Women's Murder Club [10] 10th Anniversary

by James Patterson

  “What?” she said, her eyes suddenly about the size of manhole covers. “But I thought you said everything was lost in the fire when I was three. All the tapes. All the pictures.”

  “Your dad put this in the safety deposit box right before he went into the hospital for the last time,” I said. “I know how badly you’ve been dying to know who your dad was. I wanted to give this to you so many times. But Kevin had said he wanted you to get it today. I thought it would be best to honor his wishes.”

  I started out of the room.

  “No, Mom. Where are you going? You have to stay and watch it with me.”

  I shook my head as I handed her the remote. I patted her cheek. “This is between you and your dad,” I said.

  “Hey, Em. It’s me, Daddy,” a deep, warm, Irish-accented voice said as I left. “If you’re watching this, it must mean you’re a big girl now. Happy Sweet Sixteen, Emma.”

  I turned back as I was closing the door. Aidan Beck, the actor I’d hired and filmed with a vintage camcorder at the Hudson that afternoon, was smiling from the screen.

  “There are a few things I want you to know about me and about my life, Em,” he said in his brogue. “First and foremost is that I love you.”

  DOWN THE HALLWAY, I went into a large closet, otherwise known as a Manhattan home office, and shredded the script I’d written to fool my daughter. I sifted the confetti through my fingers and let out a breath as I heard Emma start to sob.

  No wonder she was crying. Aidan Beck had performed the script impeccably. Especially the accent. I’d met and hired the young off-Broadway actor outside the SAG offices the week before.

  As I sat there listening to my daughter crying in the next room, some part of me knew how cruel it was. It sucked having to be a Gen-X “Mommie Dearest.”

  It didn’t matter. Emma was going to have a good life, a normal life. No matter what.

  The ruse was elaborate, I knew, but when I spotted Emma’s Google searches for Kevin Bloom on our home computer the week before, I knew I had to come up with something airtight.

  Kevin Bloom was supposed to be Emma’s idyllic, loving father whom had died of cancer when she was two. I’d told Emma that Kevin had been a romantic Irish cabdriver / budding playwright whom I’d met when I first came to the city. A man with no family, of whom all trace had been lost in a fire a year later.

  The fact, of course, was that there was no Kevin Bloom. I wish there was more times than not, believe me. I could have really used a romantic Irish playwright in my hectic life.

  The truth was, there wasn’t even a Nina Bloom.

  I made me up, too.

  I had my reasons. They were good ones.

  What I couldn’t tell Emma was that nearly two decades ago and a thousand miles to the south, I got into some trouble. The worst kind. The kind where forever after, you always make sure your phone number is unlisted and never ever, ever stop looking over your shoulder.

  It started on spring break of all things. In the spring of 1992 in Key West, Florida, I guess you could say a foolish girl went wild.

  And stayed wild.

  That foolish girl was me.

  My name was Jeanine.

  MARCH 12, 1992

  Party till you drop, man!

  Every time I think back to everything that happened, it’s that expression, that silly early-eighties cliché, that first comes to mind.

  It was actually the first thing we heard when we arrived in Key West to start the last spring break of our college careers. As we were checking into our hotel, a very hairy and even drunker middle-aged man wearing goggles and an orange Speedo screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as he ran, soaking wet, through the lobby.

  From that hilariously random moment on, for the rest of our vacation it was our mantra, our boast, our dare to one another. My boyfriend at one point seriously suggested we should all get “Party till you drop, man!” tattoos.

  Because we thought it was a joke.

  It turned out to be a prophecy.

  It actually happened.

  First we partied.

  Then someone dropped.

  It happened on the last day. Our last afternoon found us just as the previous afternoons had, giddily hungover, lazily finishing up burgers under one of our hotel beach bar’s umbrellas.

  Under the table, my boyfriend Alex’s bare foot was hooked around mine as his finger played with the string of my yellow bikini top. The Cars’ classic song “Touch and Go” was playing softly from the outdoor speakers as we watched an aging biker with a black leather vest and braided gray hair play catch with his dog off the bar’s sun-bleached dock. We couldn’t stop laughing every time as the collie in the red bandanna head-butted the wet tennis ball before belly flopping into the shallow blue waves.

  As the huffing, drenched collie paddled back to shore, a stiff breeze off the water began jingling the bar’s hanging glasses like wind chimes. Listening to the unexpected musical sound, I sighed as a long, steady hit of vacation nirvana swept through me. For a tingling moment, everything—the coolness under the Jägermeister umbrella, the almost pulsating white sand of the beach, the blue-green water of the Gulf—became sharper, brighter, more vivid.

  When Alex slipped his hand into mine, all the wonderful memories of how we fell in love freshman year played through my mind. The first nervous eye contact across the cavernous Geology classroom. The first time he haltingly asked me out. The first time we kissed.

  As I squeezed his hand back, I thought how lucky we were to have found each other, how good we were together, how bright our future looked.

  Then it happened.

  The beginning of the end of my life.

  Our wiry Australian waitress, Maggie, who was clearing the table, smiled as she raised an eyebrow. Then she casually asked what would turn out to be the most important yes-or-no question of my life.

  “You motley mob need anything else?” she said in her terrific Aussie accent.

  Alex, who was leaning so far back in his plastic deck chair that he was practically lying down, suddenly sat up with a wide, strangely infectious smile on his face. He was average-sized, slim, dark, almost delicate, so you wouldn’t guess that he was the nationally ranked placekicker for the University of Florida Gators football team.

  I sat up myself when I realized that he was sporting the same slightly touched, let’s-get-fired-up smile that he wore before he took the field in front of seventy thousand people to drill a fifty-yarder.

  Or to get us into a bar fight.

  Our vacation had been everything the travel brochure headline—“Five Days, Four Nights in Key West!”—had promised. No school. No rules. Nothing but me and my friends, the beach, cold beer, Coppertone, loud music, and louder laughs. We’d all even managed to stay in one piece over the previous, hard-partying four days.

  Uh-oh. What now? I thought.

  Alex looked around the table at the four of us slowly, one by one, before he threw down the gauntlet.

  “Since it’s our last whole day here, who’s in the mood for some dessert?” he said. “I was thinking Jell-O. The kind Bill Cosby never talks about. The kind served in a shot glass.”

  The Cars song broke into a frolicking guitar riff as an expression of piqued interest crossed my best friend Maureen’s face. My pretty roommate and fellow co-captain of the Gators women’s varsity softball team was apparently game. So was her boyfriend, Big Mike, judging by his enthusiastic nod. Even our studious, usually pessimistic, sunburned pal Cathy looked up from her paperback at the interesting suggestion.

  “Jeanine?” Alex said as my friends turned to me in silent deference.

  The questionable decision was all mine.

  I pursed my lips in worry as I looked down at the sand-covered bar floor between my sun-browned toes.

  Then my face broke into my own mischievous grin as I rolled my eyes. “Uh… definitely!” I said.

  All around the bar, people turned as my friends whooped and high-fived and pounded
playfully on the sandy table.

  “Shot, shots, shots,” Mike and Alex started to chant as our waitress quickly turned to get them.

  As a responsible 3.9 GPA English major and student athlete, I was well aware that vodka and gelatin was a highly hazardous afternoon snack. But then again, I had an excuse. Actually four of them.

  I was a college kid. I was in Key West. And not only was spring break ’92 quickly coming to a close, but it was three days after my twenty-first birthday. But as I sat smiling, looking through the happy, crowded bar out over the endless Tiffany blue Gulf, I still had the slightest moment’s doubt, the slightest moment’s wonder if maybe I was pushing my luck.

  The feeling was gone by the time Maggie returned with our drinks.

  Then we proceeded to do what we always did. We raised our paper cups, tapped them together, and screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as loud as we could.

  I SAW A VIDEO once of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It was recorded at some beachfront resort in Sri Lanka, and in it, as the ocean bizarrely recedes, a group of curious tourists wander down to the beach to see what’s going on.

  Staring at the screen, knowing that the receding water is actually already on its way back to kill them, what disturbs you the most is their complete innocence. The fact that they still think they’re safe instead of living out the very last moments of their lives right in front of you.

  I feel that same sick way whenever I go over what happened to me next.

  I still think I’m safe.

  I couldn’t be more wrong.

  Several hours later, the Jell-O shots had done their job and then some. By seven thirty that evening, my friends and I were sardined into the packed Mallory Square for Key West’s world-famous outdoor drunken sunset celebration. The gold of our last sunset warmed our shoulders as cold beer splattered and stuck our toes to our flip-flops. Cathy and Maureen were on my right. Alex and his Gator outside linebacker buddy, Mike, were on my left, and with our arms around one another, we were singing “Could You Be Loved” with as much gusto as Bob Marley himself.

  In front of the outdoor reggae band, I danced in my floppy bush hat, bikini top, and cargo shorts. I was as drunk as a skunk, laughing hysterically, forehead to forehead with my friends, and the feeling I’d had at the beach bar returned, on steroids. I had everything. I was young and pretty and carefree with my arms around people I loved who loved me back. For a fleeting moment, I felt truly ecstatically happy to be alive.

  For a split second.

  Then it was gone.

  When I woke, the cheap hotel room clock read 2:23 a.m. Turning over in the cramped, dark room, the first thing I noticed was that Alex wasn’t beside me. I quickly fumbled through my last memories. I remembered a club we went to after the sunset, loud techno, Alex in a straw cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, Alex twirling beside me to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

  That was about it. The intervening hours, how I had gotten back to the hotel, were an impenetrable alcohol-induced fog, a complete mystery.

  A ball of panic began to burn at the lining of my stomach like guzzled vodka as I stared at Alex’s empty pillow.

  Was he OK? I thought groggily. Passed out somewhere? Worse?

  I was lying there, breathing rapidly in the dark, woodenly wondering what I should do next, when I heard the sound.

  It was a giggle, and it had come from the bathroom behind me on my right. I rolled myself up onto my elbows and tilted my head off the bed to look through the crack of its slightly open door.

  In the light of a strange, low glow, I spotted Alex leaning against the sink. Then I heard another giggle, and Maureen, my best friend, appeared in front of him holding a lit candle.

  At first, as Maureen put the candle down onto the counter and they began to kiss, I truly wondered if I was still asleep and having a nightmare. Then I heard Maureen moan. Realizing that I was very much awake, the enormity of what I was watching walloped into me like an asteroid into a continent. It was my worst fear, everyone’s worst fear.

  My boyfriend and my best friend together.

  Crippling waves of anger and fear and revulsion slammed through me. Why wouldn’t they? Primordial betrayal was being enacted right in front of my locked-open eyes.

  I heard Maureen moan again as Alex began to peel off her T-shirt.

  Then they were cut from sight as the bathroom door closed with a soft, careful click.

  A T. S. Eliot quote from my last Modern Poetry class popped into my mind as I blinked at the closed door.

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Or a moan, I thought, turning and looking at the clock again: 2:26.

  If my premed boyfriend wasn’t currently busy, he could have marked it down.

  Time of girlfriend’s death.

  I didn’t scream as I sat up. I didn’t look for something heavy and then kick the door in and start swinging.

  In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.

  Instead, I decided not to bother them. I just simply stood.

  Barefoot, I grabbed my jacket and stumbled out of the bedroom and through the hotel room’s front door, closing it behind me with my own soft, careful click.

  TURN THE PAGE FOR A NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN FIRST LOOK!

  I’M RAFE KHATCHADORIAN, TRAGIC HERO

  It feels as honest as the day is crummy that I begin this tale of total desperation and woe with me, my pukey sister, Georgia, and Leonardo the Silent sitting like rotting sardines in the back of a Hills Village Police Department cruiser.

  Now, there’s a pathetic family portrait you don’t want to be a part of, believe me. More on the unfortunate Village Police incident later. I need to work myself up to tell you that disaster story.

  So anyway, ta-da, here it is, book fans, and all of you in need of AR points at school, the true autobio of my life so far. The dreaded middle school years. If you’ve ever been a middle schooler, you understand already. If you’re not in middle school yet, you’ll understand soon enough.

  But let’s face it: Understanding me—I mean, really understanding me and my nutty life—isn’t so easy. That’s why it’s so hard for me to find people I can trust. The truth is, I don’t know who I can trust. So mostly I don’t trust anybody. Except my mom, Jules. (Most of the time, anyway.)

  So… let’s see if I can trust you. First, some background.

  That’s me, by the way, arriving at “prison”—also known as Hills Village Middle School—in Jules’s SUV. The picture credit goes to Leonardo the Silent.

  Getting back to the story, though, I do trust one other person. That would actually be Leonardo. Leo is capital C Crazy, and capital O Off-the-Wall, but he keeps things real.

  Here are some other people I don’t trust as far as I can throw a truckload of pianos.

  There’s Ms. Ruthless Donatello, but you can just call her the Dragon Lady. She teaches English and also handles my favorite subject in sixth grade—after-school detention.

  Also, Mrs. Ida Stricker, the vice principal. Ida’s pretty much in charge of every breath anybody takes at HVMS. That’s Georgia, my super-nosy, super-obnoxious, super-brat sister, whose only good quality is that she looks like Jules might have looked when she was in fourth grade.

  There are more on my list, and we’ll get to them eventually. Or maybe not. I’m not exactly sure how this is going to work out. As you can probably tell, this is my firstfull-length book.

  But let’s stay on the subject of us for a little bit. I kind of want to, but how do I know I can trust you with all my embarrassing personal stuff—like the police car disaster story? What are you like? Inside, what are you like?

  Are you basically a pretty good, pretty decent person? Says who? Says you? Says your ’rents? Says your sibs?

  Okay, in the spirit of a possible friendship between us—and this is a huge big deal for me—here’s another true confession.

  This is what I actually looked like when I got to schoo
l that first morning of sixth grade.

  We still friends, or are you out of here?

  Hey—don’t go—all right?

  I kind of like you. Seriously. You know how to listen, at least. And believe me, I’ve got quite the story to tell you.

  THE MIDDLE SCHOOL/MAX SECURITY PRISON

  Okay, so imagine the day your great-greatgrandmother was born. Got it? Now go back another hundred years or so. And then another hundred. That’s about when they built Hills Village Middle School. Of course, I think it was a prison for Pilgrims back then, but not too much has changed. Now it’s a prison for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.

  I’ve seen enough movies that I know when you first get to prison, you basically have two choices: (1) pound the living daylights out of someone so that everyone else will think you’re insane and stay out of your way, or (2) keep your head down, try to blend in, and don’t get on anyone’s bad side.

  You’ve already seen what I look like, so you can probably guess which one I chose. As soon as I got to homeroom, I went straight for the back row and sat as far from the teacher’s desk as possible.

  There was just one problem with that plan, and his name was Miller. Miller the Killer, to be exact. It’s impossible to stay off this kid’s bad side, because it’s the only one he’s got.

  But I didn’t know any of that yet.

  “Sitting in the back, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  “Are you one of those troublemakers or something?” he said.

  I just shrugged. “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “ ’Cause this is where all the juvies sit,” he said, and took a step closer. “In fact, you’re in my seat.”

  “I don’t see your name on it,” I told him, and I was just starting to think maybe that was the wrong thing to say when Miller put one of his XXXL paws around my neck and started lifting me like a hundred-pound dumbbell. I usually like to keep my head attached to my body, so I went ahead and stood up like he wanted me to.