Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  “I don’t think she looks like anyone,” Quentin said, pointedly.

  “Come on, honey,” Dean said. “Who knows what a fifteen-year-old would look like at fifty-eight?”

  “You believe George Pollard. You think I should believe him too.”

  “I believe,” Dean said, “that anything is possible.”

  On-screen, Renee was waxing on, yet again, about Easter Parade. “I know it’s not a mother/daughter movie per se,” she was protesting over Robin’s gentle teasing. “But it’s a movie I love to watch with my daughter.”

  “Love is an understatement, Mom. How many times have we watched it together? I know it’s in the double digits . . .”

  “At least a dozen, maybe two,” Renee said, and as her daughter laughed, she gazed at the vase of spring flowers placed in front of them, probably to add extra color to the shot. Robin looked to be around forty, but Renee was clearly a young mother, and on top of that youthful for her age. For a moment, she looked like a blushing bride, lost in the emotion of her big day. “Some movies are keepsakes,” she said. Robin Diamond—a columnist, not an interviewer—didn’t ask her to explain.

  “Keepsakes,” Dean said.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll never know what that was supposed to mean.”

  The clip ended. “What are you going to do?” Dean said.

  “I’m going to get angry at myself for being so gullible.”

  “You honestly think George Pollard is lying?”

  “Not intentionally. But he said it himself. We go through our lives, telling ourselves stories.”

  “Come on.”

  “Sweetheart, let’s be real. Couldn’t that adorable, lost girl have lied to the hunky gas station attendant about who she really was? And couldn’t there be two sixtyish women out there with a special affection for Easter Parade?”

  “So you need to investigate more. Get yourself another source.”

  Quentin nodded. “Or, you know . . .”

  “What?”

  “Drop the whole thing.”

  “Quentin.”

  He turned. This close, Dean’s eyes affected him the same way the sun did. He couldn’t look into them without hurting.

  “Why does this story scare you so much?”

  “It’s not the story. It’s the lack of it.”

  “That never stopped you before,” he said. “What about that crazy guy in Kentucky who told you that the mayor of his town was a murderer? You flew out there, exposed him as a liar, uncovered a bigger, better story about the underage prostitutes—”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “Well, for one thing, he never claimed that his fucking mayor was the person who turned my mother into a worthless drug addict.” Quentin closed his eyes, but not soon enough. He saw the spark in Dean’s eyes, that wince, as though he were bracing for a blow. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No. I’m sorry. That was insensitive. I need to be more—”

  “You don’t,” Quentin said. “You don’t. What I need to do is grow up, do my job. Stop blaming everything on Mommy.”

  “It was only six months ago. You need time.”

  Quentin said, “I need to stop being so damn scared.”

  “You’re scared?”

  Quentin swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

  “What are you scared of?”

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t the right word.”

  “Quentin,” Dean said. “You’d tell me, right? I mean, if anything was going on with you again . . .”

  Quentin took Dean’s face in his hands. He kissed him, because it was something he knew how to do, because he could close his eyes to do it and because it felt a hell of a lot better than answering that question. “What are you scared of?” Dean whispered.

  Getting found out. Quentin didn’t say it, but the words raked at his skin, the backs of his eyeballs. They pushed into his lips as he kissed the man he loved more than anything, so much more than himself . . . Those words, always close to the surface when the topic of his mother came up, her death and what it had done to him, what he’d done . . .

  His hands slid down the length of Dean’s smooth body, more powerful than his own and yet more yielding. He wasn’t all coiled up inside like Quentin was. He had nothing to hide.

  Quentin pulled away. “I’ll investigate,” he said. “I’ll look into April Cooper’s past. If I can find a compelling enough reason to believe she survived that fire, I’ll fly out to New York and track down Renee.”

  “Quentin.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know what you’re scared of.”

  Quentin’s stomach tightened. “What?”

  “Hurting people.”

  Quentin smiled, tears forming in his eyes. He closed his laptop. Clicked the light off, thinking back to months ago, weeks after his mother’s death, when he’d awakened from a nightmare and reached out for Dean, pulled him too close and held on too tight, his lips pressed to Dean’s shoulder, his face wet against Dean’s neck, both fists jammed into his stomach, hanging on for his life. Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please . . . Dean waking, holding him. The gentle ssshes and it’s okays, and I won’t of course I won’t. I’ll never leave you.

  But you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.

  Neither one of them had mentioned it in the morning. Neither one of them had spoken of it again. “You’re right,” Quentin said, his eyes open in the soft pitch-dark. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  Five

  Quentin

  THE HOUSE WHERE April Cooper had lived with her doomed stepfather and baby sister had been leveled decades ago. But Santa Rosa High School, where she’d gone for what was commonly believed to have been the last year of her life, was still around, located in a dusty little town of the same name—a far-flung L.A. suburb situated between Duarte and Monrovia that was nowhere near as lovely and exotic as its name suggested.

  Judging from the old pictures Quentin had found online, it hadn’t changed much over the last forty-three years, save for the stores in the strip malls that lined the wide, treeless streets. Back then, it had been all about Perry’s Pizza and Sunglass Hut and Good Earth Health Foods (Now serving frozen yogurt!). These days it was mostly nail salons, punctuated by the occasional Chick-fil-A or Starbucks, plus a surprising number of crafting shops with overly cute names. Stitches n’ Such, Buckets O’ Yarn, Trimmin’ the Tree. All those apostrophes, cropping up like dandelions everywhere you looked.

  Santa Rosa High School was less than a five-minute drive away from St. Xavier, the Catholic boys’ school attended by Gabriel LeRoy. But Quentin already knew that. It was part of the lore, how Cooper and LeRoy had met cute at the McDonald’s between their two schools. The thing that surprised him most about SRHS was how close it was to Duarte, where George Pollard lived and worked. He’d grown up more than fifty miles away and had gone to college at Stanford, which was 350 miles north of here. Yet when it came time to settle down, he’d somehow made it back to his first love’s last-known location. Quentin wondered how often Pollard drove by April’s old school on a weekly basis—because that really was the question, wasn’t it? Not if, but how often?

  He could imagine Pollard cruising slowly past while talking to his wife on the phone, explaining to her and to himself that he was taking the long way home from work, his sparkling brown eyes aimed at the front steps, hoping to see a ghost.

  Santa Rosa High was a beige building, squat and charmless, with slits for windows like a jail. It probably hadn’t changed a bit since April Cooper was a student, which made Quentin understand, to a small degree, how she might have run off with a deranged murderer. Anything to escape.

  After he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and found a space, Quentin took out his phone and recorded that thought. If this were to become a podcast, the story might very well start here, in the hellhole that spawned April Cooper. The skin prickled at the back
of his neck, the feeling a familiar one—the thrill of being onto something, that first spark of understanding that would fire his curiosity, pushing him to investigate further. Quentin was beginning to understand April Cooper. Whether he wanted to or not.

  “A place like this,” he said into the voice recorder, “might even drive someone to kill.”

  QUENTIN HAD BEEN wrong about Santa Rosa High School being unchanged since the ’70s. While it was definitely true of the décor, not to mention the ventilation system (How can any of these kids stay awake in class?), the security at SRHS was 2019 all the way. Intercom. Metal detector. Heavy glass doors that, according to Melanie at the front desk, were bulletproof. “We haven’t had an actual school shooting,” she said, “but we’ve had some close calls. The PTA petitioned the school board, and with the help of a wealthy donor . . .”

  “You’re safe now,” Quentin said.

  “I guess,” said Melanie. “You ask me, they could have spent some of the money on new computers. Maybe a few books.”

  “Central air-conditioning?”

  “Exactly. But the donor was specific.”

  “Interesting.”

  She shrugged. “People are scared in this town. Too scared if you ask me.” Melanie clashed with her industrial surroundings. Raven-haired and pale-skinned, thanks to a shiny dye job and copious amounts of matte powder, she could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty years old, though Quentin figured she had to be on the lower end. She wore glittery cat-eye glasses, bright red lipstick, a vintage ’50s frock that looked like something Lucy Ricardo would have worn out shopping with Ethel. A hell of a lot of work, just to sit at the front desk of a stifling-hot high school over summer vacation, talking to absolutely no one for 90 percent of the day. An older person, he thought, probably wouldn’t have bothered. “At any rate,” Quentin said, “thanks for buzzing me in.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re Quentin Garrison.”

  Quentin blinked at her.

  “I mean it. I’m a fan. Kentucky Crimes is my favorite. I’ve listened to it three times.” She picked up the smartphone on the desk in front of her, headphones dangling out. “I think I’d go insane in this place if it weren’t for my podcasts.”

  “You’re interested in true crime.” He said it not to Melanie, but to the smartphone, its case designed after the cover of In Cold Blood.

  She smiled. “How did you guess?”

  Quentin smiled back. It was always so much easier when they turned out to be listeners. You hardly had to explain anything.

  “Are you doing a podcast on April Cooper?” Melanie said, proving the point.

  “How did you guess?”

  She adjusted her glittering glasses. “You’re not going to do a hatchet job on her, are you? Treat her like she was whatsherface in Natural Born Killers?”

  Quentin looked at her. “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  Melanie gave him a long, appraising look. “Come with me.”

  Quentin followed her down a hallway full of empty lockers, her heels clicking on the floorboards and echoing. A janitor nodded and grinned at her as she passed, clearly an object of interest to him in all her youth and red lipstick and costumey attire. “Hey, Bob,” she said, unfazed. Used to the attention.

  Near the end of the hallway was the library, which Melanie opened by key. “Librarians get summer vacation.” She sighed, switching on the lights. “Unlike Bob and me.”

  Quentin inhaled the smell of books and plastic and carpet cleaner, memories snaking through him.

  When he was a kid, his mother would drop him off at the public library after school and pick him up at closing. It was cheaper than day care, and Quentin never complained. At that age, before he grew tall and came out and learned how to fight, he’d spend full days getting tortured by bullies, then full nights at home with his mother, neither one of them saying a word. But at the library, he could escape. He could sit on the floor between the stacks and read for hours without feeling hassled or ignored.

  He used to daydream about staying there past closing, reading all night, the night turning into morning and that morning to weeks, months. He dreamed of living at the library, amongst the Harry Potters and the graphic novels and the grown-up books he was just starting to discover. Shirley Jackson. Edgar Allan Poe. Joyce Carol Oates.

  Once, he’d hid out in the back of the adult section and nearly achieved his dream, managing to stay past closing time to 10:00 P.M., when he was found by a security guard, thrown into a cop car, and reunited with his mother. Kate had been underwhelmed—at least that was the way Quentin recalled it—his mother’s expression changing as soon as the cops left their home. “What the hell is wrong with you?” A roll of the eyes when he tried to hug her. Then off to the bedroom, the latest boyfriend, without a glance back.

  Was that true? Like most people, Quentin so often lied to himself—out of protection or self-justification—to make himself the hero of his own story or at least someone deserving of sympathy . . . There were plenty of reasons for it. But regardless, it was difficult for him to put his trust in anything he hadn’t bothered to get on tape.

  “This was what I wanted to show you,” Melanie said. She was standing at a long table to the left of the librarian’s station, in front of a section marked Our School, which held bound editions of the SRHS newspaper, as well as shelves of yearbooks in chronological order. Melanie was holding one of the yearbooks, thumbing through the pages.

  “I knew about April Cooper when I first started working here,” she said. “I mean . . . she was probably the most famous person ever to have gone to Santa Rosa, which says a lot about this crappy school . . .”

  Quentin moved closer. The yearbook was dated 1975–76. “She’s obviously not in here very much,” Melanie said. “She was only a freshman, and not exactly an activity queen.”

  “How many pictures are in there of her?”

  “Just one.” She laid the yearbook out on the table before him. It was opened to a spread titled “Freshman Homerooms.” Quentin’s gaze moved between the six black-and-white photos, but he couldn’t differentiate April Cooper from the other ’70s-era teens until Melanie tapped on her image with a bright red fingernail: a girl with delicate features and lank, dirty blond hair. She was short, but she slouched anyway, a baggy shirt and jeans swallowing up her frame. In the TV movie, April had been played by a twenty-one-year-old actress, and since photographs of the real girl were so scarce, that was the image that had stuck in most people’s minds: that of an overdeveloped young seductress, worldly beyond her years.

  The real April Cooper had turned fifteen less than three months before the murders. She did not look worldly in any way, but Quentin had already known that. He’d seen the posed picture of the two of them at the St. Xavier High School winter formal—Gabriel LeRoy looming over her at six one, the corsage a shackle on her bird-thin wrist. What surprised him about the yearbook photo wasn’t how young April Cooper looked. It was how happy. April’s attention was focused on the woman standing next to her—Mrs. Brixton, according to the caption, her homeroom teacher. And she was beaming. “Wow,” Quentin said.

  “Right?”

  Quentin turned to her. “Do you know Mrs. Brixton?”

  “She retired before I started working here,” Melanie said. “But I’ve seen her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “At last year’s homecoming. I talked to her for a little while. Asked her about April. What she was like.”

  “You did?”

  “I figured it might be my only chance. She’s eighty-two years old, you know.”

  “Ah.”

  “And when I said the name April Cooper . . . I can’t explain it, but her face kind of lit up, like she’d been waiting all her life to be asked about her.”

  Quentin held up a hand. “Is it okay if I record you?”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s not for broadcast. Just for my own notes.”

  Melanie broke out
in a grin. “I’d be honored.”

  Once he’d turned on his voice recorder and placed it between them, Melanie repeated that last sentence—not just a podcast listener, but someone who had a true understanding of the way they worked. Quentin had a passing thought about hiring her at the station, whisking her away from all the drudgery and stale heat and craft stores. “What did Mrs. Brixton say?”

  “It wasn’t what I expected.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well . . . I always thought of April Cooper as an angry person, you know? Angry at her stepfather for being so strict with her. Angry at her mother for dying. You know what I’m saying? A girl who was pissed off enough to kill. But Mrs. Brixton told me that the April she knew was actually very hopeful. She’d meet with her after class sometimes, and they’d talk about the future.”

  “Like the distant future?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Mrs. Brixton said she came up with an assignment. ‘Letter to My Future Child.’ She wanted the kids to describe their current lives and predict what the world might be like in the year 2000. She said she kept the letters, and sent them back to whatever students she was able to track down twenty-four years later. Anyway . . . she only did it that one year. And April was the one who’d inspired her.”

  “What about her was so inspirational?”

  “Well . . . It’s kind of an odd thing for a high school freshman to say. I know when I was that age I couldn’t imagine anything worse,” she said. “But April told Mrs. Brixton she couldn’t wait to be a mother.”