by V. V. James
No kidding. Dan was the All-Connecticut Mr. Congeniality, by the looks of it. I recall the photo clipped to the top of the brief: a thick swoosh of blond hair, and a smile that not even retainers could improve. A boy radiant with youth. Somewhere in Sanctuary is a mom whose heart will be absolutely shattered—though as I know too well, moms’ hearts break over the mean and ugly ones, too.
Something tickles my cheek and falls onto the list. I brush it away, leaving a greasy, black streak across the paper. It’s soot. Long, feathery curls of it drift through the air like someone blasted a whole flock of crows out of the sky.
Sailaway Villa was fancy before it got carbonized. My brief says it was a vacation rental and empty when the party happened. Maybe someone blew the wiring with over-amped sound gear. Or kids got careless lighting joints off a kitchen stove. Perhaps it was just a phone charging with a frayed cable.
At any rate, fire first. Then a stampede to get out. And a boy falls and breaks his neck. A boy whose corpse will no doubt be found to contain epic quantities of alcohol.
So: impaired judgment due to substance abuse. Accidental death. Case closed. Maybe the parents can bring a civil suit against the property company, but it’d be a grubby business and they’d be better off quietly grieving.
I look at the list. The deceased’s name is at the top.
*Daniel Whitman
When I saw that in my brief, it sounded familiar. But there are plenty of Whitmans in Connecticut, all claiming to be related to the poet. Maybe some of them even are. I checked on his parents, and apparently Daniel’s dad is a semifamous Yale professor who’s got a few rare diseases named after him.
Second on the list is a name that definitely stirs a memory. Jacob Bolt.
“Hey,” I ask Helpful Cop. “Bolt. When I was posted in this district six years ago, Tad Bolt was the chief. Any relation?”
“He’s still the chief. And yeah, Jake is his youngest son. He’s got four.”
I try to remember what Chief Bolt was like. Big is the first word that comes to mind. Popular is the second. Pink is the third. I got plenty of callouts here, but none that progressed. I always suspected that Sanctuary dealt with its lawbreakers through warnings and hefty donations to the Police Benevolent Fund. Less paperwork, nothing on your record, and everyone’s still friends afterward.
“I put Jacob up top,” says Helpful Cop, “’cause he’s the best friend—was the best friend—of the deceased. And this is Daniel’s girlfriend. Or ex-girlfriend. I’m not entirely clear…”
He’s pointing to the third name, Harper Fenn, and that snags me, too. It’s startling how much I remember. I was in this district for twelve months, six years ago, and it feels like I know half the town. What must it be like living here?
Harper Fenn has to be the daughter of Sanctuary’s witch. I wonder if Sarah Fenn’s kooky shop is still on the square. I remember her because girls were always going in asking for love potions, or boob-boosting charms, or study-aid spells. Fenn was lax about it, and I’d have to keep warning her that witchery is an age-restricted product like booze and cigarettes. She’d sigh and promise to do ID checks, then make me revolting herbal tea. Nice lady, if ineffectual, as most Main Street witches tend to be.
“If it isn’t little Maggie Knight.”
A blow between my shoulder blades nearly knocks me flat. There’s heartiness, and then there’s assault. For a law-enforcement officer, Chief Bolt has a shaky grasp on where the line is.
“Chief Bolt, good to see you, sir.”
One meaty paw holds me at arm’s length for inspection. Though I now outrank him, I still cringe under his appraisal, as if I forgot to polish my Girl Scout pin. His eyes are a bright, hard blue, like his momma picked them out specially at a fabric store button bin.
“Guess they promoted you from doing the coffee runs, eh, Mags? Sanctuary’s glad to have you back. Here’s how it’s gonna be. Our community is hurting. Daniel was a good kid, a real good kid. Law-abiding, too. Can’t tell you how many times he was over at our place, him and Jakey hanging out in the den. I’m proud my son had such an upright young man as his friend.”
I picture Daniel and “Jakey” in the den, enjoying the time-honored recreations of all eighteen-year-old boys: watching porn, getting stoned, and groping their girlfriends.
“There’s gonna be questions asked, Mags. But here’s the deal. That house was due for repairs. Easy to see how the fire started. Easy as anything to see how those kids panicked. You coulda been sober as a judge and still had a terrible fall. Daniel was just damn unlucky. He’s something of a local hero. First-rate quarterback. Used to coach the little ones. No need to besmirch a boy’s reputation once he’s dead. Nor to go dragging other folks into it.”
The hand squeezes my shoulder again, for emphasis. Tad’s warning me off. Protecting his own son, as much as the reputation of the late Daniel Whitman. I instantly revise my assessment of what the boys got up to in their leisure time: perhaps Schedule 1 drugs, and rather more than just groping their girlfriends. What will Toxicology find was in Daniel’s bloodstream when he died?
Yet the chief’s right, isn’t he? Whatever Whitman drank or smoked or snorted, it’s not much of a crime. This was all a crappy, pointless accident that ended some poor jock’s life and probably traumatized the town’s teen population. And the boss wants me back next week.
“Looks straightforward to me,” I tell Chief Bolt. “I’ll go through the kids’ statements and get this settled quickly.”
Four
Abigail
When the phone goes, I barely have the strength to reach from under the bedclothes toward it. Why should I? Half of Sanctuary has already called with its condolences, and the other half has filled my kitchen with casseroles, cakes, and crocks of soup. They mean well, but I don’t want to speak to anyone, or eat anything, ever again.
I just want to sleep. Because every time I wake up, for a few perfect seconds I think I’m waking from a bad dream and Daniel is still alive. The horror soon hits—faster every time—when I realize that, no, it’s my life that is the nightmare. But how I crave those precious moments of confusion.
The phone drones on as my hand fumbles in my sleeve. I’m wearing the same things I wore to dinner two days ago—clothes I put on when Daniel was still alive. Things he touched when he hugged me as I set off for Bridget’s. Some part of me imagines they still smell of him, though I know they won’t smell of anything now except my own stale sweat.
I free my hand and reach toward the phone on the nightstand, knocking over the photograph there. Daniel’s smiling image clatters to the floor, and I start weeping uncontrollably.
Too weak to pick it up, I shrink back beneath the covers, stuffing the edge of the comforter in my mouth so I don’t have to hear my own sobs.
Autopilot got me through yesterday. Michael and I went straight from Bridget’s to the hospital, but there was never any hope. My boy was dead before they even put him in an ambulance. Michael identified him. They advised me not to look. Then we went home.
I reapplied my lipstick, spritzed my perfume, and sat on the couch through the night and the next morning receiving visitors. I nodded and squeezed hands offered in sympathy. Told people they were so kind and that their condolences meant so much. And all the time I wanted to do nothing except rock back and forth where I sat, and howl at them to go away, go away, go away.
And now they have. Even Michael’s gone to Yale—urgent faculty business. And while I raged and demanded he stay, I’m strangely glad, because now it’s just me and Daniel. Me and my thoughts of Daniel. And that’s how I want it to be, forever and ever.
Except this phone won’t stop ringing. I lift the receiver, intending just to drop it back down and terminate the call, but habit makes me press it to my ear and say, in my best faculty-wife tones, Whitman household, Abigail speaking.
And I find myself listening
to the polite, formal voice down the line that says it’s got Just one thing they’d like to check, if that’s okay.
The next thing I know, someone is tugging the phone out of my hand.
“Let go, Abigail. Abi!”
It’s Bridget, by my bedside. She pulls the receiver from my hand. I fight her for it. I don’t want to let it go. I want to beat my head with it until I bludgeon myself unconscious. That would make the pain stop, because I know that nothing else will. Nothing ever will make it stop.
Someone is shouting: Shut up, shut up, how dare you, shut up!
It’s me.
Bridget is speaking into the phone: I’m sorry, it’s really not a good time… Then she pauses and looks at the receiver quizzically before replacing it.
“There’s no one there,” she says. “Abigail, what was that? Are you okay?”
My baby. My poor, poor baby.
I lash out at the phone, and it hits the wall. The act is satisfying. A release. I reach for what stands alongside it—one of Daniel’s football trophies, polished and heavy. Fury has made me strong, and I slam it into my nightstand, hoping the glass tabletop will shatter, but it doesn’t. I pound it again, harder.
If I can’t break something, I’ll break.
So I do. I drop the trophy, curl into myself under the comforter, and cry until I come apart.
Bridget is trying to get my attention, anchoring me to this world in which my son is dead and someone is calling me up to spew lies and filth about him.
“Abi, what’s going on?”
I try to resist, but Bridget is strong. She rolls me over toward her—and recoils at what she sees. She’s never seen me like this. Or not for years.
“Leave me alone,” I plead. The adrenaline of a moment ago has gone, leaving me floppy and exhausted in its wake.
“You need food, a shower. Just the basics. Come on.”
She sets steam hissing in the bathroom. Pulls me up, helps me undress, even reaches into the shower cubicle and shampoos my hair like I’m a child. Like I used to do with Dan when he was little. I lean against the glass partition, too exhausted to cry.
Bridge has laid out clothes for me to wear, and it’s such a maternal gesture that I feel myself buckle. I used to leave Dan’s laundry folded on his bed. Lay out his uniform on game days.
“I’ll be downstairs,” she says. “Sarah made that zucchini salad you like so much. Get dressed and come join me.”
And she’s right. It helps to feel clean. To paint my face back on. To style my hair. To become Abigail Whitman again. I put on my soft clothes like they’re the hardest armor. Because I’ve remembered that phone call. That careful voice, mouthing lies as matter-of-factly as if it was scheduling a grocery delivery. Me shouting. Even after I could hear they’d hung up at the other end, still shouting, unable to stop.
Daniel’s gone, but he still needs me.
Bridget doesn’t ask until I’ve finished eating and have pushed the dish away. There’s a tag from Sarah tied to it, lettered in her looping handwriting. Love you and am here for you if there’s anything I can do, S. My fingers play with it as I tell Bridget what the voice on the phone told me. It’s hard to get the words out.
“It was a reporter—I didn’t catch where from—with all these awful questions. Did Dan ever take drugs? Did he drink? Were there drugs and booze at the party? And then… Stupid things. Sleazy things.” I have to stop and pull myself together. “Some bullshit about a sex tape at the party.”
The minute it’s out of my mouth, I regret having mentioned it, but if the media knows, doubtless half the town already does. I’m sure Cheryl will scrape up every bit of gossip circulating at the school and relay it to Bridget over dinner. Give it a couple of hours, and my friend will know more than I do.
“Sex tape?”
Bridget looks baffled. She can be such an innocent, like her silly daughter. For the first time ever, she must be thrilled that Izzy is a social reject who wasn’t invited to what the local TV station is calling the party of every parent’s nightmares.
“Apparently several kids have told the cops something was being projected on the wall. Not random porn—Daniel and a girl.”
“A girl? Him and Harper…?”
“Who knows. It’s just rubbish, kids have said. Kids who were drunk and in a building filled with smoke, for god’s sake.”
“That sounds…”
Bridget doesn’t have the words. I’m not sure there are words for something like this. And suddenly I’m not sad—I’m furious.
“The journalist said she was just ‘following the investigation.’ What investigation? Tad Bolt stood with me as Michael ID’d our son’s body in the morgue and promised to make sure the state detective would put together a quick, clean report, then leave us in peace. But now someone’s digging around for dirt. Isn’t it enough that he’s gone? My baby’s gone…”
And I’m off again. Tears. Snot. Shakes. The full works. Is this my life, now? Ricocheting from grief to wrath and back again. No place to rest. Just being struck again and again from all sides.
Bridget places a hand on my back and looks around my empty house.
“Where is Michael?”
“Faculty meeting. He’ll be back tonight. Sticking to his schedule will help him cope.”
Or that’s what Michael told me. And I screamed that our only child was dead and his faculty meeting could go to hell, but he went anyway.
Maybe it will help him. I should try not to resent that he can escape into his work. But it’s a relief I don’t have, seeing as I left my practice when we married.
That’s when it hits me—really hits me—just how much I’ve lost. A husband I see only at weekends. A career I walked away from. Daniel has always made up for all that.
Now I have nothing. Nothing at all.
And some investigator is going to drag my son through the mud before he’s even laid in the earth.
I won’t stand for it.
I look around for my purse and car keys.
“Abi? I’m not letting you drive,” Bridget says.
“Well, you’re not stopping me.”
“Fine. Give me the keys. Where to?”
As I slide them to her along the counter, I see again that note of Sarah’s. If there’s anything I can do…
A crazy idea comes into my head. Instead of going to the cops, I could go to my friend, the witch.
But that’s madness.
“The police station, of course. I’ve got questions.”
Five
Maggie
I came by the hospital yesterday to speak to Harper Fenn and some of the other kids who were brought in, but guess what? Smoke inhalation and scorching to her trachea means she’s under strict instructions not to talk for at least thirty-six hours. And minimally thereafter. If she’s anything like my cousin’s two teens, maybe we can text our interview.
The witness reports claim she “lost her chill” in the middle of the party. She was seen shouting and screaming. No one can tell me why, but you wouldn’t have to be top of the class at the training academy to suspect it’s linked to this “sex tape” several partygoers have mentioned.
Of course they all claim to have not seen it properly. But they all use the same words: sex tape. Not porno. It doesn’t sound like someone just streamed a dirty website for a laugh. A “sex tape” is people you know.
And I know what the rumors are saying. That it’s a tape of Daniel himself. Presumably a jock teammate put it up for a laugh. Maybe it’s Harper in the film with him. Maybe it’s another girl.
Either way, it’s guaranteed to cause a fight between them. She storms off. He tries to go after her, but is too drunk, trips—and falls.
“Ma’am?” The receptionist has repeated herself.
“I’m sorry. You said, discharged?”
&n
bsp; “Yup, she was released…oh, just a few minutes ago?” The receptionist frowns at her screen. “It registers on our system as soon as the attending physician sends the authorization, but the patient will usually take time to change back into their clothes, visit the restroom, that sort of thing. If you’re quick, you might find her.”
A few wrong turns later, I’m up on the observation unit. Harper wasn’t the only one brought here from the party, and open doors and large windows make the rooms feel as bustling as a school. Two teens are chatting across their beds, to the annoyance of the elderly lady clicking knitting needles passive-aggressively opposite them. Another girl, her arm thickly bandaged and her neck gleaming with burn salve, lies in the drooling sleep of the sedated.
One bed is curtained off. I address its stiff blue folds.
“Excuse me, Harper Fenn?”
“Don’t come in,” rasps a voice. The curtain quivers, as if she’s just grabbed it from the inside.
“I won’t.”
I step back, not wanting to make a scene. Already, some of the more alert patients are looking over, curious. A tip to would-be perpetrators: Never commit a crime in a hospital ward, nursing home, or classroom. The chronically bored make the most observant witnesses.
“I’ll wait in the corridor,” I say. Where’s Harper’s mom? Surely the girl isn’t making her own way home?
A short while later, Harper Fenn walks out. I take a good look. She’s slender and coltishly tall, wearing ripped black jeans and a jacket that her mom must have brought in yesterday. Dark hair in a messy braid, and strikingly pale eyes. A piercing in her nose, and one she’s refastening in her lip.
More rock chick than cheerleader. But I can see why she’d appeal to a boy like Daniel Whitman, with his Ivy League dad and Real Housewives mom.
“Harper? I’m Detective Knight, conducting a routine investigation into what happened at the party. I’d like a few words. Could I buy you a coffee downstairs?”