Such observations were what made designated drivers necessary.
She was saying, “I had a good time. I really did. So why do I feel sad?”
“I think you just defined ‘bittersweet,’ honey.”
“Thank you for going with me, Daddy.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it. You were the prettiest girl there.”
“Oh? Prettier than Astrid?”
“Astrid’s pretty. But she doesn’t remind me of your mother.”
She leaned against him as he drove, taking the winding road out of the lodge’s acreage slow and easy. “Part of me can’t wait for the next reunion,” she said. “Another part of me wouldn’t mind never seeing any of them again.”
Neither Keith nor his daughter could have dreamed that the reunion was just getting started.
TEN
You are proud of yourself for staying so cool at the reunion. No one would guess you are boiling inside, not even your “significant other,” as the now all-purpose term puts it. And who knows you better?
You are friendly to one and all, not pushing it, and mostly just lie back, watching, watching, watching. What you will almost certainly be forced to do doesn’t bother you—that part of it will be dispatched with a detached coolness.
But withstanding the buildup, the suspense of the uncertainty—and the threat of something happening here tonight, with so many people present, where it all could slip away from you—that is what drives you to the brink of madness.
You wonder if you did the wrong thing, not taking care of Astrid in Chicago. Before she even got here. But what had been easily accomplished in Clearwater would have been so very complicated in Chicago. And anyway, you hope you won’t be compelled, made to do anything like that tonight.
So you watch her from a distance. With talk and laughter all around, which you participate in, as if you were part of the festivities and not apart from them. Isolated in your peril. Alone in what you might have to do.
Astrid seems very natural, at ease, unlike her rather plastic way in high school. Of course, when they’d been behind closed doors or otherwise by themselves, she had been different. Human, vulnerable, revealing that her self-confidence and friendliness as shown to the other kids was something artificial, a brittle candy coating.
Not a phony, exactly. But you know from your heart-to-heart talks years ago that she had been a homely, overweight child who had sprouted and blossomed but still carried that insecurity within an attractive shell. She’d always been smart but had seen the good-looking girls around her achieve popularity even before the boys had reached puberty.
In her high school prime, she seemed to pride herself on an effortless ability to snatch a boy from another girl, but not just any girl—only the pretty, popular ones, with the best-looking, mostly jock boyfriends. Yet she’d stayed superficially friendly with each girl she wronged, despised by them until they again admired her, even adored her. Those she’d betrayed would respond to her interest and flattery and not stay mad at her. It was all those unfaithful boyfriends’ fault, right?
Wrong. But perhaps you are the only one who knew that. Well, no—Astrid had known. She’d revealed it to you, in your intimate moments together. You saw the pleasure, and guilt, of a onetime wallflower’s revenge.
But tonight, as she glides to a pause with this one and that one, here the center of a group, there in a private conservation—something seems different about her. Nothing plastic about her now. Or has she only learned how better to fake it?
She seems sincere, all right, and those she’s engaging with one-on-one are listening with pleasant expressions, responding to her shy, sad smiles with nods and smiles of their own, in most cases. With a few of those she approaches, something else is engendered—a coldness, even held-back anger, resentment. . . what are these conversations about?
She isn’t talking about you, is she?
You note that at first she’s busy with these groups of former classmates worshiping her. It takes a while, until well after dinner with the band starting in, for her to seek out individuals—and that is exactly what she’s doing now, seeking them out.
And then it begins to make sense, some of it anyway. Those women she has singled out are in many cases the girls from whom she stole boys. Some are here with the men those boys became. Others have wound up with someone else. Maybe in some cases these women wish Astrid had stolen those boys away permanently. Maybe others are grateful Astrid was a thief of hearts, because they wound up with someone else, someone better, someone they deeply loved.
So. You have it now, you get it. Mostly she is making amends. She is apologizing for her long-ago bad behavior. Most of her onetime classmates are ready to fawn over her—she had been the class favorite, student council president, resident diva of chorus and drama. But for that handful of girls she had done wrong, Astrid was something else. Something dark, and—in a melodramatic high school way—evil.
This was good. She was in a frame of mind for making amends. Perhaps she would be receptive to them as well.
Late in the evening, you follow her from the banquet hall. Watch her go into the restroom. Wait for her, until she emerges, and just happen to run into her. You greet her warmly. She smiles, but there’s a stiffness and her ice-blue eyes are cold.
“Could I have a word?” you ask.
“I don’t think so.”
“I just want to congratulate you on all your success.”
“. . . Thank you.”
“And I want to apologize. Make amends.”
She frowns a little. Still very beautiful—perhaps more beautiful as a woman than as a girl. So much perfect blondeness. Such high cheekbones.
“I sense,” you say, “just observing. . . that you’ve been making a few apologies yourself. That you’ve been the one making amends.”
She draws in a breath. Her breasts rise and fall.
“People don’t always respond well to apologies,” you say. “But a person has to try, right? I can tell your results tonight have been something of a. . . mixed bag.”
She almost smiles. “That’s true. We should talk sometime. But not here.”
“I agree!”
“And, after all, you’re not alone here tonight, are you?”
“No.” You smile nervously—the nervousness is real, but not for the reason she may think. “I should let you go. We’ll talk sometime?”
She nods. “Sometime.”
You return to your table. Join the conversation. From time to time, ’09 classmates come over to say hello. You dance a few times with your significant other, no one else. Then you leave the reunion.
In perhaps an hour, that significant other is asleep in bed next to you—you can hear the gentle snoring—and you go outside to your car. From the trunk you remove a grocery bag with some things in it. Otherwise, you don’t need the car. You can go on foot.
The Lund home is on North High, not far from downtown. It’s a milk-chocolate two-story frame house, circa early 1920s, nothing fancy but nice. Well kept up by Astrid’s parents, who had for years operated the restaurant at the DeSoto Hotel. Retired, they were in Florida right now, wintering. The yard is fairly good size, the neighborhood quiet. At after one in the morning, it’s really quiet.
You see Astrid’s car out front—a silver Jaguar XF, as sleek and lovely as its owner. Lights are on in the kitchen downstairs—you remember the layout of the house well. You go around and peek in a side window. She is in a black silk robe at the kitchen table, sitting by herself, sipping coffee—or is it tea?
After pausing to leave your grocery bag of things behind a bush, you go to the front door. You knock. Nothing. You try again.
She cracks the door and looks out at you.
“You,” she says.
“I’m sorry to disturb. I was out for a walk and saw the lights on. Couldn’t sleep. And I didn’t like the awkward way we left it. You said you wanted to talk. We could talk now, if you like.”
Through your whole spee
ch, she is looking at you through slitted eyes. When you’re done, she’s still studying you. But finally she opens the door.
“Why don’t you come in,” she says. Her hair isn’t up now, rather hovering above her shoulders. “Just for a while.”
She leads you into the living room—furnishings are mostly the same, nice, nothing special, wood-burning fireplace the best thing about it—through an archway into the dining room and beyond to the kitchen. You remember where the family room is and the laundry room. You were here several times. Not many times, but memorable ones.
The kitchen was remodeled in the ’80s and has a lot of modern wood cabinetry with dated hardware. The round maple table has her cup, four place mats, a fake-flower centerpiece, and nothing else.
“Like some tea?” she asks at the counter, civil.
“I would. Thank you.”
She pours hot water into a cup, drops in a tea bag. Puts the cup on a dish in front of you. Gestures to a chair, which you take. Sits across from you and looks expressionlessly across the fake flowers with those ice-blue eyes, so wide apart you almost have to look at them one at a time.
“Say what you have to say,” she says.
“I’m apologizing for my behavior. Back in the day. It wasn’t right. And it’s. . . haunted me ever since.”
It has, in a way. You often think of her lovely pale flesh and the ripe curves and what it was like with her. So perfect. So lovely.
“It wasn’t right,” she agrees. “And do you really think an apology covers it?”
“I suppose not. You were apologizing all over the place yourself, earlier, weren’t you?”
She stiffens. “I was. But I don’t think it was quite the same thing.”
“No. No, that’s right.” You remove the tea bag, place it on the dish. Lift the cup and sip the tea. It’s a little hot. Not bad. Nothing special. Not Earl Grey or anything. “Have you ever talked to anyone about us? About what happened?”
“Not a soul.”
“Not even tonight? At the reunion?”
“No! Of course not.”
“. . . Is it something we can. . . put behind us?”
“You mean, can I forgive you? Give you a pass?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Maybe.”
You frown. “What do you mean by ‘maybe’?”
“You know what I do, right? How I make my living?”
“You’re on the news. In Chicago.”
“I specialize in investigative reporting.”
“I’m aware.”
She sips her tea. Her coldness turns somehow businesslike. “I’m doing a piece on sexual misconduct.”
You say nothing.
“It’s something of a major topic these days,” she says. “Things that were acceptable once. . . you might say, things that people got away with. . . are now frowned upon.”
“Isn’t. . . isn’t that putting it a little mildly? Aren’t people being ruined?”
She shrugs a shoulder. “Some are. Some deserve it, wouldn’t you say?”
You say nothing. Shrug, because some response is expected.
“I want to explore the way women. . . and girls. . . have been mistreated in this society. From harassment to abuse. From date rape to, well. . . you get the drift.”
“I, uh, do. But you and I, we were. . .”
“In love?” She smiles. “You know, I thought so, at the time.”
“I did, too. I still think of you. . . fondly.”
Her expression seems to curdle. Disgust flashes across her lovely features, but then a businesslike calm returns.
“Even now,” she says, “I could hurt you.”
“I know.”
“Perhaps destroy you.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you’d like to know how you could avoid that. Maybe there’s something you could do to prevent me from turning your life upside down. After all, we were younger then. We neither one were making mature decisions.”
You sit forward. “That’s right.”
“I would want an assurance from you that what happened between us was not a. . . pattern. That it was an. . . aberration, in both our lives.”
“It certainly was.”
“Good. Good. Because what I have in mind is this. . . I want to talk about what happened between us, on camera.”
“What?”
“I want to talk to you on camera. I will use a small crew, all of whom’ll sign confidentiality statements that you witness. I will sign an agreement with you that states your face will either be pixelated or in complete shadow, and your voice disguised.”
You don’t know what to say. Not at first.
But finally, as she stares at you, smiling with a terrible confidence, real confidence, you say, “But people will guess. They’ll know who I am, because they know you, and—”
“No.” She holds up a “stop” hand. “I won’t identify myself as. . . the injured party. You will simply be someone I’m interviewing on the subject.”
An offender. Confessing in the dark.
“I would have to think about that,” you say.
“If you feel true remorse,” she says, “you can be part of the solution and not the problem. You don’t have to answer me tonight. I know how to get in touch with you.”
She does?
“I’ll let you know,” you say. “I have to think it over.”
“Of course.”
You have finished your tea.
You stand.
She stands.
“You know the way out,” she says.
She remembers, too, the times you spent here, in this house, when her parents weren’t home, after her older sister went off to college.
“Goodbye,” you say with an appropriately small smile and a little nod, and head through the dining room and into the living room. You realize she’s following and is watching, from a distance, and she says nothing, obviously doesn’t see, when you pat the piece of duct tape over the latch before you close it.
You walk around back, where the darkness conceals you.
You wait.
Within five minutes the kitchen light goes off. Your eyes go to the upstairs windows, where no lights are on. Your gaze bounces back and forth from the master bedroom window to Astrid’s old bedroom, not sure where she will land.
The light in her bedroom window goes on.
You wait awhile longer, not very long, not even five minutes this time. The light goes out. No reading lamp light either, apparently, unless it’s really weak. You figure it’s unlikely she would read, as late as it is. She did have a few drinks, this you know from observing her at the reunion. She should go right to sleep.
You wait, and this is the hardest part, a good half an hour longer. You go from a certain reluctance about what must be done to an acceptance and even irritation, as what she suggested is a sort of blackmail. She’s disappointed you.
Then you go back around to the bushes where you hid the grocery bag. You retrieve the bag and take out the black hooded raincoat and get into it. This is a new one. You threw the other one down a gutter in Clearwater, knowing not to wear it again. The blood would glow in the dark under certain light, if TV could be trusted.
You put on the fresh pair of kitchen gloves. Flex your fingers. As before, it’s awkward but not terribly.
You have a butcher knife in the bag, but you decide not to use it. Maybe somebody could trace that knife to where you bought it, across the river. You leave it in the bag. You will collect it later.
You go in through the taped-latch door, removing that tape and pocketing it, before going deeper into the house. Returning to the kitchen, you withdraw a perfectly suitable butcher knife from the countertop wood-block knife set and smile to yourself. You glance at the two teacups on the table; you can deal with those on the way out. Then, because you are here, you go up the back stairs off the kitchen to the upper floor.
Kind of strange being back here after all this time. You
feel like a ghost haunting the place. Outside Astrid’s room—will it still have the Katy Perry poster, you wonder, and that Beyoncé one?—you pause and listen. Gentle snoring. Much like the snoring of the someone in bed you left behind.
You enter quietly. Some distant street light filters in, just enough to show Astrid on the bed. Funny—maybe she’d been a little drunk. You hadn’t noticed that. Hadn’t perceived it. But here she is, not under the covers, just flopped on top of them, though the room isn’t warm. Not cold, but not warm. She’s on her side, still in the black silk robe. You gently move her onto her back, and she goes with the motion, not waking. Settling. Still sleeping.
That’s all right with you. You loved this girl once. Maybe you still love her, a little bit. You don’t want her to suffer. You’re pretty sure she doesn’t wake, although her body jerks and kind of convulses when you bring the butcher knife down again and again into her chest.
At this angle you hardly get any on the raincoat, but soon the ceiling is dripping.
ELEVEN
After showering, including shaving her legs and shampooing, and generally getting ready for her day, Krista had wardrobe considerations to deal with.
But as she stood staring at the contents of her bedroom closet, those contents stared back at her in bland indifference, as she asked questions of herself.
Uniform?
No. This was Sunday, her day off (though as chief she was always on call), and while wearing her uniform to the reunion brunch might be a nice way to quietly brag. . . no. That would just be sad.
What about the reunion brunch?
That was another no. She’d had a good time last night, perhaps short of a wonderful evening but she certainly wasn’t sorry she’d gone. But neither was she anxious to spend any more time with her old friends.
The local ones she saw frequently anyway, at least in passing, and the reminiscing with out-of-towners had exhausted itself. Of course, the brunch had been set at 11:00 a.m., to give anyone who wanted time to go to church—and Galena was a big church town, historic ones lining much of Bench Street—but. . .
Are you even going to church?
Girl Most Likely Page 9