CHAPTER8
I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me; I’m guessing it had a lot to do with the fact that I’d had roughly ten hours of sleep in four days, topped off by a liberal amount of Tanqueray. But Ochoa was right. The fallout from the three Melting Rock deaths wasn’t just going to involve keeping other psychotropic aficionados from killing themselves. It was also going to mean tracking down whoever was responsible and (figuratively, at least) hanging them from the nearest tree.
Luckily, this wasn’t my problem. What very much was my problem, however, was covering the grieving rituals of several hundred adolescents. I was aided in this endeavor by two other reporters, one of whom I didn’t actively despise. Lillian has covered local schools so long she’s interviewed the grandchildren of some of her early subjects, and although she comes across as a sweet little old lady, she’s actually the deadliest interviewer in the newsroom. I’ve always liked her, probably more than she likes me. Brad, on the other hand, is a journalist of the bull-in-the-china-shop variety; his bottomless appetite for National Enquirer-style headlines has alienated just about every town father in Walden County. Come to think of it, though, it might be kind of amusing to see him go head-to-head with that awful Mrs. Hamill from the Jaspersburg council.…
“… and we remember him not only as a fine athlete, but as a hardworking student, a loving son, and a proud member of the community …”
I’d let my mind wander, and I came back to the here and now with a thud. There I was, in the back pew at St. Anthony of Padua, momentarily unable to remember just whose funeral I was covering. Lest I come across as horrifyingly callous, let me assure you that I remembered in due course—even before I peeked down at the program I was holding and saw Tom Giamotti’s face staring up at me.
And it really wasn’t that I couldn’t tell the kids apart; in fact, they were more distinct to me than ever. The point of obituary writing is to make your subject come alive to the reader. My pieces on Tom, Shaun, and Billy had made them seem even more like red-blooded human beings than they had before—well… before the aforementioned blood was replaced with embalming fluid.
I’m sounding flip again, and I’m sorry; chalk it up to the stress, the lack of sleep, and the fact that a snarky sense of humor has always been my primary coping mechanism. The truth is, the three deaths had gotten to me way more than I’d expected. I’d covered plenty of fatalities, from car accidents to suicides to out-and-out murders, but these felt especially awful. And because I’ve been known to be the brooding type, I can tell you precisely why.
First off, there was the sheer volume; we’re talking not one death but three.
Then there was the fact that I’d met them, so their lives were automatically more vivid to me, greater than the usual sum of details and quotes.
Also that their deaths were so blatantly senseless; if they hadn’t opened up their veins (or their lungs or whatever it turned out to be) and ingested some recreational poison, they’d be off skateboarding somewhere as we speak.
And the kicker, the thing that really got me, was simple: They were just so goddamn, heartbreakingly young.
Billy had been the last to die, but the coroner released all three bodies at the same time. For whatever reason, his funeral was held first; it happened on the Wednesday after Melting Rock, in the tiny Jaspersburg Lutheran Church on Main Street. So many people attended that their cars overflowed the parking lot and glutted the streets. For once, though, the local cops didn’t seem inclined to give tickets.
There was a similar scene the next day at Shaun Kirtz’s service, held at the hippie-dippy Congregation of Consciousness, located in what used to be a carpet store in downtown Gabriel. By the time it was Tom’s turn to be eulogized, his parents must’ve realized space was at a premium. They moved the service from their small Jaspersburg parish to the biggest Catholic church in the county.
So there I was in the back row, taking notes and (catechism dropout that I am) trying to remember when you were supposed to stand and sit and kneel. In front of the altar was a white metal coffin that, sure enough, had been scribbled all over with farewell messages in black Magic Marker. From a distance the writing was a blur, but I’d seen it at the wake the night before, and a picture of it would run in the next day’s paper. Love ya, Tommy, some girl had written, with the O in love in the shape of a heart. Keep on rockin’ in heaven, someone else had scrawled, and so on. Honestly, it was all just too damn depressing.
Four of the five surviving members of the Jaspersburg Eight had attended the services—all except Cindy, who’d been in the hospital until Sunday and was reportedly still deeply freaked out. But her brother, Alan, was there, looking stoic as he guided Lauren, Dorrie, and Trish up the church steps. He seemed older all of a sudden, or maybe just miserable. Chief Stilwell was at all three funerals too, sitting with several other uniformed cops and firemen. I also noticed Rosemary Hamill, who wore another bulbous hat (black this time) and positioned herself smack behind the immediate family.
The teacher doing the eulogy for Tom Giamotti came off like he’d rather have his toes chopped off than speak in front of a crowd. His talk was stilted, a passel of platitudes that made Tom sound like some kind of cardboard cutout of a high-school student: good son, good friend, kind to children and small animals.
It was a damn shame, because from what people had told me, he’d been a hell of a lot more interesting than that. For one thing, he was a talented musician who’d taught himself to play a half-dozen instruments. And he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. When he took up drums, one of his teachers told me, he’d spent extra to get an electronic set so he could listen through headphones and not bother the rest of the family. He was also crazy about his much-younger brother and sister, whom he baby-sat every day after school; he’d insisted on doing it. When his parents offered to pay him, he’d turned them down flat.
Okay, it’s not that anybody goes out of their way to say something nasty about a recently deceased seventeen-year-old. And, granted, nobody told me tales of Tom leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But there was something about the breadth and depth of Tom’s little kindnesses that really got to me—everything from helping his sister learn to ride a bike to giving blood on the first day he was old enough. He just seemed like, well… like if he’d had the chance to grow up, he would’ve been one of the good guys.
I got out of the church ahead of almost everybody and waited on the sidewalk in case some decent color happened by as everyone filed out. Nothing seemed worth writing about, though I did notice that four of the six pallbearers were too young for facial hair. Tom’s parents came out last, and they looked as devastated as you’d expect. His mother seemed able to walk only because she had her husband propping her up on one side and her priest on the other.
A boy and a girl of around eight were near them—Tom’s twin siblings, being shepherded by an older woman who, I assumed, was their grandmother. The kids weren’t crying, exactly; they looked absolutely dazed, as though what was going on was just too awful for them to process.
I was standing there watching Tom Giamotti’s mother being helped into a limo—and contemplating all the times I’ve argued the pro-legalization thing, railing about individual rights and how drugs are a victimless crime—when Dorrie appeared at my elbow. The other three were standing a few feet away; all of them had been crying, Alan included. Lauren, who had looked merely distraught at the other two services, now seemed in danger of collapse.
“Are you going to the cemetery?” Dorrie asked. “You can ride with us if you want.”
“Um… Thanks, but I’ve got my own car.”
Just between you and me, the idea of being trapped with four sniffling teenagers was downright unbearable.
“But you’re going, right?”
“Yeah. I have to cover it for the paper.”
“And you’re coming to the house afterward?”
“What?”
“The Giamottis are having, you know, a ge
t-together. At their place. His dad said to invite whoever we want.”
“Oh, God, no.” It came out stronger than I’d intended, but… Jesus, even I know that invading a family’s privacy by sending a reporter to the private reception is out of bounds.
“I’m sure it’d be okay,” Dorrie was saying. “You’re kind of our friend now, right?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Er… Thanks, that’s really considerate of you, but I can’t. I have a deadline for tomorrow’s paper.”
I gestured toward the weeping mother by way of emphasis, though this probably wasn’t in the best of taste.
“Well, okay.”
Dorrie fumbled in the pocket of her black trousers, then took out a tissue and blew her nose with a honk.
“You know,” she said, “I never went to a funeral before this week. Never even one. Isn’t that weird?”
THE WALDEN COUNTY CORONER has always been something of a slowpoke when it comes to determining a cause of death, but this time he had a fire under his derriere. Within two days of the festival’s premature end, he’d announced that the three young men had died from ingesting tainted LSD—though what it’d been tainted with, he wasn’t saying.
A source told Ochoa it might be some chemical that’s used in the manufacturing process, but frankly nobody seemed too obsessed with the particulars. The important thing was that the powers that be knew what kind of drug the kids had taken, and therefore what drug they had to warn the rest of the world about.
The story had hit the airwaves on Monday, three apparently being the magic number of corpses that merited the attention of CNN and its ilk. The Times put the story on page three of the Metro section, the dead reduced to a list of names and ages within Gordon’s larger story about the potential dangers of a batch of killer acid.
“Nobody brews up just three doses of LSD,” one talking head from the CDC was quoted as saying. “We know there’s more out there, probably a great deal more. We need to get the word out about how dangerous this is before more people lose their lives.”
The investigation into where the drugs had come from was, by all accounts, going nowhere. It didn’t help that the Jaspersburg cops, being in a mighty rush to get everybody off the festival grounds, hadn’t gotten names and contact numbers from any of them. Neither did the Melting Rock management offer much help in figuring out who’d shown up. The festival doesn’t take credit cards, and although people can send in checks for five-day passes, the volunteers don’t keep records after they fill the orders. The closest thing to an attendance roster that organizers could come up with was a list of the people who’d reserved campsites—without phone numbers, hometowns, or (in some cases) first names.
So finding people for the cops to talk to was no easy task; it was also a job that the Jaspersburg police seemed determined to do by itself. Although a few Walden County sheriff ’s deputies had been recruited to help track down campers, offers of advice or manpower from the G.P.D. had been rebuffed, though politely. The word on the street was that Chief Stilwell was taking the case personally—very personally. Three of his daughter’s friends had died, and he was damn well going to find out who’d sold them the drugs that’d killed them.
I heard a lot of this from Ochoa, who was enjoying the typical cops reporter’s unseemly glee at the prospect of covering something more serious than jaywalking. But I also got some of the details from Lauren, who kept wanting to talk—but, to Ochoa’s eternal vexation, seemed willing to speak only to me.
She dropped by the paper four days after Tom’s funeral, arms laden with the booty of a back-to-school shopping trip, and every male eye in the newsroom looked up from their computer screens to check her out. She was wearing a dark blue Indian-print sundress, the kind you can buy in half a dozen stores on the Green and whose thin straps, sadly for yours truly, do not permit the wearing of a brassiere. Her long hair was swept up in a chunky bun, fastened with two black lacquer sticks that formed an X at the base of her skull. She wasn’t wearing a molecule of makeup, and she didn’t need to.
“Lauren, this is our science writer, Jake Madison,” I said, because I had no choice; Mad was standing there with his hand extended and a shit-eating grin on his face. “Jake Madison, Lauren Potter. Lauren”—I cleared my throat for emphasis—“is a student at Jaspersburg High School.”
“Nice,” Mad said. “What year?”
“I’m a senior,” she said. She hadn’t let go of his hand—but then again, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to let go of hers.
“Nice,” he said again. “So you must be… what? Eighteen?”
“In a couple weeks.”
“Interesting.”
I picked up my backpack. “Lauren and I were just going out for coffee.” I’d offered to take her for frozen yogurt—my second of the day—but she’d turned up her nose at it in favor of an espresso. “So, okay, let’s go.”
Neither one of them moved, though they did have the decency to stop shaking hands. “You want to come with us?” Lauren asked him. I narrowed my eyes at him in an attempt to say don’t you dare.
“I’d love to,” he said. My eyes reduced to slits. “But I’ve got an interview on campus in twenty minutes. Gotta go.”
Now, don’t get the idea that Mad was trying to behave like a decent person; I’d been at the edit meeting, and I knew he actually did have an interview.
“Maybe some other time,” Lauren said, favoring him with her very expensive smile.
“Sounds great,” Mad said, and I got her out of the newsroom before he could say anything else.
We went over to Café Whatever, the Green’s newest purveyor of caffeine and overpriced cookies. She ordered a double espresso with a twist of lemon, whereas I went for a big latte with a shot of almond syrup. We settled at one of the tables, with Lauren’s packages overflowing the adjacent chairs.
“So did you get everything you need for school?”
She surveyed the bags. “Huh? Oh, some.”
“You went shopping by yourself?”
She shrugged. “My mom was supposed to meet me, but she got stuck in the lab. Big surprise.”
“She’s at the Benson med school, right?”
She nodded. “My dad too. They’re, like, totally brilliant.”
“Are you going to go into medicine too?”
“Maybe. I’m pretty good at science stuff, chemistry and biology. Must be genetic.”
“So, Lauren…how come you came by the paper today?”
Another shrug. “You said I could.”
“You didn’t want to talk about anything in particular?”
She stirred three sugars into her espresso with a dainty little spoon. “Nah, I…I was just down here, so…”
She’s lonely, I realized all of a sudden. Despite being the alpha female of her social group, the kid’s just plain lonely.
“What are your friends up to—Trish and Dorrie and Cindy?”
She bit her lower lip. “Cindy’s…She hasn’t really seen anybody since… since what happened. Alan said he’s not even sure if she’s gonna come back to school.”
“Really? What’s she going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe go someplace different. A private school maybe.”
“But Dorrie and Trish are doing okay?”
“I guess. Dorrie…Well, Dorrie’s just Dorrie. Mainly, she likes pissing off her parents with her hair and stuff.”
“Yeah, I heard that they’re—”
“Multigazillionaires? Yeah. And they’ve been taking her to Benson alumni stuff since she was born. Drives her nuts.”
“And Trish?”
“Trish? She kind of keeps to herself a lot. She doesn’t hang out as much as she used to.”
“Since the festival?”
“Since a while.”
“Have you, you know, been interviewed by the police yet?”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? They’ve come over, like, five times since the fest. My folks
told me to tell them everything I know, but I can’t. I mean, I don’t know anything. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“You really don’t know where the guys got their drugs?”
“I didn’t even know they had any.” I gave her a look that said I didn’t buy it, and she blushed into her demitasse. “Okay, I mean …I knew they had some shit. We all did. But I didn’t know they had anything new.”
“Did you have any acid yourself?”
She shook her head with surprising vehemence. “Me? No way.”
“How come?”
“I had, you know…a bad trip a while ago. I don’t do that stuff anymore. Just pot and a little E and some ’shrooms once in a while. That’s it.”
“Sounds like plenty.”
“Come on, you’re not going to get all judgmental on me, are you? I get enough of that from my mom and dad. I mean, it’s not like they didn’t smoke dope when they were—”
“Jesus, Lauren, think about it. Three of your friends are dead. You can’t blame your parents for worrying about you. I’m surprised they didn’t confiscate your stash.”
“Are you kidding? Of course they did. They made me hand over everything I had and they flushed it down the toilet.”
“Good for them.” She gave me a beleaguered look. “What about Dorrie and Trish?”
“What do you think I’m going to do, narc on them?”
“If it could save their lives, you bet your ass.”
Her demitasse stopped in midair. “You know,” she said, “you don’t sound like most grown-ups I know.”
“Yeah, well, the jury’s still out on how grown-up I am in the first place. So, do they have any acid or don’t they?”
“Nah. It was kind of a guy thing.”
“So does Alan?”
“He says…He told me Shaun offered to get him a tab, but he said no. And later he offered to split one with him, but Alan still didn’t feel like it. I think…”
“What?”
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