All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  Even her boyfriend, Steve – the boy from Emma’s Facebook profile, Daly learned – was a clean-cut kid whom Emma’s family liked. He too did well in school and played baseball on the school’s varsity team. When he graduated, he also wanted to go to Penn State, although probably that had more to do with Emma’s plans than anything he wanted to study.

  “Did you know Emma was pregnant?” Daly asked.

  “No. She never told us,” Linh said.

  “She seemed to think your family wouldn’t take the news well,” Daly said.

  “My husband is pretty conservative about such things,” Linh said, keenly interested in her hands in her lap. “He would not have been pleased. But we loved Emma, and nothing would have changed that. She could have told us. She should have told us.”

  Daly continued probing, searching for the elusive connection that had escaped him thus far. As far as Linh knew, Emma didn’t know David Kowalski, nor did she know Justin Gonzalez or Kimberly Foster. She didn’t attend church and had never been to Camp Summit Lake. She had no bad influences to speak of, and, aside from dating a boy who could use some contraceptive training, she seemed to have good judgment.

  But after some questioning, Linh began to reveal some wrinkles in the glossy picture she’d painted of her daughter’s life. Emma was a good girl, to be sure, but she had been getting into arguments at home. Some of them grew quite heated. In the fall before her death, Emma had skipped school to go to Knoebels Amusement Resort with Steve. This was where the picture of the two of them on a roller coaster came from, Daly learned.

  The next day, the school had contacted Linh asking for a note to excuse the absence. Emma had been caught. When Linh and Vu Nguyen confronted her about it at the dinner table that evening, Emma had blown up. She began screaming that her parents couldn’t tell her how to live her life, and defied them to try. After a minute of hearing his daughter shrieking her non-compliance in his face, Vu had lost his cool as well. He stood up, sending his chair tumbling backward to the ground with a clatter and yelled for Emma to get to her room.

  “Leave your phone on the table!” he shouted.

  Emma slammed the phone onto the wooden surface and screamed the quintessential retort of a teenager who has been cornered without a witty comeback.

  “I hate you!” she blared, storming out of the room.

  Later that night, lying in bed next to her husband, Linh had expressed worry about the increasingly heated arguments Emma was having with them. She wondered if someone was bullying Emma at school. What about drugs? She wondered.

  Vu dismissed it. They kept tabs on Emma’s social media accounts, and nothing online indicated Emma was getting picked on at school. Her grades were as high as ever.

  No, Vu was certain it was just a phase. Emma was being a naturally rebellious teen.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he whispered into Linh’s ear, turning away from her and closing his eyes. “She’ll be fine.”

  But Linh couldn’t stop worrying about it. She was up half that night, her mind racing and heart beating as she wondered what was making her little girl — the child who had been so sweet and loving — turn into an argumentative and hostile being. Hormones alone couldn’t account for it, she ultimately decided.

  The next night, after a stone-faced appearance at dinner at which Emma uttered fewer than a dozen words, Linh broached the subject again. This time, however, she was prepared. She had talked to some of her friends at the coffee shop earlier in the day, and they suggested Emma get some counseling. Talking about feelings is a good way for teenagers to vent, they told her. Sometimes it’s more comfortable for a kid to tell a stranger about their problems than their own parents.

  Vu grunted as he listened. He didn’t put a lot of stock in such things. To his way of thinking, all this talk these days about people’s feelings and trying not to offend anyone was making people soft.

  “How much is this going to cost?” Vu asked.

  Despite Vu’s reservations, Linh prevailed. He could see from the look in his wife’s eyes that she needed it, and he figured the family could afford it. Hell, if the sessions earned him some peace and quiet around the house, it would be money well spent.

  Emma first went to see Dr. Marvin Radcliffe at his office in Kingston on Nov. 14, 2017. When asked, Vu would never admit there had been an immediate change in his eldest daughter’s behavior. That would be conceding too much. But a few weeks after the sessions began, Vu had to admit that the change in Emma’s behavior was stark. The arguments had ended and an unsteady truce had melted away into familiar laughter at the dinner table. Emma seemed to have come to grips with whatever it was that had been bothering her, and she had become the smiling, fun, playful teenager that had disappeared from family life just weeks earlier.

  Vu never was sure what exactly had gone wrong with his daughter, or what she spoke about behind closed doors with Dr. Radcliffe that made her come around. To some degree, it bothered him not to know the cause of his daughter’s grief. But again, he chalked it up to normal teenage hormones. And whatever it was, he figured it didn’t really matter.

  The important thing was his daughter was back.

  CHAPTER 13

  Tuesday, April 3, 2018

  1:52 p.m.

  The car pulled into a spot in front of the aging house on Lee Park Avenue in Hanover Township. The sun glinted off the car’s glass and chrome as the door creaked open. Daly’s black Doc Martens hit the pavement, each step crunching grit beneath his heel.

  Daly had walked away from his conversation with Linh Nguyen feeling lost. Any last hope he had that David Kowalski might have been involved in the deaths evaporated when Linh insisted Emma had not known him. Not only that, but Emma had never been to Camp Summit Lake, the only other connection Daly had between the victims. Either he had missed something or he was chasing a phantom that didn’t exist.

  When he’d arrived at the newsroom, he decided it was about time he paid another visit to the Foster home. Jack Foster made it clear last time that Daly wasn’t welcome, but that had been very shortly after Kim’s death. Since then, nearly two weeks had passed and by now their raging emotions would have had some time to settle.

  As a precaution, Daly had run the idea past John Richardson. He wanted to make sure he was covered if the Fosters called back to the newsroom complaining that Daly was harassing them. Richardson had given the green light with a warning to back off as soon as he saw a hint of resistance.

  As Daly approached the stairs to the run-down house, he saw with relief that the cluster of cars that had been present the first time was gone. At the top of the steps he reached for the doorbell, then realized the button was missing. All that remained was a gaping hole surrounded by the black smudges of unchecked grime. Daly opened the screen door and tapped on the wooden door behind it.

  A moment later he heard some rustling behind the door followed by the sound of the knob turning. Jack Foster pulled open the door and looked at Daly for a moment without recognition. Then, remembering their earlier meeting, his brow folded into a scowl and his demeanor turned gruff.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Mr. Foster, I apologize for bothering you again. You probably heard that there was another suicide a few days ago. The police have reason to believe it could be connected to the others. I was wondering if I could talk to you about Kim. We’re trying to figure out if she knew the other kids.”

  “Just leave us alone. We don’t want Kim’s name in the paper. We don’t want her to be remembered that way. She was a beautiful person, not some suicidal psycho like you’re trying to make her out to be.”

  “That’s not our intention, Mr. Foster. We’re just trying to figure out what happened,” Daly said.

  “You’re just trying to sell papers,” Jack said.

  “That’s not true. Someone threw a firebomb through my window the other
night. My daughter and I could have been killed. Now I might not even be able to write this story. But I need to find out what’s going on. I need to know who tried to kill my daughter. You might be able to help me. And you might save some other parents from the grief you’re feeling now.”

  Jack Foster paused, clearly surprised by the speech. He was still reluctant to talk, but he believed Daly was trying to help. And what Daly was saying struck a chord in him — a father’s hungering for action. If someone really did make his baby kill herself, he would want to find out who it was.

  He would want revenge.

  “Come in,” Jack said. “But everything we say in here is off the record, agreed?”

  Daly’s excitement at being granted an interview evaporated instantly. But he agreed to Jack’s terms. He needed to know what Jack knew, and even if he couldn’t write about it, Kim’s story could help point him in the right direction.

  They sat down on a dingy flower-print couch in a living room cluttered with old issues of Field and Stream and fishing tackle. The head of a twelve-point buck was mounted on a brown-paneled wall opposite the television, surrounded by a pair of mounted largemouth bass. The centerpiece of a pressed-board coffee table was a large crystal ashtray, bulging with crushed Marlboro butts. The room smelled of stale smoke and cat urine.

  Daly guessed that Kimberly hadn’t brought her cheerleading friends around too often.

  As they began talking, Jack cracked open a Keystone Light beer from a mini fridge that doubled as an end table.

  “I don’t really know how I can help you,” Jack said. “You already know Kim was friends with Justin. But as far as I can tell, she never met this other girl.”

  “Did she have any enemies? Anyone who might have wanted to hurt her? Daly asked.

  “Not at all. Kim was a very sweet girl. The other girls on her cheer squad respected her, and she was pretty popular, as far as I could tell.”

  As Daly listened, he wondered how much Jack really knew about the social dynamics at play when his daughter left the house. She seemed happy. She seemed to have a lot of friends. But how many high school girls would want to let on otherwise?

  Daly learned that Jack worked nights at a warehouse up near Pittston, and so he didn’t generally see much of his family except on the weekends. Kim’s mother, Sarah, worked at a hair salon in Wilkes-Barre to help support Kim and her younger brother, Derek. Kim had been big into cheerleading since she was in elementary school, and she practiced with her squad regularly. Kim was the squad leader, and the other girls looked up to her, according to her father.

  Aside from that, she was a pretty typical teenager who liked hanging out at the mall, texting her friends and listening to music. She listened to both Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, feud be damned. She watched “Dancing with the Stars.” She was basically just a regular kid, Jack said.

  “I heard she was also into poetry,” Daly said.

  “Yeah, she had an English teacher last year who was big into poetry,” Jack said. “Some of the parents got upset about it because he was assigning them some pretty dark stuff – stuff about people drinking and dying and whatnot. I guess some of the parents didn’t think it was appropriate for high school.”

  “What about you?” Daly asked.

  “I thought some of it was kind of out there, but as far as I could tell it was the classics. I don’t know much about it, but if the experts say it’s classic, then I guess it’s got to be pretty good.”

  “Was Kim writing any poetry?” Daly asked.

  “She was dabbling in it, I guess you could say,” Jack said. “She never showed it to me, though. She said it was private, so I let it be.”

  “What about what she said … at the end of the video?” Daly asked, hoping the question wouldn’t turn Jack off. “It was a strange thing to say. Do you know where she heard it?”

  Jack sat motionless for a moment, then raised the can of Keystone Light to his lips and took a long pull. When he spoke, his voice cracked and he cleared his throat.

  “No,” Jack said. “I never heard that before.”

  “What about that teacher? Do you remember his name?” Daly asked.

  “I’m not sure. It’s probably up in her room somewhere,” Jack said, putting the can down on the table next to the mound of cigarette butts. “Come on, let’s take a look.”

  Daly followed Jack into a hallway leading toward the kitchen in the back of the house. The walls were crowded with old family photos in cheap gleaming metal frames. Pictures of Kim smiling in her cheerleading uniform. Pictures of her as a toddler playing with her baby brother. Pictures of Kim with her grandparents.

  In one shot, Kim beamed and held a fishing pole while her grandfather hoisted a smallmouth bass in front of her. Daly remarked how happy she looked. Jack nodded in agreement, then noted her grandparents had passed shortly after the picture had been taken.

  Daly wondered if Jack realized how close his hallway was to becoming a shrine to the dead.

  At the end of the hallway, a staircase branched off, leading to the second story of the house. They climbed the stairs in silence, their footsteps muted by the matted brown shag carpet.

  Kim’s room was the first room on the right at the top of the stairs. The door, adorned with a pilfered stop sign, was shut. It could not have been an accident. The shut door was a symbol, a barrier preserving what was left of the family’s dearly departed daughter nearly two weeks after her untimely demise. In two more weeks’ time, the door would still be shut. Everything had changed for the family. There would be no more cheerleading practices, or awkward boyfriend introductions, no more bathroom-time fights with her brother or conversations over dinner. The Foster family had been forever changed by the nine-millimeter lead mushroom that tore through Kim’s brain. But in an upside-down world where a lone gunshot in the night turned out to be not a nightmare but a life sentence, the Fosters were determined to hold onto the memory of the little girl they loved.

  Jack turned the door handle and pushed open the door to reveal a bedroom that was no longer a bedroom. The bed still sat where it always had, and Kim’s desk was right where it belonged. The posters of Katy Perry still hung on the walls and Kim’s trophies continued to sparkle on the shelf next to the shoe collection in her closet. But the ginger steps Jack took entering the room and his voice, transformed into a hushed whisper, belied the new purpose of this room. No person would ever rest her head on the pillow again. It was no longer a bedroom. It was a sanctum.

  As Daly glanced about the room, he saw Kim’s blood had been cleaned from the wall and the carpet. But everything else appeared to have been untouched since the time the infamous video was recorded.

  Jack walked over to the desk and slid open a drawer to begin rifling through school papers and documents — pages no one would ever need again. Daly stood by the door, self-consciously trying his best not to seem intrusive. After a few minutes of awkward silence, Jack put his head forward and squinted slightly, reading a sheet of paper in his hands more closely.

  “I think I found it. Mr. Gillespie,” Jack said, looking up from the paper. “He taught her English class for a few months last year. That’s when she started getting interested in poetry.”

  “Why only a few months?” Daly asked.

  “Oh, he was a sub. Her regular teacher had a baby,” Jack said.

  Daly nodded, taking in the information. A substitute teacher could move between districts, but if he’d only known Kim for a few months the year before it didn’t seem like a promising lead.

  “And she hadn’t been in contact with him since then?”

  Daly asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Jack said. “She’s been writing poetry, but I don’t think she’s spoken to him.”

  “Would you mind if I took a look at her work?”

  Jack hesitated. These were poems his daughter had written in priva
te. She hadn’t even wanted her own father to read them. Now a newspaper reporter was asking to peer into her inner-most thoughts. Her soul.

  On the other hand, her journal could contain a clue about her last words. For the past twelve days, Jack had thought of little else besides figuring out why his baby did the unthinkable. And who might have put her up to it.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jack said. “I’ll read through her journal. If I see anything remotely resembling what she said, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fair enough. I appreciate it,” Daly said, racking his mind for any other questions to ask. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

  He ended every interview the same way. Over the years, he’d learned that often just asking what he forgot to ask about could produce solid information.

  “Not really,” Jack said. “She seemed like a happy girl. Everyone liked her. Dr. Radcliffe said she seemed to be doing good.”

  “Dr. Marvin Radcliffe?” Daly asked, stunned to hear the name of a prominent Kingston psychiatrist twice in as many days.

  “Yeah, she had been going there for a few months,” Jack said. “For a while, she was having some image problems, I guess you could say. Her mother was worried because she wasn’t eating. She said she thought she was turning into an anorexic.”

  “Did the therapy help?” Daly asked.

  “I’d say so. Kim started eating dinner with us again. Like I said, she seemed happy.”

  Daly thanked Jack for his time and offered his condolences for the family’s loss. Before leaving, he repeated his promise that he would not publish anything about their conversation without Jack’s permission. He walked back to his car like a man in a dream, lost in his thoughts as he processed what he’d just heard.

  By their families’ accounts, both girls had been happy, well-adjusted kids. Not the kind of kids one would expect to be in therapy.