by Dianne Emley
“I didn’t think the project was a good idea for Jared right now. We discussed it with Jean, his therapist—our therapist. Jared and I had sessions with her together. She agreed with me and thought he’d be better off focusing on the future and positive things rather than dwelling in the past. She advised him to set it aside for a few years. Maybe use it as a college class project or even a master’s or PhD thesis.
“Jared wasn’t happy with that idea. He didn’t want to let too much time pass. People’s memories fade and key people might die and so on. I’d love to find out who murdered Jack, but Jack is dead and my focus now is the well-being of my children. Lately, I’d wondered if Jared was working on his project behind my back. He had been secretive recently. Staying out later and not coming home from school right away. I think Jared and Mrs. Keller got too close to the truth about who murdered his dad. Please don’t let Jared’s memory be tainted as the crazy boy who killed his teacher and killed himself. Jared deserves better. His sister and I and his late father deserve better. Please do the right thing and get to the truth.”
Chapter 12
After leaving the Hayword home, Alex walked to his car, checking his phone with one hand and using his other to get his car key from his pants pocket. Nan struggled to keep up with him, clutching in her hand a copy of Jared’s newspaper essay about his dad’s death, which Melissa Hayword had given her. She was familiar with Alex’s fast-man walk, which he did when he was disturbed. Conversation was impossible until he stopped to open his car door and turned to face her with his back to the open door, facilitating a quick escape.
Nan said, “What the hell’s going on? That wasn’t a notification call to the grieving family. That was an interrogation. Did Beltran tell you to try to box Melissa Hayword into a corner? To get her to make incriminating statements about Jared? And what were you and Beltran texting about?”
“Privacy much? And so what? Beltran’s in charge of our unit.”
“Alex, don’t pull this crap with me.” She moved to stay in front of his face as he tried to turn his head away, avoiding her gaze. “This is me, okay? We’ve been through a lot of bullshit together. I at least deserve a straight answer.”
He scratched his face with the hand that held his phone and then shoved the phone into his inside jacket pocket. He looked around before taking a step closer to Nan. The street was quiet and the houses were dark. Keeping his voice low, he said, “After we left the park, Beltran texted me to make sure I pressed Jared’s mom hard. He said that Jared was a murderer and that his mom would cover for him. Spread sunshine—that’s what she did, I get that. That’s what moms do. I asked her the hard questions and we found out that she didn’t know what Jared was up to. He had a secret life. His dad’s suicide screwed him up. He was a creepy little dork who was obsessed with his teacher and murdered her in a rage and then managed to finally succeed at killing himself.”
“Alex, that’s just one scenario about what might have happened.”
“That’s what the evidence”—he realized he was speaking loudly and dropped his voice—“points to. That’s what you taught me. Follow the evidence. No matter what.”
“We don’t have all the evidence. So much of what we’ve seen makes no sense and you agreed. We all did, except for Beltran. Why is a high school English teacher carrying a gun in her purse?”
“She’s afraid.”
“Of a loner student or of her abusive husband who’s a police sergeant?” Nan raised her hands with frustration. “We have to at least wait until the physical evidence is processed—the fingernail scrapings, fibers, hairs—and until we see the medical examiner’s report after the autopsies. That’s what’s going to close this case.”
“The case is already closed.”
Nan took a few steps backward as if she’d been broadsided. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s what Beltran said in his last text to me when we were talking to Mrs. Hayword.”
“But the autopsies haven’t been done.”
“They were. Just a while ago.”
Nan planted her hands on her hips. “Already? Why weren’t we notified? We should have been there.”
“Beltran was there. He said, ah…” Alex took out his phone, found the text message, and read it aloud. “Called in some favors. Expedited the autopsies with Dr. Ambry in Pomona.”
Nan’s frown deepened. “Pomona?”
Alex continued reading. “Ambry concluded that Jared’s cause of death was suicide. He will prepare full report ASAP.”
“I don’t know a medical examiner named Ambry. How do you spell it?” Nan typed what Alex told her into her cell phone. “This is just wrong.”
“What am I supposed to do, Nan? I’m open to suggestions. If the LT says the case is closed, it’s closed. Do you expect me to take a stand and end up transferred to some boo-shit task force studying whether we’re using the right kind of toilet paper? I’m not stupid. I know I’m being played.”
“Beltran’s the point man, but I’m thinking someone higher up is pulling the strings. Beltran wouldn’t go out on a limb without a good reason.” Nan seethed as she looked down the dark street. “I didn’t sign on to participate in something like this. To stand by and do nothing and let a murderer go free.”
“Why don’t you take a stand? You need your job too, more than me. I don’t have a mortgage or a kid. I don’t even have a goldfish.”
“We took an oath, Alex. I spilled too much blood, including my own, trying to uphold it.”
“Nan, when it comes down to it, we’re just cogs in the machine. I’m going home to my small apartment where nobody talks back to me. You’re still off for a couple of days, right?”
“Yes. Back to my original plans, I guess.”
“Right now all I want to do is sleep. See you.” He got into his car and left.
Standing alone in the street, Nan looked at the Hayword home as the living room lights and then the dining room lights were switched off. She thought, There’s no going back to original plans for Melissa Hayword.
Chapter 13
Nan drove to her L.A. neighborhood of Mount Washington from the Pasadena side, the prettier side, passing an eclectic mix of home styles, from prairie to Tudor to colonial to craftsman, many with walls and trimming of river rock culled from the Arroyo. Her usual route home, off the Pasadena Freeway, which rambled along the hindquarters of L.A., was less grand but had its own unique charm. Heading up the mountain, she turned before reaching the top, which had the biggest homes with the best city views, and turned onto her cul-de-sac, Stella Place. A few mid-century homes from the original housing development, including Nan’s house, still dotted her street. The rest had been torn down and replaced with hulking manses built out to the property lines and surrounded by iron fences. Nan’s cordial-but-cool next-door neighbors had torn down two older homes to build their Tuscan-inspired monstrosity, which Nan secretly hoped would slide down the hillside in the next earthquake.
Nan clicked the garage door open as she approached her boxy 1960s home, which was suspended over the steep hillside on cantilevers. She parked inside beside Emily’s car. She pressed the clicker and watched in her rearview mirror as her old-fashioned wooden door slowly lowered down. When the door reached the bottom and closed with a little shudder, Nan felt as if she’d pulled up the drawbridge on the rest of the world and was now at last secure in her castle.
On the drive home, she’d received a call from Sergeant Early, informing her that the Erica Keller–Jared Hayword case was closed. Nan had told her about Melissa Hayword’s belief that Jared had been murdered by the same people who’d murdered her husband and who’d made it look like a suicide.
“Nan, I’m sorry for Mrs. Hayword’s losses, but this case is closed. There will be a press conference at noon tomorrow.”
Nan opened her glove compartment, retrieved her Walther, and shoved it into her purse. From the back hatch of her SUV, she took out a canvas messenger bag with textbooks, her lap
top, and a paper bag with takeout containers from a 24-hour Carrows diner, where she’d bought a BLT and a veggie burger. She was starving and thought that Emily might be hungry too if she was still up.
She unlocked the door into the kitchen. She barely heard the pre-alarm tone over Emily’s music blasting from her room downstairs.
“So much for taking a shower and going to bed,” Nan muttered as she punched a code into the alarm keypad beside the door. It was one-thirty A.M. She dumped everything but the food onto a counter by the door that was a gathering place for odds and ends, with baskets and decorative boxes for mail, coupons, takeout menus, notepads and pens, and a telephone. She put the bag with the food on a dinette table beside the kitchen windows.
She stepped through an open doorway off the kitchen and onto a landing at the top of the stairs, which led down to Emily’s domain in the home’s former rumpus room. She shouted down, “Ahoy, below.”
She thought she heard Emily yell some sort of greeting.
Nan went down the carpeted stairs. Entering Emily’s room, she crossed a white shag area rug that Granny had given her. The rug was one of the few decorative items Em had salvaged from her most recent redecorating project she’d done with the eager participation of her stepmother. Em and Kaitlyn had ditched Em’s pink-and-white polka-dot theme. Now the bedding, walls, and upholstered chairs were done in shades of bright yellow and black with pops of lime-green and orange.
Emily sat at her desk with her back to the room, typing on her laptop. Her pajama bottoms were printed with drawings of Curious George. Over an orange camisole, she wore a man’s plaid flannel bathrobe that she’d picked up at a secondhand shop. Her long dark hair was freshly washed and was smooth and sleek. She tapped a button on her computer keyboard to mute the music and swiveled her desk chair to face her mom. “Hi, Mom. You look tired.”
Emily’s comment made Nan realize how tired she was, but she was also disappointed and discouraged, which made everything worse. She went to her daughter and saw that Em’s eyes and nose were red from crying. “How are you?”
“I’m okay. I can’t sleep. I’m too upset. Nobody can.” Emily scrolled through a Twitter feed displayed on her laptop. “Everybody’s tweeting and Facebooking and Instagramming about what happened. Classes are canceled tomorrow. There’s going to be a candlelight memorial at Coopersmith tomorrow evening.”
Nan looked over Em’s shoulder at the Twitter feed. The screen was filled with #CoopersmithTragedy tweets. She scooped up Em’s hair and closed her fingers around it, making a thick ponytail, and drew the hair through her hand. It felt like cool silk. “I picked up a BLT and a veggie burger from Carrows. You hungry?”
“Kind of. I could hardly eat my mac and cheese at Smitty’s. I brought it home.”
“Want to have a bite and a glass of milk with me?”
On Em’s desk were her open trigonometry textbook and a sheet of homework problems with a pencil lying across it. Em had completed the first homework problem and had started the next one. Math wasn’t her favorite subject. On top of the textbook were crumpled tissues. A tissue box was nearby.
“Sounds good. So did you find out anything else about Jared and Mrs. Keller?”
Nan had decided not to tell Emily about the resolution of the Erica-Jared case right now. The findings weren’t yet official. They would be announced tomorrow and should be under wraps at the PPD until then unless someone inside leaked information. “Jared had a difficult time after his father died.”
Emily was silent for a moment. “I know Jared tried to kill himself after his father killed himself, but why did he kill Mrs. Keller? Not that it changes what happened, but if I know, maybe I can deal with it better, you know?” She wiped away a tear. “Jared is the first person I’ve known who’s close to my age who’s died. So weird. All his plans for the future, going to Yale and everything, and Mrs. Keller’s plans too, though I don’t know what they were, but she wasn’t that old. One minute they’re here and the next they’re, like, gone. Forever. All those hopes and dreams they had were for nothing.”
Emily’s tears began anew. She yanked two tissues from the box and pressed them against her eyes. “It’s just hitting me. I think I was in shock before. How do you do it, Mom?” She looked up at her mother. “I mean, deal with murder every day. The reality of it. Gangbangers shooting each other is sad, but it’s not like they’re like Mrs. Keller. Or Jared.”
“It’s not easy, Em.” Early on in Nan’s career, her mentor at the PPD had told her to look at corpses as if they were dolls. She’d tried to do that. It had helped her to distance herself from a tragedy—for about a minute. She hadn’t tried to do that for many years. “Even gangbangers are somebody’s children.”
“You’re right. And now everyone knows that Ashton and I found the bodies, so everyone’s asking me stuff.”
“If people ask you about the crime scene, just say that you can’t talk about it.”
“I’m not talking about it. It’s too horrible to talk about.”
“What about Ashton’s parents at dinner? Did they ask you and Ashton for details?”
“Of course not. They’re super nice.”
Nan grimaced behind Emily’s back. She saw tweets about murder-suicide, stabbing, possible sexual assault, and slit wrists. She didn’t see photos of the crime scene and was grateful for that. “Who released these details?”
“This isn’t, like, the year 2000, Mom. Information is out there. It didn’t come from me or Ashton.” Emily’s phone, on her desk by her right hand, emitted the first notes of a song that Nan didn’t recognize. Emily angrily huffed out a breath and pressed IGNORE.
“How do you know it wasn’t Ashton?”
“Ashton thinks social media is a waste of time.”
Nan considered that at least he had that going for him.
“I did tell Aubrey, but she won’t tell anybody.”
Telling one teenager was more than enough to spread the news as quickly as measles, Nan thought. “Whose call did you ignore just now?”
“A number I didn’t recognize. Some reporters have been calling.”
“Great.” Nan reached around Emily, grabbed a lime-green mouse, and started scrolling through the #CoopersmithTragedy feed. There were school portraits and snapshots of Erica Keller and Jared Hayword. Most of the tweets expressed grief about Mrs. Keller. Many were about Jared being a strange, creepy freak, who knows what some people are capable of, and so on. Beast kills Beauty was a common theme.
“These are terrible things that people are saying about Jared. Em, I hope you’re not saying anything bad about him. He has a family who loved him and who are just as devastated as Mrs. Keller’s family is.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Mom.” Em’s phone buzzed. Nan saw it was a text message from Emily’s best friend, Aubrey. Em snatched up the phone.
Nan clicked on what appeared to be Jared’s most current school portrait. He had a winsome smile and the photo showed off his nascent handsomeness, but it unfortunately caught his dark eyes open too wide and looking scarily intense in a Charles Manson way. She saw Em’s avatar, a black-and-white photo of her face from the nose up superimposed over an orange-and-black pop-art background. Nan silently read a tweet she’d posted: It’s so sad. I loved Mrs. Keller. I can’t believe it. I can’t stop crying.
Nan grimaced as she silently read another tweet: Went to hs with Jared in Reno. Tried to kill himself there. Guess he pulled it off. #success #loser.
She read a tweet aloud: “Mrs. Keller got too close to her students, IMHO. Especially Jared Hayword. Who wrote that, Em?”
“Sierra. She’s a junior. I have two classes with her.”
“Do you think there was something romantic going on between Jared and Mrs. Keller?”
“With Jared? No.” Emily set down her phone and leaned back in her chair. “Well, I don’t know. I never really thought about it. He wasn’t bad-looking, I guess. He was just so…” She pursed her lips as if tasting something sour. “
And Mrs. Keller was so pretty and friendly. They were together a lot though.” She faked shuddered. “But eww.”
Nan clicked over to Emily’s Facebook feed. Someone had already started a Coopersmith Tragedy page. Nan paused on a post and read it to herself: I hope the police don’t ignore Erica’s husband as a suspect. She was divorcing him and had to take out a restraining order because he was stalking her. He even threatened her at school in her classroom. “Em, do you know anything about Mrs. Keller’s husband threatening her at school?”
“I heard about it. Mr. Keller came into Mrs. Keller’s classroom after school. Jared was in there with her and Mr. Keller went off on them, yelling at them and even calling her a slut. I guess Jared tried to protect her. Stood between them. Mr. Hernandez ran over from the classroom next door and got Mr. Keller to leave. I heard this, like, fifth hand, but that’s supposedly what happened.”
Emily’s phone again buzzed with a new text message. Nan saw that it was from Ashton before Emily quickly picked up the phone. Nan couldn’t catch much of the message but saw that it started with Hey sexy…
“Emily, it’s too late to be texting with Ashton. Leave your phone here, come upstairs, and have something to eat.”
“But—”
“No buts. Let’s sit down and talk.”
“Is this about Ashton?”
“It’s about us having a conversation and decompressing after a long day.” Nan thought, Yes, it is about Ashton.
Chapter 14
Emily dunked a french fry into the puddle of ranch dressing she’d poured onto her plate beside her veggie burger. Nan had ordered a side salad with her BLT instead of fries. She’d taken her and Emily’s food from the take-out containers and set it on plates. They were sitting at the kitchen dinette table.