All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  And yet, both of them were going to the same psychiatrist. Was it a coincidence? The longer Daly was in the business, the less he believed in such things. Where there was smoke, there was usually fire. And Dr. Radcliffe’s appearance in the case was setting off alarm bells in Daly’s mind.

  The first thing he needed to do was get back with Celeste Gonzalez. Daly needed to know if Justin had been another happy, well-adjusted kid under the care of Dr. Marvin Radcliffe.

  CHAPTER 14

  Tuesday, April 3, 2018

  3:34 p.m.

  Daly pulled off Lee Park Avenue and began heading back to Kingston. His initial thought was to call Celeste Gonzalez to ask her about whether Justin had been in therapy, but he decided against that. He wanted to see the look on her face when he mentioned Dr. Radcliffe’s name. He wanted to be able to read her.

  Crossing the Market Street Bridge, Daly made his way along the wide, tree-lined thoroughfare, driving past the banks and law offices and restaurants until he reached Rutter Avenue. He pulled up in front of the Gonzalez home and was relieved to see Celeste’s car was in the driveway.

  Celeste answered the door after the first knock.

  “Hi, Erik. How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, thanks. I wanted to talk to you about something. Could I come in for a minute?” Daly asked.

  “Of course,” Celeste said, holding open the door for him to pass.

  Inside, she offered him a cup of tea that Daly declined. Then they sat on the brown leather couch in the front sitting room. Daly glanced up at the large crucifix hanging on the wall, a reminder to all who passed through these walls the Gonzalezes were God-fearing Christians. Celeste wore a hopeful expression on her face, one that said she was still in denial about Justin’s death and that she was wishful Daly would have something to contradict the police. She was looking to him for answers, and Daly began to doubt his decision to come in person, as though he had some big news to reveal. All he’d discovered was a tenuous connection between two kids, and here he was barging into a grieving mother’s house as though he’d discovered the Rosetta Stone.

  “I wanted to ask about Justin,” Daly began, hesitantly. “I was just over at Kim Foster’s house. Her father agreed to talk to me about her. I found out she had been seeing the same psychiatrist that Emma Nguyen was. Dr. Marvin Radcliffe.”

  Celeste slowly began shaking her head as she thought.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I know a Dr. Radcliffe.”

  Daly slumped his shoulders, dejected. Emma and Kimberly lived miles apart and went to different schools. For them to both know Dr. Radcliffe had seemed like too big a coincidence to be accidental. But if Justin wasn’t seeing him, maybe Dr. Radcliffe wasn’t the link. Maybe Daly had only what he did when he began: nothing.

  “Is there anything else you can think of?” Daly asked, pleading. “I don’t know where else to go from here. Did anything else unusual happen before Justin died?”

  Celeste took a slow sip of her milky English breakfast tea and stared a few moments too long at the coffee table before speaking. When she did, she put her cup down unsteadily, the tinkling of chattering china momentarily filling the thick silence that had engulfed the sitting room.

  “I don’t want any of this to get printed,” Celeste said flatly. “Do you understand?”

  For the next half-hour, Daly’s heart sank as he learned about the short and sad life of Justin Gonzalez. Justin, it seemed, had been a good boy who served on the church choir and had a love for God. But he also had a love for other boys. From a young age, Justin had seemed very “sensitive,” as his mother put it. Most of his friends had been girls, but he didn’t seem to have any attraction to them.

  When Justin was fourteen, he’d had a male friend sleep over. The boys were supposed to be upstairs in Justin’s room playing video games, but when Celeste went up that night to ask if they wanted a snack, it appeared they were playing something of a different kind. As the door opened up, Celeste had caught a glimpse of hurried movement between the two boys. They quickly separated, and though they were still dressed, Celeste couldn’t help but think something had been going on.

  Something wrong.

  Something unchristian.

  Her cheeks flushing with embarrassment, Celeste had whispered a hurried apology and quickly pulled her head from the doorway.

  She left the door open.

  At her bedside, she went to her knees and offered a silent prayer for her son, hoping that what she thought she had seen had been a mistake. Maybe they had just been horsing around. Maybe Justin had just been reaching for something.

  But the thought of having a gay son consumed Celeste. A few weeks later, she built up the nerve to ask him about it. She could tell Justin was embarrassed by the questions and was hesitant to answer. He didn’t know how his father would react.

  But at heart, he was a good Christian boy. He couldn’t lie to his own mother. He told her the truth and Celeste broke down in tears.

  After service on the following Sunday, Celeste had pulled the priest aside and confided in him her son’s deepest secret. Justin had stood meekly at her side, eyes fixed to the floor, as he listened to his mother describe him as being possessed by the devil. The priest agreed to take Justin under his counsel and try to reform him. Celeste didn’t exactly say so, but it was pretty clear to Daly she wanted Justin to pray the gay away, as the saying goes.

  For a while, Celeste thought it was working. Justin was more interested in what she considered straight activities like sports, and he stopped hanging out with the boy from the sleepover. Of course, Justin never learned to be straight. He merely learned to better hide being gay from his family.

  Life went on normally for a while after Justin’s counseling. Justin hid his true feelings. Celeste pretended her son wasn’t gay. In Celeste’s mind, anyway, everyone was happy. But then came the day she decided, on a whim, to check Justin’s Facebook page. He hadn’t done anything in particular to warrant a search, but Celeste liked to check in every once in a while, just in case.

  Justin had gone to school as usual, and the moment he stepped onto the bus Celeste had gone to the den and logged onto the family computer. After opening the browser and navigating to Facebook, Celeste began going down Justin’s timeline. Memes, videos of people falling down, selfies snapped in front of the bathroom mirror. It was routine stuff. After reading his posts from the past few weeks, she went to close out the window. But before she did, it occurred to her to check the messages. She clicked the message icon and started down the list. Justin didn’t have too many new messages – he preferred texting and Tweeting – so it was easy for Celeste to pick out a thread toward the top of the list.

  As she read the exchange, a nervous frown crept across her face. She brought her hand to her mouth to cover the chasm that opened when her jaw gave out. She felt sick. Justin had been chatting with a man, a grown man. Celeste crossed herself as she read the foul exchange, stopping after a few messages to pinch her eyes and clear her throat.

  She sat in stunned silence for a few minutes before slowly sliding the cursor up the screen and closing the browser. The churning in her stomach gave way to anger as she thought about how her son – her own son – had been lying to her face for months. Every week he’d assured her his talks with the priest were helping his urges. He promised he wasn’t feeling attracted to boys anymore.

  Now, betrayal. Justin had been lying, feeding her lines. That will not stand, Celeste thought.

  And that man. That predator lurking behind a screen name, willing to talk to her precious sixteen-year-old son like he was some sort of a whore. A grown man who enjoyed preying on children, a man who probably jerked off every time he read her baby’s words.

  Celeste seethed.

  When Justin came home from school that afternoon, Celeste was sitting in the front sitting roo
m motionless, staring ahead at the wall. Justin looked at her with a nervous smile and asked if everything was all right when it clearly was not.

  No, everything was not all right, she said. Not by a long shot. She told Justin what she’d found and demanded he explain himself. Justin knew there was nothing he could say. He was caught. He was caught and his mother knew it and now she would punish him.

  “I want to help you,” Celeste had said.

  Justin’s eyebrows raised up, tentatively. What was this? Sympathy? Not scorn?

  “Who is that man you’ve been talking to?” Celeste asked.

  “He’s just a guy I know,” Justin said. “It’s no big deal.”

  “You know him? In person?” Celeste asked. A chill surged through her body.

  Justin assured her nothing had happened. They chatted online sometimes, but they’d never done anything. He looked his mother in the eyes and promised. He begged her not to call the police. He vowed to change.

  Celeste had been reluctant. She knew how Justin really felt, and she knew it would be hard for him to deny his desires. But she could also see the pleading look in her son’s eyes, a look that said calling the police would be apocalyptic for Justin. Criminal charges would mean public court hearings. Sex charges would mean media attention. Regardless, other kids in Justin’s class would almost certainly find out about it. He would be outed. More than that, he would be outed as a gay snitch whose mother had to step in and save her little baby.

  That phone call would have been social suicide for Justin.

  So Celeste promised she wouldn’t intervene. But she vowed to be vigilant. She had stood over Justin’s shoulder as he unfriended the creature on Facebook, and blocked him from making future contact. She warned Justin she would be checking, and she didn’t want to see any more. No more dirty talk with grown men. No more flirtation with boys in general, for that matter.

  Justin promised, and for Celeste the matter was a done deal.

  But Daly wasn’t so sure.

  “This guy on Facebook, how do you know he never contacted Justin again?” he asked.

  “I guess I don’t for sure. But we put monitoring software on Justin’s cellphone so we could keep tabs on what he was doing. We never got an alert about that guy again.”

  “Do you know who he was?” Daly asked. “The guy Justin was talking to?”

  “Vincent Gillespie,” Celeste said. “Justin had him as a substitute a few times.”

  The melancholy that overcame Daly at hearing Justin’s gloomy coming-of-age story vanished in an instant. As he walked down the sidewalk to his car, his step regained a slight bounce. Vincent Gillespie knew Kimberly Foster and Justin Gonzalez, and apparently pretty well at that. If Daly could connect Gillespie to Emma Nguyen, he could have another viable lead. But for this part of his investigation, Daly decided to skip meeting back up with Linh Nguyen, at least for the time being. It was time, he decided, to meet Steve the boyfriend.

  * * *

  Tracking down Steve was much easier than Daly had anticipated — all he had to do was call Linh Nguyen and explain he was trying to get a more complete picture of Emma’s life and wanted to talk to other people who knew her. Linh had been more than happy to give up Steve Granger’s cellphone number.

  Steve picked up after the third ring, sounding wary and guarded about answering a call from a number he didn’t recognize. Daly identified himself and in the same breath threw out Linh Nguyen’s name. Emma’s mother was on board with this project, and he wanted to make damned sure Steve the boyfriend knew it. At the mention of Linh’s name, Steve seemed to let down his guard a bit. He agreed to talk.

  It turned out some of Daly’s initial information had been a bit off. Steve wasn’t as much a boyfriend as an ex-boyfriend. The two had split up about three weeks before Emma died.

  The timing of the split could not have been a coincidence. Emma had only recently learned she was pregnant and probably had only been with child for a few weeks when she died.

  “Why did you two break up?” Daly asked.

  “You probably know she was pregnant,” Steve said. “I wasn’t going to deal with that.”

  The blunt answer startled Daly. He suspected Steve had broken things off because of the baby, but he didn’t expect him to freely admit it. Lots of young men get scared off by the thought of responsibility and domestication. Most of them have enough vanity to at least pretend the baby wasn’t the reason for the split.

  “Didn’t you feel bad leaving her like that?” Daly asked, trying to bury the resentment in his voice.

  “I thought about her as much as she thought about me,” Steve said. “It wasn’t my baby.”

  It was an answer Daly hadn’t expected. He began to feel guilty for judging. Apparently Steve wasn’t some deadbeat who left a young girl’s life in ruins after he had his fun. He was just a kid who had been hurt by the girl he cared about, reacting the way most men would.

  Assuming, of course, that the story were true.

  “I’m sorry,” Daly said, still skeptical. “How did you find out?”

  “How? We never did it. It couldn’t have been mine,” Steve said.

  Daly learned that Steve and Emma had begun dating about eight months earlier. Through the years, they had been aware of each other at school, but it wasn’t until the previous fall when they really got to know each other. They had been paired up as partners in their chemistry class and hit it off right away. Steve had recently ended another relationship, what he described as a summer fling. He liked the way Emma sometimes rolled her eyes and smiled at him when the teacher made bad science puns. She liked how Steve got her jokes and the way he smiled back at her. One day at the end of class, Steve had asked her out to the movies. She said yes, and they had been an item since.

  But after the new year, things were different. They were still science partners, but Emma seemed to have cooled to Steve. It was like a giant chasm had opened between them, and Steve couldn’t see across it. When they kissed, Emma broke away first. She wasn’t smiling the same way at his corny jokes. Her hand easily lost its grip in his.

  Eventually, Emma stopped coming over Steve’s place after school. She always had an excuse – she wasn’t feeling well, or she had to help her mother with something at home – but to Steve, it was clear that something had changed. The relationship had undergone a shift and the chemistry that once existed had vanished.

  Steve hadn’t known what the problem was. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t changed. He still cared for Emma and wanted things to work out. He tried small gestures to win her back. Emma started finding flowers in her locker. Love notes were slipped into her textbooks. She always smiled and hugged Steve to show her thanks, but the gesture was perfunctory. There was no feeling behind it.

  Then one day in early March, Emma had asked Steve to walk her home from school. He should have seen it coming. Something was obviously broken with the relationship. It had been raining outside – hardly an ideal day for the long walk to Emma’s house in Plains. But Steve said he had been clueless about the relationship’s steady decay until that afternoon.

  As they made their way up Main Street, Emma confided that she was pregnant. At first, he didn’t know what to say. He was a high school junior who just learned his girlfriend was pregnant. And there was no way the child could be his. The emotions ran through him in quick succession: surprise, disbelief, jealousy, anger.

  “Please don’t be mad at me,” Emma had said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  But how could he not be angry? Standing on the corner of Main and North streets, Steve had spoken the last words he would ever exchange with Emma Nguyen. When he stormed off, a look of rage masked the tears that were building up in his eyes. Emma stood on the corner, sobbing alone in the cool afternoon drizzle.

  “Did you ever find out whose baby it was
?” Daly asked.

  “She told me whose it was that day,” Steve said. “It was a substitute teacher she had for English. Mr. Gillespie.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Wednesday, April 4, 2018

  11:43 a.m.

  This was the day. All through the night, Daly had tossed and turned. There had been no danger of the dream returning. There had been no chance of finding sleep. For two weeks, he had been chasing a phantom, an unknown malevolent force that may not have even existed. Now, after countless miles spent driving back and forth across the Wyoming Valley, Daly felt he was finally close.

  On paper, Vincent Gillespie seemed normal. Online court records showed Gillespie was twenty-eight years old and lived in Pittston. He had a few speeding tickets a few years back, but no criminal history. From the digital archive, Daly learned that Gillespie had graduated from his hometown’s Pittston Area High School in 2008. He could only assume that Gillespie had been in college during at least some of the intervening years. It looked like Gillespie had a Facebook page, but most of it was private. The profile picture showed a smiling well-groomed man wearing a shirt and tie with his sleeves rolled up. It appeared that Mr. Gillespie also had a dog and drove a Ford Five Hundred. Mr. Normal.

  But.

  To Daly, it seemed improbable that the same teacher would have been involved in the lives of three suicide victims. Three kids who went to different schools. There were thousands of high school students spread out over more than a dozen high schools in Luzerne County. And Mr. Gillespie was a young man. He wouldn’t have had much time to substitute all over the county to get to know the kids.

  And the fact remained that he didn’t just know them. He appeared to have made a connection to each of them. For Justin and Emma, that connection was a felony. According to Jack Foster, Gillespie had just been talking poetry to Kimberly. But who knew how much Jack really knew about his daughter’s personal life? Having a fling with a teacher wasn’t something a teenage girl would likely bring up at the dinner table.