A Hard Day's Fright

by Casey Daniels

  “We were scared.” He gulped. “We thought if we told anybody what happened, we’d all get into real big trouble. And Darren, he was the one who said we should all just stick together. That if we kept our mouths shut, everything would be OK.”

  “But it wasn’t OK, was it?” Understatement of the year! “Ella has spent all these years thinking about Lucy and worrying. And you, Will, you decided it was better to drown yourself in a bottle than face the truth. And Bobby—”

  “He wanted to die.” Will rasped out the words. “That’s what we heard later from his buddies. Bobby just walked into the middle of that battle and never tried to stop or hide or defend himself. He let them kill him. I wish…I’ve spent all these years wishing I had the nerve to do something like that.”

  “Do you think Janice felt the same way?”

  Will knew better. He read the newspaper, the same as the rest of us. “The cops said Janice didn’t kill herself. Somebody tried to make it look like a suicide.”

  “Do you know who?”

  He scraped his hands together, but he didn’t answer.

  I tried again. “Do you know why?”

  “I don’t think it’s my fault. I mean, it couldn’t be, could it? Not a second time.” Will was trying so hard to convince himself by convincing us, it hurt. Ella sat back down beside him. By this time, Ariel was so caught up in the story, she wasn’t even writing anything down. Her nose was red, and I reached for the pile of paper napkins on the table and slid one her way.

  “I called them,” Will said. “Janice and Darren. I called them after you came to see me at the rehab center, and I told them somebody was asking questions about Lucy. Darren…he said he wanted to talk to me about it.”

  “So that’s why you left rehab.”

  Will nodded. “Darren came to talk to me. He told me not to worry, that nobody could ever really find out what we did to Lucy. It was too long ago. And there was no proof. He brought me—”

  “Let me guess, a week’s supply of Seagram’s VO.”

  “A week’s supply, yeah, and it lasted me exactly three days.” He hung his head.

  “And Janice?”

  Will was so lost in thought, he flinched. “Janice, she told me to go away and never call her again and not to bother her. She said she didn’t remember anyone named Lucy and she didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “Doesn’t that just figure.” Ella sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “They were supposed to be best friends.”

  “And they might have been if they weren’t fighting over Darren,” I said. “These days, I’ll bet Janice thought everybody had forgotten all about Lucy. You were a threat, Will.”

  “But nobody killed me. Not like…not like Janice.”

  “Yeah, well…” I weighed the wisdom of scaring him then decided he needed to hear the truth. “Darren was probably hoping you’d drink yourself to death.”

  Will shook his head. “No. Darren has always been my friend. He knew I was thinking about the past. He knew I was feeling bad. He was just trying to make me feel better.”

  “The way he made Janice feel better?”

  Ella’s face went ashen. “You mean, you think…You think Darren…?”

  “Who else could it have been?” I stared at her long enough for this to sink in.

  “But Darren…” Ella’s expression was sour.

  “Darren was in on it just like the rest of them were,” I said. Only it wasn’t what I was thinking. Because what I was thinking was that he was really in on it more. Because somebody held that squishy blanket over Lucy’s face, and that somebody could only have been the person who went to get her out of the trunk. Of course, I couldn’t tell Will that yet. I couldn’t tell anyone. Not without proof. “Darren had as much to lose as anyone else.”

  “The police will talk to him, right?” Will asked me. “I’m going to…” He scraped back his chair and stood. “I’m going to go turn myself in. I’m going to tell them everything. Now. Tonight. Ella…” He looked her way. “Ella said she’d come with me.”

  “And I think that’s the best thing you could do,” I said. “But not tonight.”

  They all looked at me in wonder.

  “You not letting Will go to the police, that’s obstruction of justice,” Ariel reminded me, and maybe she was just full of too much prime-time TV, or maybe she was right.

  Either way, I wasn’t about to let that stop me.

  “You can turn yourself in tomorrow,” I told Will. “And Ella will go with you, and I will, too, if you’ll let me. But not until after you do me one favor. Will, you have to show me what you did with Lucy’s body.”

  I suppose I should have paid more attention that night when I told Will what I wanted him to do for me and he clammed up like a…well, like a clam. My only excuse (and I’m not saying it’s a good one) was that I felt sorry for the guy. All those years, he’d been keeping a secret, and it was literally eating him up from the inside out.

  If I’d been less compassionate and more hard-nosed, the way a detective is supposed to be, it would have saved me the disappointment the next day when I parked the car in a shaded picnic area in one of the Metroparks that ring the city, and Ella, Will, and I got out and trudged to a spot where a winding creek snaked around the contour of a hill packed with just-about-to-burst-into-green trees.

  “It was a long time ago,” Will said, glancing around. “Things change. I haven’t been back here, except that one time. The next day.”

  I perked up. “You didn’t tell me you’d come back the next day.”

  Will stayed at Ella’s the night before (I had it on Ariel’s authority that he slept on the couch in the family room) and he’d taken a shower that morning. I’m not sure where Ella got it, but she’d managed to come up with a clean long-sleeved T-shirt that fit him. His jeans still looked like they’d seen too much wearing and too little laundry detergent, but the rest of him was clean and presentable.

  He kicked one sneaker-clad foot through the dirt. “When we found out that Lucy was…When Darren said she was dead, we didn’t know what to do. We panicked. You know.”

  I didn’t. I never wanted to. But I could imagine.

  “We…we took her out of the car. I think we were parked over there somewhere.” He pointed back near toward where we’d left our car. “And we carried her over here.” He walked a little farther on toward the trees. “Me and Bobby carried her. Janice, she was crying too hard. She kept saying how her life was ruined and it was all our fault.”

  “And Darren?”

  Will glanced my way. He shrugged. “I remember him standing back over by the car for a while, smoking a cigarette. I think it was his way to deal, you know?”

  I had a feeling his way to deal was a lot different, but for now, that didn’t matter nearly as much as finding Lucy’s body. I followed Will farther into the woods. “Do you have any idea where her body might be?” I asked him.

  “Well, that’s just it.” He paced the banks of the swirling creek. “We carried her here and we laid her on the ground. You know?” Demonstrating, he motioned toward the dirt. “And that’s when Darren, he finished his smoke, and he came over and he said we shouldn’t just leave Lucy here like that, that we should cover her up with leaves and things. We did. We collected leaves and branches and stuff, and we covered her, that made sense at the time. But the next day, me and Bobby talked, and we said that was no way to leave Lucy. We came back. You know, to move her.”

  “And you took it where?”

  “Well, that’s just it.” Will’s chin quivered. “We came back the next day and Lucy…She was gone.”

  My hopes of finally seeing Lucy at peace fell. “Are you telling me—”

  “We were terrified. You get that, don’t you, Pepper?” He swung the other way to where Ella was standing in the shade of a giant oak, staring at the ground and looking miserable. “Ella, you understand how we felt, don’t you? Somebody took Lucy’s body, and that could only mean one thing: s
omebody must have seen us take her out of the car and leave her there. Oh, man!” He swiped his nose and moaned. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. We were all scared. Somebody saw us, and that meant somebody knew what we’d done. We waited. Every day. We waited for the cops to knock on our doors and tell us we were under arrest.”

  “But they never did.”

  Will looked my way and nodded. “It was years before I slept through the night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Lucy looking like she had when we were at the Beatles concert, all pretty and happy. And then when I did fall asleep, I’d dream there was someone knocking at the door, and it was the cops, and they were coming to take me away.”

  I was afraid I knew the answer, but I asked, anyway. “So you don’t know what happened to Lucy’s body?”

  Will shrugged. “I can’t say. I only know that whoever took it and wherever it is, nobody ever found it.”

  True.

  And I was right back where I’d started from.

  17

  I haven’t mentioned Winston Churchill in a while, and really, it’s no wonder why. For one thing, all that hoopla about the cops having a city neighborhood surrounded because the killer was hiding somewhere nearby? Well, that turned out to be a big ol’ nothing. As usual, the local media was all over it, anyway, savoring the fact that the guy was still on the run and milking the story for all it was worth. An exclusive interview with the killer’s kindergarten teacher? Please!

  For another…well, obviously, thinking of the whole serial killer thing made me think of the guy who caught the serial killer in the first place, and thinking about the guy who caught the serial killer in the first place…

  No good was going to come from that.

  I also had a new and bigger worry, one I hadn’t even imagined before Will took Ella and me out to the park where Lucy died and told us how he and Bobby had returned there the day after the Beatles concert. If Will didn’t know where Lucy’s body was even back before he fried his brain…if someone actually had moved it…then I really was up that famous proverbial creek without a paddle. And in a leaky canoe, too. Even though I knew what had happened to Lucy, I was farther from the truth than ever, and farther than ever, too, from finding her body so that Lucy could finally rest in peace and Ella could get some closure.

  With all that whirling around inside my head, there was no room for Winston Churchill. I figured there was no room for any more worries, either, but oh, how wrong I was!

  Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about how poor Will Margolis and his friends had spent forty-five years believing they’d been responsible for Lucy’s death. In light of that info, it was no surprise that Bobby sacrificed his life in combat and Will had turned to the bottle for comfort. Imagine the kinds of demons that must have haunted them after that fateful night.

  As for Janice?

  Ah, that’s where things got really dicey. See, I knew there was a flaw in Will’s story. Because I knew what nobody else did—Lucy didn’t die because those stupid kids pulled a stupid practical joke and it went all wrong. Or because Darren’s Mustang had a faulty exhaust system. Somebody killed her.

  It could only have been one person, and that one person could only have been Darren Andrews.

  Which meant that Darren might also have had something to do with Janice’s murder.

  And I didn’t have a clue how to prove any of it.

  Was it any wonder that I was preoccupied? Not to mention moody, touchy, and with my brain working so much overtime, I was pretty sure my skull was going to split.

  In an effort to forget my troubles when I got home from work the day Will took us to the park, I planted myself on the couch. By eight o’clock, I realized I was still there, and since staring into space had gotten me nowhere, I flicked on the TV.

  There was a photo of Winston Churchill gazing back at me.

  Before I even had time to surf my way to another channel, a local news guy with too-blue eyes and too-perfect hair informed me that the cops had Churchill cornered in an abandoned warehouse somewhere over on the west side of town. This time it was for real. There had even been an exchange of gunfire.

  Ho-hum.

  Like I said, I had other things to worry about.

  I did that by devouring most of a pint of Häagen-Dazs Midnight Cookies and Cream and watching every DVR-ed episode of Real Housewives that I’d hoarded for just such an occasion.

  It must have been ice cream overload.

  I fell asleep on the couch.

  And all that chocolate and fudge and those cookie wafers conspired against me—I dreamed about Quinn.

  In my dream, he was standing next to the couch, looking down at me. He was dressed in one of those tailor-made suits of his, the kind that look like they come right off the cover of GQ. This one was charcoal gray—dark, but not nearly as inky as his hair. His white shirt was stylishly striped with winey purple and his tie was understated elegance itself, tone on tone, grape-colored paisley.

  Leave it to Quinn to be tasteful and sexy all at the same time.

  “Hey, Pepper, are you sleeping?”

  Awake or asleep, I guess there’s no way to keep the cynicism out of the voice of a woman who’s been dumped for lousy reasons. Just in case Dream Quinn wouldn’t notice, I gave an exaggerated yawn. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  He was all set to snarl right back at me, but he snapped his mouth shut instead and shifted from foot to foot.

  It was a weird sign of hesitation from a man who was usually anything but. But then, those fudgy ribbons of deliciousness in the ice cream were doing strange things to my brain, too, so I didn’t pay much attention.

  I sat up. My couch is one that used to be in my parents’ family room, and even in my dream, I knew it was a bad choice for sleeping. I fisted my right hand and kneaded the small of my back.

  “What do you want, anyway?” I asked him. “Isn’t it bad enough I think about you when I’m awake? It’s not fair for you to show up in my dreams, too.”

  “You think about me? Really?” There was a momentary and all-too-familiar flash of green fire in his eyes. I held my breath, just waiting for him to jump on that little sign of weakness so that I could tell him it wasn’t what I’d said at all and I made it a practice never to think about him, waking or sleeping. He didn’t give me the chance. But then, he was looking around my living room as if he’d never seen it before.

  “I’m in your apartment,” he said.

  I was going to say, No duh! But again, I wasn’t quick enough.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said. He dropped down on the other end of the couch, and truth be told, I was glad. Quinn and I had done some…er…interesting things there on that couch. I was grateful he didn’t get any closer and spark any more memories. “It’s about Winston Churchill.”

  I groaned. I mean, really, like anybody could blame me? After months of pining and being pissed and moaning and missing him, I was finally dreaming about Quinn. Thank you, subconscious! Anything could happen. In fact, I was counting on it. Now he was going to waste perfectly good dream time chatting about some killer who wasn’t the killer I cared about in the first place?

  A shot of anger propelled me off the couch. “You’re kidding me, right? You show up out of nowhere and worm your way into my psyche or my unconscious or my…whatever…and you’re going to squander a perfectly good opportunity for me to have a sexy encounter with you that I don’t have to feel guilty about by talking about some scumbag I just saw on the news?”

  One corner of his mouth lifted into that little smile that always sent tingles of electricity through me. “You think about it, too, huh?”

  I knew he was talking about the sex. Sometimes I think it was the only thing Quinn and I ever did right.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Best sex I ever had,” I admitted because, after all, it was a dream and there was no use lying to my own brain.

  His smile bloomed full force. “Me, too. Exce
pt . . .” Leave it to Quinn to sigh without ever ruffling that perfectly starched shirt and that wicked fabulous tie. His expression grew serious in a way it hardly ever did except when he was thinking about some case he was trying to crack. “I thought there was more to us than that.”

  Like I said, there was no use lying to myself. “Yeah, me, too.”

  Stalemate.

  Waking or sleeping, things were always the same between us.

  Since there didn’t seem to be anything else for us to talk about, I pointed at my TV. I remembered that just before I dozed, I’d turned it off. The screen was dark. “You’re talking about Winston Churchill because I saw a picture of him before I fell asleep. That’s how dreams work, right? Your brain processes things you saw that day. It makes perfect sense.”

  “Except you didn’t see a picture of me, did you? But I’m still here.”

  There was that.

  This was exposing a little too much of my psyche. Even to Dream Quinn.

  Something told me he knew it, too. He stood up, and I braced myself. Now that I’d practically come right out and admitted that the sex was great, that I thought about him all the time, and that we’d both screwed up what might have been a good thing, I fully expected him to kiss me. Even asleep, the old, familiar tingle kicked into high gear.

  Instead of coming closer, though, Quinn poked his hands into his pockets. “I can’t stay long,” he said. “And I’ve got important information that I’ve got to tell somebody. Only…” In silence, he studied me for a long time. Like he’d never seen me before.

  Which was dumb. And made me uncomfortable. Not to mention antsy to get this dream over with.

  “Only . . ?” I urged him to finish, and when he didn’t, I stepped closer to him.

  He took a step back. “Only I didn’t think it was going to be you.”

  “Well, doesn’t that make me feel all warm and fuzzy?” Was it possible for a smile to be so brittle it hurt? Even in a dream? I guess so, because for the sake of making an impression, I ignored the pain as well as the disappointment that flowed through me. Even in a dream, I couldn’t catch a break. No sex. Just talk. And the same ol’ go-round of fighting.