But it was. The dead guy was Shaun Kirtz.
KEEPING AN AMBULANCE parked at the entrance to the fairgrounds is the town of Jaspersburg’s major contribution to Melting Rock public safety. In this case, though, it didn’t do much good. Although a pair of EMTs came jogging over with their bags and stretcher within a matter of minutes—while I was still standing there reeling at the fact that I actually knew these two kids—it was obvious the victim was way beyond saving. They messed with him a little, but you could tell it was just for show—whether for themselves or for the crowd, I wasn’t quite sure.
Before long, the woman EMT shook her head and her partner, a guy barely older than the one they’d been working on, pulled a walkie-talkie off his belt and spoke into it. They sat there on their haunches for a few seconds; then the woman noticed Cindy, still whimpering and sobbing in the arms of a middle-aged lady with a gray-flecked ponytail and a Fifth Dimension T-shirt.
The female paramedic went over and guided the girl back to one of the folding chairs so she could check her vital signs. She must not have liked what she saw, because she got a concerned expression on her face and pulled out her own radio. Then she called to her partner to help her get Cindy on the stretcher—not a big one with wheels but the hand-carried kind with fabric strapped to a metal frame. I figured they’d whisk her off, but the woman just knelt by Cindy and covered her with a thin blue blanket, alternately saying vaguely soothing things and checking her watch.
After a few minutes of this—just when she’d unzipped her bag like she was going to administer something—another pair of EMTs showed up. They stood over the body with a distasteful sort of detachment, like a couple of DPW guys assessing a pothole. The woman went over to talk to them, and when she was done, she and her partner picked up Cindy and hauled her away.
The two new EMTs had clearly been given the job of babysitting the body and weren’t happy about it. They stood there looking uncomfortable, crossing and uncrossing their arms, periodically glancing in the direction they’d come from. The collective shock was wearing off, and the crowd was starting to bug them—wanting explanations for what had happened to the poor kid, even though the two of them had just gotten there and obviously hadn’t the slightest clue. They kept having to ask the crowd to stand back, to “keep the area clear,” but shock was turning to agitation and the EMTs were severely outnumbered. Eventually, a trio of volunteer firemen showed up, all wearing baseball hats and yellow jackets over blue jeans. They joined the other two, who looked decidedly relieved to have reinforcements.
“What’s going on?” The voice came from behind me, so close it made me jump. I turned around, and there was Lauren Potter. “Hey,” she was saying, “what’s all the buzz about? Did somebody get sick?”
She tried to peer through the thickening crowd, though by now neither of us could see much. “What’s up, anyway?” she said again, her voice tinged with classic rubbernecker’s relish. “Are they taking somebody to the hospital?”
“Um…I think they already did.”
“No way. You know who?” She looked over at me, and I realized she hadn’t recognized me before. “Oh, hey, hi, Alex. So what’s going on? Somebody get sick or something?”
“Listen, Lauren….Are any of your other friends around here anywhere?”
She looked thoroughly flummoxed. “Uh…I dunno. Why?”
“Is”—I grappled for the name—“Tom around here maybe?”
“I don’t know where he is. I’ve been looking for him for a while. Why?” Now she was starting to get worried. She looked from me to the crowd and back again. “What’s going on?”
When I didn’t answer her—mostly because I had no idea what to say—she made a move toward the commotion. I grabbed her arm and held her back. “Wait,” I said. “You don’t want to go over there.”
She stared at me for a second, then tried to break free. I held on. “Hey, what the—”
“It’s…”I chickened out, if only briefly. “It’s your friend Cindy.”
She stopped struggling. “What happened to her? Is she okay?”
“She kind of collapsed. They took her to the hospital.”
“Oh, my God. Is she gonna be okay?”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
“But what happened?” She started chewing on a pinkie nail. “Oh, man, her mom is gonna freak. Does Alan know?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I didn’t see him around here.”
“I gotta find him.…” She started looking around, then seemed to realize there was still something major happening at the epicenter of the crowd. “What is going on over there, anyway?”
Damn. “I…It’s Shaun.”
“Shaun?”
“Yeah.”
It was only one word, but apparently it was enough for her to get the drift that something was seriously wrong. She gave me a look that was both confused and hostile, then blew past me and elbowed her way through the crowd. I was too short to see what happened next, but I could hear it; for the second time in one morning, the tent city echoed with a young girl’s scream.
AS A REPORTER, I’ve been compared to a vulture more times than I care to count. Also a leech, and a vampire… and a parasite too.
All the aforementioned creatures prey on the misfortune of others; they can’t survive without somebody’s lifeblood to suck or corpse to ravage.
Now, this certainly isn’t nice, but occasionally it’s true. Like the members of many other professions—doctors and cops are the obvious ones—we journalists tend to do our best work when other people’s lives have gone all to hell.
Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of covering major tragedies, or minor ones, either. Being the stereotypical newshound who sticks a tape recorder in the face of some woman who’s just lost her daughter in a plane crash and asking, “So how do you feel?” makes me sick to my stomach.
Still, there’s no arguing with the fact that my life got a whole lot more interesting after poor Shaun Kirtz, as his hippie mother would later put it, “crossed over to a friendlier realm.” Suddenly, I wasn’t just covering a music festival that had gone off pretty much unchanged for the past dozen years; I was covering a music festival during which a teenage boy had—as the rumor mill instantly reported—died from an overdose of some unspecified recreational substance.
I called Bill as soon as I was sure Lauren was okay. He made no particular pretense of being bummed out by the young man’s demise. When I told him that Melissa had previously taken the guy’s photo, he was positively gleeful.
But to go back to what happened during the event itself: From the time the EMTs left with Cindy, it took the Jaspersburg cops the better part of an hour to show up—and mere seconds to piss everybody off once they got there.
First they sniped at the firemen for letting the crowd get too close to the body; then they declared everything within a ten-yard radius off-limits, which meant that about fifty people were forbidden from entering their own tents. I expected them to cordon off the area with crime-scene tape, but apparently they didn’t have any—or if they did, nobody could find it. Eventually, one of the volunteer firemen left, returning a few minutes later with a yellow roll that, when unfurled, turned out to say WET PAINT.
I tried to get some information out of the cops, but they weren’t in a talkative mood. One of them told me to back off until the chief got there; he proved to be the charmer of the two, since the other told me to back off or get arrested.
“Arrested for what?” I said.
“I’ll think of something,” he said.
I backed off.
News of the death was spreading through the festival at light speed, the crowd getting bigger (and the cops more ornery) by the minute. I was navigating my way through the sea of agitated humanity, not sure where exactly I was going, when I ran into two other members of the Jaspersburg Eight: Billy Halpern and Dorrie Benson.
I was fully prepared to turn tail and run—there was no way I w
as breaking the news to more of Kirtz’s friends—but they caught sight of me, and one look in their eyes told me they already knew.
It wasn’t that they were crying or anything, just standing there looking totally helpless and sucking on cigarettes like the butts supplied oxygen instead of carbon monoxide. When I got over to them, I realized that Trish Stilwell was standing on their far side, so small and slight I hadn’t seen her. She wasn’t crying, either, but she’d obviously just stopped; her eyes were dazed and red, lids puffy and lashes clumped together.
“You heard?” Billy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know if Lauren’s all right?”
“She went to lay down in her tent.” He reached up to take another drag on the cigarette, and I noticed his hands were shaking. It was hard to reconcile this version of Billy with the hipster from the day before; he came off as a whole lot younger and way less cocky. “She asked us to look for Tom and tell him to come stay with her. You seen him?”
“No. Sorry.”
“I just can’t believe it,” Dorrie said, wrapping her arms around herself so tightly the cigarette seemed to sprout from her left shoulder. “This is like some nightmare, you know? Poor Shaun.…”
“Poor Cindy,” Trish whispered.
“Poor Cindy,” Dorrie echoed. “You think she’s gonna be okay?”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine. She was probably just in shock.”
“Of course she was in shock,” Dorrie said. “Can you imagine how awful that was, watching Shaun—” She cut herself off. “Of course she was in shock,” she said again. “Wouldn’t you be?”
Billy shrugged, then parked his eyes on my reporter’s notebook. “You gonna put this in the paper.”
“You mean Shaun dying?” He nodded. I nodded back. “It’ll be in tomorrow.”
“You mean, like, with his name and all?”
“I assume so. The only reason we wouldn’t run his name is if the cops can’t notify his family in time.”
I girded myself for a lecture about how much newspapers suck, but none of them seemed particularly pissed about it. Dorrie tilted her head so she could take a drag off the cigarette without unfolding her arms. “You mean, you won’t say his name if they don’t tell his mom first?”
“Nobody wants somebody’s family to find out they’re dead from reading the newspaper.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s good, I guess.” The other two nodded vaguely.
“Listen,” I said, “I hate to ask you this, but I’m gonna have to write a story about Shaun for the paper. Do you think you guys would mind talking about him?”
Billy looked at me like I’d just grown a pointy nose. “I thought you said you weren’t running his name unless—”
“We’re not, but my guess is his folks have already been notified. Unless they’re out of town or something—”
“It’s just his mom,” Dorrie said. “She’s probably at her store in Gabriel. That’s where she usually is.”
“Oh. So listen, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. It’s just that I have to write what we call a news obit, talking about Shaun and what kind of person he was, what he liked to do and everything….” I was starting to feel like a ghoul, a title I arguably deserved. I decided to plow ahead anyway. “It’s better if I can talk to his friends than somebody who barely knew him, you know? That way you get a realistic picture of a person.”
Billy didn’t look convinced. “And you want to do that now? Like, right here?”
“Not necessarily, but I figured you guys would be leaving soon and I didn’t want to bother you—”
“Huh?” He looked to Trish, who’d been staring at the ground for the past few minutes. Then he tried Dorrie, who rewarded him with a mirror image of his own cluelessness.
“Leave?” she asked. “Why would we leave?”
“Um, I just figured that with… what happened to your friend, you probably wouldn’t want to stay.”
“But what good would leaving do?”
“Don’t you, you know, want to go be with your parents?” The looks I got reminded me it had been a decade since I was seventeen. “So… I guess you’re staying?”
“That’s what Shaun would want,” Dorrie said, and turned to Billy. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “You could write that down if you want. We’re staying at Melting Rock because that’s what Shaun would want.”
It was as good a quote as any, so I jotted it down. “But don’t you think they might cancel the rest of the festival?”
Now the two of them looked genuinely horrified. Dorrie recovered first. “Are you serious?”
“I’m just guessing.”
“But why would they do that?”
“Well, for one thing, the police might be worried that if Shaun really died from a drug overdose, maybe somebody else’d do the same thing.”
Dorrie unclasped her arms and ran the butt-free hand through her spiky hair. Then she just said, “Oh.”
“And listen,” I said, “I’m not trying to be your mother or anything, but if you guys have any…you know…If you’ve got any drugs on you, for chrissake, don’t take them. Flush them down the toilet or whatever, okay?” Dorrie and Billy offered a pair of shrugs by way of response. “Trish?”
She looked up from the ground, though her eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “Okay. Whatever.”
Billy pulled out another cigarette and offered the pack around. This time, I took one—not so much to ingratiate myself with them as to calm my nerves. I still couldn’t shake the memory of Shaun Kirtz’s vacant eyes.
Billy produced an expensive-looking windproof lighter, and I leaned toward the flame. “So what do you want to know about Shaun?” he asked.
“Well, first off, how long have you guys known him?”
He lit his own butt and pocketed the lighter. “Since, like, fifth grade. He and his mom moved here from San Francisco.”
“What about his dad?”
“Shaun never met him,” Trish told the grass. “Never even knew who he was.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t like it bugs him or anything,” Dorrie said. “He and his mom are really tight.”
“Really? What’s she like?”
“She’s really cool. She lived in Haight-Ashbury back in the day, when she was our age. And when she got older, she decided she wanted to have a baby, so she had Shaun—even though she wasn’t married. Don’t you think that’s cool?”
“You said before she had a shop in Gabriel. Which one is it?”
“You know the yarn store on the Green?”
“The one that sells all the homespun wool? Sure.”
“That’s his mom’s place. She raises her own sheep—shaves them and spins it and dyes it and everything.”
“Where do they live?”
“You know Eco-Homeland?”
I did. It was a latter-day commune a couple of miles off the main road between Gabriel and Jaspersburg, a clutch of modernish buildings where people who earned incomes in the mid-to-high five figures could live in environmentally conscious comfort.
“So what kind of things was Shaun interested in?”
Billy fielded that one. “Lots of stuff,” he said. “He’s a huge skateboard freak, for one thing. That and computers—he’s a total whiz. You ever see that movie Hackers? He loves that movie. He’s always saying he wishes he lived in a big city so he could hang with guys like that.”
I noticed he was still talking about Shaun in the present tense—understandable, since the guy’s body was barely cold. “So…he’s that good at computers, huh?”
“He’s amazing,” Dorrie chimed in. “Like, he never paid for a long-distance call—he had some system he figured out to do it for free and—”
Billy put up a hand to interrupt her. “You can’t put that in the paper. I mean, his mom didn’t know that he—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He exhaled smoke in a relieved plume. “Cool.”
“Listen,” I said, “this can be off the record too if you want, but I was wondering …What do you think he took?”
He eyed me, suddenly wary again. “You mean, like, what drug?”
“Yeah.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I’m just wondering.”
Dorrie shrugged. “I dunno.” My expression must’ve told her I didn’t buy it. “No, really,” she said. “I don’t know. It could’ve been anything.”
“Well, what was his, you know, drug of choice?”
She didn’t answer, just looked at Billy with a knowing sort of smile. “Pretty much anything,” he said with a grin. “That was Shaun for you. He’d try anything once.”
Trish offered up a mirthless laugh and looked me straight in the eye. “I guess last night,” she said, “that was one time too many.”
CHAPTER5
The three of them were still standing there chattering about what an adventurous drug taker Shaun had been when Melissa showed up and started snapping pictures. This pleased the Jaspersburg cops not at all, though there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. She took photos of people who were weeping and exhausted; of others who looked strangely jazzed up; of cranky policemen; of the chili-bedecked tent surrounded by the banner of WET PAINT that made the local constabulary look like a bunch of idiots.
And speaking of the tape: Two minutes later, it was ripped down by a burly fellow in a green windbreaker and jeans. I barely had time to wonder who he was when Trish said, “Daddy!”
The man stopped gathering up the tape and just let it drop. Trish came rushing through the crowd toward him—which, considering that she’d recently described him as a Nazi storm trooper, rather surprised me.
If I expected him to shy away from a show of fatherly affection in the middle of a crime scene, I was off base there too. He wrapped her in his arms, each of which appeared to be roughly the circumference of a telephone pole, and held her in an extended bear hug. She must’ve burst into tears, because I could see her slender back shaking up and down. He rocked her gently from side to side, his jaw set in a grimace that told me he couldn’t stand to watch his little girl cry.
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