by Leigh Perry
“I don’t have anything specific. I just want to know what Kendall was like.”
She pulled Lance into her lap, and patted him some more. “Kendall was a good student. She was always polite to me and as far as I know, to the other teachers. Not an original thinker, perhaps, and focused more on grades than on learning, but she was hardworking and meticulous. She also stayed active in extracurriculars—softball and choir and I think the Spanish club.”
“What about friends?”
“She was fairly popular. I don’t recall her dating anybody seriously, but she had a couple of boyfriends. She did have three close friends she ran with.”
“Alexis Primo, Nadine Seger, and Vanessa Yount?”
Ms. Rad nodded. “They were very close, and in fact, the only instance when any of them had to be disciplined was for talking to one another in class. They spent so much time together that I had mixed feelings when they ended up at four different colleges. On one hand, they’d have a chance to learn and grow as individuals, but on the other, I was worried they’d be lonely. I read in the paper that they were all there the night Kendall was killed, so obviously they kept up the relationship, but that must have made it so much more devastating for the three survivors.”
I remembered the girls’ faces when the police had brought them to Stuart Hall after the murder. “Devastated” was the right word.
Ms. Rad said, “That’s really all I can tell you about Kendall. A good student, popular in school, and I never had any problems with her.”
“What about Linda Zaharee? Did you teach her, too?”
“I did, and I would never have expected her to do something like this. Not that I expect any of my students to be murderers, but all teachers get those who go bad, and sometimes you’re surprised and sometimes you’re not. This time I was shocked.”
“My family knows Linda, and we’re just not convinced that she’s guilty. The police think she was jealous of Kendall and that led to the murder.”
“That’s their idea of a motive? Has there ever been a high school student who wasn’t jealous of somebody?”
“Verena Rose was the one I envied,” I admitted. “She was prettier, made better grades, and dated the boy I had a crush on, but she’s still alive as far as I know.”
“Exactly. Now it’s true that Linda was a troubled girl. Her grades were good, and she really did seem to enjoy literature, but she never seemed happy. She didn’t have many friends, and I suspected she was a cutter.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I may have been wrong, but she showed the signs: too many Band-Aids, wearing long sleeves in warm weather, and so on. I spoke to the guidance office, they spoke to her parents, and they got her into treatment. I never heard anything else officially, but after a while, I stopped seeing Band-Aids.”
“But she was never violent toward other students?”
“No, never. I’m no expert, but self-injury sufferers usually turn their pain inward, not outward. As for Linda and Kendall having some sort of rivalry, they were in my English class together and I never saw any signs of problems between them. In fact, I don’t remember them interacting at all. Linda was very self-contained.”
“What about any other students? Did anybody else show signs of disliking Kendall? Did she ever get into fights or feuds?”
“Not that I ever saw.” Then she started patting Lance, which meant she was either stalling again or thinking.
So I prompted, “But?”
“But Lance didn’t like Kendall.”
I looked at the stuffed lion, almost expecting him to join in on the conversation.
“I know it sounds silly,” Ms. Rad said, “but there are some students that I have no particular reason to dislike or distrust, yet on a subconscious level, I find myself getting anxious when they touch Lance. Kendall was one of those students.” She shrugged. “I can’t tell you anything more definite than that. Lance didn’t like her.”
“What about Linda?”
“Oh, he liked Linda. In fact, on those days when I could tell Linda was particularly sad, I’d leave him with her during class. That’s why this all seems so inexplicable. Does any of this help you?”
“I think it does.” Ms. Rad did have a way of figuring people out. If she’d thought something had been off about Kendall, then something probably was. “Thank you.”
“Any time. Stop by again when you get a chance, and let me know how it all turns out.”
“You bet. Just one other thing—”
“Lance likes you just fine, Georgia. And Madison as well.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, reaching over to rub his fuzzy head.
As soon as I got home, I ran up to the attic to tell Sid.
“So the toy lion didn’t like Kendall,” he said. “And you take this seriously?”
“How many friends have I dumped on the advice of an ambulatory skeleton?”
“Are you comparing me to a stuffed lion?”
“Nope. You’re far better educated and intelligent and talented—”
“And I know when I’m being buttered up.”
“Perceptive, too.”
“What do you want?”
“If there’s something nasty to be found about Kendall, there must be a sign of it, and since you said she was active on social media, there might be something there.”
“You want me to dig?”
“Like you’ve never dug before.”
“Then hold my calls and bring me a shovel.”
27
Sid wasn’t kidding about holding his calls. He didn’t come down for dinner or to watch TV, and when I yelled good night on my way to bed, he was still typing as he yelled back. I’d intended to check on him in the morning, but I found a text on my phone that said, I may have something. Do NOT interrupt.
I followed his instructions, and didn’t text once all day. But when I got home after work and he was still at it, I had to resort to folding laundry to keep myself distracted. By the time dinner was over, I was thinking I’d need a sleeping pill or a strawberry margarita to keep from bugging him. Then, as I was grading papers, I heard loud music and bony pounding from the attic.
“What is that?” Mom said.
“I believe that’s ‘Shut Up and Dance’! Sid’s having a dance party!”
“That’s nice,” she said doubtfully.
“It’s more than nice. It means he found something!” Leaving my papers where they were, I zoomed up the stairs and into the attic, where I joined in on general principles. As impatient as I was to find out what he’d learned, I kept on dancing through the end of that song, “Bang Your Drum,” and “What the Hell?” before reaching over to turn off the music blaring from his computer.
“Please tell me this means you found something.”
“Georgia, I will never doubt Lance again. Kendall Fitzroy was not what she appeared to be.” He paused dramatically, waiting for a breathless prompt from me.
Considering how long and hard he’d been working, I was willing to oblige. “Really?”
“Big time, but it wasn’t easy to find.”
I took this to mean that he was going to go through the whole investigative process before spilling the goods, so I sat down and got comfortable.
He said, “I started with Twitter, thinking that people can be looser in their tweets, but that didn’t help. Kendall was more a re-tweeter than a tweeter.”
“Ms. Rad said she wasn’t much for original thinking.”
“So then to Facebook, where I went through hundreds of posts. Maybe thousands.” He held up his fingers. “Are my finger bones shorter? They feel shorter.”
“They look fine.”
He looked at them as if doubting my veracity, then continued. “Mostly it was the stuff everybody puts on Facebook. What she ate, the movies she saw, the clothes she
wore, the work she had to do, how bored she was. Which was nothing to how bored I was.”
“I can only imagine.”
“But I persevered, and a couple of patterns began to emerge.” Again he paused to look at me significantly.
“You’re only allowed one dramatic pause per conversation.”
“Fair enough. The first pattern was while she was still at PHS, when she and a lot of her friends made references to online bullying. A couple of kids mentioned trolls spamming them with things—making fun of their weight, their clothes, their grades. All the usual attacks. There was a lot of it going on, apparently.”
“Who was doing it?”
“Nobody seemed to know, and there was considerable discussion of who it could be. Lots of names were bandied about, including Linda’s.”
“Linda was a cyberbully?”
“Bear with me a while longer.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No. So the bullying was the first pattern. I know trolling is common, so I wasn’t sure it meant anything until I saw the second pattern.”
“Which was?”
“Several times, Kendall was discussing something and would then make reference to taking it offline or having private time.”
“So there was nothing online?”
“That was what I thought at first, but then I had an idea. Maybe Kendall was part of a secret Facebook group.”
“You can do that?”
“Groups can be public, private, or secret,” he said loftily. “But while Kendall’s settings allow me to see her public and private groups, I couldn’t see her secret groups. I had to hack her account.”
“Since when do you know how to hack Facebook accounts?”
“Since about three in the morning,” he said with a totally fake yawn. “It turns out that there are quite a few ways to hack an account, but the easiest is to guess the user’s password.”
“How?”
“Kendall created that account when she was a young teenager, and most young teenagers aren’t overly sophisticated when they choose their passwords. A lot go with ‘12345’ or ‘password’ or ‘qwerty,’ because they think those are clever. Which they were the first time somebody came up with them, back in the dawn of time. If not one of those, they pick an obvious piece of personal information, like a pet’s name or their middle name or their favorite band. Since I’d gone through years of Facebook posts, I knew all that stuff about Kendall. I was prepared to keep trying as long as I had to, but as it turned out, it was her cat’s name. Which was Fluffy.”
“Of course it was.”
“Once I was in her account, it was easy to find the secret group. It was called the Devil’s Divas, and had exactly four members.”
“Four? Would the other three be Kendall’s BFFs?”
He tapped his nasal cavity. “On the nose. Alexis, Nadine, and Vanessa.”
“So what was the group for?”
“Nothing good. While I hate to speak ill of the dead—” He stopped. “Hey, you speak ill of me all the time! Why don’t I get a pass?”
“You can either stay in a grave and get a pass, or hang with me and take your chances.”
“Okay, I can live with that. Well, not technically live—”
“Focus, Sid.”
“Focusing. Now I know why Lance didn’t like Kendall.”
“Why?”
“Because she was a bully. An internet troll. The Devil’s Divas existed solely to torment people. And they weren’t content to just mock people behind their backs. No, they’d plan and carry out elaborate harassment campaigns. Once they picked a target, they were merciless. They made fun of other girls’ weight and clothes and looks. They told a gay guy he ought to kill himself because he was an abomination. They spread rumors that a girl’s boyfriend had screwed around on her, and that somebody else was sleeping with a teacher to get good grades. They posted screenshots and links. They doxxed people. Alexis seemed to be the real strategist, but they all participated eagerly and often.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious, if you’ll pardon the expression. And they didn’t limit themselves to PHS students. Neighbors, kids they met at softball tournaments, fellow parishioners from their churches. Even random people. If they could find you on Facebook, you were a potential target.”
“How did they get away with that?”
“By hiding their identities. Vanessa is good with computers, and guided them through creating multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts purely for the sake of bullying.”
“Those ossifying pieces of sacrum!”
“And they didn’t even believe in half of their own insults. Telling that gay guy he was an abomination? Nadine is bi, and the others don’t care. Anti-Semitic screeds? Vanessa is Jewish. They just like torturing people. If it was somebody they saw every day, like another PHS student, they’d watch to see if they were getting a good reaction. No reaction, and they’d move on to somebody else, but if a victim started to look sad or cried in class for no reason, they’d double down. One of their victims ended up in the hospital, either from the stress or just a coincidence, and they all posted ‘LOL LOL LOL.’ Laughing out loud! It’s a game to them, Georgia. Literally. They keep score! Who hurts the most people, who hurts them the worst.” He shuddered noisily.
I didn’t blame him. I felt sick to my stomach. “This is vile. At least when you bully somebody in person, people recognize you as a bully. But when you make up an online identity and bully without even telling people who you are, it’s that much worse. I bet doing it in secret added to their kicks.”
“You know that happens all the time online,” Sid pointed out.
“That doesn’t make it any better.”
“So what do you think? Did I find a juicy murder motive or what?”
“I hate to say this, but maybe not.”
“Georgia, she was a part of a commando team of Internet bullies! The only mystery is why nobody went after her before.”
“Did any of their victims realize who was behind the fake e-mail addresses? Were any of them at McHades Hall the night of the murder?”
“Well . . .”
“Sid?”
“Okay, I started the dance party too soon. I read enough of the posts to see what the Divas were up to, and got excited. I haven’t started finding the victims yet. Back to work!”
“Why don’t you take a break, Sid? You’ve been amazing to find all this stuff out. Come down and watch some TV or read.”
“No, thanks,” he said. “The premature dancing was enough of a break for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hey, I’m a researching machine. You go back to doing what you were doing.”
“Okay, but yell if you need me.”
I didn’t really expect to see Sid for the rest of the evening, but about an hour later, I got a text:
Can you come to the attic? I need to talk to you.
This time I cleared up my papers before heading up. “Is it time for another dance?” I sat down on the couch, expecting him to launch into his latest discovery. Instead he sat down next to me and fiddled, popping his fingers off and reattaching them. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve gone through about six months of posts from the Divas—and if we get a chance tomorrow, I want a skull bath. Reading that stuff makes me feel dirty.”
Sid didn’t bathe regularly, for obvious reasons, but he did like a good wipe with hydrogen peroxide every once in a while to keep himself white and clean. I got the job of swabbing out the inside of his skull.
“We can do that. So what did you pull out of the muck?”
“I found a bullying victim who was at McHades that night.”
“Great! Who was it?”
“It’s Madison, Georgia. The Divas went after Madison.”
&nbs
p; 28
“Sid, tell me you don’t think Madison killed Kendall Fitzroy!”
“Of course not! I’m just worried that other people might think she did. And by other people, I mean the cops.”
“Who’s going to tell the cops?”
“You might have to if the bullying turns out to have something to do with the murder.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. “What did those pieces of sacrum say about her anyway?”
“I’m not entirely sure. It was Kendall who was going after her, and she mostly talked about her attempts failing. Some of the others offered to join in, but Kendall said it wasn’t worth it. She really didn’t post much these past few months. As far as I can tell, Madison was one of her last victims.”
“That’s odd. I wonder why.” Before we could discuss it further, we heard Madison and Byron coming upstairs, heading for bed. “I’m kind of concerned Madison didn’t tell me about this. I think we need a mother-daughter talk.”
“I’m sorry, Georgia,” Sid said, his bones loosening. “It never occurred to me that Madison would be brought into this.”
“I asked you to dig into Kendall, and Madison was already involved because she was at McHades during the murder. This is just another complication, that’s all. I’ll go talk to her and let you know what I find out.”
“Give her a hug from me.”
* * *
Madison was already wearing the oversized T-shirt she slept in when I tapped at her door.
“I was going to come kiss you good night,” she said.
“I wanted to talk to you about something first, if you’re not too tired.”
“Sure.” She climbed onto her bed, pushed Byron to one side, and patted the other side for me to sit next to her.
“Madison, you know I’ve stopped monitoring your online stuff—e-mail and Facebook and all. I trust you to tell me if anything bad is going on.”
“Geez, has there been another incident of a girl running off to meet a hot guy from online, only to find out it’s some gross perv instead? Mom, I know better than that.”