“Listen,” I said, trying to sound as comforting as I could muster, “you obviously have something on your mind. You’ll probably feel a lot better if you just go ahead and tell me.”
Another excruciating pause. “It’s just that …I never thought it would be like that.”
“Be like what?”
“Be so…” Her voice cracked, and tears started running down her pudgy cheeks. “I always thought it was just for fun, you know? I never thought something that awful would ever happen.”
“You mean Shaun?” She nodded. “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“My parents… They just look at me like I’m broken, you know? And all they have to do is figure out a way to fix me and everything’ll be okay. But it won’t…”
Her voice trailed off into a sniffle. I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.
“I heard you might not want to go back to Jaspersburg High.”
She spun around to face me. “That’s not me; that’s them. I want to go back, but they don’t think it’s…What do they keep saying? That it’s not a healthy environment for me. But I just… I just want things to be back the way they were.”
She swiped at the tears and dried the back of her hand on her T-shirt. Her eyeliner was running, so she looked like a cross between a raccoon and a circus clown.
“Do you want me to get you some Kleenex?”
She shook her head. “They took me to see this doctor and he gave me some medicine, and I guess it’s good for me, but… I just keep seeing it.”
“Seeing Shaun?”
She nodded, wiping at her runny nose. “It was just so horrible. And they don’t even want me to talk about it. They wouldn’t even let Chief Stilwell interview me like he did with Alan. They keep telling me it’s not healthy to think about it. God, I hate that word so much.”
I put a hand on her knee. It was covered by the hem of her loose denim shorts; below, her pale legs were covered with blond stubble. “They probably have no clue how to deal,” I said. “Do you think, you know, maybe you could talk to a therapist or something?”
“Some people said I should. Like, the guidance counselor from school called and I guess she said that. But my folks don’t want to send me to that kind of doctor. They don’t want me to go to the kind where you talk about stuff. They just want to send me to the kind that gives you pills. Like I can take a pill and just have everything be okay….”
“What about your brother, Alan? Can he help you deal with your folks?”
“Alan is like… He acts like he’s all strong and everything, but he’s all flipped out too. I mean, you can’t blame him, right? He lost three of his friends just like that—one, two, three.”
She counted them off on her fingers, then seemed vaguely appalled with herself for doing it. Her moist hand fell to her lap.
“How has Alan been doing?”
“He works out.”
“What?”
“All he does is go to the gym, go running, practice soccer. He says it’s because he wants to be good this season so he can get a scholarship, but I think it’s just… what he needs to do. I don’t know.”
“And what do you need to do?”
The tears started up again. “I don’t know. But just …not this. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t stand Mom and Dad going around like nothing ever happened, like if they just ignore it and fix me somehow and send me off to some Catholic school it’ll go away. But how am I supposed to ignore it? How am I supposed to forget… what I saw?”
“Have you talked to anyone about it?”
“Just Lauren, a little. But I don’t think she can take it, because… well, because the same thing happened to Tom. She can’t stand to think about it.”
“The two of them were really close, weren’t they?”
She snuffled up a great quantity of whatever was running out of her nose, and when she spoke again, she sounded calmer, like she was being tranquilized by the change of subject.
“Lauren really loved him,” she said. “Not like in a romantic way—she doesn’t go out with high-school boys. But they were best friends. I think if she’d been into it, Tom would’ve gone out with her in a heartbeat, but he didn’t blame her for not wanting to or anything.”
“What about Dorrie and Trish? Can you talk to them?”
“They’re kind of closer with each other than they are with me and Lauren. But when I heard Alan talking to Lauren about the story you’re writing, I thought maybe…” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed embarrassed all of a sudden. “Maybe it was a stupid idea.”
“No, it’s not. Go ahead.”
“Well…I thought maybe I could talk to you.”
“Sure you can.”
“And you’d want to put it in the paper?”
“That kind of depends on what you say.”
She took a deep breath. “Do you think maybe I could have that Kleenex now?”
I went in to get the box, and I was half afraid she’d be gone by the time I came back out. But there she was, swinging on the creaky bench, her mind obviously two weeks and ten miles away from my front porch.
I gave her the tissues, and she blew her nose into a handful of them. Then she wiped at her eyes, and when she balled up the paper, her hands were smeared with black. I offered her a soda, and she took it and popped it open. But she tried to drink it too fast and spent another minute or so coughing into her fist.
“You probably think I’m a total weirdo,” she said, once she’d caught her breath.
“Not at all.”
“Really?”
It was only one word, but it was delivered so plaintively I had to quell the instinct to hug the poor girl.
“Really.”
“You mean it?”
“Actually, you remind me a little of myself when I was your age.”
She stared at me, mouth agape. “But you’re so smart and pretty.”
Now I really wanted to hug her.
“Trust me, Cindy. Being a teenager is the worst. It’s all downhill from here. Er…I mean in a good way.”
“People say it’s supposed to be the happiest time of your life.”
“Nah, that’s a crock.”
“It is?”
“The only reason people want to recapture their lost youth is because they forgot how much it sucked.”
“You really think so?”
“It’s kind of a theory of mine.”
She contemplated that for a while. “But Melting Rock was supposed to be different. It was different. Until…”
“Until this year.”
“Yeah.”
“How was it supposed to be different?”
“You know. You were there.”
“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, I never really got it.”
Another deep breath. “Melting Rock was… It was like this place where anything was possible. Like this never-never land, you know?”
It was a good quote, so I wrote it down. “Go on.”
“It was like this place where nothing bad could ever happen. Sort of like …you know, when you go on a roller coaster and you get scared, but it’s okay because you know nothing’s really going to happen to you.”
“Melting Rock made you scared? I mean before this?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. It’s more like …you could take risks and be yourself and do whatever you want, say whatever you want, and everything would still be okay. Nobody would hold it against you later. It was just like… ecstasy.”
“You mean, like the drug?”
“No, not the drug, like the word. Like the feeling. Just this total perfect happiness, you know? Just for five days a year, but that was enough. And now…now it’ll never be the same. I wouldn’t ever go back there. Not ever.”
“I can’t blame you.”
“Lauren doesn’t understand. She’s already planning some tribute thing there next year, like planting a tree maybe, plus some other big thing at the high school. It’s
like she gets off on it or something.”
“How do you mean?”
“I probably shouldn’t have said that. It’s probably not nice. I just…Lauren’s always been kind of a drama queen, you know?”
“I thought you said she hardly even wanted to talk about it.”
“I said she hardly even wanted to talk about what happened. But doing this whole memorial thing, it’s like her own little holy mission. I mean, I guess I can understand and all, but I can’t even think about that kind of stuff yet.”
“So… what happened?”
She stared at me, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right.
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
More gazing off into space. “My parents say if you’re sick, you go to the doctor.”
“What?” I was starting to wonder if somebody’d spiked her Sprite.
“Like I said before, they took me to a doctor. But not the kind of doctor who thinks talking’s such a great thing.”
“So you haven’t really had a chance to get it off your chest.”
A quick intake of breath, and she started sobbing all over again—and so hard it made the past half hour look like a sneeze. I just sat there and tried to be nurturing, which I’m not so great at if the patient doesn’t have four paws and a tail. Finally, the waterworks ran dry and she started talking.
“We were just hanging out, you know?” she said. “I kind of …I always sort of liked Shaun, and I was really psyched he wanted to hang out with me. I mean, I knew he was tripping and everything, but he told me I could be his guide. Like, Shaun knew about all that stuff. He read books about what happened in the sixties, about how this guy’d drive around in a bus and give people acid and open their eyes to all this cool stuff. And I’d never done that stuff before, ’cause I was too scared, but Shaun didn’t think I was a loser or anything. He said I could trip with him if I wanted, and he’d split the tab with me, or else I could just stay with him and be his guide and help him deal with all the experiences. And …I kind of wanted to try it too, because of the way he made it sound, but I thought it’d be cool to be his guide. I guess I was kind of flattered.”
“So you didn’t take any.”
She shook her head. “Just Shaun. And he said he wasn’t sure how long it’d take to start working. He said if it was a regular dose, it might be an hour or two, but if it was a strong one, it could be just like twenty minutes.
“But it was only maybe ten minutes later that he started to feel weird—I mean not good weird, bad weird. He knew right away there was something wrong. He said he couldn’t breathe right and his stomach hurt. And I was going to go for help, but he said he was scared and he didn’t want me to leave him alone. And I know I should’ve gone anyway, but I couldn’t…I couldn’t just leave him there.”
“Why didn’t you yell for help?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did, but it just all happened so fast. We were inside the tent and he sort of crawled out, and for a minute I thought he was going to be okay. But then he started having these awful spasms, like his whole body was shaking and jerking back and forth, and his eyes kind of rolled way back in his head. God, it was so awful.”
I patted her knee again and said, “It’s gonna be okay,” or something equally lame.
“But don’t you get it? It’s all my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“If only I’d gone for help, maybe he’d be okay. But I didn’t. I just sat there. I just sat there and watched him die.”
“I really don’t think you could’ve done anything. From what you told me, it all happened way too fast. There’s nothing anybody could’ve done.”
“But Shaun… He was so scared. So scared and angry.”
“Angry at who?”
She shook her head, like it hurt to have the memory rattling around in there. “When he could still talk, when he thought he was just having, you know, a bad trip or something, he was saying…he was really mad at the guy who sold him the stuff.”
“What did he say?”
“He kept saying, ‘I’m gonna kill him; I’m gonna fucking kill him.’ ”
“I meant, did he say who it was?” I tried to keep my voice calm. “Cindy, please try to remember. It’s really important.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah what?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“And you told the police?” She shook her head. “Will you tell me?”
“I…You know him. I mean, I know you sort of met him once. I was there.”
“Come on, Cindy. Who?”
“It’s this guy who hangs out with that weirdo with tattoos that Dorrie likes,” she said. “His name is Rob Sturdivant.”
CHAPTER15
When you’re talking to a hysterical adolescent teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you’re probably supposed to treat her with kid gloves. For one thing, you’re probably not supposed to jump to your feet, wave your notebook around, and say the following:
“Son of a bitch, Cindy. For chrissake, how could you not have told somebody about this? Are you out of your mind?”
The expression on her face was blank—so blank, in fact, that I had a feeling the prescription pharmaceuticals had just kicked in.
“Um…” The swing was jerking back and forth from the force of my exit. “Nobody asked me.”
“What?”
“I…You know, right after it happened, I was, like, totally in a daze, and then I was in the hospital and my folks didn’t want anybody bothering me….”
“Didn’t you think it was kind of important?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was kind of, you know… unplugged.”
The temptation to harangue her further was great, but I endeavored to resist.
“What else did he tell you?”
“Who?”
Son of a… “Shaun.”
“Oh. Nothing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Nothing.”
“You know you’ve got to tell the police about this.”
Her eyes went wide. “Why?”
I realized with a start that—duh—she didn’t know the deaths hadn’t been accidental. Then I figured the kid’d had enough trauma for one day. “They have to track down where the drugs came from,” I said.
“Can’t you tell them?”
“What?”
“Please?”
“Cindy, I wasn’t there. You were.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know anything.” She looked like she was about to start crying again, but when I thought she was reaching for the Kleenex, she grabbed her backpack and stood up. The bag was shaped like a teddy bear, with a zipper down its front like it’d had the Muppet version of open-heart surgery.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to get the bus back to J-burg. My parents’ll be home soon.”
“Wait—”
“I have to,” she said, and took off down the sidewalk.
I thought about chasing after her, but I couldn’t see the point. So I just watched her hustle down the street toward the center of town, her grape-colored hair flopping surreally over the teddy bear’s smiling mug.
I sat back down on the swing, wondering just what the hell I was supposed to do now. Shakespeare, who’d taken a dim view of all the jumping and hollering, gave me a wary look as she settled back into her spot.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said. “You got any advice for me?”
She raised an eyebrow. It didn’t help.
Now, the optimal course of action may seem obvious to you—make haste to the nearest officer of the law and spill my guts—but for me there was another wrinkle.
Because, you see, I’d suddenly come into possession of a rather awesome scoop. I knew something that, presumably, the cops didn’t even know: the name of the creep who had sold the LSD to Shaun Kirtz.
So… what to do? Should I behave like a decent human being and go tell the cops? Or should I sit on
the information until Monday morning’s paper, thereby screwing every other reporter in the state—including, most deliciously, Gordon Band of the New York Times—but also, theoretically, setting back the investigation by two whole days?
And what about the fact that if I went for option two and somebody else died in the meantime, I was going to want to jump in the gorge while slitting my wrists with a rock tied around my neck?
I could go to the police, they’d pick the guy up, and goddamn Gordon would almost certainly get wind of it in time for the Sunday paper. Or I could keep it to myself, moral misgivings be damned. I could try to track down Sturdivant for an interview on some pretext—and the odds were that as soon as he figured out where my questions were going, he’d fly the coop. I could try to talk to his friend Axel, and the end result would probably be the same. I could call Marilyn and Bill and just drop the whole thing in their laps, and the issue would be out of my hands. But—let’s face it—was that any different from deciding to sit on the story until Monday? What would Mad or Ochoa do? And did I really want to ask them?
Unable to think of anything better to do, I sat there and swung back and forth for a while. It was thirsty work; I demolished both my diet Sprite and the rest of Cindy’s, then went back in for more.
At some point, I stopped pondering the question at hand and starting thinking about the creepy dude at the center of it: one Robert Adam Sturdivant, aka “Sturdy.”
I’d only run into him twice, but his image was rather vivid in my mind—he was, after all, not the kind of character a person can easily forget. I pictured the bald head and the multiply pierced ear, the bulging biceps and the meaty neck. All in all, he did sort of add up to a drug dealer right out of central casting.
And then there was the vaguely threatening aura he radiated, as though he’d just as soon eat you as look at you. But at the same time, I’d also gotten the weird sense that he was desperate to be liked, at least by the female of the species. Maybe that was one of the perks of the drug-dealing métier; it stands to reason that the guy with the goods can be considered an attractive fellow, physical drawbacks and all.
Unless, of course, your customers start dying.
Okay, I thought, let’s look at this logically. Did I really think that Sturdivant had concocted the killer LSD himself? Or had he just gotten it from some supplier, who was either the guilty party or yet another unwitting link in the chain? Was it possible that this bullnecked lug of a guy had launched some diabolical scheme to knock off the better-looking competition? And—more to the point—since I barely knew him, why the hell was I even bothering to speculate about it?
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