The Suicide House

by Charlie Donlea

  Rory dwelled all night about what might have happened had she not come down from Chicago. A gritty wave of selfishness washed over her, leaving her itchy and uncomfortable as she sat through the lonesome hours of night contemplating how Lane’s death would have left her truly alone in this world. A soft knock on the door took her from her emotions. She looked up to see a woman in the doorway.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

  Rory reached for her glasses but realized she had removed them during the night while she sat at Lane’s side. Instead, she ran a hand through her hair, wishing she had her beanie cap to shield her.

  “I’m Ryder Hillier,” the woman said. “I knew Mack Carter.” After Lane had arrived in the ER and his condition had been declared as critical but stable, a uniformed police officer had questioned Rory about the events of the night. The officer was young and inexperienced and had checked all the boxes of a formal, first-tier line of questioning. Precise, by the book, and totally useless in regards to gathering pertinent information. But in the process, Rory had learned that the other car in the driveway of the burning house belonged to Mack Carter and that it was his body Rory had seen in the house along with Lane. Mack had been pronounced dead at the scene. Rory recounted her decision not to reenter the house because of the heat of the fire and the smoke billowing from the back door. The officer assured her she’d done the right thing, although Rory took little solace in the condolence.

  “I’m sorry about Mr. Carter,” Rory said.

  “I was just an acquaintance. We didn’t know each other well. We worked together in a roundabout way on his podcast. I’m a reporter.”

  Ryder Hillier.

  Rory suddenly remembered the name. This was the true-crime journalist who had posted video of the dead Westmont Prep student to the Internet just hours after he’d thrown himself in front of a train.

  Rory noticed the woman’s eyes move to Lane. “Is he going to be okay?”

  Rory nodded. “So they tell me.”

  “I heard Dr. Phillips had signed on to the podcast to offer his expertise into the criminal mind.”

  Rory focused her gaze somewhere over Ryder’s head. She didn’t answer.

  “I’m not sure how much you know about the podcast Mack Carter was working on,” Ryder finally said. “But this explosion . . . his death . . . it’s all very suspicious.”

  Behind Ryder Hillier, two men appeared. Rory knew by their suits and their expressions that they were detectives.

  “Excuse us,” one of them said. “We’re here to speak with Dr. Phillips.”

  “I’ll let you go,” Ryder said. She seemed to know they were cops, too, and Rory recognized in the woman’s eyes a sudden urge to escape the room. She handed Rory a business card, like an ambulance-chasing attorney. “Tell Dr. Phillips to call me if he wants to talk.”

  Rory held the card in her hand as Ryder disappeared past the detectives. Rory reached into her rucksack, slipped the business card into a slot in the front pouch, and pulled out her glasses, pushing them up the bridge of her nose and feeling slightly more invisible.

  “I’m Detective Ott,” the older gentleman said. “This is my partner, Detective Morris.”

  Rory sized them up instantly, her mind firing through the possibilities until she settled on the one she knew was most accurate. Ott was about sixty. The skin under his eyes drooped with a combination of years and experience, and likely too much alcohol. He was close to retirement and maybe had another couple good years in him. Morris was younger, maybe thirty. His face was nearly wrinkle-free, and his scowl told Rory he was the protégé who was a bit too eager to prove himself.

  “Rory Moore,” she said.

  “How’s Dr. Phillips?”

  “Stable,” Rory said. “Some smoke inhalation and a nasty head wound.”

  “Has he been able to talk?” the younger detective asked with little emotion.

  “Not yet. He’s sedated. They’re making sure the swelling in his head comes down and the hemorrhage starts to clear before they get too excited about letting him wake up.”

  “Well, he’s in good hands. Docs here are great,” Detective Ott said.

  Rory nodded her thanks. She wasn’t sure how good the health care was here, and she was reluctant to compare Lane’s current level of care to what he might receive in Chicago. But the doctors had pronounced him stable and had told Rory they were being cautious during the first forty-eight hours. They assured her that they had the ability to transfer him, by helicopter if needed, to a higher-level trauma unit if he didn’t progress as expected.

  Detective Ott, too, pulled a card from his pocket. “Would you mind giving us a call when Dr. Phillips is up for a chat?”

  “I’ll pass along the request.”

  Detective Ott next pulled a notepad from his breast pocket.

  “Do you have a minute to run through what happened?”

  Rory knew it was a rhetorical question, so she didn’t answer.

  “You were first to the scene. Can you tell us about your night?”

  “Sure,” Rory said, briefing the detectives on her impromptu trip down from Chicago and how she tracked Lane to Mack Carter’s rented house. About entering the house through the rear door and finding Lane on the ground in the room off the kitchen.

  “Can you tell us what you and Dr. Phillips are doing in Peppermill?”

  “Lane was working on Mack Carter’s podcast about Westmont Prep. I was joining him to keep him company.”

  There was a moment of silence as the detective jotted on his notepad.

  “The fire marshal said the explosion was the result of a gas leak. Considering the damage to the house, he’s damn lucky to be alive,” Ott said. “We’re looking into how the leak started. We’ll know more soon.”

  “We’ll be requesting fingerprint samples from you,” Morris said in a tone meant to assert competence and authority but only made Rory think he was compensating for a lack of it.

  “That can be arranged at your convenience,” Ott said. He looked down at his notepad. “When you arrived at the house, did you see any cars in the area? Or anyone else around?”

  “No,” Rory said. “I saw flames and I ran inside. Front door was locked. I tried to kick it open before I ran around to the back.” She looked at Morris. “You’ll probably find my footprint on the door. Size seven Madden Girl Eloisee combat boots. No need to call in the CSI guys for that one.”

  Her comment caused Ott’s lips to curl.

  They spent ten minutes asking Rory questions. Despite telling the truth, an itch materialized on each of her deltoids, just below the shoulder, that begged Rory to scratch and claw. She refused. She had nothing to hide, but her mind didn’t work that way. She was suspicious by nature, and when she was the one being questioned, she worried that the detectives would misinterpret her body language and avoidance of eye contact as deception.

  “Where will you be staying, Ms. Moore?” Ott asked as they finished their questions.

  It was a good question and she hadn’t thought about it until just now. “I guess I’ll be at Lane’s rental.”

  She gave them the address and shared her cell number. After the detectives left, she stood next to the hospital bed. Besides some fitful sleep in the bedside chair, she had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, ever since she woke in Miami after the auction. Despite the early hour now, she was in desperate need of a Dark Lord and maybe a shower. She took Lane’s hand in hers and squeezed before she left. He didn’t move.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE GROGGY GLOW OF EARLY MORNING SHADED THE STREETS OF Peppermill as she drove past the shops and restaurants, through the main boulevard, and eventually onto Winston Lane, the shadowed road where her night began almost twelve hours earlier. Cottages lined each side of the street as she drove into the cul-de-sac. She had fished the keys from Lane’s pocket after the nurses gave her a bag filled with his clothes. She parked in the driveway and walked to the front door, where s
he keyed the lock and entered.

  Rory kept the cottage in shadows, only lighting the small lamp on the end table in the front room. She took a moment to study the small house, walking into the kitchen. Hunger growled in her stomach, and she pulled open the refrigerator door. It was empty of food, but filling the top shelf were six bottles of Dark Lord stout lined in perfect rows with the labels forward, as if Rory herself had arranged them. A smile found her face. He had known she would come.

  She pulled a Dark Lord off the shelf and grabbed a glass from the cabinet. The beer formed a thick head as she poured it, and Rory allowed the stout to settle as she carried the glass with her and explored the rest of the house. When she reached the three-season room at the back of the cottage, she stopped and stared at the desk. Arranged on its surface was an array of pastels she used to color the dolls she restored. Next to them were brushes and swabs. The presentation represented just a fraction of the tools she used during a restoration, but Rory appreciated Lane’s efforts. The rest of her equipment was packed in her car, along with her new Kiddiejoy doll. The makeshift studio here, isolated from the neighbors and with the tall windows looking out over the pond that held the subtle glow of early morning, was nearly as inviting as her workshop at home.

  When she walked into the room she noticed a present wrapped and waiting on the desk. She spun the package around and saw her name scrawled on the tag in Lane’s cursive. Peeling off the paper, she found a pine box the size of a hardcover novel. She lifted the top to reveal a set of Foldger-Gruden paintbrushes. The collection had been discontinued years ago, and Rory’s current set had belonged to her great-aunt. Those brushes were worth more in sentimentality than practicality, as many were unusable after so many years of restorations. This sight of the pristine set prickled her chest with possibility and produced the urge to go to her car, retrieve her new doll, and put the brushes to use. Rory lifted one of the brushes from the foam casing that secured it. The handle, like the box, was made from pine. On one end were fine bristles made from sable hair. She stroked the back of her hand to feel the softness. The other end of the handle was beveled to a needlelike point, which was meant for sculpting. Rory took a moment to admire the collection of brushes, which ranged from fine to broad and would be perfect for restoring her new Kiddiejoy doll.

  As drawn as she was to the workbench Lane had arranged for her, something else in the room called for her attention. Against the far wall she saw a large corkboard propped on an easel. It looked eerily similar to the one in Rory’s office. That infamous corkboard in her Chicago bungalow was pocked with hundreds of holes from years of sticking pins through photos of victims from the cold cases she had solved. Once she tacked a photo to the corkboard, Rory embedded the victim’s image in her mind in a way that prevented her from forgetting their face until she had found answers to what had happened to them. During this process, a relationship began—an intimate bond between Rory and the deceased that she had never been able to explain to another living soul. It was how her mind worked. It was the way she unraveled cases no one else could solve. She grew closer to the victims whose murders she investigated than she did to nearly anyone else in her life.

  Rory carried her glass of Dark Lord through the room and stared at the corkboard. Pinned to it was a photo of Theo Compton, the most recent Westmont Prep student to go back to that boarding house and kill himself. Other photos were pinned below Theo’s. As Rory moved closer to the board, she recognized the five faces that stared back at her. She’d done her research. After Lane had first told her about the case, Rory spent the night scanning the Internet and learning everything she could about the Westmont Prep Killings. It had been a distraction from the angst of preparing to board an airplane the next morning.

  Two of the faces belonged to the students who had been killed during the slaughter. The other three were the survivors who had gone back to that house over the last few months to kill themselves. Rory stood in front of the board and scanned each photo, hypnotized by the eyes that stared back. Finally, she looked at the table next to the corkboard. A glossy five-by-seven photo lay on the surface. It contained another face with eyes that were equally hypnotic. She lifted the photo from the desk, stared at it for a moment, and then pinned it to the top of the board, above the others. This photo was of Charles Gorman, the chemistry teacher who killed the first two students and hung one of them on a fence.

  Rory took a step back to take in the entire board. The room was starting to brighten with the rising sun. It was approaching six in the morning when she sat in a chair in front of the corkboard and stared at the faces that held the mystery of Westmont Prep. She raised her glass and took a sip of Dark Lord. Something sinister lay hidden and buried out at that boarding house. Whatever it was, Mack Carter had started digging in the right spot to find it. And if it wasn’t the exact spot, he had been close enough to spook whoever wanted it to stay buried.

  Rory’s expertise was reconstructing crimes to find the truth hidden within them—not just how they happened, but why. As she sat in the small cottage in Peppermill, Indiana, she was hard-pressed to come up with a case better suited to her talents than the Westmont Prep Killings. She settled into the chair and studied the faces in front of her. They were the students who once walked the campus but now were ghosts of the forest. And the teacher who turned on them.

  She took another sip of Dark Lord and wondered what happened at that school that had caused so much death.

  Westmont Prep

  Summer 2019

  Session 3

  Journal Entry: A RELUCTANT ACCOMPLICE

  I LOOKED THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. AFTER MY FATHER FINISHED HIS PURGING, there was a long stretch of silence when the house was calm and quiet. The view through my keyhole offered nothing but an empty dining room and the blank table where my father had swiped everything to the ground. I thought about leaving my room. I wanted to run to my mother and make sure she was safe. Get her ice for her broken lip. I’d done it before, and she always told me how much she loved me for it. But tonight’s beating was different. My father was possessed in a way I hadn’t seen before. The broken lamppost was simply a catalyst for a much greater issue that he wanted to get out of his system.

  I was scared to leave my room. Not so much because I feared he would hurt me but because I worried my mother would step in and try to prevent it. She’d done it before, and my father had emptied the rest of his wrath on her. As hard as it was to watch through the keyhole, another level of inadequacy always came over me when I watched him beat her in person. Through the keyhole I was anonymous. Out there I was not. Out there my mother’s eyes would occasionally meet mine in the middle of it. When I stood helplessly in the shadows during those moments, I felt less than human. It was better to stay behind the closed door of my bedroom, watch through my portal, and wait.

  Finally, after an hour of peering through my keyhole, I saw my father walk into the dining room. He seemed in a hurry as he picked the items off the floor and rearranged them on the table. There was something about his mannerism that I couldn’t place. Something about him I didn’t recognize. After he finished cleaning the mess, he paced back and forth. As he did, it finally struck me. I understood what seemed so strange. He was nervous. The same look I had seen so many times on my mother’s face as she anticipated his arrival home from work was now on my father’s.

  Before I could work out this strange role reversal, I heard sirens. Soon, flashing red and blue lights were painting my bedroom walls. Then I heard doors slamming and voices talking, and I suddenly knew why my father was nervous. Why the nastiness was gone from his face and the arrogance absent from his posture. He had hurt my mother tonight in a way he’d never done before, and he had called an ambulance for help.

  I jumped to my feet and ripped open my bedroom door. I sprinted down the hallway and into the dining room, arriving just as my father pulled open the front door. There, on the landing, were two paramedics with a gurney between them.

  “In h
ere,” my father said. “She’s at the bottom of the stairs. She must have fallen.”

  The paramedics calmly entered my house and assessed the scene. I walked slowly toward the stairs, different from the way I had sprinted from my room. I took one hesitant step at a time. One after the other, until the dining room wall gave way and I had a clear view into the foyer. My mother was in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes closed as if sleeping but the rest of her body at strange angles. One arm was draped over her face and the other tucked impossibly under her body. One leg was straight, but the other was bent at the knee as if she were sliding into second base.

  “It’s okay,” my father said to me.

  I couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to me.

  “Your mother had an accident. I came home to find her like this. Did you see her fall?”

  I stared at my father with a blank look. I didn’t answer. The paramedics were tending to my mother when one of them looked up at me. “Did you hear anything? Did you hear her fall?” he asked.

  Inexplicably, I nodded my head. “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know what the noise was. I was in my room doing my homework.”

  “It’s okay,” my father said. “The paramedics are here. They’ll take care of her.”

  The men went back to helping my mother. They loaded her motionless body onto the stretcher and wheeled her out to the ambulance. I saw a few neighbors on the front yard in the red glow of the ambulance light. They were staring at my mother as she was placed into the ambulance. I hadn’t seen her move once, and her eyes never opened.