He was thinking too of Sarah Rice, now mortified, who had come to his house only to watch movies and ended up being subjected to pornography. True, she was not that much younger than everybody else, but he knew Caitlin, Mimi, and Jenny would just let the incident roll off their backs. Sarah, he was not so sure.
He glared hard at her brother. If ever there was an opportunity for either Gooch or Mitch to pull a prank, it was a certainty the other was in on it as well.
“What?” Mitch asked defensively. “It’s not my tape!”
“Ain’t mine, either, dude,” Gooch added. “Honest to God, I thought it was your Fawlty Towers tape. I got it from your room.”
“My room?” Jason’s heart skipped a beat. The Bascock tape! He had forgotten all about it. So it was not a montage of security videos, but...
Jason squeezed his eyes shut. Gooch had to have taken the unlabelled tape, which meant Jason had taken the correct one from the box. His father did not have any offending videos, then. For that, Jason sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving.
A gasp from Caitlin brought his gaze back to the screen. It was still blue.
“Turn the tape back on,” she said, tugging at Jason’s sleeve.
Jason, still grasping the remote, towered over everybody sitting underneath him, blocking Caitlin’s view. “What?”
“Just do it,” she insisted. “I want to see something.”
“I’ll bet,” Mitch snickered, then bent over to make sure his sister had the pillow ready.
Reluctantly Jason fired the movie back up, and the close up copulation shot they had viewed dissolved into a head shot of a woman with long blonde, curly hair. Her head was bent back with her chin jutted high; bright blue eyelids glowed in the poor quality lighting as the woman’s red lips emitted a deep-throated moan.
Quite suddenly he paused the scene in mid-moan. Why did the actress look familiar?
“You see it, too?” Caitlin squealed. “That’s Miss Stone!”
Several heads now leaned forward for a better look, eyes squinting to better decipher the waving picture and the lines of white static dancing across Bailey’s forehead and throat. Aghast whispers tickled Jason’s ears. How did he come to have a porno tape starring Bailey Stone, they wondered aloud. Their friend, the future priest!
Jason ejected the tape without pressing stop and yanked it from the VCR before it pushed out completely. “Wait here!” he ordered everyone, barreling upstairs to his father’s room. He burst through Dan’s bedroom door without knocking, not that he expected to find his father and Willie intertwined. “Dad,” he said breathlessly, “the tapes...Miss Stone...”
Jason paused for a gulp of air, curious to see his father’s attention had not been diverted from the television set, nor was Willie’s. Gazing at the screen himself, Jason saw why.
They had unearthed another adult film, one Jason apparently had missed in his earlier search at Bailey’s condo. This one featured Bailey as a pig-tailed redhead massaging a woman also looked familiar. Why did everybody in these movies look familiar?
Jason tore his gaze away from the screen and turned to get his father’s attention. He and Willie appeared entranced, like watching the aftermath of a car wreck.
“Dad?”
Jason turned back to the screen, and it hit him. The woman on the receiving end of the massage was the Elaine clone from Jillian’s.
Chapter Seventeen
As Dan prepared for Bailey Stone’s viewing, he recalled for some inexplicable reason a humor column he once read concerning the Southern preoccupation with death and dead people, in particular how great pains were often taken to ensure the dearly departed a proper sendoff. So fanciful were some funerals and so detailed were instructions left behind that it seemed the way was buried was more important than how that person lived.
Southerners used to sit up all night with an open, occupied casket, keeping cool with handheld funeral fans and mewing over the deceased. “He just looks so natural,” the mourners wailed, all gracious enough to ignore how Uncle Bernie’s face, slathered in pancake makeup with his wrinkles sliding back into his ears, looked too freakish to have been human. The Irish, at least those in the Greevey family, would drink well past their individual saturation levels and link arms, belting out every hymn they could recall despite their overall intoxication, toasting the deceased until he was in better physical condition than they were.
Dan had not a clue as to how Bailey’s family handled funerals. In deference to the deceased, therefore, he opted for the simplest package the funeral home had to offer: a viewing for friends to feature prayers from Bailey’s minister, followed by cremation. Bailey’s church would get the ashes and sister Debbie the bill.
Jason, sitting stiffly in his best charcoal suit, fidgeted with the seatbelt and leaned his head against the passenger window. Dan set the parking brake and sighed heavily; through the rear view mirror he detected a few Colley High teachers entering the building. He felt relieved; at least Bailey’s final memorial would not be a party of three.
“You don’t have to come in,” Dan said, sensing his son’s tension. Jason had only attended one other viewing: Liza’s. The boy was inconsolable then, seeing his mother’s body lying in a peach silk-lined coffin, white and waxy as if she were not real. “If you want, you can wait in the lobby. I don’t expect Reverend Johnson to be long-winded. We don’t have the room but for two hours, and he agreed to oversee the cremation, so our work is done.”
Jason idly tapped the center console of the car. “It’s not that, Dad. I don’t have a problem seeing Bailey and all. It’s just...” another deep sigh, “like, when I do see her it’s not going to be a deluded substitute teacher lying there. All I’m going to see is her in that porno flick, doing porno things.” Right this second, the image of naked, writhing Bailey was fresh in his mind. No amount of prayer or Cartoon Network had yet been successful in erasing it.
“I know there has to be somebody coming tonight who had respect for Miss Stone, and doesn’t know about this.” Jason wrung his hands. “I guess I’m just afraid I might let something slip.”
“So don’t say anything at all,” Dan suggested. “Just smile and nod and remember what the Bible says. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’.” He eased out of the car and Jason did the same; they faced each other over the car’s roof. “We don’t know the circumstances that led to Bailey’s involvement in those movies. She may have been forced.”
“Or maybe she needed money, and felt she had no other recourse.” Could this have been the reason for her estrangement from her family? Did Bailey’s sister even know this was going on? Jason drummed the heels of his hands against the car roof. “That could be it, but surely if Miss Stone was capable of keeping up a teaching certificate she could have gotten a decent job if she needed money.”
“True, but we knew her frame of mind somewhat. She may have believed differently.” Dan scanned the parking lot for Willie’s car. “We don’t know that somebody may have talked her into it, and then she found herself in so deep that she could not get out.”
“If she wanted out,” Jason grumbled. He had not told his father that in the tape Gooch accidentally played that Bailey—high in the throes of ecstasy—was screaming Danny, oh Danny, and peppering her staccato orders to Danny with language bluer than Superman’s bodysuit. He had not bothered to check if the male character in the movie was named Danny. Jason did not want to discover differently, thinking “Danny” was Bailey’s motivation for filming the scene.
Nor did Jason mention the appearance of the mysterious Elaine in the other film, unsure if Dan or Willie had recognized her. Jason knew if he said something it would only launch yet another argument about Bailey’s death in relation to the past two murders. Dan would chalk Elaine’s involvement in the adult film to mere coincidence (“Norfolk isn’t that big a city,” he could hear his father saying) and end the subject. Getting through Bailey’s memorial was enough for one day.
“You think Detective
s Simons and Gross will come?” Jason asked.
“Why would they? They barely knew her outside of that one interview at the hospital, and her death is no longer under investigation. Willie’s here.” Dan waved as Willie steered her car into the narrow space next to them.
“Just asking,” Jason mumbled, but he could see his father was no longer paying attention. Dan greeted Willie with a kiss when she emerged wearing a knee-length black dress, her thick dark hair pulled back in a bun.
The three headed inside the building. Soft, mourning organ music followed them via overhead speakers as the funeral home director guided them to the last room on the left where the viewing was already in progress. “Remember,” Dan whispered to his lady friend and son, “just relax and keep everything we discovered last night to ourselves.”
No problem, thought Jason, feeling too petrified to speak to anyone. For a brief moment he envied Bailey, silent forever.
The Eternity Chapel was not very large. A wallpaper floral print frieze lined the mauve walls, accented by white molding and baseboards. Jason glanced at the first exposed page of the memorial book, recognizing five names as teachers from the school. Numbers one and two were Reverend and Mrs. Johnson. Taking the chained pen in hand, Jason signed himself in then turned slowly to survey his surroundings. Memories of his mother’s viewing flooded his consciousness as the aroma of carnations and lilies invaded from all directions. His head swam with the pungent scents and he grasped the book podium for support, wanting to shrink back into the walls and become invisible. If he were not here, none of this would be happening, he thought. If seeing is believing, perhaps not seeing negated the bad stuff. Bailey would be alive. Mom would be alive...
He stumbled to a folded chair in the back right corner of the room, where his view of the iridescent pink casket framed by two large wreaths of white and pink flowers was nearly unobstructed. Dan, standing at the front, turned momentarily toward his son and crooked his head—an invitation for Jason to pay his final respects. Jason mouthed “in a minute” and sank back into the cushioned chair. He was not completely honest with his father, for the prospect of seeing Bailey’s body did bother him. It did not matter whether or not he would he looking down upon a teacher, a madwoman, an X-rated movie actress, or a person in general. Regardless of who she was or what she did, Bailey was dead, and she would never reveal what occurred in her last moments, much less who administered that last lethal injection.
Slowly more people filtered into the room, talking softly amongst themselves and greeting each other happily, as if at a reunion instead of a more solemn occasion. Jason remained planted in his seat, nodding to Maura Arnaiz, who appeared to be there solely out of duty judging from the frequency with which she checked her watch, and Debra French, looking completely out of place in a blue suede minidress, high heels, and teased hair.
Edna Wallis arrived, waggling a hello from the doorway. She took the chair directly in front of Jason and stretched out to squeeze his shoulder. “How are you doing?” she asked, concerned. “I heard about what happened at the prom. You must have had the beejeebers scared out of you.”
Jason nodded. “I’m alright now. I certainly didn’t expect it to end like this, especially when we heard that Bailey faked being stabbed.”
Edna sighed deeply and twisted in her seat to face Jason better. The dark purple polyester blouse she wore appeared to be too tight for her generous bosom and bulging abdomen, for she was constantly tugging at the hem, pulling it over the waistband of her paisley skirt. “Ugh,” she scoffed. “I think I shall be forever grateful if I don’t see or hear anything as dramatic ever again. If it isn’t somebody pretending to be stabbed, it’s somebody pretending to be sincere about wanting my job.”
“What’s that?” Jason’s interest was piqued. He remembered Mrs. Wallis’s plans to retire but figured a decision on the future of her AP position would not be made until the summer.
Edna patted Jason’s knee and scooted her chair inward as more people shuffled inside. The room was shrinking from the number of people coming to bid Bailey farewell, which surprised them both. Edna commented that she was not aware Bailey knew so many people. “I figured many of the people here would be from Colley, but there are some unfamiliar faces. I suppose they’re from Bailey’s church.”
Jason, meanwhile, kept an eye out in the event Elaine showed. If she did, what would he say to her? Would he have the courage to approach her, he wondered.
“Anyway,” Edna said. “I’m not sure if I should be divulging this, but come June I’m gone and I won’t even care. That damned Lawrence Brantley, he’s taking every opportunity to kiss Rockwell’s sweet patoot. I know, I’ve talked to Rockwell about possible in-house replacements, and I’m trying to get him to understand that it wouldn’t be prudent for a teacher to have two different AP courses, especially if one is in English. There’s a lot of preparation involved in teaching that course, and I’ve always believed the students need more preparation in the core subjects.”
Jason did not need further explanation, given that Dan seldom came home from work without the entire back seat of the car bogged down with papers and books. It was partly the reason why Dan had not yet appealed for an advanced placement Latin elective.
“I just don’t think Brantley can effectively teach the English courses and hang onto to his advanced Drama schedule, which is what he wants,” Edna continued. “For one thing, he would have to parse some lower level drama classes to other faculty, and God help the poor teacher who thinks he or she can teach without Brantley butting in.”
“Why doesn’t he just give up Drama altogether and take on the English courses? Leave the Drama program to somebody else?”
“Why would he?” Edna exclaimed. A few heads turned momentarily in their direction before resuming hushed conversations. “He’s only after the AP money, I just know it. I’ll betcha, what with the way he campaigned for an AP Drama program so he could get all that fancy equipment. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was thinking of funneling the English funds into his precious program.” She fanned herself with her hand; the topic was clearly irritating her. “Got his eye on some kind of fancy digital camcorder, I’m certain.”
Jason pondered the teacher’s accusations. He managed to avoid drama, having taken a drawing class last year to satisfy his fine arts requirement, and therefore felt unable to comment himself. Why Mr. Brantley needed such equipment outside of the sound boards, speakers and lighting for the stage puzzled him, though. He never recalled seeing any of the Drama Club’s productions being filmed.
“I tell you what, I wouldn’t put it past Brantley to show up, if only to look good,” Edna added sharply. “Rockwell was pulling up when I got here, and lately it seems wherever he goes Brantley is two steps behind.”
Jason looked to the front of the chapel to see his father glaring at him before resuming conversation with a somber Maura Arnaiz. By now it appeared more people were milling around than there was space to move. Bodies filled more of the chairs up front while others lined up at Bailey’s coffin, murmuring at the still being inside. “I should go up there,” he told Edna, “to pay my respects.”
Edna offered to save the boy’s chair, and Jason started up the side aisle, startled by the soft hand now clasped around his bicep.
“Hey,” he whispered to Caitlin, but the girl urged him forward.
“Stick close to me, please?” She bit her lip and burrowed through a field of mourners with her head lowered, leaving Jason with no other recourse but to follow. “Pretend you’re my date?”
Jason, finding it odd that anyone would bring a date to a memorial service, much less pretend to have a date at one for the sake of appearances, simply smiled and nodded to familiar faces. People were too close, hovering around them and well within earshot, so asking for an explanation was out until he could somehow steer Caitlin away to a remote corner.
That was, he thought, if Caitlin would listen to him now. Her face was turned away and she stared
straight ahead, pulling him deeper into the throng of mourners until they were face to face with the guest of honor.
Jason drew in a breath, his entire body tense as he peered down at Bailey lying in state in the powder blue dress Willie selected from the dead woman’s closet. Her cheeks were tinted rose with generous swipes from a cosmetic brush, and her slender pale fingers—intertwined and resting on her abdomen—were tipped in a matching color of polish.
“I’ve never seen a dead person before.” Caitlin rocked backward slightly. The shadow her body cast moved across Bailey’s face and Jason braced her back with his hand, thinking she was about to faint.
Surprisingly the sight of Bailey did not unnerve him like he thought it would. Whatever pain she harbored in life was over, he hoped.
“Three days ago she was having a fit at the prom and scaring us with a fake stab wound,” Caitlin said. “I never expected her to die afterward. That’s freaky.”
Jason echoed the sentiment. “Nor did I expect you to come,” he said. No other students to his knowledge made mention of showing up themselves.
Mystery Bundle (Saints Preserve Us, Pray For Us Sinners, Murder Most Trivial) Page 65