by Gail Giles
“I wanted to be a cool guy. Stay low, deep, background kind of guy, but I constantly had to rescue David. I was used to it at home, but now he couldn't handle frickin’ first graders. I got tired. Always the noise and the crying and talking, and the bitching. I loved David. I loved him. And he needed me. But god help me, he was the cause of all my problems. Well, that's how I saw it then.
“I thought it would get better when I went away to college. But, it didn't. It got so much worse.”
CASS
Those words took me right down the rabbit hole.
“Words are teeth…eat me alive…feed on my corpse”
Tears stung my eyes. How far past bottom does a person have to be to write that? To feel it? David Kirby felt like he was eaten alive? He'd rather be dead than feasted on by people—like me?
For the first time I could remember, I felt sorry for someone other than myself.
“Nothing to say?”
I didn't want to respond but I thought about dirt coming down the air hose. “No,” I whispered.
“No?” He whispered too. He seemed next to me in the dark. “No smart remarks? Nothing about the food chain? Don't want to call anyone gay?”
How do you work your way out of something that might actually be your fault?
I felt cold again. From the inside this time. That fleeting feeling that I couldn't handle this, that I wouldn't be able to achieve my goal, was getting less fleeting.
But I wanted to survive.
I still had to try.
It was who I was.
Dad always says that people expect an argument. Anything else catches them unprepared.
“So this is all about two notes. I wrote one that made David write his.”
Silence.
“I never thought David would see that note. It wasn't meant to hurt him,” I said.
“Don't even start that shit with me.”
“I'm not. I know it hurt David and it is my fault. I'm not trying to get off the hook. I'm looking back at that day, and you know, with all the stuff that's happened, it changes things.”
“Yeah, a few little things.” It was sarcasm, but it was sadness too. Kyle was doing a piss-poor job of hiding pain. “I have some questions,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Don't try to mess with me.” He sounded like a dog snarling.
“Like you said, you have the edge.”
“When did he ask you out?”
“Tuesday. No, Monday. I heard about…him on Tuesday.”
“How'd he do it?”
I didn't know what he meant. God, Kyle knew what David had done. He'd just told me in horrifying detail.
“I don't understand…”
“Ask you out, bitch. How did he do it? Where?
What did he say?”
“Oh.” I closed my eyes and got a visual of David. “It was in the hall, next to a class we have…had together.” I told him what I could remember of the conversation. I left out the part about the big ears and the lobe pulling.
“What did you say to him?”
“I was nice. Because I wanted him to vote for me for Prom Queen mostly. I told him I was super busy and I'd get back to him. I smiled at him like it was a real possibility.”
“So then what?”
The dark and the cold closed around me. Once I told Kyle, was he going to rip the air tube out and leave?
“Glass started.”
“Is that when you wrote the note?”
“Yes,” I said. “That's when I did it.”
I felt and heard something pound above me then. On me. Slam! Slam! Slam! I jumped and scrabbled at the top of my coffin with my shredded fingertips. The pounding continued. Faster. Harder.
“What is that? What are you doing?”
One more hard slam.
Kyle's voice was tense and hard. “Why? You told him no. You left him standing there. Why did you write that note? Why did you have to cut him up in pieces like that?”
“I don't know! I don't!” I was screaming. “Stop doing that. What are you doing?” The vibration and the noise, I couldn't…
“I'm hitting your grave with the shovel. I wish it was your skull. Tell me. You tell me why you wrote that note.”
“I…”
I started sobbing. Not fake. Gut-deep kind. Because I had to think about Kyle's question. I saw Dad's face across his desk from me, knocking over my king with his own. And how I'd felt betrayed and…insignificant.
“It's twisted, but it's like I can't feel good about me until I put somebody else down. I don't know why I do it. I never thought David would read the note. So, I could feel bigger and it would never touch him.”
“You're a piece of shit.”
I sighed as more realization swam over me. “Why else would I have to chop everyone else up to feel whole?” Saying it calmed me down. The truth will set you free? Was this as free as I was going to get? Fuck that.
“How did David get the note?” Kyle asked.
I told him.
I expected a stream of cursing. Something, anything but what I got.
A sigh. Of disgust?
“Well, isn't that classic David? As if there's not enough hurt out there with his name on it? No, he's got to go digging to see if he can't find a little more.” He sounded sad and tired, but there were feathers of frustration around the edges.
Could I work that?
I wiped my nose and tried to clear my throat with the walkie off, then pressed the button.
“But there's something I don't get…,” I said.
Nothing.
“I expected David to show the note to someone. Show people what a shit I was. It's what I would do. If somebody hurts me, I take it back to them, you know?”
“Not everybody is like you.”
“But you are,” I said, keeping the words as soft and easy as I could. “I hurt your brother and you came after me. You took me down. I get that. I do.”
Footsteps. He paced across my body.
“But, David, he didn't hurt me. He hurt himself. That's what I can't understand. How does anyone do that? And why over a note I wrote? That alone proved I'm a snobby bitch. David had to be smart enough to know that.”
He kept pacing.
I kept talking.
“I didn't know David. For you to do—this—then he had to be special. He can't have been a loser. You said he wasn't a nobody. So he had to see me for what I am. You do.”
“Shut up!”
There.
There it was.
Kyle lost control.
This time it wasn't at me. It was to me. All the difference in the world.
I knew it was momentary. He was still up there and I was down here, but it was the first skirmish where I had taken the edge. Now I had to hold it.
“Sure,” I said. “Shutting up.”
“Give it a rest. You're just like her, you know. You never shut up. Yammering in our heads and there's no…” He trailed off.
What the hell was he talking about? Her who?
“You want to know about David? Let me tell you about my little brother.”
BEN
Ben scrawled David Kirby's name on the board. Scowled. “Roger?”
Roger set up a tape recorder. “This is the best of the interviews I taped. English teacher. Because of scheduling changes this woman taught Cass freshman and sophomore years.”
“Let's have a listen,” Ben said.
“For the record, this is Cynthia Forman. She teaches at Sterling Valley High School and is speaking for the record with me, Officer Roger Oakley.”
“Cass McBride. Yes. You wanted to know about her. Was she popular? That's a word that's not used like we used it when I was in school. Cass and her friends are what are referred to now as ‘resume packers.’ She's wealthy and attractive and, thankfully, quite intelligent These RP kids run for Student Council offices so it looks good for their extracurriculars. They can't get into a top university with just good grades anymore. A g
irl like Cass wants to be Prom Queen and Homecoming Queen and Student Council President to pad out that high school file and show herself in every possible good light.
“The kids that aren't competing for the big colleges let the RP's take all the prizes. Don't need it. Don't want it. Don't care. You end up with a yearbook that shows the ‘same cadre of kids in all the pictures. Well, they are on the yearbook staff too. And the real go-getters, like Cass, go beyond school; they sign up to work for the ASPCA dog wash and make sure they're there for the photo shoot. Clean Up the Highway Day—she'll be there and she'll be in that picture when the paper comes out.
“Cass isn't as cold as all that sounds. She puts up a good front, but she's just a little girl with her britches hanging out. Oh, I see your face, Officer. Not like that. That's an old Southern expression, meaning she's showing things she doesn't know she shows.
“In our poetry unit Cass turned in interesting work. Here, let me read one for you:
I climb the sheer wall of my father's expectation
While his determination of the greatness that I'll achieve
Tells of the nothing he knows me now to be
The steepness attracts
Draws me
Though there is no soft place to fall,
Not to climb
Will leave me in the cold.
“I was never much good with poetry, but all that stuff about her father's ‘expectation,’ does that sound any alarms for you?”
“Officer, your mind went to the gutter again. No, I don't think there is sexual abuse in that house. But Ted's love for Cass is conditional. Somewhere deep down, she knows that. It makes me sad for her. I know, sad for the poor little rich girl. How trite.
“Who do I think took her? That's unfathomable. Her father is wealthy, but not that wealthy. Let's hope the kidnappers think he is and she's alive.”
“Good work, Roger. All that kind of knits together with the poetry book we found in the girl's nightstand.” He stared at the board. “The kid has issues with her father but I don't see it leading anywhere in this kidnap, do you?”
He surveyed the officers and then struck a line through Ted McBride's name.
“I saved you for the good stuff,” Ben said to the female officer.
“The friends,” she said. “All but the boyfriend and the best friend. Those two are waiting for you in the interview rooms.”
Her notebook was open but she didn't glance at it. “There's a crowd of girls that hang with her on a regular basis. All affluent parents. High-end homes and cars. Great clothes, uptown haircuts, rich-kid lifestyle. A couple have been busted for small-time possession. No bigs, and Daddy's lawyers smoothed it over. Not bad kids, really. No huge trust funds to keep them rich forever so they'll have to go to school to maintain their privileged lifestyle. Keeps ‘em honest.
“Guys are the same way. Pretty decent. When you get past the posturing, I got the same story. Cass doesn't see high school boys as anything but a staging area. Practice. If I'm reading her right, she dates the football captain during football season, the basketball star during that season.”
Tyrell whistled. “An athletic supporter.”
She sighed. “I have a gun and I will use it.”
He put up his hands in surrender.
“You know what I think it means?” the officer said.
Ben nodded. “She's a teenager.”
“That's how I see it.”
“Tyrell, go see the teachers and the principal about the Kirby kid. I don't like coincidence. And that's a big one. Then put the squeeze on forensics about the drug tests,” Ben said. He stared at the board. “We're running out of time.”
KYLE
I pressed my palms against my ears. Trying to keep the sound out. But the sounds were in my head. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to think but the voice wouldn't go away. The voice over the phone. The voice in my ear the night I made the plan.
“She's tearing me apart, Kyle. Come home; it's not so bad when you're here.”
“Just keep out of her way, David, you can…”
“I can't. You know how she is.”
“I know. I hear you and I know.” I paced the room, listening to David's ragged breathing in my ear. Pulled the cell phone away so I could think. It was barely October and this year was already worse than last. Mom was worse to David when I was away at school than when I was home.
What could David do that…
I put the phone back to my ear. David was crying again. “David, stop crying and listen. I've got an idea. Maybe we can shut her up for good.”
CASS
“It starts with her.”
“Her? What starts with her?” I asked.
“Pay fucking attention! You want to know about David? It starts with her. My mother. I guess a shrink would say it starts with her mother and then her mother and back until a woman in a cave clonked her daughter on the head with a club. Like I give a shit. That's ancient history.”
He stopped talking, but the static hissed and crackled. Kyle was in a rage.
“My mother was the blond cheerleader, Homecoming Queen, parasitic bitch that didn't intend to work for a living.”
Even knowing Kyle was a nutcase, that sudden lash of spite startled me. How could I outmaneuver a full-fledged, mother-hating psychopath?
“She was determined to nab the football star that was headed to medical school. He was scholarship material all the way, so there would be no putting a husband through med school. Not for her. Nope—spend a few years living the young college life and then coast in the rich lane with DR. WIFE vanity plates on a Jag.”
His radio popped off. I couldn't feel him walking. I guess he was standing still. Thinking? Deciding what to say next?
He needed a prompt.
“I'm guessing the football player/med student was your dad?”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“You're telling me that your mom married your dad just so she could be a doctor's wife? Not because she loved him?”
“That's what I'm telling you.”
I stayed quiet. I tried to move my legs. My knees were stiff and aching and I groaned as I eased them out a bit. “When I read about David in the newspaper, it didn't say your dad was a doctor.”
Kyle made a sound I think was supposed to pass for a laugh. It didn't come close. “He's not.
“I was Mom's snare to get Dad,” Kyle said. “She wasn't worried when he didn't want to get married right out of high school, but when he finished undergrad work and got into medical school, she saw the writing on the wall. She didn't like the story.”
Static. Something. Maybe a sigh.
“Mom took action. The wedding was rushed, but Mom was happy. She was happy with me. I was the key to the lock that kept Dad as her treasure chest.”
Kyle seemed to be waiting for a reaction.
“That sucks,” I said.
Slam! Slam! Slam!
The shovel again.
“Shut up!” Kyle shouted.
BEN
“You don't seem worried,” Ben said.
“Nothing to hide. Why would I worry?”
A young man lounged in the chair, seemingly unconcerned about being interviewed by the police. Arrogant and handsome, he bored Ben and crawled right up Scott's neck.
“You're dating a girl that's missing. You're not worried about her safety?” Ben said.
The kid sighed. “Nobody really dates Cass. She sort of allows you to take her places.”
Ben sat back, a signal for Scott to take over.
“I gotta tell you, that would spin me up a little. What do you mean, ‘allows you to take her places’?”
Derek Richards smiled. “It's not like that. She's pretty and she never dates anybody for a long time, so you know not to get, like, invested. But, she's fun and can be funny and it feels good to be seen with her. It's a win-win deal.”
Scott walked behind Derek. “We heard she can be kind of a backbiter.”
“May
be. She might make fun of the nobodies and the dorks. But I've never heard her say anything mean about, you know, us.”
Scott made a gun out of his finger and thumb and mimed shooting Derek in the back of the head. “Never talked shit about the people that count, right?” He circled around to face the young man.
Derek smiled. “Right.”
Ben and Scott exchanged glances. The kid was a bonehead.
“So, you're telling me, you, nor anybody else that dated Cass, would want to put the grab on her?”
Derek smirked. “Put the grab? You're trying too hard. Give it up and just talk like an old guy. I can translate. No, I have no reason to kidnap Cass and I don't think anybody else that went out with her would either. It's not Cass's way to make enemies with boyfriends. She doesn't let you get that close, you know what I mean? She keeps it loose.”
Ben interrupted. “I think we get the picture. Did you know David Kirby?”
Derek put his palms up and out. “Whoa, the train jumped the tracks there. David Kirby? The kid that offed himself?”
Ben stared the kid down, long enough to send a message.
“Don't get all righteous on me. I didn't know him. I know his brother. By rep anyway. He's a year older and we didn't hang together. Until what's-his-name died, I didn't know Kyle Kirby had a brother.”
“So David Kirby was one of those people that didn't count,” Scott said.
“Hey, I'm, like, volunteering to talk to you, and you're going for attitude. I didn't know David Kirby. Kyle Kirby, I knew a little. He played baseball. He dated hot girls. But, you know, he was kind of like Cass. He was ‘seen’ with them. I don't remember him having a girlfriend. And he was weird about something else.”
“What was that?” Ben asked.
“Summers. The dude worked. Landscaping. Yard work. I mean, it kept him ripped, but…well, that meant he couldn't hang with all the guys. Kirby was a loner.”
“What do the ‘other’ guys do in the summer?” Scott asked.
“Sports camp. Work out at the gym. Hang. You know.”
Ben stood. “You can go.” He walked Derek past Scott, who glared the kid out the door.