Over Her Head

by Shelley Bates

  “Did anyone go down to try to get Randi out of the water?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. And I was pretty upset.”

  He wondered about that. “And it never occurred to you to go get help? Or call 911?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Well, sure. That’s what we were doing—running around trying to think what to do.”

  Were they? Because the only person who had actually done anything concrete was Anna Hale, if Vanessa’s story about her running under the bridge was to be believed, and even still he hadn’t been able to find out exactly what had happened after that. It bugged him that none of these kids had done the logical thing and called for help. Was it out of guilt? Or ignorance? Deliberate malice? Or worse—apathy?

  “Anything else you’d like to add?”

  “No, but if this tape goes on America’s Most Wanted, they need to remember that my real name is Kathryn. That’s R-Y-N. Kate is just what my friends call me.”

  Nick resisted the urge to remind her that this was the homicide of a classmate, not a reality show. “We’ll try to remember that, Kate. Thank you for coming in.”

  He deposited the girl in the loving arms of her parents, who were still shouting recriminations and threats. After instructing the sergeant to hold them until Rose’s interview was complete, he went to check on Gil’s progress. Instead of joining them in interview room B and possibly interrupting a vital train of thought, though, he walked down the hall to the video closet. The tech indicated a chair and he sank into it, watching Gil’s technique with the petite brunette in the expensive leather jacket.

  “So you’re saying Randi had a crush on Brendan, who was Kate’s boyfriend?”

  “Yes, which was totally not mutual. He couldn’t stand her. So when she showed up and started talking to him, Kate got upset and got in her face.”

  “What was everyone else doing at this point?”

  “I was talking to Kyle because we have this thing going, and I don’t know what Kelci and Michelle were doing. I was busy, if you know what I mean.”

  “So Brendan and Kate were with Randi?”

  “We were all kind of in this big group. So anyway, Kate gets in her face, and I go to help her, ’cause she’s my best friend and all, and Kate gives her a shove, and then Brendan does, and then I do. Just little shoves, you know, like this.” She flicked her hands as though she were on a volleyball team setting up the ball.

  “Then what?” Gil prompted her.

  “So Poser is over by the rail and Kate is in her face and I turned to look for Kyle but he was gone.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Anna Hale showed up. He feels sorry for her that she’s not in our group, see, so he goes to talk to her.”

  “So he wasn’t there.”

  “No. But meanwhile Kate’s getting really mad, and she pops her fingers against Poser”—again the volleyball flick—“and she’s up against the rail and so I turn around and suddenly she’s not there.”

  “Who?”

  Rose glanced up at Gil through her bangs as though he were a complete idiot. “Poser, of course. Then there was a big splash and all you-know-what broke loose.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just started crying. And nobody carries tissues so I had to go over to the Stop-N-Go and buy some. I missed a lot of what happened then.”

  “So, to recap, you saw Kate push Randi over the rail?”

  “It was her popping her in the chest, so yeah, she could have done it.”

  Great. So much for being best friends. And so much for my bright idea about getting the real story.

  “What happened while you were at the Stop-N-Go?” Gil went on.

  “Nothing. I got my tissues and went back up on the bridge, but by then mostly everyone was gone. Some sophomore guys walked me and another girl home. They were on the soccer team, I think, if you want to talk to them.”

  “Where was Kate?”

  She shrugged. “I guess she went home. Brendan probably went with her. They live on the same street.”

  “What about Anna Hale?”

  But on the tape, Rose just looked blank. Gil wound up the interview and when the room had emptied, Nick met him in the hall as he escorted Rose back to her mother.

  “Get that?”

  “Yep. Same story, different bad guy. Same bunch of stonewalling they’ve been doing all along.”

  “Why, who did Kate say was the bad guy?”

  “Rose.”

  Gil cursed and then put on his solemn cop face as they stepped into the waiting area.

  “Thank you for coming down tonight, folks,” he said. “We appreciate your willingness to help us find the person responsible for this.”

  After more shouting and threatening with at least three different flavors of lawsuit, the parents got themselves mobilized in the direction of the door. Just as her father put his arm around her to guide her outside, Kate turned.

  Her perfect oval face was white. “Wait,” she said.

  “Kate, come on. We’re going home,” her father said.

  “No. No. This isn’t right. Deputy, I—I have something I need to say.”

  “Not without Jack O’Day here to advise you, you don’t,” her father snapped.

  “Daddy, no, this is important.”

  “Go ahead, Kate,” Nick said. “That is, if your dad says it’s okay.”

  She pulled away from him and he rolled his eyes. “Fine. Whatever.”

  “I didn’t quite tell you everything back there.”

  “No? How about you tell me now?”

  The desk sergeant leaned on his elbows in his glassed-in window, and even Rose’s mother stopped in the doorway to listen.

  “After—after Randi went in, we all kind of fell apart and went running around ’cause we didn’t know what to do.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “Well, what I didn’t say was that for a few seconds I was by myself, over on the other side of the road, where you can kind of look down on the park.”

  Where Kyle had told him he’d found Anna Hale. “Yes?”

  “And I saw—I saw Anna there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the water. With—with Randi.”

  “What?”

  Pandemonium broke out. If this had been a movie, Nick would have fired his service weapon into the air to get everyone to quiet down. It took at least half a minute before he could even hear Kate speak.

  “Kate, this is serious. Slow down and try to remember exactly. Didn’t you say it was dark and you couldn’t see anything?”

  Tears streaked her cheeks. “Yes, I did. I didn’t want her to get in trouble, honest. But I can’t keep this to myself anymore. It’s eating me up.”

  “She’s right,” her mother said. “She can’t sleep, doesn’t eat properly—she’s a mess over this.”

  “Tell me what you saw,” Nick repeated. He was not in the mood for a sympathy ploy right now.

  “She was in the water, and Randi was kind of floating, and Anna reached out and touched her, and she just kind of . . . sank.”

  “Was she alive?” Gil put in. “Could you tell if she was conscious?”

  “No,” the girl said. “I told you, it was dark.”

  “When you say ‘touched her,’ what do you mean?” Nick tried to keep the urgency out of his tone, but it wasn’t easy.

  “She—she put her hand out, kind of over Randi’s face, and went like this.” The heel of her hand dipped, as though she were pushing an imaginary canoe away from shore. “And then Randi just went under.”

  The sobs she’d been trying to hold back burst out of her, and her parents put protective arms around her and hustled her out the door.

  Nick looked from Gil to the desk sergeant to the overhead camera, which had recorded everything. He’d heard the same rumors as everyone else, but he’d dismissed them as insubstantial since no one had actually been able to confirm them.

  Anna. His heart squeezed with anguish. />
  Had he ever once thought that she might be involved as deeply as this? Had he ever been willing to consider that rumors are sometimes rooted in fact? Had he let love blind him to the truth?

  Had love blinded them all? He thought of Laurie, as staunch as any soldier in her belief in her daughter. What would she do when she heard?

  Family aside, what was he going to do? The pressure to make an arrest had reached the boiling point. The switchboard fielded twenty or thirty calls a day, from people who thought they had leads to people demanding a recall of the sheriff because he hadn’t found the guilty party yet. Once the word got out—and he had no doubt at all that it would be all over town by breakfast—the department was going to have to act decisively, one way or the other.

  The department, of course, meaning him.

  Anna.

  Without another word, he went back to his desk and called up the file on the system. He did his duty and wrote up the report, then put in a requisition to have the lobby security tape logged into the exhibit room as evidence.

  Anna.

  These girls pointed fingers at one another so easily. It was easy to be skeptical and dismiss them, but somewhere in all this videotape lay the truth. And now that Kate’s accusation had been made in public, he was bound to perform due diligence and investigate her claim as carefully as all the other leads and hints he’d followed up on.

  Whether he believed it or not.

  On Tuesday morning, Laurie had just pulled into the garage after dropping off Tim (still half asleep—he was not a morning person) and Anna (sulky and adamant that she wasn’t going to miss English to talk to a cousin she saw at least once a month anyway), when her cell phone rang. She threw the gear shift into park and shut the engine off, then pressed the answer button.

  “Lor, it’s me.”

  She smiled at the sound of her husband’s voice, which had lost that frightening, closed-off tone and sounded more like the best friend she’d depended on for more than half her life. “Nice timing. I just got home.” Looping one hand through the straps of her purse, she slid out of the van, slammed the door shut, and walked into the kitchen. “What’s up?”

  “Have you seen a paper this morning?” His tone stopped her.

  “No. I only read it at school. Why?”

  “Anna made the front page.”

  “How can that be?” Anna was grounded. She wasn’t out running around and getting into trouble. Not anymore.

  “It says here that two girls were questioned in connection with Miranda Peizer’s death, and in a ‘dramatic exposé straight out of America’s Most Wanted,’ one of them said that not only was an ‘unnamed juvenile’ the last person to see the victim alive, she also pushed her head under the water. And we know who they mean. So will everyone else.”

  Laurie’s jaw dropped, and she spluttered through the dam of furious denial that backed up in her throat. In the end all that made it out was, “That’s a fabrication and you know it.”

  “All I know is that Anna doesn’t tell it that way. It’s more important than ever that she see the counselor today.”

  “Don’t worry. She’s going if I have to drag her out of English class by her hair.”

  “We might have to keep her home a couple of days, Lor, if this is all over the school. Even though they didn’t print her name, you know how nasty kids can get.”

  “What, and make her look like she’s guilty? The kids are already nasty, Colin. They’re throwing stuff at her in the cafe-teria.” Fight or flight. Adrenaline flooded her system as her body prepared to do battle—even though there was no one in her empty kitchen. “Who is saying all this, anyway? Who are these girls the paper is talking about?”

  “It doesn’t say here, but the simple process of elimination tells me one of them has to be Kate, or maybe Rose or Kelci.”

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.” How dare these criminals-in-training shift the blame onto Anna? It was a fact that one of them had done the pushing. If there had been no pushing, there would have been no death. The evidence supported that, and everyone knew the evidence didn’t lie.

  Unlike teenage girls who were too afraid to come clean about their own horrific behavior.

  “Lor, don’t fly off the handle. Leave this to the police.”

  “Believe me, that’s my very next call.”

  “Lor—”

  Laurie could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d hung up on her husband. This made one more. And for a miracle, Nick actually answered the phone at his desk.

  “Tremore.”

  “Nick, it’s me.”

  “Lor, I’m so sorry the paper ran the story before I could call you.” Nothing like getting straight to the point. But was it propelled by guilt? Laurie decided she didn’t care.

  “You have to get them to retract it. If it wasn’t already, my little ‘unnamed juvenile’s’ life is going to be sheer hell, starting today.”

  “I couldn’t stop it. There was a reporter there picking up a news briefing, and he happened to be in the waiting room when Kate made her big announcement.”

  So it had been Kate. Tall, slender Kate Parsons with her unlimited clothing budget and her big brown eyes.

  “She’s lying through her teeth, Nick. Anna would never do something so horrible. If she really did run under that bridge, she did it to see if she could help. I know that much about my daughter.”

  “Has she given you any other details at all?”

  “Nothing more than what she told you, but think about it for a second.” In view of this new twist, he needed to know what she knew. “I talked with Kyle Edgar the other day, and he said he found her standing in the water. But you know that part of the river as well as I do. There’s a big drop-off about four feet out. We know where Randi fell, and there’s no way Anna could have gotten that close without swimming. She was only wet up to her ankles.”

  “Laurie, think carefully. What was Anna wearing that night? Do you remember doing her laundry?”

  She and Janice had talked about this, before their visit had gotten ugly. “There was nothing. No muddy socks, nothing.”

  “You don’t remember wet pants or a wet shirt?”

  “Nick, my daughter isn’t going to go swimming in the Susquanny in November, no matter what the provocation. She’s the world’s original cold-water wimp.”

  “But she was suffering from severe agitation and trauma. She could have jumped in and not even felt it.”

  “Nope. Kyle said she was just standing there, up to her ankles in water.”

  “But we have no way to prove it.”

  “We have no way to prove what Kate said, either. We need to focus on who did the pushing, not the hysterical stories of fourteen-year-olds who are trying to foist the blame on an innocent girl to save their own skins.”

  “You don’t need to tell me how to do my job, Laurie.”

  His tone was so cold she blinked, feeling the sting of his rebuke right through the connection. “I—I’m sorry. Of course not. I’m just a little hysterical myself right now. I want to tear apart anyone who points a finger at my little girl.”

  “That’s natural. I know how protective you are. And I want you to know I’m doing everything I can to get to the bottom of this.”

  She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Okay. I’ll try to possess my soul in patience while poor Anna is probably having the worst day of her life at school today.”

  “I think we should cancel Thanksgiving.”

  For a second her mind went blank. They’d cancel a holiday gathering because of a lot of gossip? “Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes. Remember I asked you if Tanya Peizer could come along with me?”

  Oh. Of course. “Right. I was thinking of something else. Why would you want to cancel it?”

  “In light of this news . . . I think it would be awkward, not to mention a little weird.”

  What was it Colin had said about armed camps? Everyone seemed determined
to put Tanya in one camp and Laurie in the other. And that was reasonable—if you believed that Anna had come within twenty yards of being responsible for Randi’s death.

  “Nick, Anna is innocent. She did not push Randi under the water, and she did not see her alive once she fell. If you believe that, really believe it, then having Tanya here is not awkward at all. It’s simply two families helping each other through a rough time.”

  Static crackled. He must be on his cell phone.

  “Nick? You believe that, right?”

  “I don’t have the luxury of believing anything other than the evidence,” he said slowly.

  “And there’s no evidence to support what Kate said in the paper. So no, we’re not going to cancel Thanksgiving. Dinner is at two o’clock, as usual. And Tanya is very welcome.”

  “Thanks, Lor. I meant it, you know. I’m doing everything I can to find out the truth.”

  “The truth shall set us free.” She reminded herself of the Bible’s promise aloud, and wondered if something that had been recorded two thousand years ago applied to the here and now in Glendale, Pennsylvania.

  “Are you quoting the Bible to me, the family heathen?” Nick said. At least the cold note had gone out of his voice, and he was back to being the teasing cousin she loved.

  For once, she didn’t go along with the joke. “I was just thinking out loud. Hoping that what the Bible says really is true.”

  “I thought all you Christians believed that. The process of law is based on it,” he pointed out.

  “Provided you have all the evidence.”

  “Yeah. The evidence. I have to say, though, that I believe it as a general principle. I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t think that the truth divides the people doing wrong from those doing the right thing.”

  “Maybe you’re closer to Christianity than you think.”

  “Don’t push it,” he warned, and she wondered if he was kidding, or if she’d overstepped the boundaries of his privacy. Maybe she should change the subject.

  “You take good care of my daughter, Nick.”

  He was no dummy. He caught the implication right away. “You can count on me. Look, I’ve got to go. See you Thursday.”