said. “So what do you got?”

  “Check this out,” Richardson said.

  Richardson clicked his mouse and began playing a video on LiveLeak.com. A pretty girl with tears in her eyes began talking to the camera. Together, the newsmen watched the scene play out, eyes transfixed on the gruesome fate of Kimberly Foster.

  “She was a freshman at Hanover Area High School,” Richardson said. “Facebook took the video down less than an hour after it happened, but someone had already posted it to LiveLeak. It’s got more than 50,000 views.”

  “Shit,” Daly said. “What do you want to do about it?”

  The Wilkes-Barre Observer’s policy was that suicides were generally not newsworthy. Publishing suicides would upset the families and could inspire copycats. But as is the case with most rules, there were exceptions. If the person was well-known, it would most likely be news. The same was true if the person killed herself in public. There was also a catch-all clause allowing for coverage of any suicide that editors believed had genuine news value.

  So essentially the policy was that the Wilkes-Barre Observer didn’t cover suicides, unless it did.

  Kimberly Foster’s death took place in the confines of her bedroom, which is just about the most private place in a teenage girl’s life. But she also chose to broadcast it on Facebook in a video that had gone viral. Daly had to concede there wasn’t much room for argument.

  “I’ll see what the cops have to say,” Daly said.

  “You good to go on this?” Richardson asked. “You look … tired. This could be a big story.”

  “I’m fine,” Daly said. “I’ll make some calls.”

  Daly headed back to his desk, lifted the handset from its cradle and dialed the cellphone number for Detective Sgt. Phil Wojcik, the supervisor for Luzerne County detectives. The detectives were part of the district attorney’s office, a creation of necessity in a county with seventy-six municipalities that were mostly small and poorly funded. When the local police department — if there even was one — lacked the training or manpower to investigate a major crime, the county detectives were able to step in and assist.

  Wojcik had been a career state trooper before retiring into his job as a county detective. That allowed him to collect a pension on top of earning a handsome salary for doing essentially the same amount of work as before. But at fifty-three, Wojcik still had a genuine drive to be a cop. He wasn’t just collecting a paycheck like a past-prime civil servant. He still had it in him to do some good in the world, and he was determined to leave his mark.

  “I bet you can guess why I’m calling,” Daly said when Wojcik picked up.

  �
�The eighty-seven-year-old DOA we had in Exeter last night?” Wojcik deadpanned.

  “Right. What do you know about this video?”

  “Well, if you saw the video, then you probably know what you need to know,” Wojcik said. “We had an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on a fifteen-year-old victim at a home on Lee Park Avenue.”

  “I did see the video. Pretty hard to watch. You got a name?” Daly asked.

  “Kimberly Foster. A student at Hanover Area.”

  “What time was this?”

  “The parents discovered her around 1:40 a.m.,” Wojcik said. “She was rushed by ambulance to Geisinger and was pronounced dead upon arrival at 2:23 a.m.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “No. It’s pretty clear what happened.”

  “All right, thanks Phil,” Daly said, hanging up the phone. He still had a few questions for Wojcik, but he wanted to post a breaking news update online first.

  Daly quickly made a few other calls and then started typing, aware that the city’s Other Paper — whose true name no dignified Observer reporter would dare utter — was no doubt frantically pursuing the story as well. This was a newspaper war, after all. The readers might not notice which paper had the story a few minutes before the other, but being first was a matter of professional pride for both teams.

  The television news stations would certainly be on the story as well. It’s said that if it bleeds, it leads. That adage has never been more true. To some extent, Daly couldn’t blame the producers — images of a body draped in a white sheet bathed in blue and red flashing lights were much more enticing than talking heads debating some or another issue at a council meeting. They were interested in ratings, and for good ratings, you need good stories with compelling images.

  In this case, there would be no shortage of compelling images. The question in the back of Daly’s mind as he hammered on the keyboard was how much the local stations would show. No doubt the video would air repeatedly with an earnest-faced anchor warning in a grim tone that the images might be disturbing to some viewers. Of course, the anchor would really be telling everyone to immediately stop what they’re doing to take a gander at some particularly sensational footage.