The Suicide House

by Charlie Donlea

  Finally, Rory read about the scene out at the train tracks when the officer had discovered a near lifeless Charles Gorman after he had tried to end his life. A troubling question kept bouncing around her mind: If Gorman was innocent, why had he tried to kill himself? She was beginning to wonder if, perhaps, Henry Ott had arrested the right man. She was starting to doubt that the box next to her held any secrets at all, or if everything that needed to be found had already been uncovered.

  A couple of red flags convinced her, though, that something had been missed. The first was the unidentified blood. The second were the students who had killed themselves. She took a sip of Dark Lord, returned the Gorman folder to the box, and pulled out the file of Bridget Matthews—the first Westmont Prep student to follow Gorman’s footsteps onto the train tracks alongside the abandoned boarding house.

  Rory was sure the mystery of the Westmont Prep Killings lay with these suicide victims.

  CHAPTER 54

  RORY READ DETECTIVE OTT’S NOTES ON BRIDGET MATTHEWS. THEY included his initial interview with the girl the day Tanner Landing had been found impaled on the fence and the detective’s discussions with Bridget’s parents in the wake of her suicide. Together, the transcripts painted Bridget as a typical teenager. She came from a wealthy family, and her relationship with her parents sounded no more strained than most kids her age who were sent to a boarding school for ten months out of the year.

  Bridget’s version of events on the night of the crime was a spot-on match when Rory compared it against the other students’ statements, which meant they were all telling the truth or a well-rehearsed lie. The story went like this: They all met at a preplanned location off Route 77 on the south end of campus. This was the typical route the students took to reach the boarding house—a little-known back route that was off the beaten path and avoided the need to cross the main campus. On the night of June 21, the students gathered on Route 77 to participate in the initiation of a game called The Man in the Mirror. Their task that night was to venture alone into the woods surrounding the boarding house and search for keys that had been hidden by the seniors. The keys would open the “safe room” inside the boarding house. They were required to complete this challenge by midnight.

  The group consisted of five juniors—Bridget Matthews, Gwen Montgomery, Gavin Harms, Theo Compton, and Danielle Landry. Tanner Landing, who was Bridget’s boyfriend, had gone to the woods earlier than the others. Each student offered the identical explanation for Tanner’s isolation that night. They said Tanner was more enthusiastic about the night than the rest of the group and was determined to be the first to arrive at the boarding house and complete the challenge. The benefit of such a feat was becoming the leader of the initiates and the head of the group the following year when they took things over as seniors—a position that had been held by Andrew Gross.

  After reaching the designated location on Route 77, they each set out into the woods. After an hour of searching, they had all found their keys and raced back to the house at different times. As they emerged from the woods, the first thing they saw was Tanner Landing impaled on the gate. Panicked, they all ran back to campus. All but one. Gwen Montgomery stayed behind and tried to lift Tanner off the gate before finally settling on the ground next to him and waiting for help.

  Rory took a sip of Dark Lord and imagined teenagers stalking through a dark forest. Few of these details had made it to the public’s attention. Ott had told Rory that after they caught the scent of Gorman’s trail, they purposely kept the details of the cultish game to themselves for fear that a repeat of the ’80s paranoia about satanic cults would plague their investigation.

  Next, Rory pulled Bridget Matthews’s medical records in front of her, including the transcripts of the girl’s therapy sessions with Dr. Christian Casper. Rory read through them. Bridget’s sessions prior to the summer of 2019 were benign and included the worries of most teenage girls—boyfriends, best friends, the stress of schoolwork, and the worries of finding the right college. But after the killings, the transcripts painted a girl beset with sorrow and grief over Tanner’s death. Rory read a letter penned by Dr. Casper to Bridget’s parents that described his concern over Bridget’s mental state. Dr. Casper’s letter described suicidal tendencies and the characteristic warning signs that accompanied them. Bridget displayed them all, and Dr. Casper suggested both medical and psychotherapy. But it was too late. On September 28, 2019, three months after that night in the woods, Bridget Matthews stepped in front of the Canadian National freight train at roughly ten-thirty P.M.

  Rory pulled Bridget’s autopsy report from the file. She took a sip of Dark Lord to steady herself, then turned the cover and opened the report. Attached to the top left side of the inside flap was a small photo of Bridget Matthews. A beautiful girl, young and innocent and with so many unlived years in front of her. Rory felt an immediate draw to the girl. Bridget, like all the victims whose deaths Rory reconstructed, seemed to throw a grappling hook across the chasm between life and death that stuck to Rory’s soul. It would stay there, Rory knew, creating a connection and generating a constant tug that would not relent until Rory could provide answers and closure. Rory was unsure how she felt about this vulnerability—the inability to forget about the dead until she was certain their spirits were at peace. It was the reason she was so particular about the cases she took on. The connections she formed with the victims were taxing and came with great responsibility.

  Rory had not chosen the Westmont Prep case. Uncontrolled circumstances pulled her into it. Rory’s uncertainty was rooted not only in fear that there was nothing new to discover about this case but also in the fact that multiple victims were involved. Five students had died—two were savagely killed, and three had taken their own lives. Building relationships with so many victims at once carried the potential to overwhelm her senses and take the edge off her ability to see what others had missed. But she knew she had no choice. The whispers had started, and only answers would mute them.

  Rory spent an hour—and half a Dark Lord—reading Bridget Matthews’s autopsy report, paging carefully through every finding and each line. Suicide by train was a grisly scene, and Rory read the ME’s findings stating that devastating head and torso injuries led to death. Rory glanced over the autopsy photos but did not dwell on them. There were no drugs or alcohol in the girl’s system. The report ended with the cause of death: Multiple blunt traumatic injuries. The manner of death: Suicide.

  Rory read the final page and closed the file. She was about to push it to the side to start the review of the next student when something stopped her and called to her. She reopened the autopsy report and turned back to the last page. Quickly skimming the information, she ran her finger down the page. She had nearly missed it, and was sure others had. But Rory Moore saw everything. If a critical detail wasn’t immediately obvious, her mind stored the information on a rolling and endless scroll and then sent out a beacon until her conscious mind noticed. That signal was bright now and pulled all her curiosity toward it. There was something in Bridget Matthews’s autopsy report. It was not a physical finding but instead more benignly listed by the medical examiner along with the items included on Bridget’s body at the time the postmortem exam was conducted.

  In the pocket of Bridget’s jeans were three items: a tube of Chap-Stick, an ATM card, and a penny. She might have skimmed right over the description of the penny, but she hadn’t. She stopped and read the ME’s notes that described the penny as “flattened and oblong.”

  Rory’s mind fired. Like a short circuit, something flared until her memory spun the scroll to the exact location she needed. She pushed her chair away from the desk and fell to her knees as she riffled through the evidence box. There she found the notes from Charles Gorman’s attempted suicide. She took the file and placed it on the desk, covering Bridget’s autopsy findings—something she would never normally do, since the unorganized concept of having one open file touch another would typically have her out of
sorts. But so fragile was the thread she was looking for that she had no time to organize things now into tight piles.

  She opened Gorman’s file, licked her index finger, and paged through the contents until she found the list of items discovered at the scene of his attempted suicide. Item seventy-two, imaged in the crime scene photo next to an inverted yellow marker, was a flattened and oblong penny found just three feet from where Gorman’s near lifeless body lay. A clear and distinguishable fingerprint lifted from the penny had been matched to Charles Gorman, suggesting that he had been holding the penny at the time he was struck by the train. Analysis of this coin suggested that its unusual shape had been caused by placing it on the rails and allowing a train to pass over it.

  CHAPTER 55

  HER DISCOVERY WAS WORTHY OF A MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT DISCUSSION. After learning that an oddly shaped penny was both in Bridget Matthews’s pocket at the time she killed herself and at the scene of Charles Gorman’s attempted suicide, Rory had skimmed through the autopsy findings of the other students who had taken their lives. Catalogued in the personal items of both Danielle Landry and Theo Compton were flattened and oblong pennies. It was a common link that tied them together and was too unusual to be considered coincidence.

  Lane sat at the kitchen table across from Rory. It was three-thirty in the morning.

  “What does it mean?” Lane asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Rory said. “Other than it’s an oddity that links them all.”

  “A lot of things link them,” Lane said. “But this is certainly interesting. Kids put pennies on train tracks for the trains to run them over and flatten them. It could be as simple as that. They had all thrown pennies on the track since they spent so much time at the abandoned house and the rail lines.”

  “Except that a penny was found with Gorman, too.”

  Rory spun the glass of Dark Lord in front of her as she thought. Finally, she looked up at Lane.

  “Let’s run it through the MAP database. See if the algorithm picks up any hits.”

  Lane nodded his head at the suggestion. The Murder Accountability Project algorithm had certainly found stranger links than flattened coins.

  “What’s the marker?” Lane asked. “Pennies?”

  “Pennies, flattened pennies, train tracks.”

  “We’ll get a lot of hits with ‘train tracks.’ But I’ll plug it in and see what the algorithm comes up with. It’ll take a day or two to root through all the information and refine the search.”

  Rory took her last sip of Dark Lord and emptied her glass.

  “I wonder if showing these pennies to Gorman would trigger anything.”

  Lane raised his eyebrows at the thought. He ran a hand down the back of his still-bandaged head. Rory’s mind never rested. She burned through the midnight hours with no difficulty at all. Lane needed eight hours of sleep and then a pot of coffee before his neurons fired. And his neurons were groggy from both the early morning hour and the concussion.

  “Ott said Gorman hasn’t spoken since he’s come out of his coma,” Lane said. “The neurologists believe his mind is gone. An EEG says there’s nothing there. But the brain is a mysterious thing. You never know what might stimulate it. I still know a few folks at Grantville Psychiatric Hospital from when I was writing my dissertation. I’ll make a call to see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 56

  THE NURSE WALKED INTO ROOM 41 AND SAW HER PATIENT STANDING by the sink, toothbrush in hand, and staring into the mirror. It was a common scene. Her patient had had the wherewithal to begin a task but became stuck somewhere in the middle, having forgotten the end goal. The nurse tended to many patients but found the resident of Room 41 in these situations often. Sometimes standing next to the bathroom door forgetting that sitting on the toilet was the original intention of walking to that location, or sitting at the table with fork in hand but forgetting to eat. Today, it was standing in front of the mirror, confused by the toothpaste in hand.

  The nurse walked over. Everyone deserved compassion and dignity, no matter how far gone they were. Human touch, the nurse had learned during her thirty-year career, was a way to bring patients with traumatic brain injury back to the present. A gentle stroke on a shoulder, a careful hand to the forearm—any small interaction went a long way. She always did this slowly and delicately, so as not to startle her patient. Then she achieved eye contact, as she did now.

  “You were going to brush your teeth, do you remember?”

  After several seconds, the nurse finally saw a nod. Facial expressions never changed—there was only a stoic look of detachment. But a nod of the head was a good sign. The nurse had broken through this morning. With a patient this far gone, it was all she could hope for. It was how things had always been, and how, the nurse believed, they would be forever. There was only one time when this particular patient showed any acknowledgment of life around the hospital, and that was when the visitor came. Once a week, like clockwork.

  Slowly, the nurse watched the toothbrush rise. The aim was off, so she guided the brush to her patient’s mouth and assisted as the bristles moved up and down.

  CHAPTER 57

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON ON THURSDAY, THE DAY AFTER RORY HAD STUMBLED across the pennies that linked each of the Westmont Prep students who had killed themselves. That Charles Gorman also possessed one of these coins was another piece to the puzzle. Lane started the search through the MAP database by setting the markers—pennies, flattened pennies, trains, train tracks—and looking for matches to other homicides. He knew his search would be broad and that the algorithm would take time to sort through the findings. While he and Rory waited for the preliminary results, they turned their attention to Lane’s laptop, which was open in front of them in the front room of the cottage. A thumb drive protruded from the USB port, and the computer screen played the video the crime scene investigators had shot when they arrived at the boarding house the night Andrew Gross and Tanner Landing had been killed.

  A properly handled crime scene, especially a homicide, included a strict pecking order. After first responders determined that a homicide had occurred, they called their superiors to develop a chain of command. Detectives were dispatched, the crime scene investigation unit was summoned, and a log was started to document everyone who entered the crime scene. The initial group to set foot on the crime scene, after first responders, were the CSI folks. Their job was to document everything with still photos and video. This was done before others could disrupt the scene footprints and fingerprints and random dribbling of DNA. In the evidence box Henry Ott had delivered to Rory was a thumb drive that contained the crime scene photos and video recording. Rory and Lane watched now as the abandoned boarding house materialized on the laptop. The date appeared across the bottom of the screen: Saturday, June 22, 2019—12:55 A.M.

  Spotlights offered a bubble of illumination within the black forest. The point-of-view video shot by one of the crime scene investigators bounced as the camera moved from the area behind the house and through the opening of the doorframe. The interior of the house, too, was lighted by bright spotlights that overexposed the camera as the technician first entered the house.

  When the camera adjusted to the contrast, Rory and Lane saw a narrow hallway that led to the kitchen. Lane paused the video and pointed at the monitor.

  “Why is every cabinet door open?”

  “Ott told me about a game called The Man in the Mirror. The students were playing some version of it that night. The spirits that come with this mythical character find safe harbor in anything that is closed. Cabinets, drawers, closets, rooms. Opening everything in sight prevents spirits from staying behind to curse you.”

  “Lovely,” Lane said. “Whatever happened to Spin the Bottle?”

  “Oh,” Rory said, resuming the video. “These kids were way past Spin the Bottle.”

  On the screen, the camera moved over the entire kitchen and through the first floor, where every door to every room was open. Then the camera shoo
k its way to the front room library. Rory had walked through the room two days before with Detective Ott. A row of candles sat in front of a standing mirror. Matches were scattered on the floor next to the candles, and in front of it all Andrew Gross’s body lay in a heap. Rigor mortis had yet to set in, and his body appeared to have deflated, as if his once-full limbs had depressurized to leave him in a mound on the floor. A clear-edged pool of blood surrounded his body, dark and syrupy. The mirror reflected the image of the crime scene technician as she swept the camera across the room, producing a strange collision of the living and dead. The surface of the mirror was speckled with blood, as was the wall behind it. The room was otherwise empty but for the red ivy that drifted through the open window, the cherry petals fluttering as the night air whisked it in from outside. The camera moved away from the window and pointed at the door to the room. On the floor of the doorway were spears of blood from where Tanner Landing’s body had been dragged.

  The scene cut from the front room, and the next image Rory and Lane saw was filmed outside. Spotlights that shot down from overhead brightly lit the area. The hum of a generator could be heard powering the police lights. As the camera moved across the front lawn, it documented the trail of blood and the gouges in the ground produced from Tanner Landing’s body dragged across the earth. Slowly, the camera moved from the ground to the wrought iron gate. Rory unconsciously leaned backward, away from the computer, as Tanner Landing’s body came into view. She remembered Henry Ott describing the scene as a slaughter, and as Rory took in the image of the tine piercing the boy’s chin and protruding through the top of his forehead, she could think of no better word for it.