“Not to worry.” Janice glanced over at Natalie and Maggie, who had taken Jimmy Tyler the plate of coconut squares. “I see the news of our visiting celebrity is out.”
“Anna told the police that Randi had made him up.” Laurie took one of her own tarts to fortify herself. “Apparently not. No one could make up clothes like that.”
Janice’s attention swung to her abruptly. “The police came to talk to Anna?”
“Sure. They said they had two hundred teenagers on the list. Practically everyone at the high school. Kyle, too?”
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?”
At least she believed in her son, even if others didn’t. Laurie felt the first flicker of affinity with Janice.
“Unbelievable or not, I’m glad Anna isn’t involved,” she admitted. “We have enough on our plate with helping Tanya survive this.”
Janice’s face wavered, and then steely control seemed to bring her features back to their usual smiling calm. “I’m glad you know Anna had no part in it. I wish I could say the same.”
Chapter Six
To group: Budz
From: JohnnysGrrl
Someone’s talking. Better not B u. Nice funeral huh? How bout that Jimmy Tyler? Ha ha.
Nick didn’t consider himself a type A kind of guy. He didn’t fly off the handle; he thought things through. He never leaped to conclusions, and he liked clean evidence and orderly thinking. He’d seen the results of road rage a time or two, and that had even cured him of any urges he might have had toward reckless driving.
But orderly thinking wasn’t doing him any good today. Not after he’d received Lisa Nguyen’s e-mail with her written preliminary findings and the attached zip file full of digital photographs of Randi’s autopsy.
Between those and Forrest Christopher’s investigation of the crime scene on the bridge, the sequence of events had become clear. But even if she had been pushed, and had gone over either accidentally or by design, why had no one jumped in to help, why had no one called 911? If Randi had still been breathing when she went under, maybe she could have survived.
He glanced again at the photograph of her skull. Maybe.
The list of teenagers on the bridge was now part of the permanent record in his brain. Nobody was admitting to seeing anything. Kate Parsons and her little crew of two, Rose Silverstein and Kelci Platt, had bought sodas and chocolate bars at the Stop-N-Go and stopped to talk to Kyle Edgar, Brendan, and another boy named Morgan Williams. According to them, the conversation hadn’t lasted more than half an hour or so. Kate thought she’d seen Anna Hale and another girl talking to Randi under the trees, but Kyle said he hadn’t seen Anna since their last class, earlier in the day.
Nick was a little more inclined to believe Kyle than Kate, especially when Anna had said she was at home in bed. In that case, who had really been talking to Randi under the trees? He’d be extremely interested in interviewing that person.
He’d also be interested in getting a straight story about what had happened to Randi between talking under the trees and falling into the river, because every statement in this folder said something different.
Were kids really that scatterbrained and unobservant? Or were they just all lying through their orthodontically perfect teeth?
He printed the report and the photographs and slid them into the case folder. With the funeral today, it was only a matter of time before Randi’s mother would be asking for answers. It was Nick’s job to provide them.
Too bad he didn’t have any at the moment. Just a boatload of new questions.
Those teenagers held the key. One or all of them were hiding the truth about what happened. He was just going to have to lean harder on them, and sooner or later somebody would crack.
In the church activity room, Laurie stared at Janice Edgar.
“Kyle was there?”
The poor woman. It was bad enough having the police come to visit and hint that your child might be involved when someone had died. But to actually know that he might be prosecuted—she couldn’t bring herself to think about it.
Janice took a sip from her cup of tepid tea, and seemed to swallow with difficulty. “So he told Nick.”
“What else did he say?”
“That Kate was there, and that other girl who spoke today.”
“Rose. Who else?”
Janice lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you want to know? Anna wasn’t there, according to Kyle.”
“No, for which I’m thanking God as we speak. But surely one of them must have seen something.”
“Apparently not.” She would have said more, but Tanya touched Laurie’s arm and they both turned to her.
“Laurie, I can’t handle this,” Tanya whispered. “I need to go home.”
“I’ll take you,” Janice offered instantly.
Laurie would just as soon have taken Tanya home herself and made sure she was all right before Debbie Jacks came on duty that evening, but then who would take care of getting all this food put away and the activity room cleaned up?
“Thanks, Janice,” she said. “I’ll talk with you later. Before Bible study on Thursday, okay?”
Janice gave her a surprised look, but murmured something in the affirmative before she and Tanya made their way out of the room. Well, maybe she’d deserved it. She and Janice weren’t exactly on “I’ll give you a call for any old reason” terms. But that could change. She wanted to know what Kyle knew.
She wasn’t sure exactly why—but there was this knot of anxiety growing inside her, and something had to be done about it. If she could find out something—any detail—about that night, then maybe it would dissipate.
Laurie didn’t indulge much in self-examination. She didn’t have a therapist or spend her energy figuring out how to self-actualize. Frankly, she didn’t have the time. Getting Colin and the kids from one end of a day to the other didn’t leave much time for contemplating her navel, and any free time she did have went to the church or even to herself in a rare hour alone to read.
So she didn’t bother examining the roots of the little knot under her breastbone. She just went with what her instincts told her—that information about that night would help, and the more facts she had, the safer she’d feel.
Safe from what?
Well, that was the silly part. Anna had done nothing wrong. Her family was safe, and there was nothing to be afraid of. But she trusted her instincts. Colin didn’t put much store in instincts—they were too close to what he called “that ESP nonsense.” But they hardly ever led her wrong.
When the mourners had thinned to just a trickle of die-hards who were there because they didn’t often get the opportunity to socialize and enjoy a good spread at the same time, Laurie and her team—down to just Cammie and Mary Lou now—began to clean up. The leftover cookies and squares would be perfect for the worship team’s music rehearsal the following night, along with the soda, so that all went into the fridge.
The kitchen had a cooking area, with stove, sink, and refrigerator. A long staging counter with a pass-through opening on one side faced the multipurpose room, with storage cupboards beneath it. Laurie was on her knees putting minarets of paper cups back in their space when she heard her name on the other side of the pass-through.
“I don’t think Laurie knows that.”
She froze. Her legs tensed as she got ready to pop to her feet and say, “Knows what?”
But then she recognized the voice of Sophie Dayton, the pastor’s wife, who would probably clam up if she did that. So she stayed on her knees and closed the cupboard door as quietly as she could.
“Brendan swears Anna was there, too.” Aha. Nancy O’Day.
Sophie’s tone was gentle but honest. “It’s not likely Brendan is going to lie about that. He’s been very up-front about being out that night.”
“Why shouldn’t he be?” Nancy seemed to bristle a little. Well, using the word lie in connection with her child would make Laurie bristle, too. “He’s got nothing to hide. H
e didn’t do anything wrong.”
“None of them did. I’m sure it was all an accident or a suicide and the police are being overly cautious. Even treating it like a murder investigation. Not that it is,” she said hastily. “Just treating it that way.”
“They should treat it carefully. That’s their job. Pass me one of those pecan tarts, would you? I’ve been holding out all afternoon, and I just can’t anymore.”
Their voices faded to the other side of the room and then out the door. Laurie stood, wishing she’d had the courage to stand up. At least there were two people who stuck up for Brendan the way she’d wished her friends would have stuck up for Anna.
Brendan, who didn’t deserve people sticking up for him. Who was putting the word out that Anna had been on the bridge that night. Putting her in danger. Laurie could practically feel the hackles rise on the back of her neck. She’d had just about enough of people spreading lies about her daughter. But she wasn’t the police. Other than solving the investigation herself, how was she going to make them stop?
No one was with Tanya Peizer at the mortuary, which puzzled Nick a little, considering the army of loving and efficient women who had surrounded her up until now. Maybe she’d slipped her handlers and come to do this on her own. Maybe he should butt out and find another time to talk to her.
It wasn’t strictly necessary that he tell her in person about what Lisa and Forrest had found. A copy of Lisa’s report would come to the mailbox at apartment 202 in due time, in all its stark and ugly detail. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to put this fragile woman through reading something like that when he had the means to break it to her kindly, as a compassionate but impartial officer of the law.
This wasn’t Pittsburgh, where an officer might not see the family of a homicide victim unless he chose to go to the funeral. This was Glendale, where he knew nearly everyone, from the drunks he put in the slammer to sleep it off before they drove home, to the kids he coached in Little League every summer. If he had the power to do someone a kindness, then he did it simply because he could—and today’s errand fell into that category.
He sat in what the funeral business called the “meditation room,” which resembled the waiting room of a doctor’s office but with comfortable chairs and no magazines. When Tanya came out, he expected to see her carrying an urn, but her hands were empty. A worn brown leather purse swung from her left shoulder.
She looked a little surprised when he got to his feet. “Deputy Tremore.”
“You can call me Nick. Everybody else does.”
Her gaze took in his khaki uniform, badge, utility belt, and the radio on his shoulder. “Nick, then. Do you have more questions for me?”
Her skin was so pale it made her reddish hair look as though it were burning. Dark smudges hung below her eyes, as though sleep was something she chased every night and failed to catch.
His insides squeezed with compassion. Coming here had been the right decision.
“No, no questions,” he said, and her shoulders dipped a little, as though she had exhaled a sigh of relief. “I did want to talk about something, though, so the woman in the apartment next to yours told me where you’d gone.”
She led the way outside into the blustering wind, buttoning a duffle coat cut to look like the kind sailors wore. It was pea green and a little tattered at the cuffs and collar. Navy surplus, probably.
“This might take a while,” he said when she paused by his vehicle. “I have the preliminary findings about Randi’s death.”
This time her shoulders really did sag. “I can’t do this,” he thought he heard her murmur, but the wind had kicked up a flurry of leaves in the parking lot, and the sudden whisper scratched out her words.
On impulse, he went around and opened the passenger door of the police vehicle. “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.”
Instead of following him, she stepped back. “Down to the station?”
“No, no. Just for a ride. I think better when I’m driving, and you’ll have a little privacy.” He glanced at the door of the mortuary, where a black limo was pulling up. “More than we’ll get here, anyway.”
“All right.” She climbed in and he closed the door behind her, then went around the front and got in. It took about five minutes to get to the edge of town, and then they were headed east into the Pennsylvania hills, now covered in the bare skeletons of trees.
“Where are we going?” She didn’t look at the bleak scenery, but at the radio, the rifle rack, the GPS, and the computer system angled around him.
“There’s a place I know about eight miles away. I used to ride there on my bike as a kid. It has a nice view and my cousins couldn’t find me.”
“Isn’t Laurie your cousin?”
“Yeah, but she’s five years older than me. When you’re eight, you don’t want your teenage girl cousin acting like your mother and bossing you around.”
“That sounds like Laurie.”
“Nothing’s changed. But people need to be organized, and she happens to be good at it.”
“She makes sure I have company all the time. Not that I’m not grateful,” she said hastily, glancing at him. “At first I hated to be alone, and the memorial service was awful. But now that those things are over, I want to breathe a little bit and feel like I can grieve. I didn’t want anyone with me during the”—her voice broke—“the cremation. I wanted to cry without anyone thinking they had to make me feel better.”
He paused, feeling for the right words. “I think they’re afraid you’ll hurt yourself,” he said quietly. “Like with the pills.”
She shifted and fussed with the seat belt. “I flushed them days ago. Patty meant well, but I wasn’t thinking straight when I took them.” Another glance his way. “You’re not going to arrest her for giving them to me, are you? She wanted to help.”
He shook his head. “I had a little chat with her after I talked with you, and it didn’t take long to realize she was honestly trying to do right. But she won’t be doing it again, that’s for sure.”
He signaled and turned off the highway, taking a narrow road that wound up the side of a hill. In a few minutes—a distance that had taken him an hour of pumping and puffing on his bike—he pulled over where the road widened a little.
“Is this it?” she said doubtfully. “I think you’ve brought me up here under false pretenses.”
If this had been any other woman, he might have thought she was flirting. But Tanya was dead serious.
“We have to walk a little way. Not far.” Belatedly, he checked to see what she had on her feet. Sneakers. Good.
Only a few hundred feet of trees and brush separated the road from a place he remembered as being a kind of refuge. Collars of dirty snow stood around the bases of the trees in the deepest shade, but as they cleared the trees and emerged onto the south-facing cliff, it was dry and almost warm. Provided you had a good coat. At least the wind had died down.
“Over here.” He helped her up a tumble of limestone boulders and then settled on one that was nearly level. This natural bench was where he’d done his daydreaming as a kid.
“You came all the way out here on your bike?” Her profile looked very young and almost wistful as she gazed out over the valley. Glendale lay off to their right, the highway snaking through the bare trees, following the course of the Susquanny.
“Sure.”
“Didn’t your mom tell you not to?”
“I never told her about it. Never told anyone. I used to pick her flowers up here and bring them home in my backpack, and she never asked me where I got them.”
“I always asked Randi where she went. She might not have liked it, but she always told me.”
Told you something. Maybe not the truth.
“We had pretty good communication,” she went on, “considering we mostly saw each other at breakfast and at night. I wanted her to know she could tell me anything. Heaven knows I’ve done a ton of stuff I’m not proud of. She probably couldn’t m
ake any mistakes I haven’t made myself.”
The cold air moving down the side of the hill stirred the curls on her forehead. She’d pinned her hair back into a twist for the trip to the mortuary—a touch of formality, a show of respect for her daughter’s last journey.
Unexpectedly, his throat closed up on whatever inane comment he’d been about to make, and he cleared it roughly.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to babble. You had something you wanted to tell me.”
He frowned. Trust him to break a mood. “No. I mean, you weren’t babbling. Talking about Randi is natural.”
“Talking about the coroner’s findings isn’t.”
“I can do it another time. I’d rather listen to you reminisce about her.”
“On my tax dollars? I don’t think so.” For a moment, he thought a smile might soften the words, but she gazed at the river instead, the corners of her eyes pinched with pain. He braced himself. What he had to say was not going to make this any better.
As gently as he could, he summarized what Lisa had told him. By the end, Tanya’s cheeks were glassy with tears.
Yeah. A real pro at ruining a mood, a view, and a whole blasted day.
He didn’t even have a tissue on him. She dug in her pocket, found a tattered one, and blew her nose. “Is that everything?” she said when she could finally speak.
“Not quite. But we can leave the rest for another time.”
“No.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “If I have to have this in my head for the rest of my life, you might as well give it all to me. I just can’t bear . . .” The word trailed off into tears, and a flock of brown sparrows who had been investigating the rock below them took off in alarm. “Bear thinking of her in pain and me not being there.”
One crumb of comfort. It was all he had, and he offered it with eagerness, as if it would make up for the rest. “She wasn’t in pain, Tanya. When she went in, I mean.”
The sobs jerking her body under the ugly green coat seemed to slacken as she tried to listen. “How do you know?”
Over Her Head Page 7